ABSTRACT
The new dominant town environment was being developed chiefly for the promotion of work. But socially-aware Victorians recognized that facilities for play and recreation - mental and physical - would be needed by the new urban millions. Matthew Arnold had become greatly concerned by what he regarded as the shallow and misguided values of the new urban England. In Culture and Anarchy (1869) he divided society into three categories: Barbarians (aristocrats), Philistines (the middle classes), and Populace (the rest). He argued that all lacked 'culture'; but he was particularly critical of the middle classes, who were (he claimed) too much interested in profit-making and materialism. Arnold called upon Englishmen to abandon their sectional interests, to seek instead a social consensus through the lifetime pursuit of 'sweetness and light', of 'a national glow of life and thought'. Some were trying to give the masses 'an intellectual food prepared and adapted'; but Arnold did not want his culture-bearers to offer any substitutes. 'Culture works differently. It does not try to teach down .... It seeks to do away with classes and sects; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere.' 1
