It inspired our poetry; it controlled our art; for long it obstructed, ...

It inspired our poetry; it controlled our art; for long it obstructed, Wade in his History of the Middle Classes (if indeed I have correctly interpreted his mysterious hintings). Place gave instruction at Charing Cross; Mrs Grote, I suspect, more than instruction to her village neighbors. Croker's attack on Miss Martineau was quite unpardonable, but it is fairly clear that Miss Martineau did not know what she was talking about.

Perhaps it still obstructs, the formation of a true philosophy of urban life. But all the while Industrialism had been coming over England like a climatic change; the French wars masked the consequences till they became almost unmanageable.

It is possible to imagine, with Billy Owen, an orderly evolution of the rural village into the industrial township, given the conditions which he enjoyed at New Lanark, a limited size and a resident, paternal employer.

Belper under the Strutts, Bolton under the Ashworths, the cosy houses and flourishing gardens of South Hetton, to which foreign visitors were carried with special pride, the playing fields of Price's Candle Works, the Lancashire village where Coningsby met Edith, all have some affinity with the Owenite Utopia, bold peasants, rosy children, smoking joints, games on the green; Merrie England, in a word, engaged in a flourishing export trade in coal and cotton.' But any possibility of a general development along these lines had already been lost in the change-over from water to steam power, in the consequent growth of the great urban aggregates, and the visible splitting of society, for which the Enclosures had created a rural precedent, into possessors and proletariat.