The preceding volume in the New Oxford History of England, covering the years 1727-1783, described the people as ‘polite and commercial’. Boyd Hilton does not imbue their sons and daughters with Byronic qualities, as his title might suggest; rather, it expresses the extreme volatility of the period. In the 1820s 60 per cent of the population were no older than 24. This generation had known little respite from war and its dismal aftermath, frequent and biting economic depressions, scarcity of food and recurrent unrest. Malthus’s warning of the destructive power of population growth and millenarian prophecies of the Apocalypse offered scant reassurance.
The 63 years from the loss of the American colonies to the repeal of the Corn Laws represents, for Hilton, a distinct period in which fear of ‘a mad, bad and dangerous people’ haunted the imaginations of polite and respectable people. It was only the failure of Chartism and revived confidence in an imperial destiny that dissipated these anxieties and the English ‘woke up, as it were one morning, to find themselves respectable’. In their own minds, at least, they had the moral authority to govern one quarter of the world’s population. The country had also reaffirmed its position as the wealthiest country in the world; but success was, as this book makes clear, ‘a damned close run thing’.
Hilton backs away from the idea that the country altered beyond recognition. An English Rip van Winkle who slept through the period the book covers, he believes, would not have felt out of place. Yet fear of revolution, crime and the noxious habits of the ‘dangerous classes’ radically altered mentalities, particularly notions of liberty. A professional, uniformed police force, for example, was regarded in the earlier period as incompatible with freedom and alien to the national character; toleration of a rude and coarse people with all their antisocial ‘sauciness’ was the price a nation had to pay for its freedom.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in