ABSTRACT
Mr (later Sir) Ebenezer Howard was a plain man. Born in 1850 into a non-conformist household in the City of London he was a stranger to self-aggrandizement and flamboyancy. He was to hold a modest job as a stenographer recording proceedings in Parliament. To see a picture of him, a diminutive figure in a black suit, with a drooping moustache, he looks every bit a member of London’s late-Victorian army of clerks, as indeed he was. He could almost have been an inspiration for his turn-of-the-century contemporary, H.G. Wells, in the creation of one of the author’s lower-middle-class characters.
