ABSTRACT
Mid-Victorian Britain was the ‘workshop of the world’ and the cynosure of social observation. Britain was to the nineteenth century what America is to the twentieth—an image of the future, with all its attendant wonders and new social problems. ‘The Condition of England question’ was debated primarily in England, though the discussion was informed by the observations of European and American visitors, to whom the historian is indebted for their general speculation on the nature of English society. English writers, true to their empirical tradition, and conditioned by the fact that they were themselves participants in the process they sought to analyse, tended to focus attention on specific aspects of the emergent industrial Britain in which there were as many townsmen as countrymen by 1851.
