ABSTRACT
Contemporaries were just as divided about the effects of industrialism on town life as on living standards and the family.4 The strictures of such anti-urban pessimists as Cobbett and Ruskin apart, even optimistic supporters of industrialism like Cooke Taylor and Joseph Fletcher, the school inspector and moral statistician, were disturbed by the social problems of the rapidly growing towns.1 The latter, for example, thought that the concentration in large towns of ‘the masses employed in mining and manufacturing pursuits’ was responsible for most of the social problems of the age:
Here, brought into close neighbourhood, and estranged from the influence of superior example, they are subject to temptations, hazards, and incitements far beyond those which approach the rural cottage; ignorant and largely depraved, they are likewise capable of combination; and combined, they form bodies little prepared to stoop to the exigencies of a reeling alternation of prosperity and adversity; to say nothing of all the evils which improvidence and heathenism pour out upon themselves.
