Ben Wilson: Decency and Disorder

The Age of Cant 1789-1837

I’m looking at my copious notes here, quite baffled, hardly knowing where to begin – so be warned the following will be long, if I am to write down even half of it. Let me just say straight off that Decency and Disorder is one of the most exciting and engaging works of history I have ever read, and that probably isn’t something you’d expect from a book on changing public attitudes to morality. Wilson writes about a mystery that has exercised many noddles: how did the bawdy and rambunctious Georgians turn into decidedly un-bawdy and decorous Victorians? His time-frame, 1789-1837, is when this unquestionable change took place; but if you consider the magnitude of the subject – involving, as it does, everything from poor laws and the industrial revolution to fiddling beggars, adulterous aristocrats and gin prices – a book of 510 pages (including the index and end notes) isn’t likely to do more than scratch the surface. And that’s where my bafflement kicks in, because somehow Wilson manages to cram it all in, make his narrative very lucid and balanced, and convince the reader with his conclusions, to boot. The dizzying variety of facts are not simply there, but they make a coherent whole, too – and nothing about this book comes across as reductive. This is the portrait of an entire era, with all its nuances and contradictions, in 510 pages. How does he do that?

Another feat Wilson accomplishes is to write a serious social history in a way that is accessible to the non-serious reader. Much of its liveliness is due to the fact that he isn’t afraid of seemingly trivial anecdotes. He begins with an account of hypochondriacs and quack doctors, for example, that serves to illuminate the wider anxieties of the age. The 1790s were a turbulent decade of invasion fears, counter-revolutionary paranoia, and economic fluctuation; no wonder the people became prone to melancholia. The Britons had never been so rich and fortunate, but they had never felt so vulnerable either. Some turned to the religious revival for solace. Some turned to religion and reformism. The 18th century may have been the age of idealised sincerity and faith in the virtue of the natural man; now, the rowdy masses were no longer a cheerful manifestation of John Bull’s exuberance, but a horror to be restrained and regulated. Sexuality was especially suspect, associated as it was with French vice and Malthusian pessimism. But it wasn’t just all the unbridled working-class sex that was so worrying. The middling classes had been no angels themselves, and they were ashamed of their earlier licentiousness. They felt compelled to lead the way and create an alternative set of values to challenge aristocratic excess and working-class depravity. James Bowdler, whose namesake is still a metonym for meddlesome prissiness, wrote a work titled Reform or Ruin: Take Your Choice! - and it was a sentiment shared by many.

But such religious and moral ‘enthusiasms’ (a word with unpleasant connotations back then) were not yet very popular, and of course, the pleasures of the poor were the easiest to target. Sabbath-breaking, ‘dangerous print material’, and gin shops were among the favourite hobby-horses. These ‘ruthless reformers’ established ‘a connection between philantropy and cant in the public mind’ – so that even in the 1820s, when ‘cant’ had effectively won the battle, their little crusades attracted wide-spread ridicule. But nobody questioned their motives as keenly as the evangelical reformers themselves. (Just read Mary Brunton and you’ll see.) It is easy for us to attack Victorian hypocrisy from our vantage point in history, but most of these pre-Victorian busybodies genuinely believed in what they were doing, and that made them so hard to disagree with. Who would knowingly have taken a public stand for drunkenness, blasphemy, and sedition?

The only section that was a little disappointing was the one on aristocratic (lack of) morals; Wilson seems to take a bit simplistic, even conventional view of upper-class women in particular, as decorative puppets leading stultifyingly restricted lives. The more you read about the reality of these women’s lives, the harder it becomes to say definitively that they were this or that. But Wilson makes a good point when he says that the upper classes felt themselves to be under constant scrutiny. They were richer than ever, and more restless than ever - the British aristocracy had always been quite fluid and never legally defined, but the shadow of the French Revolution and the upward mobility of the merchant classes left them feeling paranoid and insignificant. The women retreated behind rules of exclusivity and minute hierarchies of good breeding; men were either slumming it by speaking and behaving like working-class thugs, or obsessed with the details of their dandified appearance. I wish Wilson had written more about this conflict in ideals of manliness. What about the men – usually young men – who aspired to both extremes at once?

In 1815, post-Waterloo, the tide had irreversibly turned in favour of the reformers. It was a time of national self-congratulation:

God had forgiven the country all the sins she manifested and granted her the opportunity to make something glorious from the bounty lying at her feet; there was a crying need for redoubled efforts, new measures and a thorough purge of bad habits. The country was rich, but now she needed to concentrate on what Hannah More called ‘moral prosperity’.

Paradoxically, the anxieties that should have been over returned with a vengeance – the surplus population and demobilised soldiers now seemed a serious threat to national security. This was coupled with a loss of sympathy with the poor. They were not only a burden - their poverty began to be seen as a ‘moral disease’, too, and this gradually changed for good the way people gave to charity. The poor were either potentially or inherently depraved: the working classes were lazy by nature, possibly even criminal. There had been a steady improvement in public morals, but people continued to believe that crime was rampant. Although the objective was to make work more attractive than beggary, the new Poor and Vagrancy Laws instead transformed the poor into habitual beggars; and once institutionalised, the unsightly portions of the populace – such as vagrants and prostitutes – were easier to sweep under the carpet. Efficient policing had been a hard-won battle, and this was the crux of the matter: do you accept life as something noisy, dirty, and disorganised, or do you impose a better order through control and surveillance? Do you accept the loss of the fabled English liberty, in return for more security? Increasingly, people felt it was a small price to pay.

And most of those people belonged to the ‘uneasy classes’ – the bourgeoisie. Business depended on credit; credit depended on respectability; and respectability was uniformity: ‘In many ways, ostentatious propriety was an appropriate mode of conduct for anonymous businessmen trading with strangers.’ This neat façade was the most valuable asset of the middle classes.

Wilson also gives voice to those who protested, grumbled, indulged in nostalgia (see Pierce Egan), or were victims of public outrage – like Byron and Edmund Kean. John Stuart Mill called it a ’state of society where any voice, not pitched in an exaggerated key, is lost in the hubbub’. But those who condemned ‘cant’ pitched their cries in equally strident tones, and often ended up pooh-poohing the good things the reformers stood for as well – from the anti-slavery campaign to better healthcare and practical education - and thus contributed to the rising distrust of sincerity. At any rate, it smacked of sour grapes. Did not both evangelicism and theories of political economy reassure the reformist-minded middle classes that they, with their self-help and efficient virtues, were the new elite? Hypocrisy was no longer the ‘vice of vices’: mannered behaviour was the norm, and good citizenship was marked by a willingness to compromise for the sake of common decency. Again, it is easy enough for us to condemn hollow Victorian conventionality – but the early Victorians saw themselves as highly progressive, not reactionary. The world had changed considerably since the 18th century, and to most eyes – especially middle-class ones – it was truly a Brave New World. ‘To say it was an age of boundless optimism would be an understatement. In terms of the average age of the population, this was a young country, hungry for change and opportunity,’ says Wilson, and goes on to quote from the Quarterly Review:

‘In houses, dress, furniture, horses, roads, conveyances, and every thing which can minister to the ease and gratification of mind and body; in the number and refinement of the sources of amusement; and in all the articles of domestic luxury and convenience; the progress that has lately been made is unprecedented either for extent or rapidity.’

For those who like their history to inform the present, Decency and Disorder offers much material for modern parallels. Or what would you say about a pill-popping, neurotic, gadget-obsessed people who confuse healthy bodies with healthy morals to the point of falling victims to eating disorders – people who cynically make fun of idealism and zealotry, but are increasingly prone to irrational bouts of popular panic? As the Russian traveller Nikolai Karamzin said of the Englishman, ‘He is unhappy from a superabundance of good fortune.’ To me, that sounds like a bad case of the affluenza.

Faber & Faber  2008  paperback  510 pp.  ISBN: 9780571224692