Keeping the best of order

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’.