19th-century-in-the-united-kingdom

"In the eighteenth century the English ruling classes – squirearchy, merchants, aristocracy – were men hard of mind and hard of will. Aggressive and acquisitive, they saw foreign policy in terms of concrete interest: markets, natural resources, colonial real estate, naval bases, profits. At the same time they were concerned to preserve the independence and parliamentary institutions of England in the face of the hostility of European absolute monarchies. Liberty and interest alike seemed to the Georgians therefore to demand a strategic approach to international relations. They saw national power as the essential foundation of national independence; commercial wealth as a means to power; and war as among the means to all three. They accepted it as natural and inevitable that nations should be engaged in a ceaseless struggle for survival, prosperity and predominance. Such public opinion as existed in the eighteenth century did not dissent from this world-view. The House of Commons itself reflected the unsentimental realism of an essentially rural society. Patriotism coupled with dislike and suspicion of foreigners were perhaps the only emotions that leavened the vigorous English pursuit of their interests; a pursuit softened but hardly impeded by the mutual conveniences and decencies of international custom and good manners."

"Unlike most of Europe, Britain had no censorship and its political press was both more sophisticated and more widely distributed than that of any other European nation – few continental periodicals ever approached the extensive circulation of the Gentleman's Magazine, even Paris had no daily press before 1777 and certainly the obscenity and scurrility found daily in English cartoons, ballads, plays and pamphlets would never have been tolerated by continental rulers. Moreover London had a political significance quite unlike that of any other European capital. Europe's largest urban community – dominating the nation to the extent that one-sixth of the population spent part of their working life there – was endowed (unlike Paris, its nearest rival) with an autonomous and surprisingly democratic municipal government and within its parliamentary constituencies with a very broad electorate, both of which were the seed-grounds of political education and urban radicalism. The extent of political liberty enjoyed in England (as its natives were proud of reminding themselves) and the degree of political sophistication – even if largely, though by no means completely, confined to the metropolis – were greater than in any other European nation."

"William Warburton's Alliance between Church and State was published at the time of greatest strain in 1736. It offered a realistic defence of the position of the Church, one which abandoned all pretensions to an independent authority, and yet laid on the State a clear duty of protection. It was strongly approved by Sherlock and the court. In time it came to be seen as the classic statement of complacent Georgian Erastianism and a mark of the stable relationship between religion and politics in mid-eighteenth-century England."

"Trade was a national preoccupation and the constant concern of Parliament and the government, for all his contemporaries were agreed with Defoe that trade was the cause of England's increasing wealth. The trade of England, both overseas and domestic, was extremely rich and varied, based partly on things made or grown at home and partly on an extensive re-export trade of raw materials from the colonies in America and luxury goods from the East. In order to encourage trade, Walpole removed all restrictive measures on the export of English manufactured goods. He also allowed into the country the raw materials needed for them duty free. But, of course, there was no general tendency towards free trade. Everyone, including Walpole, believed that English manufacturers had to be protected at all costs. The Irish were forbidden to make cloth or export their wool to anywhere but England in case the greatest of all English industries – cloth manufacture – should be endangered in any way. This fear of foreign competition was at times carried to fantastic lengths: it was an offence to shear sheep within four miles of the coast in case the fleeces should be smuggled overseas. Yet this attitude – absurd as it might be in many manifestations – was fundamentally realistic. Eighteenth-century politicians realised with great clarity that wealth meant power. Chatham, who was more preoccupied with England's grandeur than any other statesman, planned his campaigns with the merchants of London and planned them to capture French trade. For trade was wealth and wealth was power."

"The appetite of England had been whetted by the rapid commercial expansion. A world of never-ending luxury could be won by vigorous and aggressive action against her competitors; so it seemed to many of London's merchants. That war would bring commercial wealth was a deep-seated belief which influenced English politics profoundly."

"The age of Walpole was rough, coarse, brutal; a world for the muscular and the aggressive and the cunning. The thin veneer of elegance and classic form obscured but never hid either the crime and dissipation or the drab middle-class virtue and thrift. For the majority of England, life was hard and vile, but the expanding world of commerce and the rich harvests brought both prosperity and opportunity, which bred a boundless self-confidence."

"The success of the slave trade agitation has obscured a great deal of the Sect's other social work. Active Christianity was the panacea for the world's ills; in consequence, education and missionary enterprise were more important to the Sect than the more direct ameliorations of social conditions, such as control of child labour, shorter working hours, cheap food, and higher wages. They and their supporters set up schools for the poor, especially Sunday Schools for ragged children, which were interested principally in the inculcation of morals and Christian principles, as narrowly interpreted by Simeon or Wilberforce. Not only the poor received their attention, but also the wealthy and middle classes, and, in spite of much aggressive opposition, prudish piety began slowly to replace that frank cynicism which had been the hall-mark of eighteenth-century fashion."

"Out of doors, crime was rife and often bloody: smugglers had little compunction about slaying excise officers. And, from the rough-house of the crowd to the dragoons' musket volley, violence ran through public and political life, as English as plum pudding. Force was used as a matter of routine to achieve social and political goals, smudging hard-and-fast distinctions between the world of criminality and politics."

"Upright citizens – not just blackguards and bravoes but the village Hampden too – did not shrink from force to get their due. There was a cacophony of verbal violence: newspapers, cartoons and street ballads blasted their targets with scabrous insults and Billingsgate scurrility; political sermons thundered from pulpits."

"The lava flow of violence ran through the political landscape, sometimes underground, sometimes on the surface. Unpopular politicians were often ragged, peers' carriages pelted and rocked, and their windows smashed, as they left Westminster... Minorities were tempting targets. Methodists were treated as cockshies (John Wesley saw it as a mark of Divine favour that no brick hit him personally), as were homosexuals, witches, bawds and Frenchmen. The Act of 1753 legalizing the naturalization of Jews brought baying anti-Semitic mobs on to the streets: it was immediately repealed. Irish-baiting and Scots-baiting were national sports. Fear of popery sparked the Gordon Riots in London in 1780, though targets broadened to include the rich, Lord Mansfield, breweries and Newgate goal."

"It is often the custom to think of the eighteenth century, prior to the French Revolution, as a period of effete politeness and intelligence, of cultured and artificial decadence, of scepticism, atrophy, and want of enterprise... With regard to the continent of Europe, there is a certain amount of symbolical truth in this popular impression, but, for Britain, a more illuminating picture of the eighteenth century would be supplied by a vision of something more robust—Clive planted four-square across the breach of Arcot; Wolfe and his men scrambling up the precipitous forest track towards Quebec; Captain Cook's sails sweeping into Botany Bay; Wesley's lean face and long white hair, as he preaches to mass meetings of miners and throws powerful men into fits of hysteria; James Watt working in the instrument maker’s shop, with thoughts in him that shall have their consequences in the history of mankind"

"The eighteenth-century English, on the average, were an earnest, virile, original, unconventional, and energetic race."

"With regard to the continent of Europe, the popular impression that the eighteenth century was effete and conventional has at least a certain relation to truth... But when we turn to the Britain of the period we have a different story to tell. This was the time when our fathers conquered Canada and half India, rediscovered and began to settle Australia, and traded on an ever-increasing scale all over the inhabited globe; reorganized British agriculture on modern methods; began the Industrial Revolution in our island, thence in later times to spread over the whole world; and if the thirteen American colonies were at the same time lost to the British Empire, it was the result less of decadence in Great Britain than of young and mutinous energies in English America."

"Whether or not I am right in supposing that the England of the eighteenth century had an energy of spirit that was lacking elsewhere in the Europe of that day, it is at least certain that this view was then generally held upon the Continent. After the Marlborough wars with which the century opened, and, still more after the great victories of Chatham in two hemispheres in the Seven Years War, foreigners were always asking each other what was the secret of English success, and the answer they found was that the secret lay in our free institutions. In the days of Charles I and II our Parliament had been regarded abroad as a source of confusion and weakness to England. But the course of William III's and Marlborough's wars had changed that view completely. For the British Parliament had defeated the all-worshipped despotism of Louis XIV in a long-drawn contest, in which England had proved supreme alike in land warfare, in sea warfare, in diplomacy, and in financial strength. This unexpected event gave a prestige to our institutions which coloured European thought from the time of Marlborough right down to the French Revolution. The prosperity of England under Walpole, the constant increase of her trade and maritime power, her victories under Chatham in Canada and India, all confirmed the same impression. Even our great catastrophe—the loss of the American Colonies—was read in France as another demonstration of the power that freedom gives. It was not only our Parliament that was admired, but freedom of speech, press, person, and religious toleration."

"In the eighteenth century the English working man—then called the jolly yeoman or the industrious ’prentice—was intensely British, boasted himself a free-born Briton, and had no use for the frog-eating, priest-ridden Frenchman of his imagination. The average Englishman had not made the Grand Tour, and had no information about foreigners such as is being constantly poured in upon us to-day through newspapers, cinemas, books, pamphlets, and photographs. What the common English thought of the French you can see in Hogarth's uncomplimentary picture, entitled ‘Calais Gate’, in the National Gallery. This contempt for, and ignorance of, foreigners was extended not only to the Irish, but even to the Scots—who only became understood and admired in England in the age of Walter Scott, partly through the powerful influence of his pen."

"The life that the English gentry lived was as different as possible from that of their continental friends. The nobles of France and Italy thought little of existence away from the Court of their master, the King or reigning Duke. But the English gentry, when they came to town, came first and foremost to their own Parliament, only secondarily to the King's Court... But the bulk of their lives the English gentlemen spent neither at Court nor yet in the purlieus of Parliament, nor in London at all; but in the country, among their neighbours of all classes whom they led, entertained, bullied, and at election time courted and bribed. It was to their country houses that they brought back the art treasures they had collected on the Grand Tour—treasures in our day being scattered oversea by the auctioneer's hammer. They lived among their neighbours, hunting foxes, shooting partridges, inclosing and draining land, improving breeds of sheep and cattle, governing the countryside as Justices of the Peace. Their whole manner of life and way of thought was English, and though every English gentleman was recognized as belonging to the same social level as the continental nobleman, he was also recognized as belonging to a separate and unique island species of the genus European gentleman."

"There was therefore in eighteenth-century England, prior to the changes gradually made manifest by the Industrial Revolution, a national solidarity and unity of idea which bound Englishmen of all classes together and separated them from foreigners. Power, as we think looking back, was unduly concentrated in the hands of one class, the country gentry, but their monopoly was not popularly regarded as a grievance. The novelist Fielding is one of the very few contemporary critics of squirarchical power in the mid-eighteenth century. Classes were distinct in England—less distinct and rigid, indeed, than on the Continent at that time, but much more distinct and rigid than they are to-day. Wealth was very unevenly distributed. But there was little or no social discontent, and the national idea made every one proud of being a free-born Englishman."

"Victorian historians too often depicted the past as an inevitable progress leading to the glorious present when Britain ruled the world. And French and German and Russian and American historians did much the same thing for their nations’ stories. Like epic poems, their books were filled with heroes and villains and stirring events. Such histories, says Michael Howard, the eminent British historian, sustain us in difficult times, but they are “nursery history.”"

"Take another look at the graph showing illegitimacy from the 1500s up to the present, and focus on the period from 1850–1900. It would be hard to find a time or place in which industrialisation and urbanisation were faster, more sweeping, or more wrenching than in Victorian England. And yet during that same period, illegitimacy went down, not up (crime also dropped, amazingly). The Victorian middle class was superbly efficient at propagating its values throughout society, and its success overcame the naturally disruptive forces of modernisation."

"Now the Victorian Age, or the nineteenth century as a whole, was a great moral reformer... It proclaimed that men, even courtiers and noblemen, ought not to be drunken or dissolute or even corrupt, that politics were really concerned with the welfare of the people, that the rich had duties towards the poor. The transition from George IV and his unpleasing brothers to the young Queen and the Prince Consort was typical of a much wider change. When Lord Palmerston was caught chasing a maid of honour into her bedroom, the excuse made for him was: "Your Majesty should remember that he is a very old gentleman and accustomed to the manners of the late Court"."

"There was a re-birth of public spirit. Gentlemen ceased to take bribes. Justice became incorruptible... It has been observed that up to about 1820 the laws passed by Parliament had almost all been for the protection of the privileged few against the many; after that time they are predominantly for the protection of the nation as a whole against abuse and privilege. Instead of the ferocious defence of property, a spirit of sympathy and help to the oppressed begins to inspire legislation. The old revolutionary doctrine of the infinite perfectibility of mankind, which had set on fire the enthusiasm of Godwin, Shelley and Condorcet, passed in a milder and more reasonable form into the general imagination of the age."

"Whether or no man might be made perfect, he certainly might be made better and happier than he is; and the conscious pursuit of that object became an accepted source of inspiration to politics and literature. With it went the conception that the necessary condition of the pursuit was freedom: set man free, let him have room to move and external conditions which do not starve or cramp him, and human nature of itself will strive to rise higher. This spirit shows itself in almost all the best English fiction of the period, from romantics like the Brontës, and realists, like George Eliot, to satirists, like Dickens and Thackeray. It had been utterly lacking in Fielding and Smollett, and even in Jane Austen. It shows itself in the immense increase of charitable institutions, of religious missions, of societies for the education of the people. There is no question of hypocrisy. To suppose there is, is the mere petulance of jealously. Shelley's or Gladstone's love of moral improvement was just as genuine as Falstaff's love of sack. But an age of moral earnestness seems in our own day to have been succeeded by an age of relaxation; and one can see in, for instance, such a book as Mr. Strachey's Eminent Victorians that the moral earnestness of Gladstone or Dr. Arnold is felt by the author to be a hateful quality and not easily to be forgiven."

"[T]he Victorian Age... cared more for life than for thought; consequently it produced abundant and fine life, while its thought was comparatively unambitious and aimed mainly at serving the practical purposes of life. It cared intensely for morals and little for metaphysics; a good deal for religion and scarcely at all for theology... It had an immense faith, a faith in goodness, in duty, in the future of mankind."

"The Victorian Age was in its essence liberal, a time of continuous progress in humanity, in enlightenment, in the welfare of the masses; a time in which an aristocracy was, on the whole, in power but was continually resigning its privileges or extending them to classes hitherto excluded. The statesmen of that time thought of themselves not as leaders of a class, but rather as ‘Shepherds of the People’, concerned with the good of the flock but somewhat aloof from it."

"Between 1780 and 1850 the English ceased to be one of the most aggressive, brutal, rowdy, outspoken, riotous, cruel and bloodthirsty nations in the world and became one of the most inhibited, polite, orderly, tender-minded, prudish and hypocritical."

"Meanwhile, it may with little fear of contradiction be asserted that there never was, in any nation of which we have a history, a time in which life and property were so secure as they are at present in England. The sense of security is almost everywhere diffused, in town and country alike, and it is in marked contrast to the sense of insecurity which prevailed even at the beginning of the present century. There are, of course, in most great cities some quarters of evil repute, in which assault and robbery are now and again committed. There is, perhaps, to be found a lingering and flickering tradition of the old sanctuaries and similar resorts. But any man of average stature and strength may wander about on foot and alone, at any hour of the day or the night, through the greatest of all cities and its suburbs, along the high roads, and through unfrequented country lanes, and never have so much as the thought of danger thrust upon him, unless he goes out of his way to court it."

"Audrey Russell: Do you think that there may be a reversal and that certain very strict standards may suddenly follow the present age? Mary Stocks: Well it could happen. You see, it did in the first half of the nineteenth century, didn't it? When there was a reaction against the sort of extreme libertarianism of the late eighteenth century."

"When I speak of Victorian values, I mean respect for the individual, thrift, initiative, a sense of personal responsibility, respect for others and their property, and all the other values that characterised the best of the Victorian era."

"I had great regard for the Victorians for many reasons – not least their civic spirit to which the increase in voluntary and charitable societies and the great buildings and endowments of our cities pay eloquent tribute. I never felt uneasy about praising ‘Victorian values’ or – the phrase I originally used – ‘Victorian virtues’, not least because they were by no means just Victorian. But the Victorians also had away of talking which summed up what we were now rediscovering – they distinguished between the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving poor’."

"No class in the community has more reason to be satisfied with the results of the last sixty years than the working men. Into that period have been crowded a series of economic changes, on the whole making for their comfort, and of reforms which have made them the envy of the same classes in other countries. They have got their "Six Points," or something better. It was the utmost demand of their best friends at the beginning of the present reign that they should be free to work out, by combination or otherwise, in their own way, their salvation, that their societies should be legalized, and that the criminal law should not be used to increase the power of capital—in a word, that they should suffer from no disabilities. They find themselves in 1897 in the position of a privileged or favoured class, fenced about with special legislation, and possessed of some rights denied to others. And this period has also been for them one of unexampled material prosperity. Their wages have risen, while the prices of food and most articles of consumption have fallen. The State educates their children gratis. The State makes the acquisition of allotments easy for them. The municipalities give them recreation-grounds and free libraries."

"What brighter jewel in a Sovereign's crown, what nobler record of a reign, than the fact that it witnessed the children's emancipation, that it released from toil in tender years the sons and daughters of the poor? The success of the Factory Acts has suggested other measures intended to make less oppressive the labour of those who, being, it is supposed, unable to bargain for themselves, need the protection of the Legislature; and this group of laws will be an enduring monument, if not of the wisdom of the Victorian age, of its solicitude for the welfare of its wards."

"The contrast between the labour laws of 1837 and those passed in 1875 is the contrast between harshness and mercy, distrust of the working classes and confidence in them."

"One thing that strikes me when I think of Booth is the nonsense that is talked today about the poverty of the Victorian age. Why the Victorian age is so unpopular today very largely arises from the fact that, in spite of all its faults, there was among its great men, who were numerous, a faith in goodness: there was a moral earnestness and there was a sense of duty and a performance of duty."

"The bettering of conditions of life for the majority of people was the material achievement of the Victorian age, parallel to its glories in literature, intellect and science."

"The middle and later years of the nineteenth century, the most progressively prosperous and, in the sum of genius and achievement, perhaps the most solidly great in our annals, have been called the Victorian era... Though all was not well in 1897, yet, in those sixty years past, millions had come out of the house of bondage and misery into which the unregulated advent of the Industrial Revolution had plunged its victims. In the same years our people had spread far over the face of the globe, carrying with them, on the whole, justice, civilisation and prosperity where they went. Great men of genius in literature, science and thought had adorned an age when civilisation seemed for awhile to be strong both in quantity and in quality, and had helped to make common during her reign certain standards of intellectual seriousness and freedom."

"Could some one who had emigrated from our shores sixty years ago return to-day he would scarcely recognize in the ordinary working men the sons or grandsons of the working men whom he knew. He would note that their dress and that of their families were much improved; they wear better clothes than their masters wore in 1837. They eat and drink better food and drink than was then within their reach; and, with the price of wheat which has ruled in recent years, they know nothing of the sharp pressure of want, the periodic returns of semi-starvation which then visited large masses of men. Such an observer would find that the working-man's house was more commodious and better furnished, and, if his tastes kept him from the publichouse, had its little store of luxuries and ornaments. Model dwellings are erected for him... If he is ill, hospitals which he does little to support receive him... Should he or his sons be studious, there are free libraries, institutions which, at convenient hours, give him sound instruction, and plenty of people disposed to applaud his efforts to better his lot or enlarge his intelligence. In short, he is better fed, better clothed, better housed, better paid, better educated, lives longer, probably, as a rule, weighs more than his father or grandfather."

"In Victorian times business was seen as a romance and books by the score portrayed the lives of entrepreneurs both as gripping adventure stories and also as examples of high moral principle, dedication to public service and concern for others."

"It is in the connection of the conflict with the Yankee...that we can perhaps best understand the South's unusual proneness to sentimentality. The root of the thing, obviously, was in the simple man... It was part and parcel, in fact, with his unrealism and romanticism, and grew as they grew. It gathered force, too, from the Zeitgeist, of course—from the great tide of sentimentality which, rolling up slowly through the years following the French Revolution, broke over the Western world in flooding fullness with the accession of Victoria to the throne of England. Nowhere, indeed, did this Victorianism, with its false feeling, its excessive nicety, its will to the denial of the ugly, find more sympathetic acceptance than in the South."

"The colonisation of Australia and New Zealand, and the acquisition of South Africa in the decline of Holland, created the new and wider British Empire still based upon sea-power and comprising a fifth of the human race, over which Queen Victoria, in the longest reign of British history, presided. In this period moral issues arising from Christian ethics became prominent. The slave trade, from which Britain had so shamelessly profited in the past, was suppressed by the Royal Navy. By a terrible internal struggle, at the cost of nearly a million lives, slavery was extirpated from the United States; above all, the Union was preserved."

"During the last half of the 19th century there was a marked fall in the crime rate with a substantial decrease in both crimes of dishonesty and violence, and in the illegitimacy rate, and the beginnings of a fall in the incidence of drug and alcohol abuse. It was a period of striking moral reform in personal behaviour which transformed Britain from being a violent, dishonest and addicted society into a peaceable, law-abiding, respectable and essentially moral realm that endured for much of the 20th century."

"British rates of recorded crime fell as markedly in the latter part of the 19th century as they have risen since. The overall incidence of serious offences recorded by the police in the 1890s was only about 60 per cent of what it had been in the 1850s and, given that the efficiency of the reporting and recording of crime was improving at the time, the real fall in the crime rate was probably far greater than that indicated by official statistics. Thus in 1900 Britain was not only a less violent and dishonest country than today, but also less violent and dishonest than it had been in the earlier part of the 19th century."

"[A]n earlier generation of Britons succeeded in changing the character of their people and producing a diminution in the many forms of deviance that have reappeared and flourished in our own time, because they saw them as constituting not a social but a moral problem whose solution lay in the reform of personal conduct. One key agency in spreading and transmitting Gorer's "strict conscience and self-control" from being "a feature of a relatively small part of the population" to becoming "general throughout nearly the whole of society" was the Sunday school whose enrolments rose as the incidence of deviant behaviour fell in the late 19th century. Significantly, the numbers enrolled in and the influence of this institution then fell in the years prior to the reversal of the U-curve of deviance which has produced Britain's present high level of moral problems. There seems to be a clear inverse relationship between the rise and fall of the Sunday school...and the fall and rise of deviant behaviour."

"The postulate that there was a link of some kind between the rise of the Sunday school and the original decline of deviance is reinforced by the geographical evidence as well as the aggregate changes over time. Wales, which historically had been one of the more violent and lawless parts of Britain, became in the later 19th century an especially peaceable and law-abiding place, characterised by temperance and a strict moral code."

"No one will ever understand Victorian England who does not appreciate that among highly civilized...countries it was one of the most religious that the world has known. Moreover its particular type of Christianity laid a peculiarly direct emphasis upon conduct; for, though it recognized both grace and faith as essentials to salvation, it was in practice also very largely a doctrine of salvation by works. This type, which had come to dominate churchmen and nonconformists alike, may be called, using the term in a broad sense, evangelicalism... [I]t became after Queen Victoria's marriage practically the religion of the court, and gripped all ranks and conditions of society. After Melbourne's departure it inspired nearly every front-rank public man, save Palmerston, for four decades... [N]othing is more remarkable than the way in which evangelicalism in the broader sense overleaped sectarian barriers and pervaded men of all creeds... Even Disraeli, by nature as remote from it as Palmerston, paid every deference to it in politics, and conformed to all its externals in Hughenden church."

"It is...beyond question that the century now expiring has exhibited since the close of its first quarter a period of unexampled activity both in legislative and in administrative changes; that these changes, taken in the mass, have been in the direction of true and most beneficial progress; that both the condition and the franchises of the people have made, in relation to the former state of things, an extraordinary advance; that of these reforms an overwhelming proportion have been effected by direct action of the Liberal party, or of statesmen such as Peel or Canning, ready to meet odium and to forfeit power for the public good; and that in every of 15 Parliaments the people of Scotland have decisively expressed their convictions in favour of this wise, temperate, and in every way remarkable policy."

"During the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth centuries the strict conscience and self-control, which had been a feature of a relatively small part of the English population, became general throughout nearly the whole of the society... The forces which led to this transformation in character are difficult to establish; although religious belief is not nowadays typical of the prosperous working class, it is possible that the evangelical missions of John Wesley, of whom it is said that he prevented the French Revolution reaching England, may have played a significant part in their time, particularly in the industrial Northern regions. So too may have done the gradual spread of universal education. On the basis of the evidence available to me, however, I should consider that the most significant factor in the development of a strict conscience and law-abiding habits in the majority of urban English men and women was the invention and development of the institution of the modern English police force."

"One of the most impressive demonstrations of the increase in the law-abiding character of the English is the following table of the number of criminal commitments in the half century between 1841 and 1891. During this period serious offences decreased 60 per cent in volume, and 80 per cent relative to the increase of population. As can be seen, the really dramatic break in criminal commitments came in the decade 1851–1861. Police forces were first established all over England by the County and Borough Police Act of 1856."

"I don't think there has been a better time in our history. Better leaders than Palmerston, Gladstone, Disraeli and Salisbury? Braver thinkers than Mill, Ruskin, Faraday and the mighty Darwin? And, crucially, when was English literature ever more richly endowed with talent? From Hardy to Dickens, George Eliot to Mrs Gaskell, Tennyson to Browning, Arnold to Wilde, English poetry and prose was never so well served."

"To the degree Victorians succeeded in "bourgeoisifying" the ethos, they also democratized it. That ethos was not, to be sure, an exalted or heroic one. Hard work, sobriety, frugality, foresight—these were modest, mundane virtues, even lowly ones. But they were virtues within the capacity of everyone; they did not assume any special breeding, or status, or talent, or valor, or grace—or even money. They were common virtues within the reach of common people. They were, so to speak, democratic virtues."

"They were also liberal virtues. By putting a premium on ordinary virtues attainable by ordinary people, the ethos located responsibility within each individual. It was no longer only the exceptional, the heroic individual who was the master of his fate; every individual could be his own master. So far from promoting social control, the ethos had the effect of promoting self-control. This was at the heart of Victorian morality: self-control, self-help, self-reliance, self-discipline. A liberal society, the Victorians believed, depended upon a moral citizenry. The stronger the voluntary exercise of morality on the part of each individual—the more internalized that morality—the weaker need be the external, coercive instruments of the state. For the Victorians, morality served as a substitute for law, just as law was a substitute for force."