Book excerpt: First published in 1977, Urban Education in the 19th Century is a collection based on the conference papers of the annual 1976 conference for the History of Education Society. The book illustrates a variety of ways of elucidating the connections between education and the city, mainly in nineteenth-century Britain. Essays cover political, geographical, demographic and socio-structural aspects of urbanization. There is an emphasis on comparative studies of urban educational developments and attention is paid to the perceptions of the nineteenth-century city and its problems, especially for child life, as well as to the realities of urban change