In the second half of the nineteenth century, Germany, France, and the United States followed Britain’s lead and became industrialized nations. All witnessed the growth of the middle and working classes—and experienced the deplorable sanitary conditions that accompanied rapid urbanization. By the 1860s, however, significant advances in public health and medical science had increased the life expectancy of the urban poor. Politically, the expansion of the electorate in Britain, Germany, and France meant that, by 1884, the working class was the largest voting bloc in all three nations, although throughout Europe, women of all classes still lacked the vote. In the intellectual realm, literary realists challenged the romanticism of the first half of the century, basing their work on observation instead of emotion and rejecting pastoral scenes for gritty depictions of urban working-class life, while the theory of evolution and its outgrowth, Social Darwinism, seemed to directly defy the religious revival cultivated during the Romantic movement. The following documents reflect the facts that Britain set the mold for urbanization and industrialization—modernity—and that British thinkers were at the forefront of public health, scientific, and pseudoscientific trends. ■