A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846

by Hilton, Boyd

• ISBN13: 9780198228301
• ISBN10: 0198228309
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2006-04-13
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

This was a transformative period in English history. In 1783 the country was at one of the lowest points in its fortunes, having just lost its American colonies in warfare. By 1846 it was once more a great imperial nation, as well as the world's strongest power and dominant economy, having benefited from what has sometimes (if misleadingly) been called the "first industrial revolution." In the meantime it survived a decade of invasion fears, and emerged victorious from more than twenty years of "war to the death" against Napoleonic France. But if Britain's external fortunes were in the ascendant, the situation at home remained fraught with peril. The country's population was growing at a rate not experienced by any comparable former society, and its manufacturing towns especially were mushrooming into filthy, disease-ridden, gin-sodden hell-holes, in turn provoking the phantasmagoria of a mad, bad, and dangerous people. It is no wonder that these years should have experienced the most prolonged period of social unrest since the seventeenth century, or that the elite should have been in constant fear of a French-style revolution in England. The governing classes responded to these new challenges and by the mid-nineteenth century the seeds of a settled two-party system and of a more socially interventionist state were both in evidence, though it would have been far too soon to say at that stage whether those seeds would take permanent root. Another consequence of these tensions was the intellectual engagement with society, as for example in the Romantic Movement, a literary phenomenon that brought English culture to the forefront of European attention for the first time. At the same time the country experienced the great religious revival, loosely described under the heading "evangelicalism." Slowly but surely, the raffish and rakish style of eighteenth-century society, having reached a peak in the Regency, then succumbed to the new norms of respectability popularly known as "Victorianism."

Author Biography

Boyd Hilton is Reader in Modern British History the University of Cambridge and has been a Fellow of Trinity College since 1974. He has served as Senior Tutor, Dean, and Steward of the College.

Table of Contents

List of Plates	xviii
List of Figures and Maps	xx
List of Tables	xxi
Abbreviations	xxiii
England 1783--1846: A Preview	1	(38)
The Economy: Crisis and Survival	2	(22)
An Old or New Regime?	24	(7)
The Politics of Theatre and the Theatre of Politics	31	(8)
Politics in the Time of Pitt and Fox, 1783--1807	39	(71)
The Launching of Pitt and the Destruction of Fox	41	(6)
Party Government or Broad Bottom?	47	(10)
The French Revolution and Political Realignment	57	(8)
`Pitt's Terror'	65	(9)
Irish Problems	74	(8)
French Wars	82	(9)
The Fall of Pitt	91	(7)
Peace and War	98	(12)
Pittism and Plutocracy: The Social and Psychological Foundations	110	(85)
Court Whigs, Country Whigs, and the Conservative Reaction	110	(3)
Virtuous Economics	113	(6)
A New Vision of Government	119	(5)
Class Distinctions and Rentier Capitalism	124	(9)
The Late Hanoverian Aristocracy: Domination or Accommodation?	133	(8)
Commerce and the Quasi-Professions	141	(11)
Business Classes	152	(4)
Producers and Dealers: The Makings of a Lesser-Middle Class?	156	(6)
Civic Cultures: A Literary and Philosophical People	162	(12)
The Evangelical Revival	174	(10)
Slavery and National Mission: The Politics of Virtue	184	(4)
The Politics of Pittism: Rhetoric and Reality	188	(7)
Politics in the Time of Liverpool and Canning, 1807--1827	195	(114)
The Development of Two-Party Politics?	195	(15)
The Narrative Resumed: All-Out Warfare	210	(13)
Liberation and Liberalism	223	(12)
Victory, the Second Empire, and a Mistaken Case of National Identity	235	(16)
`A Malady of Peace': The Foundations of Monetary Policy	251	(13)
Rethinking the Corn Laws	264	(4)
The Squires' Revolt	268	(6)
`Never a Controversial Cabinet': Lord Liverpool's System of Politics	274	(6)
The Reshuffle of 1821--1823 and the Origins of Cabinet Government	280	(6)
Divided Cabinets: Foreign and Economic Policies	286	(23)
Ruling Ideologies	309	(63)
`A Love of System'	309	(5)
Liberal Toryism versus High Toryism	314	(14)
Utilitarianism	328	(4)
Natural Theology in a Fallen World	332	(10)
The Paradoxes of Political Economy	342	(4)
Philosophic Whiggism	346	(7)
The Status of Women and Ideas about Gender	353	(19)
The Crisis of the Old Order, 1827--1832	372	(67)
Coalition and the Canningite Flame	372	(4)
The Goderich File	376	(3)
The First Blow: Test and Corporation Act Repeal	379	(5)
The Second Blow: Catholic Emancipation	384	(7)
The Emancipation of Peel	391	(6)
Money and the Millennium	397	(9)
Ultra Tory Backlash	406	(5)
The Fall of the Pittite Regime	411	(9)
The Struggle for Reform	420	(9)
A Middle-Class Bill, or a case of Landed Reaction?	429	(8)
Appendix 6.1. The Status of the Borough Freeholders	437	(1)
Appendix 6.2. Split Voting, Straight Voting, and Plumping	437	(2)
Contesting Mechanical Philosophy	439	(54)
The Evolutionary Moment: The Scientific Threat to Belief	441	(13)
From Romantic Science to Peelite Compromise	454	(6)
From Unitarianism to Liberal Anglicanism	460	(8)
The Oxford Movement	468	(7)
The Middle Ages, the `Olden Time', and Ideas of Nation	475	(12)
From Romanticism to Socialism	487	(6)
Politics in the Time of Melbourne and Peel, 1833--1846	493	(80)
From Reform to Repeal: The Narrative Resumed	493	(20)
The Analysis Resumed: Party Politics without Parties	513	(11)
The Politics of Militant Dissent	524	(14)
Clouds in the West	538	(5)
Towards Free Trade: `Mighty Athlete' or `Wounded Giant'?	543	(15)
Towards the Pax Britannica	558	(7)
Imperial Onset	565	(8)
The Condition and Reconditioning of England	573	(55)
Social Crisis	573	(15)
The Origins of Social Policy	588	(11)
`System, Method, Science, Economy': Defining the Liberal State	599	(13)
Chartism	612	(10)
Class and Community	622	(3)
Mad Metropolis	625	(3)
Afterwards: `There are no Barbarians Any Longer'	628	(11)
Chronology	639	(25)
Bibliography	664	(61)
Index	725