ABSTRACT
The urbanization of the nation has been, and still is, a problematical phenomenon for educational reformers. This is mainly because of the ambiguities which inhere in the idea of the modern city as an agency of civilization and as a suitable environment for bringing up children. Educational changes and innovations have frequently been justified as offering antidotes to the worst features of urban life. This is the theme which is pursued now by discussing how connexions might be made between education and the urban problem in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period. The precedents for studying educational movements and ideas in the context of city developments have been set by American social historians. 1 However, the chief concern in my paper is to discuss similar movements in Britain from the point of view of an historian interested in responses to the urbanism of the later-nineteenth century. One aspect of these responses which began to emerge during research on educational and social movements in late-Victorian and Edwardian cities was the number and variety of apparently separate organizations whose members were, in one way or another, hoping to take a hold on and shape the urban future. It is only possible on this occasion to hint at the common concerns and overlapping membership of some of these groups, which need to be sorted more systematically: what the paper does set out to illustrate is how the connecting threads between them were provided by the city.
