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Themes
Browse by subject to discover a wide variety of primary and critical materials on our key topics: Class and Work, Agencies and Institutions, Crime and Punishment, States of Mind, Health and Welfare, Family and Demography, Recreation and Consumption, Rural and Urban Life, Race and Empire and Gender and Sexuality. These short introductions offer a concise overview of ten key areas within British society and have been written by our academic editors, Professor Martin Hewitt and Susie Steinbach.. Click on a subject tile to read an overview of the category and view the relevant primary source documents, secondary source book chapters, journal articles and thematic essays.
- Agencies and Institutions
- Class and Work
- Crime and Punishment
- Family and Demography
- Gender and Sexuality
- Health and Welfare
- Race and Empire
- Recreation and Consumption
- Rural and Urban Life
- States of Mind
In discussing ‘states of mind’ we must beware of assuming a uniformity of beliefs, or of privileging the views of elites and dismissing those of marginal groups. There is always diversity and difference. Having said this, it is difficult to understand social history without some sense of what a society sees as ‘normal’, what it is that dissenting groups are reacting against. It is usually in these typical attitudes that past societies differ most from the present day.
Take religion, for example. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of religion in this period. British society was undergoing a process of ‘secularisation’, the decay of religious belief and observance; but it was slow and uneven, and indeed for a while around 1800, during the evangelical and Methodist revivals, it was probably reversed. Before 1914 nearly everyone at least marked the rights of passage – birth, marriage and death – religiously, and those that didn’t often followed pseudo-religious movements such as spiritualism. And for many, religion was the most important part of their identity, shaping their social and cultural lives, as well as their morality. Religious disabilities, which prevented some denominations from sitting in Parliament or being awarded degrees, survived into the middle of the nineteenth century. In the early nineteenth century evangelicalism was the driving force behind campaigns against slavery, and later the ‘nonconformist conscience’ of protestant dissenters (that is, the protestant denominations, including Methodists, Baptists and Congregationalists, which rejected the authority and disciplines of the Anglican church) was probably the most powerful component of the Liberal party.
The British prided themselves on being unideological. Ideologies were associated with the excesses of the French Revolution or the European uprisings of 1848. Pragmatism was preferred to grand theories. Society was subject to powerful ways of thinking, but because they were often treated as ‘truths’, their ideological character was often not recognised. Ideologies of gender and the ‘separate spheres’ are treated in a separate introduction. Paternalism (not the same as patriarchy, but the belief that the rich and educated should look after the less well off, as a father might look after his children) was an enduring ideal, first in agricultural society, and then widely in factory towns. Over time it was replaced by ‘laissez-faire’ ideas traced back to the economist Adam Smith: both domestically, in terms of belief in the freedom of economic activity and the removal of controls or protections; and externally in respect of ‘free trade’ and non-intervention, which became the cornerstone of British foreign policy. Only after the 1880s was there any significant increase in support for greater state intervention.
What the British did self-consciously embrace was ‘values’; indeed so-called ‘Victorian values’ became a matter of fierce political debate in Britain during the 1980s. It may be unfair to think of the Victorians as humourless, but after the Romantic period, when emotions and at times excess were celebrated, there was certainly a sense that reason and moderation were to be preferred. As well as the Christian virtues, hard work, self-improvement, self-reliance, earnestness, and material success were the sorts of ideals celebrated by Victorian writing. Actual behaviour often didn’t match up, which left Victorians vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy and double standards, especially as some of these norms, in particular the proscription of homosexuality or extra-marital sexual activity, were imposed oppressively. [498]
For further reading on this subject, please see: Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians. A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in the mid Nineteenth-century (1966), Linda Woodhead, ed, Reinventing Christianity. Nineteenth-Century Contexts (2001), Simon Dentith, ‘Political economy, fiction and the language of practical ideology in nineteenth-century England’, Bernard Deacon, ’Regional identity in late nineteenth century England; discursive terrains and rhetorical strategies’, and 19th Century Literature, Religion and Society.
- Agencies and Institutions
- Class and Work
- Crime and Punishment
- Family and Demography
- Gender and Sexuality
- Health and Welfare
- Race and Empire
- Recreation and Consumption
- Rural and Urban Life
- States of Mind