James Silk Buckingham (1786-1855) was a Cornish-born traveller and writer. As a member of Parliament in the 1830s he campaigned for reforms in the army and navy as well as for the temperance movement. He travelled widely to the Middle East, Israel and America, wrote travel books and also founded a number of journals. One of these was The Athenaeum, a weekly London periodical covering a wide range of topics from literature to popular science. In this work, published in 1849, Buckingham names seven evils threatening contemporary society (ranging from ignorance from intemperance to war and competition), proposes a number of economic reforms that primarily target the existing taxation system, and pleads for a new Reform Bill. Buckingham develops in great detail his vision of a model town and the community inhabiting it, and offers his thoughts on how a such city should be planned.
