Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2009
By the closing decades of the nineteenth century the continued and rapid growth of cities had given rise to acute problems of municipal policy on both sides of the Atlantic. America had come to its urban experience relatively late – the population of Chicago at the time the Liverpool & Manchester Railway opened was 50 people – but between 1880 and 1910 the critical shift had taken place in the United States to a population which was over 50 per cent urban. The fifty million town dwellers in America not merely outnumbered the whole population of the UK, but included a large number of recent immigrants from the poorer, non-English speaking countries.
This paper was originally delivered in 1977 at Professor Dyos's Victorian City seminar and to the SUSS Edinburgh University. In the interests of brevity no attempt has been made to expand the article to include the interesting points raised in discussion. It was also my intention not to dilute or qualify the interpretation put forward.
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