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IV. Two Roads to Social Reform: Francis Place and the “Drunken Committee” of 18341

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Brian Harrison
Brian Harrison
Affiliation:
Corpus Christi College, Oxford
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Extract

Historians of the ‘Age of Reform’ have sometimes been tempted into the fallacy castigated long ago by Herbert Butterfield; they busy themselves ‘with dividing the world into the friends and enemies of progress’ and forget ‘with what wilfulness and waste [progress] twists and turns”. Often, by implication, they exaggerate the stupidity and selfishness of the reactionaries while overestimating the enlightenment of the reformers and understressing their faddishness, their lack of scruple, and their divided aims or methods; it thus becomes difficult to see why reforming causes were ever resisted. In this sense, nineteenth-century England has received too few ‘Tory historians’ not too many; though with Professor Gash's well-known defence of Tories misguided enough to oppose franchise reform in 1831–2, and with the recent reinstatement of mid-Victorian working men shortsighted enough to vote Liberal there are signs that the reaction against Whiggish historiography of the nineteenth century has already begun.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , June 1968 , pp. 272 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1968

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References

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45 B.M. Add. MSS. 27829, fo. 72; Add. MSS. 35149, fo. 302: Place to Hawes, 7 July 1834.

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48 His copy of t he report is preserved in B.M. Add. MSS. 27830 (Place Papers).

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62 Because the statistics involved in the dispute cannot indicate the relative prevalence of drunkenness within particular social classes at any one time, their importance consists purely in the extent to which they illuminate the two viewpoints held in 1834, and I have not therefore felt it worth reproducing them in full here. They are listed in my thesis, tables 5–11; for a general discussion of nineteenth-century drink statistics, see my ‘Drink and Sobriety in England 1815–1872. A Critical Bibliography’, International Review of Social History (1967), Part II, pp. 207–10.Google Scholar

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128 B.M. Add. MSS. 27827 (Place Papers), fo. 31: Lovett to Place, 17 November 1834.

129 The advance from anti-spirits association to teetotalism is analysed in my thesis, chapter 3.

130 For medical arguments, see B.M. Add. MSS. 27830 (Place Papers), fo. 194 commenting on Q. 2663; see also Place's evidence in S.C.H.C. Education, Parl. Papers (1835), VII (465), Q. 899.Google Scholar

131 On this, see my thesis, pp. 169–83, 203–17.

132 Rev. Fletcher, J. M. J., Mrs Wightman of Shrewsbury (1906), p. 66.Google Scholar

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