0521823420 cambridge university press the character of credit sep 2003

Making English Morals
Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886

Campaigns for moral reform were a recurrent and distinctive feature of public
life in later Georgian and Victorian England. Antislavery, temperance, charity organisation, cruelty prevention, ‘social purity’ advocates and more – all
promoted their causes through the mobilisation of citizen volunteer support.
This book sets out to explore the world of these volunteer networks, their foci
of concern, their patterns of recruitment, their methods of operation, and the
responses they aroused. In its exploration of this culture of self-consciously
altruistic associational effort, the book provides the first systematic survey
of moral reform movements as a distinct tradition of citizen action over the
period, as well as casting light on the formation of a middle-class culture torn,
in this stage of economic and political nation-building, between acceptance
of a market-organised society and unease about the cultural consequences of
doing so. This is a revelatory book that is both compelling and accessible.
m . j. d. r o b e r t s is Associate Professor in the Department of Modern History, Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of numerous articles on
volunteer association in the religious and philanthropic life of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, and has held visiting fellowships at the University
of Adelaide, the University of Edinburgh and All Souls College, Oxford.


Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories
Series editors:
margot c. f inn , University of Warwick
colin jones, University of Warwick
keith wrightson , Yale University

New cultural histories have recently expanded the parameters (and enriched the methodologies) of social history. Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories recognises the
plurality of current approaches to social and cultural history as distinctive points of
entry into a common explanatory project. Open to innovative and interdisciplinary

work, regardless of its chronological or geographical location, the series encompasses
a broad range of histories of social relationships and of the cultures that inform them
and lend them meaning. Historical anthropology, historical sociology, comparative
history, gender history and historicist literary studies – among other subjects – all fall
within the remit of Cambridge Social and Cultural Histories.
Titles in the series include:
1 margot c. f inn The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English
Culture, 1740–1914
ISBN 0 521 82342 0
2 m . j. d. r o b e r t s Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and
Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886
ISBN 0 521 83389 2


Making English Morals
Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in
England, 1787–1886
M. J. D. Roberts
Macquarie University


cambridge university press
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© M. J. D. Roberts 2004
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Contents

Preface
Acknowledgements
List of abbreviations
Introduction

page vii
x
xii

1

1

Moral reform in the 1780s: the making of an agenda

17

2

‘The best means of national safety’: moral reform
in wartime, 1795–1815

59

3

Taming the masses, 1815–1834

96

4

From social control to self-control, 1834–1857

143

5

Moral individualism: the renewal and reappraisal

of an ideal, 1857–1880

193

The late Victorian crisis of moral reform: the 1880s
and after

245

Conclusion

290

Select bibliography
Index

299
313

6

v



Preface

This is a book driven into existence by curiosity about moral change. Who
decides that contemporary moral values, current standards of behaviour, are
repugnant? What experiences promote this sensitivity? What experiences and

mental processes trigger attempts to promote moral change – attempts often met
with indifference, hostility, ridicule and failure? And under what circumstances,
by what methods, do the morally sensitive manage to persuade the indifferent,
and overcome the hostile, when they do achieve recognition? ‘Nothing is more
difficult perhaps than to explain how and why, or why not, a new moral perception becomes effective in action. Yet nothing is more urgent if an academic
historical exercise is to become a significant investigation of human behavior.’∗
This, then, is a study of people seeking moral reform – and about the associations they formed, the campaigns they fought, and the responses they achieved.
The leading characters will be relatively familiar to the reader. The list begins
with William Wilberforce and concludes with Josephine Butler and the crusading journalist W. T. Stead. The volunteer associations which these recognised
historical figures led, and relied upon to achieve their goals, will, to most, be
less familiar – as will some of the goals themselves.
It is hoped that the book itself may prove useful in three ways. Given the
variety of causes canvassed and the complexity of their organisation, my first
purpose has been to tell a story – to establish a chronology of organised moral
reform activities across the period from the later eighteenth century to the turn
of the twentieth. This reconstruction of sequence gives an opportunity, not
only to clarify the range and order of events, but to work towards two more
explanation-focused tasks. That is, it gives an opportunity to place each moral
reform initiative in precise context – to explain its appearance and evolving
fortunes in terms of the context (demographic, economic, cultural, political,
administrative) which moulded the perceptions and motives of those attracted
to (or repelled by) the task taken up. It also gives a much-needed opportunity to
integrate the study of particular causes – temperance, antislavery, social purity,
∗

M. I. Finley, quoted by David Brion Davis, ‘The Perils of Doing History by Ahistorical Abstraction’, in T. Bender (ed.), The Antislavery Debate (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1992), p. 300.

vii

viii

Preface

etc. – into a study of moral reform as a diverse but distinctive mode of thought
and action. ‘Very little has so far been published on Victorian moral reform
movements. There is no general survey of them’: thus Brian Harrison in 1974.†
Since then there has emerged a useful (though still incomplete) range of individual movement studies and sectoral surveys, yet it remains the case that there
is still no general survey of them, let alone a survey which links them to their
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century precursors and prototypes. This book
aims to provide that survey.
A second way of reading the book is to read it as a contribution to the cultural history of the strata of society from which moral reform associations drew
their chief support – that is, the English middle classes, especially the professional and commercial middle classes. The leaders of moral reform movements
over the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, as I aim to explain, can
plausibly be said to have established a ‘moral reform tradition’. By means of
volunteer associational action they created and successfully transmitted across
several generations a collective memory of cultural heritage and obligation, as
well as a commitment to a form of public action self-consciously presented
as aiming to transcend individual or sectional self-interest. That sense of obligation was particularly aroused by unease about the moral consequences of
material advance.
While it has long since been recognised that the English middle classes of
this period cannot adequately be ‘represented’ by an elite of industrial capitalists, the tracing of the diversity of types of middle-class cultural response to
the coming of a market-organised society is still, as I understand it, very much
work in progress. It is in this context that I present the study of moral reform
voluntary association as a contribution to the appraisal of middle-class ambivalence towards the spread of a market-organised society. On the one hand, it can
be argued, voluntary association plays a major role in a middle-class mission
to promote the market-related values of self-control and self-reliance among
other social groups. On the other hand, moral reform voluntary effort is also
identifiable as a reaction to the ‘temptations’ of a free market in goods, services
and labour; and the attitudes expressed by reformers are attitudes which register

a recurrent and, in some quarters, acute, anxiety about the market’s apparent
power to corrupt moral values at all social levels including their own, thus
potentially ‘delegitimating’ middle-class claims to public leadership. In this
context moral reform voluntarism can be identified as a form of compensatory
investment in cultural stabilisation on behalf of the class most self-consciously
‘implicated’.
†

B. Harrison, ‘State Intervention and Moral Reform’, in P. Hollis (ed.), Pressure from Without in
Early Victorian England (1974), p. 317.


Preface

ix

Finally, because of its focus on voluntary association, the book may be read
as a contribution to current debate about the nature and cultural underpinning of
that elusive yet desirable state of social evolution – ‘civil society’. In civil society, as political scientists present it, citizens avoid the repression and inflexibility
inherent in societies organised in more authoritarian or atomised ways, instead
acting in self-initiated ways which (largely inadvertently, through experimental
practice) create ‘social capital greas[ing] the wheels that allow communities to
advance smoothly’. They do this, the argument goes, by active participation in
a public life of committed, yet tolerant, trusting and (perhaps) ‘rational-critical’
interaction which both trains them in negotiation and, at the same time, curbs
the ‘unmediated’ power of the state and of market forces over their lives. While
the concerns that have stimulated this debate about the generation of ‘social capital’ have been aroused by perceived trends over recent generations in western
societies as a whole, it has been customary to invoke a benchmark state of
society for comparison which is located, historically, in the period (and, to a
degree, in the society) covered by this book. The opportunity therefore arises

to test, so far as evidence permits, the plausibility of the model, and also to
make some attempt to evaluate the contribution of ‘associations for altruistic
purposes’ to the emergence of a functioning civil society in England.


Acknowledgements

This book has been a long time in the making. In that time I have incurred many
debts, to institutions and to people.
Among institutions, my thanks to the Australian Research Council (the former Australian Research Grants Committee) for supporting two short research
trips from which the project emerged. My thanks also to my own university
for study leave and research support. My particular thanks to the Institute for
Advanced Study in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, to the Centre
for British Studies, University of Adelaide, and above all to the Warden and
Fellows of All Souls College, Oxford, for electing me to visiting fellowships
which allowed ordered research, discussion and writing to take place.
The support of librarians and owners of manuscript collections is also a pleasure to record. My thanks to the following for permission to quote unpublished
materials from their collections: the Bodleian Library, Oxford (MSS Wilberforce); the Trustees of the Broadlands Archives, University of Southampton
(diary of the seventh earl of Shaftesbury); the William R. Perkins Library, Duke
University (William Wilberforce papers); the London Metropolitan Archives
(MacGregor papers); the North Yorkshire County Record Office (Wyvill
papers); the West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds (Symington Collection);
and the Head of Leisure Services, Sheffield City Council (Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments: the Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments have been accepted
in lieu of inheritance tax by HM Government and allocated to Sheffield City
Council). My thanks also for permission to inspect materials, and for assistance beyond the call of duty, to Lord Kenyon; to librarians at Hoare’s Bank,
37 Fleet Street, London; the Lord’s Day Observance Society, London SE20;
the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, Horsham, Sussex;
The Women’s Library (formerly the Fawcett Library), London Metropolitan
University; and to the expert and hard-working staff of ‘Document Supply’ at
my own university library. My apologies to anyone inadvertently overlooked.

Without such help there would have been no book.
At the personal level of scholarly advice-giving, criticism and encouragement, I am heavily in debt to a variety of people. These include, at Oxford,
Brian Harrison and Jo Innes, also John Walsh and Bryan Wilson. My thanks
x


Acknowledgements

xi

also to intellectual partners at Australasian Modern British History conferences,
in particular Jim Hammerton, David Philips, Sandra Holton and Bob Dare, also
Wilf Prest and Barry Smith. At my own university I am in debt to Jill Roe
and George Parsons for their support and skill in bargaining the time for me to
complete this project; also to Linda Paoloni and Beth Lewis for early assistance
in creating a text.
More personally still, my thanks to Faye, Alex and Amelia for sharing some
of the thrill of research, and much more of the strain of living with a historian
in the throes of composition, with ungrudging generosity. Finally, my thanks
to my parents, who not only supported me to persist in the hope of becoming
a historian when I had yet to convince myself that this was feasible, but also,
by introducing me to the differing traditions of English midlands Nonconformity and Australian evangelical Anglicanism, first trained me to recognise the
existence – and value – of cultural difference. For these reasons this book is
dedicated to their memory.


Abbreviations

Organisations
BAPT

BFTS
CEPS
CETS
CFS
COS
LDOS
LFS
LNA
MRU
NAPSS
NARCDA
NSPCC
NVA
PDS

[R]SPCA
SDUK
SRM
UKA
VA
WVS
YMCA

xii

British Association for the Promotion of Temperance
British and Foreign Temperance Society
Church of England Purity Society
Church of England Temperance Society
Children’s Friend Society

Charity Organisation Society
Lord’s Day Observance Society
Labourers’ Friend Society
Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the
Contagious Diseases Acts
Moral Reform Union
National Association for the Promotion of Social Science
(Social Science Association)
National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious
Diseases Acts
National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children
National Vigilance Association
Society for the Improvement of Prison Discipline and for
the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders (Prison Discipline
Society)
[Royal] Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals
Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge
Society for the Reformation of Manners
United Kingdom Alliance
Vigilance Association for the Defence of Personal Rights
(Personal Rights Association)
Workhouse Visiting Society
Young Men’s Christian Association


List of abbreviations

Sources and publications
BDEB
BL Add. MSS

CSHB
DNB
HC SC
HL SC
PD
PP
WWM

Blackwell Dictionary of Evangelical Biography, ed.
D. Lewis (2 vols., Oxford, 1995)
British Library Additional Manuscripts
Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, ed.
F. M. L. Thompson (3 vols., Cambridge, 1990)
Dictionary of National Biography
Select Committee of the House of Commons
Select Committee of the House of Lords
Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates
[British] Parliamentary Papers
Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments

xiii



Introduction

A history of moral change is, to a certain degree, a history of everything. This
book is of more limited scope. It aims to explore the history of English moral
reform – that is, of self-conscious, organised efforts by groups of concerned
citizens to change moral values and to modify patterns of behaviour associated

with them. It is argued that ‘moral reform’ as a category of social action was
a particular preoccupation of the period between the Revolution Settlement of
1688–9 and the turn of the twentieth century and, more distinctly still, of the
hundred years between the 1780s and the 1880s.
Moral reform identified
How is moral reform to be identified? It may help to begin with an attempt at
definition by an actively engaged contemporary. In 1852 the British Temperance Advocate published an article: ‘What the Temperance Society is not ’.1
In this article the author compared the work of a temperance society with the
work of four other types of volunteer action. A temperance society was ‘not
a charitable institution’ – though it helped to teach ‘the true charity which
restores to sound moral habits, to virtuous self-help and self-reliance’. Nor was
it ‘an educational society’ or a ‘sanitary association’ – though its encouragement to self-management would assist members towards accumulation of the
resources and will-power needed to raise their educational and environmental
goals. Finally, it was not ‘a political union’ – though its members, by their
self-control, proved themselves fit for recognition as citizens. In the context of
its era a fifth distinction might have been added – a temperance society was not
(yet) an organisation for religious evangelisation – though the majority of its
members would have some link with a church or, more likely, a chapel.
Why, then, this anxiety to establish a distinct identity? Why was such a
distinction valued? As this survey of voluntary action develops, a cluster of
explanations will become apparent. The most significant link moral reform to,
and distinguish it from, the activities of organised religious evangelisation, of
1

British Temperance Advocate 29 (1852), pp. 103–4.

1


2

Making English Morals

charitable relief-giving, of party politics and of public administration. Thus one
of the reasons why moral reform and religious evangelisation remained distinguishable (if sometimes overlapping) activities during this period was that
moral reform had the potential to avoid sectarian disputes about the type or
extent of belief in a particular form of Christianity. Again, one of the reasons
why moral reformers preferred to distinguish their mission as one of encouraging ‘true charity’ was that it distanced them from stereotypes of religionbased relief-giving which, in an age of political economy, were vulnerable to
charges of encouraging habitual (‘demoralising’) dependency. The key reason
why moral reformers invariably felt unease at becoming too closely associated
with a political party or pressure group was the fear that this would run the risk
of subordinating goals perceived as altruistic to goals perceived to be tied to sectional self-interest. And a major reason why moral reformers usually retained a
strong commitment to voluntary status when they became associated with the
development of schemes for the ‘reclamation’ of the young or undersocialised
or the victims of cruelty and injustice was that it helped them to retain a living
sense of personal responsibility for those they perceived as ‘less fortunate’ than
themselves – a sense which most of them envisaged as difficult to preserve if
the work was entrusted to professional or official agency.
If this was, broadly speaking, the rationale of moral reform, what of the objectives falling within its scope? Here, temperance gives us only one illustration of
a complex and mutating range of concerns. Activists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries attached the moral reform label from time to time to everything
from repression of the profanation of the Sabbath to the encouragement of pure
literature, from the suppression of the slave trade to the prevention of cruelty
to animals and children. Temperance, charity organisation, prison reform, the
abolition of capital punishment, reclamation of ‘fallen women’, promotion of
‘social purity’, all fell within the category for some or all of the period explored
here.
In this they reflected changing practical priorities: the discovery of one form
of moral depravity often led to the discovery of another. They also reflected
changing perceptions of the moral sphere and its boundaries. That is, moral
reform depended on a set of culturally evolving assumptions about the responsibility of individuals for their own actions – about their capacity to choose

between vicious and virtuous conduct. Obviously a religious culture expressing its values in terms of sin and salvation will define this responsibility in
terms distinct from the terms employed by secular utilitarians. A society which
respects hierarchy and inherited rank will have a set of moral values which
distinguishes it from one which promotes individual autonomy and freedom of
contract. The extent of specialisation of professional knowledge will also have
a bearing on expectations of moral responsibility, as will the degree to which
a society endorses a specialisation of gender roles. All this makes a difference,


Introduction

3

and unavoidably did make a difference to the goals which moral reformers
set themselves over the period between the later eighteenth and later nineteenth
centuries. During this period, as we shall be acknowledging, debate about moral
values, about moral standards of behaviour, was therefore constantly entangled
with debate about religious belief and organisation; philanthropy, education and
the legitimate scope and goals of public administration; labour management,
work discipline and public order; family structure, gender roles and the socialisation of the young. At core it became a debate about the cultural control of
the ‘animal appetites’ – greed, lust, violence and (if it counts as an appetite)
indolence – all human propensities which have the potential to disrupt the fulfilment of social obligation to family, employer, neighbours, civil authority and
God.2 In a phrase, the limits of the moral are culturally determined in complex
ways.
Beyond the issue of identifying certain values and patterns of behaviour
as objects of moral reform concern, of course, lies the further question of
agency. Whose culture did the determining of moral boundaries, and by what
mechanisms?3 Without attempting to foreclose too much future argument, the
finding of this survey is that moral reform cultural elites can be most readily
located among ‘the middling ranks’ of English society. Sometimes the influence of these elites was powerful or persuasive enough to recruit support from

the world of the landed, titled and fashionable, and sometimes also from the
world of the labouring classes, especially skilled and semi-skilled tradesmen. As
noted above, the world of the middling ranks was not always (or even usually)
a culturally homogeneous world, and part of the appeal of moral reform was
its potential to build experimental bridges of co-operation across the chasms of
regional, occupational, gender and religious difference.4 Yet, in one respect, it
was united – united in commitment to a belief in the utility and acceptability of
volunteer association as a means of mobilising support and taking public action.
The tradition of clubs and societies in English life was by no means a new
one.5 And the uses to which volunteer association might be put were equally
2
3

4

5

Cf. William Paley’s classification of moral duties (‘Towards God . . . other men . . . ourselves’),
Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785; reprinted 1978), p. 36.
For the useful distinction, relied on here, between ‘culture as a category of social life’ and ‘culture
as system and practice’, see W. Sewell, ‘The Concept(s) of Culture’, in V. Bonnell and L. Hunt
(eds.), Beyond the Cultural Turn. New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley
CA, 1999), pp. 39–47.
On the tensions within middle-class culture, see A. Kidd and D. Nicholls (eds.), The Making
of the British Middle Class? Studies of Regional and Cultural Diversity since the Eighteenth
Century (Stroud, 1998), pp. xv–xxxii; S. Gunn, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class
(Manchester, 2000), pp. 14–30.
The tradition, it must also be noted, was not confined to England. The existence of a culture of
voluntary association, spread by the later eighteenth century across the English-speaking world,
has recently been extensively documented (P. Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800

(Oxford, 2000)), and the culture was periodically reinforced during the century which followed,


4

Making English Morals

available for the pursuit of projects of unvarnished self-interest (regional, occupational, political) and for the promotion of projects of claimed communal
altruism. The tradition of moral reform, as it emerged, however, was firmly
based on a collective belief in the possibility – and desirability – of disinterested
service in the cause of human moral improvement. Whether that improvement
was envisaged as a ‘reformation’ towards the retrieval of a purer moral order
allowed over modern times to decay, or as a ‘reform’ towards the creation of a
more modern, more rational, refined and evolved set of cultural relationships,
remained an ambiguity to be resolved over time.6
Perspectives on moral reform
Meanwhile, moral reform as it developed also became subject to evaluation by
people other than its supporters. Not all of these were prepared to take moral
reformers’ declarations of altruistic motive at face value and, as we shall see
in chapters to follow, there were moments when sections of the moral reform
project came under direct challenge. Such was the heat released that when, at
the end of the nineteenth century, a first generation of professional historians
began to record the achievements of moral reform activism, their attempts at
evaluation were themselves coloured by awareness of its contested reputation.
It is to these and following attempts at contextualisation of moral reform that
we must now turn.
Broadly speaking, we can identify three approaches – three framing narratives – into which the English volunteer moral reform tradition has been inserted
over the last hundred years. The first of these approaches is probably still the
most widely recognised. This is the presentation of moral reform as an aspect of
the history of the development of capitalist industrial society. In this approach,

campaigners for moral reform make their appearance as either the knowing or
involuntary articulators of the new standards of labour discipline required by that
circumstance. The primary goal/function of moral reform, the argument goes,
was to break in a ‘pre-industrial’ population to the ‘methodical way of life of industrial capitalism’. ‘The pressures towards discipline and order extended from
the factory, on one hand, the Sunday school, on the other, into every aspect of
life: leisure, personal relationships, speech, manners’, explains E. P. Thompson
in his depiction of the era of ‘Pitt’s moral lieutenant, Wilberforce’.7

6
7

especially among groups (temperance, antislavery, child-protection associations, etc.) linked to
Protestant evangelical networks. This study is limited to English materials, partly to make it
manageable, partly because of the distinctive cultural shape of English associational voluntarism
which stemmed from English society’s distinctive ecclesiastical and social structure, and from
its political and public welfare systems.
Cf. J. Innes, ‘ “Reform” in English Public Life: The Fortunes of a Word’, in A. Burns and J. Innes
(eds.), Rethinking the Age of Reform (Cambridge, 2003).
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth, 1968 edn), pp. 442–
3, though cf. Thompson’s warning against ‘sentimentalizing’ pre-industrial society at p. 451.


Introduction

5

Thompson’s critique of the coercive and disciplinary agenda of moral reform
was, in fact, a mid-twentieth-century reworking of a long line of moral criticism of moral reform. Marx, in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, had identified ‘economists, philanthropists, humanitarians, improvers of the condition of
the working class, organisers of charity, members of societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, temperance fanatics, hole-and-corner reformers of
every imaginable kind’ as incurable agents of the exploiting classes ‘desirous

of redressing social grievances in order to secure the continued existence of
bourgeois society’.8 Before Marx, the defender of the leisure pastimes of the
free-born Englishman, William Cobbett, had also identified moral reform as the
prop of an exploitive social order: faced with the prospect of enforced departure
to America in 1818, he had welcomed (rather prematurely) the opportunity of
moving to ‘a free country [with] No Wilberforces!’9
By the time self-consciously professional historians began to create the story
of ‘the English industrial revolution’ in the early twentieth century the perspective had changed, though not the generally negative evaluation of moral
reform. What had infuriated Cobbett and drawn the contempt of Marx now drew
the puzzlement mixed with hindsight-assisted disapproval of the Webbs. Moral
reform was recognised as a precursor of social reform and therefore acknowledged as a legitimate field of activity, but it was evaluated negatively for being a
conceptualisation of issues which was both unscientific and pre-modern. As the
Webbs summed up the moral reform activists of the 1780s, these were people
unable to distinguish between class interest and wider community need:
There is, to our modern feelings, something unsavoury in this combination of concern
for the spiritual welfare of the poor and for the security and profit of the rich, especially
when it led merely to attempts to deprive the lower orders of their margin of leisure and
opportunities for amusement.10

And because moralising volunteers were so unwilling to subordinate selfinterest to scientific evaluation of outcomes, they had continued to play an
ambivalent role in the development of a coherent, uniform, professionally
administered and adequately resourced set of national social policies designed
to achieve ‘the prevention, not directly of pauperism but of destitution itself’.11
8
9
10
11

Marx, in his commentary on ‘Conservative, or Bourgeois Socialism’, Communist Manifesto,
ch. 3.

Cobbett’s Political Register, 3 Oct. 1818, cited in J. and B. Hammond, The Town Labourer,
1760–1832 (1917), p. 238.
S. and B. Webb, English Local Government, vol. xi: The History of Liquor Licensing (1963; 1st
publ. 1903), p. 162. See also p. 159.
Webb, English Local Government, vol. viii: English Poor Law History, Part II: The Last Hundred
Years (1963; 1st publ. 1929), pp. 467–8; and see the ambivalent appraisal of the COS and
its work, viii.455–6; ix.791. The Webbs, and many labour historians after them, it must be
recognised, saw a continuing role for volunteer action, experiment and self-sacrifice, so long as
it was subordinated to state-determined priorities and not applied to produce merely ‘feel-good’
outcomes.


6

Making English Morals

As this approach makes clear, for the Webbs, as for many labour historians
after them, the chief analytical failing of the moral reform approach was that it
privileged motive over outcome. Moral reform was tolerable as a way of muddling through a transitional stage of social development, but an impediment
to the achievement of citizen social integration and material well-being when
it continued to value status-driven volunteer ‘amateurism’ in an age with the
resources and knowledge to do better.12 The future lay with the democratically
legitimised, expert-advised, centrally organised state.
The Webbs, of course, had their own political axes to grind and it has been
noted that a certain amount of their ‘historical’ work was in fact material originally drafted for purposes of political persuasion.13 That does not of itself,
however, invalidate what they, and others in their tradition of interpretation,
were arguing in the case of moral reform. Nor does it undermine the claim of a
major segment of early twentieth-century educated opinion to be making a professional evaluation of the significance of past ‘experiments’ from the viewpoint
of ‘present knowledge’ as it existed at the time of writing.14 If material wellbeing and social efficiency were the assumed ultimate objectives of society, then
class-based volunteer initiative was bound to be both inefficient and oppressive

in its impact. Voluntarists were wasting scarce resources. Moral reform voluntarists were inappropriate, insensitive and counter-productive sponsors of
cultural change in a society based on a principle of equality in citizenship.
Yet, from the hindsight view of a later generation, two major blind spots limit
the persuasiveness of the ‘labour discipline’ approach to moral reform. The
first is its limited range of curiosity about moral reform goals: these goals were
assumed to be the thinly disguised expressions of material class interest and, if
they resisted this classification (as antislavery appeared to some to do), then they
became examples of selective conscience or even of ‘false consciousness’.15
The other question which a labour discipline approach tended to sidestep was
the question of who represented the exploiting classes in moral reform movements – the question of distribution of power within property-owning ranks.
Once again, it was Evangelicals such as Wilberforce (‘Pitt’s moral lieutenant’)
who posed the most obvious problem, both because of their strangely yoked
12
13

14

15

Webb, English Local Government, viii.456, 467–8.
A. Kidd, ‘Historians or Polemicists? How the Webbs Wrote their History of the English Poor
Laws’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 40 (1987), pp. 400–17, esp. 410–15. See also
D. Cannadine, ‘The Past and the Present in the English Industrial Revolution 1880–1980’,
Past and Present, no. 102 (1984), pp. 114–31, esp. 132–42.
G. Finlayson, Citizen, State and Social Welfare in Britain 1830–1990 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 155–60;
M. Wiener, ‘The Unloved State: Twentieth-Century Politics in the Writing of Nineteenth-Century
History’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994), pp. 288–9.
For the Hammonds’ puzzled acknowledgement of Wilberforce’s limited but genuine ‘humanity’,
see Town Labourer, p. 245. For the classic argument that antislavery was a form of capitalist
self-interest, embraced when it was realised that ‘free labour’ was more profitable than slave

labour, see E. Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill NC. 1944).


Introduction

7

priorities and because of their willingness on occasion to criticise vested interests and to alienate ‘official opinion’. Yet, at various stages of the narrative of
modernisation, the same could also be said of secular moral reformers – administrative and professional elites in particular. Why, in addition, were captains
of industry so modestly represented in moral reform leadership? Eventually, a
revaluation of the relation between (and relative importance of) economic structure and cultural superstructure would emerge to encourage labour historians
to take culture as a variable in its own right,16 but by that stage the emergence
of the working classes was not the only narrative of interest to historians of
culture change.
A second framing narrative with implications for the history of moral reform
movements has been one starting from the assumption that what most needs
explaining in modern national experience is not the history of conflict, but of
conflict successfully mediated or resolved. Once again, there is a sense in which
this narrative is a recycling of the world-view of a section of Victorian society
itself – the personal responsibility-taking, respectability-seeking section of that
society – and it is therefore no surprise to find the classic presentation of this
viewpoint in a work retrieving for a mid-twentieth-century audience the world
of nineteenth-century temperance. This is Brian Harrison’s study of Drink and
the Victorians, first published in 1971. The cultural underpinning of that concern
with the evolution of stability and consensus, however, spread further than an
attempt by a new generation of professional historians to demonstrate their
technical skill by the interpretation of the fossilised remains of extinct cultural
species.17
One context prompting revaluation was the increasingly anomalous national
experience of English society itself by mid-twentieth-century standards of comparison. By rights, the ‘first industrial nation’ should have led the way in resolving its class conflicts in favour of the working classes. Yet the historical record

seemed, instead, to indicate a remarkable story of class politics deflected.18 In
addition, the prestige of state-sponsored solutions to issues of class exploitation
had, by the 1960s, sunk; the reputation of the ‘Fabian orthodoxy’ as developed
by the Webbs and others had been damaged by exposure to the realities of
state totalitarianism of both radical right (by then defeated) and Soviet communist left (still ‘flourishing’).19 In its place a new post-war generation of young
16
17
18

19

H. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (Oxford, 1984), chs. 6–7, esp. pp. 234ff.
B. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians. The Temperance Question in England 1815–1872 (1971),
based on his Oxford D.Phil. thesis of 1966.
Once again, there were precedents for this insight, most notably Elie Hal´evy’s thesis on the role
of Methodism as a cultural bridge set out in his History of the English People in the Nineteenth
Century (6 vols., 1949 edn), vol. i: England in 1815 (first publ. 1913), pp. 424–5. (My thanks
to John Walsh for a timely reminder about the relevance of Hal´evy to the historiography of the
subject.)
Wiener, ‘The Unloved State’, pp. 295–7.


8

Making English Morals

historians was moving, sometimes rebelliously, to identify not with the managers and policy elites of societies past and present, but with ‘ordinary people’
as the shapers of their own cultural worlds.20
One logical outcome of this broadening of interest from state to society, and
from labour relations to culture, was a new-found interest in voluntary association generally. It became relevant to study the ways in which ‘community’

was formed on bases of religious, geographical, ethnic, age-group and gender
loyalty as well as of class. It became relevant as well to investigate cultures of
consumption in their own right rather than as facets of the problem of labour
discipline. As mentioned above, the pioneering case study of this approach
was Brian Harrison’s Drink and the Victorians. Harrison was soon to use this
case study as a strand in studies of ‘moral reform’ voluntarism as a general
phenomenon of public life in ‘post-industrial revolution’ Britain.21
Harrison drew several deductions from his studies of moral reform efforts.
First, moral reform motive could not be reduced to economic self-interest alone.
Some of it clearly was so reducible, but much of it (including the impulse to
control alcohol consumption) was a response to a variety of pressures, cultural
and psychological as well as economic (some of which could be seen to have
outlasted the industrial phase of capitalist society itself). Thus, while some
labouring people sometimes opposed moral reform as a form of class oppression, others actively co-operated with the propertied classes through voluntary movements such as temperance and antislavery, even Sunday observance.
Such ‘working-class co-operation’, while it clearly aided ‘long-term [crossclass] co-operation’, was not usefully interpreted ‘as an example of “falseconsciousness”’ – rather as ‘an important stage in the growth of working-class
consciousness’ as it fostered both organisational self-help and ‘articulateness’.22
The problem, therefore, for Harrison, as he ultimately formulated it, merged
into an aspect of a general quest for ‘the sources of social and political cohesion
in Britain since the industrial revolution’, and Marx’s denigration of moral
reform movements as vehicles of class manipulation became a function of
his own ‘peculiar perspective’: ‘[Marx] rightly saw that they were blurring
class divisions; but because he foresaw an era of mounting class conflict, he
underestimated their historical significance.’23 Their fully restored historical
significance was that they assisted the establishment of a pattern of integration
20

21
22
23

Kaye, British Marxist Historians, p. 205. See also Harrison, Drink (2nd edn, Keele University,
Staffs., 1994), p. 13. All references to Drink and the Victorians are to the second edition unless
otherwise noted.
B. Harrison, ‘State Intervention and Moral Reform’, pp. 289–322; B. Harrison, Peaceable
Kingdom. Stability and Change in Modern Britain (Oxford, 1982), pp. 4–5.
Harrison, Drink (1st edn), p. 367. See also B. Harrison, ‘Religion and Recreation in NineteenthCentury England’, Past and Present, no. 38 (1967), pp. 119–23.
Harrison, ‘Religion and Recreation’, p. 121.


Introduction

9

of outsiders into a tradition of public debate about values which was accepted
as normal and serviced by ‘political mechanisms [to] bring the idealist into
regular contact with the pragmatist’.24 ‘Nonconformists, women and articulate
working men’ in turn challenged the status quo to educate and be educated in
turn about the practicalities of power. The outcome was a ‘Peaceable Kingdom’
of citizens with the ‘highly original quality . . . of not killing one another’.25
If this was a class struggle minimising revaluation of moral reform, an alternative line of revaluation developed in parallel over the period aimed to solve the
puzzle of ‘stability achieved’ not so much by investigation of relations between
classes as by exploration of the power relations between status and occupational groups within the morality-sponsoring middle class itself. Once again,
the starting point was a recognition that class loyalty was more complicated,
more culturally conditioned, than attribution based on economic self-interest
alone could explain.
A series of case studies of the dynamics of middle-class interaction in the
archetypal commercial centres of the north of England (and of Scotland) during the formative decades of the industrial age gave strong clues. Most fully
developed among these studies was that of R. J. Morris on Leeds.26 The Leeds
middle class of the 1830s and 40s, by occupational criteria and by patterns
of religious and political behaviour, Morris noted, was far from the monolith

of economic self-interest steadfastly pursued which orthodox Marxists might
hope to find. Indeed, virtually the only area in which class co-operation of
any reliably predictable sort could be located was that of voluntary association. Voluntary societies, Morris argued, gave urban elites faced with the challenge of establishing their authority in an era of dislocation a way forward.
It was a way forward which avoided reliance on the state (which they distrusted as deficient in moral legitimacy). It was a way forward which allowed
community-based co-operation to take place between citizens of otherwise
antagonistic religious allegiance. It was also a move which sidestepped the
immediate need to resolve cultural tensions within propertied ranks about the
relationship between the laws of the market and the laws of God. In this
24
25
26

Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, p. 6.
Harrison, Drink (1st edn), p. 363; G. Orwell, epigraph to Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom.
R. J. Morris, ‘Organization and Aims of the Principal Secular Voluntary Organizations of the
Leeds Middle Class, 1830–1851’ (Oxford D.Phil., 1970), thereafter reworked into a range of
chapters and articles culminating in Class, Sect and Party: The Making of the British Middle
Class, Leeds 1820–1850 (Manchester, 1990). Other major studies sensitive to the role of culturally based status assertion in middle-class self-presentation include T. Koditschek, Class
Formation in Urban-Industrial Society: Bradford, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1990), chs. 8–9;
A. Kidd, ‘The Middle Class in 19th-Century Manchester’, in A. Kidd and K. Roberts (eds.),
City, Class and Culture (Manchester, 1985); S. Nenadic, ‘Businessmen, the Urban Middle Class
and the “Dominance” of Manufacturers in 19th-Century Britain’, Economic History Review,
2nd ser., 44 (1991), pp. 66–85.


10

Making English Morals

way voluntary societies (often presented as having a moral reform purpose)

became the early nineteenth-century ‘basis for the formation of a middle-class
identity’.27
As this line of argument indicates, Morris retained some of the labour history
tradition of interpretation of moral reform as a project of class self-interest. The
term ‘class’, however, is a much more culture-linked one than it once was, and
the term ‘self-interest’ now embraces fully self-conscious class awareness of the
need to preserve moral legitimacy. Volunteer subscriber-based association thus
gives the key to explaining the successful stabilisation of early urban industrial
society. And the documented dominance of commercial and professional men
in voluntary associations gives the clue to urban middle-class priorities – not
profit maximisation but ‘a stable and moral order’ in which ‘market structures’
are ‘manipulated’ to legitimise middle-class claims to civic leadership.28 In
this sense, the middle class becomes an ‘elite-led class’, with the elite proving its credentials by its energy and skill in hierarchical but community-based
voluntary activity.29
These ‘stability-explaining’ approaches to moral reform certainly refine the
‘labour discipline’ interpretation. They also help to resolve issues which that
interpretation was inclined to ignore or to present as paradox. From one direction they make sense of the range of moral reform enthusiasms – not just the
enthusiasms focused on labour discipline but the ‘consumption-disciplining’
and ‘citizen-training’ ones as well. From another direction, they are able to
give a plausible explanation for the dominance of cultural rather than economic
elites in moral reform mobilisation.
These are major insights, both of them persuasive as far as they are developed.
They do, of course, rest on their own assumptions – as all arguments must –
and in this case the assumptions include a willingness to believe that, in English
public life, cultural conflict has proved an educative experience because conflict
has, broadly speaking, been a stage in a process of negotiated compromise.30
As we shall see, not all observers of moral reform in its more coercive phases
have been able to agree with this, and some would argue that the ghost of a
27

28
29

30

R. J. Morris, ‘Voluntary Societies and British Urban Elites, 1780–1850: An Analysis’, Historical
Journal, 26 (1983), p. 96, and see also pp. 109–13. Again, there are nineteenth-century precedents
for this line of interpretation: see, e.g., Robert Vaughan, The Age of Great Cities (1843), pp. 296–
7, cited in A. Lees, Cities Perceived (Manchester, 1985), p. 47.
For the fullest statement of the case, see Morris, Class, Sect and Party, ch. 13, esp. pp. 327–8
(from which the above quotations are taken).
Morris deliberately particularised his conclusions to provincial urban communities of the early
nineteenth century, but has recurrently noted their applicability at a national level, with formative
‘after-effects’ extending across the century: for his most recent statement, see ‘Structure, Culture
and Society in British Towns’, in M. Daunton (ed.), Cambridge Urban History of Britain, vol. iii:
1840–1950 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 395–426, esp. pp. 415–23.
See, e.g., Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, pp. 430–3; B. Harrison, The Transformation of British
Politics 1860–1995 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 162–3, 169–70.