ABSTRACT
When Victoria became queen in 1837 most of her English subjects were still countryfolk: when she died in 1901 most of them were townspeople. Here was one of history's great social and economic transformations. England had become the world's first predominantly urbanized industrial nation. 1 Some types of town and some forms of commerce and industry had, of course, existed since ancient times; but never before had large urban areas constituted the everyday environment of most citizens of a large state. This novel development forced the Victorians to learn how to live a new urban way of life. 'Possibly the life of England is changing, perhaps has already changed, far more than we realize', sensed an article in the Quarterly Review for April 1873. 'The growth of enormous cities, the ease of travelling and the taste for travelling, the largeness and organization of commercial energy, the disappearance of those local attachments and local peculiarities, which used to hold us so strongly because they had bound our fathers and grandfathers before us - these imply, it may be, a more rapid transition from one state of national development to another than can be made clear to those in whose unconscious presence the process has accomplished itself.'
