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This paper aims to examine how William Wordsworth, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charles Dickens present cities in their works. It argues that the writers criticized their city-based contemporary civilization and searched for community values to sustain human unity in an industrial society. The three writers, this paper suggests, evaluated the city-based civilization with their shaping vision and thereby guide us into a direction that the restoration of human unity depends on how an ideal community is planted in a city. William Wordsworth sees London as a capitalistic city which commodifies human dwellers. What Wordsworth discovers in London is the world of a phantasm which alienates its dwellers. It not only signals the emergence of a new civilization. It also indicates the impoverishment of rural communities and the loss of self-identity. Wordsworth pays much attention to the country life for an alternative community, but his preference for that community results from his desire for internalizing socio-political conflicts in the city. In The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne makes an experiment on a new mode of life, which supposedly substitutes for the industrialism-oriented city life. The experiment fails, however, for the characters' ego-centric desires conflict with one another and the realistic or outer conditions of life interfere with the actual life of the community. The failure of the experimental life is interconnected with Hawthorne's essential skepticism permeating his world view, rather than he could not foresee industrial depredation. Anyway, Hawthorne does not intend to continue his experiment in his contemporary city life although his experimental spirit is influential enough to form the view of nature of later thinkers and writers. Dickens created the Victorian London that we know today. Through his imaginative work, we clearly understand how deeply the newly-emerging industrial society affected people and changed human life in general. The city-dwellers of all social classes were living their lives as if, both literally and figuratively, “living in death.” Dickens seeks for a fundamental solution to the problems within the city and suggests that we should restore the warmth of home and familial relationships to society as well as to individuals.