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The Unloved State: Twentieth-Century Politics in the Writing of Nineteenth-Century History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Martin J. Wiener
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Extract

“Who loves the state these days?” Frances Cairncross rhetorically asked in The Times Literary Supplement at the height of the Thatcher era. “People have become more cynical,” she went on, “about the central tenet of socialism: the concept of a wise and beneficent State, representing the best interests of the community at large.” The skepticism about the state as a provider of national well-being which Cairncross was referring to was of course not confined to Britain. Nor was it, in Britain, simply to be identified with “Thatcherism.” Rather, such disillusion developed over a period of several decades and across the political spectrum. As significant in this development as the thunderings of Thatcherites were the reconsiderations of those further left; David Marquand spoke for many when he declared his own tradition of Croslandite social democracy virtually bankrupt, flawed to the root by its statism, through which “civil society was seen, all too often, not as an agent, but as a patient.” The deep shift of opinion embodied in such observations has made its mark in a variety of realms, one of which is the subject of this essay: an alteration in the interpretation of British history, in particular of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the era in which this newly problematical state began to grow into its modern form.

It has become something of a truism that historical writing is a part of the wider field of social discourse.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , July 1994 , pp. 283 - 308
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1994

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References

1 Cairncross, Frances, review of Rethinking Socialist Economics, edited by Nolan, Peter and Paine, Suzanne, The Times Literary Supplement (January 9, 1987)Google Scholar.

2 Marquand, David, The Progressive Dilemma: From Lloyd George to Kinnock (London: Heinemann, 1991), p. 212Google Scholar.

3 The recent tendency among scholars to revaluate upward the importance of the eighteenth-century state (see, e.g., Brewer, John, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 [New York: Knopf, 1989])CrossRefGoogle Scholar raises important questions that cannot be adequately dealt with in this essay. It should be noted, however, that while in the “long eighteenth century” to 1815 the British state grew markedly in size and expenditure, its functions did not significantly expand. In particular, it remained a very minimal state with regard to domestic social services. The origins of the twentieth-century welfare state remain in any meaningful sense in the nineteenth century, and not earlier. On the “traditional” character of eighteenth-century state growth, see Harling, Philip and Mandler, Peter, “From ‘Fiscal-Military’ State to Laissez-faire State, 1760–1850,” Journal of British Studies 32, no. 1 (January 1993): 44–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 In attempting to distinguish some large patterns, the analysis which follows inevitably involves oversimplification. Terms like “statism” and “Fabianism” are more ideal types than precise descriptions, useful in pointing out affinities between professional history and the world outside, but not meant to be taken as fixed and controlling. Actual historical scholarship has of course almost always been more subtle and complex than such labels, or the sort of brief, rather schematic citation to which we are limited here, can convey. Nonetheless, such labels and citations have important uses.

5 On Whig historiography there is a large literature: the starting point is Butterfield, Herbert, The Whig Interpretation of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1931)Google Scholar; see particularly Burrow, J. W., A Liberal Descent: Victorian Historians and the English Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the reaction leading up to Butterfield's critique, see Blaas, P. B. M., Continuity and Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Kipling, Rudyard, Puck of Pook's Hill (London: Macmillan, 1906)Google Scholar, and Rewards and Fairies (London: Macmillan, 1910)Google Scholar. For a more prosaic and straightforward Tory history, see Fletcher, C. R. L. and Kipling, Rudyard, A History of England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1911)Google Scholar (written by Fletcher, with poems by Kipling).

7 “This [Tory] epic of English expansion has been swallowed into the original system of the whigs” (Butterfield, Herbert, The Englishman and His History [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1944], p. 82)Google Scholar. While Butterfield stressed the way the Whig tradition absorbed all rivals, he failed to notice how the process changed it as well, attenuating its traditional antistatism.

8 Arthur Bryant, who wrote many of Stanley Baldwin's speeches, in his very popular English Saga, 1840–1940 (London: Collins, 1940)Google Scholar chastised the early nineteenth-century rulers of England for their abandonment of paternalist traditions in favor of radical doctrines of laissez-faire individualism, tracing the roots of this betrayal of the people back to 1688: “With the weakening of the authority of the central government that followed the defeat of the Crown by the aristocracy, the rich and powerful grew restive at any interference with their freedom of action” (p. 32). Bryant went on, however, to inveigh against the “bureaucratic despotism” that gradually arose to fill the void left by paternalism's demise.

9 See Wallas, Graham, Life of Francis Place (London: Longman, 1898)Google Scholar, and “Bentham as Political Inventor” and “The British Civil Service” (1927 inaugural address to the Institute of Public Administration) in Men and Ideas, ed. Wallas, May (London: Allen & Unwin, 1940), pp. 33–48, 114–30Google Scholar.

10 As far back as 1962, William Thomas noted that Wallas was the first to emphasize the importance of the Benthamites in the “nineteenth century revolution in government” (“Francis Place and Working-Class History,” Historical Journal 5, no. 1 [1962]: 61–79)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. S. E. Finer, author of influential works on the civil service and on Edwin Chadwick, later recalled of the interwar period: “In my youth when I was much under the influence of the Webbs' historical works and was privileged in my brother Herman's house to mix and talk with their latter-day disciples among the political scientists of the LSE, [Bentham's Constitutional] Code was regarded by them with a sort of holy awe; it was seen as the very fons et origo of the kind of democratically-sanctioned bureaucratic state to which their Webbist Fabianism was conducting them” (Bentham Newsletter, no. 6 [May 1982], p. 30Google Scholar).

11 Wallas, Graham, Human Nature in Politics (London: Constable, 1908), p. 263Google Scholar. Wallas thereafter served on the 1912–14 Royal Commission on the Civil Service. Sidney Webb similarly described the civil service as a national treasure (quoted in Theakston, Kevin, The Labour Party and Whitehall [London: Routledge, 1992], p. 77)Google Scholar.

12 Blaas (n. 5 above) has much of interest to say on the early phases of this development, which reached a kind of culmination for the medieval period in Sayles, G. O., The Medieval Foundations of England (London: Methuen, 1948)Google Scholar and Richardson, H. G. and Sayles, G. O., The Governance of Medieval England (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963)Google Scholar, and for the early modern period in Elton, G. R., The Tudor Revolution in Government: Administrative Changes in the Reign of Henry VIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The nineteenth-century state began to get serious study only in the 1950s, with the debate over the sources and character of the “Victorian revolution in government” (see n. 20 below).

13 Pollard, A. F., History of England (London: Home University Library, 1947), pp. 163–64Google Scholar. Pollard's great successor in Tudor history, G. R. Elton, shared his anti-Whiggism (but from the Right, as Pollard has criticized it from the Left). Elton began his landmark work, The Tudor Revolution in Government, in 1953 by declaring that “English history has been as remarkable for good government as for free and constitutional government”; yet though the latter could not flourish long without the former, it had received far more attention. “Our history,” he complained, “is still much written by whigs, the champions of political freedom; to stress the need for controlling that freedom may even today seem not only not liberal but even illiberal” (Elton, p. 1).

14 Woodward, E. L., The Age of Reform, 1815–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1938)Google Scholar. At the same time appeared K. B. Smellie's influential history of the modern rise of the state, in which he complained that “the growth of English administrative machinery was stunted by the continuity of her political and legal tradition. We paid too big a price in administrative immaturity for our national tradition of gradualness” (A Hundred Years of English Government [London: Duckworth, 1937; rev. ed., 1950], p. 57)Google Scholar. The climate of “progressive” opinion is suggested by Douglas Jay's remark that same year in his widely read book The Socialist Case (London: Socialist Book Club, 1937)Google Scholar that “the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves” (cited in Theakston, p. 6).

15 See Wiener, Martin J., Reconstructing the Criminal: Culture, Law and Policy in England, 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

16 The “entire narrative [of their poor law history],” Alan J. Kidd has noted, “is a litany of praise to the growth of collectivism…. They interpreted the old poor law in terms of ‘state-building,’ applauding the centralized administration of the Privy Council in the early seventeenth century and condemning the ‘unfettered local autonomy’ of the eighteenth century.” See Kidd, Alan J., “Historians or Polemicists? How the Webbs Wrote Their History of the English Poor Law,” Economic History Review, 2d ser., 40 (1987): 402CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The same can be said of the parts of their local government history devoted to law enforcement and prisons. For similar observations on yet another aspect of their historiography, see Wrigley, Chris, “The Webbs: Working on Trade Union History,” History Today 37, no. 5 (May 1987): 51–55Google Scholar.

17 Such as Ruggles-Brise, Evelyn, The English Prison System (London: Macmillan, 1921)Google Scholar.

18 On policing, see Emsley, Clive, introduction to The English Police: A Political and Social History (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991)Google Scholar. Key works in this tradition were Reith, Charles, The Police Idea (London: Oxford University Press, 1938)Google Scholar, and British Police and the Democratic Ideal (London: Oxford University Press, 1943)Google Scholar; and Critchley, T. A., The Conquest of Violence: Order and Liberty in Britain (London: Constable, 1970)Google Scholar. On prosecution and punishment, see Radzinowicz, Leon, History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration since 1750: vol. 1, The Struggle for Reform (London: Stevens & Sons, 1948)Google Scholar; vol. 2, The Enforcement of the Law (London: Stevens & Sons, 1956)Google Scholar; and vol. 3, The Reform of the Police (London: Stevens & Sons, 1956)Google Scholar. On punishment, see Fox, Lionel, The English Prison and Borstal Systems (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952)Google Scholar; and Rose, Gordon, The Struggle for Penal Reform: The Howard League and Its Predecessors (London: Stevens, 1961)Google Scholar. See also Wiener, introduction.

19 Asa Briggs, “Public Opinion and Public Health in the Age of Chadwick” (paper presented at the New Art Gallery, 37th annual lecture series of the Chadwick Trust, Leicester, October 4, 1949); rev. version in The Collected Essays of Asa Briggs (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985), 2:129–52Google Scholar. See also Finer, S. E., The Life and Times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (London: Methuen, 1952)Google Scholar; and Lewis, R. A., Edwin Chadwick and the Public Health Movement, 1832–1854 (London and New York: Longman, Green, 1952)Google Scholar. Finer had previously authored a generally admiring sketch of the civil service (The British Civil Service: An Introductory Essay [London: Fabian Society, 1927]Google Scholar).

20 Roberts, David, Victorian Origins of the British Welfare State (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960)Google Scholar. Some of the highlights of this debate are Hume, L. J., “Jeremy Bentham and the Nineteenth Century Revolution in Government,” Historical Journal, vol. 10 (1957)Google Scholar; Roberts, D., “Jeremy Bentham and the Victorian Administrative State,” Victorian Studies 2 (1958–1959): 210Google Scholar; Macdonagh, O., “The Nineteenth Century Revolution in Government: A Reappraisal,” Historical Journal 1 (1958): 52–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and A Pattern of Government Growth, 1800–1860 (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1961)Google Scholar; Hart, J., “Nineteenth Century Social Reform: A Tory Interpretation of History,” Past and Present, no. 31 (July, 1965), pp. 39–61Google Scholar. This debate is surveyed in Cromwell, Valerie, “Interpretations of Nineteenth-Century Administration: An Analysis,” Victorian Studies 9 (1966): 245–55Google Scholar.

21 Macdonagh, , A Pattern of Government Growth, p. 15Google Scholar.

22 Clark, G. S. R. Kitson, The Making of Victorian England (London: Methuen, 1962)Google Scholar. On public health reform in the 1860s he remarked, “It was in fact a policy devised by experts, appealing to experts, to be executed by experts…. It was a foretaste of what was to come as the work of the State grew more technical, and [John] Simon was the forerunner of other men, like himself unusually able and unusually devoted, who were to play their part in making both Victorian and post-Victorian England from behind increasingly effectively closed doors” (p. 110).

23 Bruce, Maurice, The Coming of the Welfare State (London: Batsford, 1961)Google Scholar.

24 Clark, G. Kitson, An Expanding Society: Britain, 1830–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), p. 182Google Scholar.

25 In arguing for the replacement in the Conservative pantheon of Disraeli and Churchill by Lord Salisbury and Baldwin, two leading “high politics” historians praised Salisbury's skeptical view of government: “Legislation had for Salisbury a more un-equivocal capacity for inflicting injury than for imparting benefit…. In dwelling on the essential inferiority of the political profession, his ordinance was self-denying: rent-collectors did not intrude between the soul and its Creator, nor did officers of the law, and ‘I rank myself no higher in the scheme of things than a policeman—whose utility would disappear if there were no criminals’” (Jones, Andrew and Bentley, Michael, “Salisbury and Baldwin,” in Conservative Essays, ed. Cowling, Maurice [London: Cassell, 1978], p. 27Google Scholar).

26 “‘High politics’ as a treatment of a subject was not so much obsessed with ambition and manoeuvre, as human imperfectibility” (Brent, Richard, “Butterfield's Tories: ‘High Politics’ and the Writing of Modern British Political History,” Historical Journal 30 [1987]: 945CrossRefGoogle Scholar; also see Clark, J. C. D., “National Identity, State Formation and Patriotism: The Role of History in the Public Mind,” History Workshop Journal, no. 29 [Spring 1990], pp. 95–102)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

27 Cooke, A. B. and Vincent, John, The Governing Passion: Cabinet Government and Party Politics in Britain, 1885–86 (Brighton: Harvester, 1974), p. 1Google Scholar.

28 The leading Left historian, E. P. Thompson, for instance, focused an increasing amount of his topical social criticism during the 1974–79 Labour governments on the supposed growth of authoritarianism. See the essays in his Writing by Candlelight (London: Merlin, 1980)Google Scholar.

29 Most explicitly, in Donajgrodzski, A. P., ed., Social Control in Nineteenth Century Britain (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1977)Google Scholar.

30 Corrigan, Philip and Sayer, Derek, The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution (Oxford and New York: Blackwell, 1985)Google Scholar; Langan, Mary and Schwarz, Bill, eds., Crises in the British State, 1880–1930 (London: Hutchinson, 1985)Google Scholar.

31 Corrigan and Sayer, p. 119.

32 Ibid., p. 118.

33 Colls, Robert, “Englishness and Political Culture,” in Englishness: Politics and Culture, 1880–1920, ed. Colls, Robert and Dodd, Philip (London: Croom Helm, 1986), p. 52Google Scholar. In the new fashion, he capitalized “State.”

34 Webb, Sidney and Webb, Beatrice, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation (London: Longman, 1935)Google Scholar. Also see Harrison, Royden, “Sidney and Beatrice Webb,” in Socialism and the Intelligentsia, 1880–1914, ed. Levy, Carl (London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987)Google Scholar. As Jose Harris observed, the Webbs “did not believe in moral freedom,” “were profoundly ill at ease in an atmosphere of diversity and conflict,” and, partly because of this, were “naively indifferent to the fact that concentrated state power could be used in many different ways” (Harris, Jose, “The Webbs,” in Founders of the Welfare State, ed. Barker, Paul [London: Heinemann, 1984], p. 59Google Scholar).

35 Wilson, Elizabeth, “Marxism and the ‘Welfare State,’” New Left Review, no. 122 (July–August 1980), p. 86Google Scholar. Also see her Women and the Welfare State (London: Tavistock, 1977)Google Scholar.

36 Pelling, Henry, “The Working Class and the Origins of the Welfare State,” in Popular Politics and Society in Late Victorian Britain (London: Macmillan, 1968)Google Scholar.

37 See Joyce, Patrick, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), esp. p. 72CrossRefGoogle Scholar (“the state was looked upon with deep distrust”); Biagini, Eugenio F., Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. pp. 84–85Google Scholar; and many of the essays in Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914, ed. Biagini, Eugenio F. and Reid, Alastair J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1963)Google Scholar.

39 For an example specifically linked to antistatism, see Stephen Yeo, “Socialism, the State, and Some Oppositional Englishness,” in Colls and Dodd, eds.

40 As in the “History Workshop” movement, displayed in the History Workshop Journal from 1967 on.

41 See, for example, Lewis, Jane, ed., Labour and Love: Women's Experience of Home and Family, 1850–1940 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986)Google Scholar; and Davidoff, Leonore and Hall, Catherine, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

42 It is illuminating to note the reception given West, E. G., Education and the State (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1965)Google Scholar, which questioned the necessity or beneficence of the rise of state education by arguing for the ability of the market to fill the need. West supported his argument with evidence, rescued from oblivion, of the flourishing nineteenth-century private market in schooling. Much of this work was historical, yet its discussion of the nineteenth century was completely ignored by professional historians. Indeed, the book was ridiculed even by that famous bastion of the Left, the Economist. “There is no point,” it announced, “in trying to argue against a nineteenth-century thesis in twentieth-century terms, nor against a metaphysical one in economic terms. Behind Dr. West's often inchoate theorising seems to lie the notion that it is for parents to choose how their children are to be educated,” which the Economist simply labeled “odd” (“Adam Smith, Creeping Socialist,” 217 [November 27, 1965]: 967).

43 On the 1970s and 1980s “crisis of confidence” in the police, see “From Local Bobby to State Lackey?” chap. 8 of Emsley, The English Police (n. 18 above). On a similar crisis of confidence in the penal system and the courts, see Terence Morris, “From Consensus to Division,” chap. 11 of Crime and Criminal Justice since 1945 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989)Google Scholar.

44 Highly influential theoretically was the work of Taylor, Ian, Walton, P., and Young, J., The New Criminology (London: Routledge, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Critical Criminology (London: Routledge, 1975)Google Scholar.

45 See Hay, Douglaset al., Albion's Fatal Tree: Crime and Society in Eighteenth Century England (London: Allen Lane, 1975)Google Scholar.

46 On police, the most important works along these lines are Storch, R. D., “The Plague of the Blue Locusts: Police Reform and Popular Resistance in Northern England, 1840–1857,” International Review of Social History 20 (1975): 61–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Policeman as Domestic Missionary: Urban Discipline and Popular Culture in North England, 1830–1880,” Journal of Social History 9 (1976): 481–509CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stevenson, John, “Social Control and the Prevention of Riots in England, 1789–1829,” in Donajgrodzski, , ed. (n. 29 above), pp. 27–50Google Scholar; Philips, David, “‘A New Engine of Power and Authority’: The Institutionalization of Law-Enforcement in England, 1780–1830,” in Crime and the Law: The Social History of Crime in Western Europe since 1500, ed. Gatrell, V. A. C., Lenman, B., and Parker, G. (London: Europa, 1980), pp. 155–89Google Scholar. Increasingly, the roots of Sir Robert Peel's new police in Ireland, and the explicit system of political repression there, have been emphasized; see, e.g., Palmer, Stanley H., Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. On prisons, see Morgan, Rod, “Divine Philanthropy: John Howard Reconsidered,” History 62 (1977): 388–410CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Evans, Robin, The Fabrication of Virtue: English Prison Architecture, 1750–1840 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

47 Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Sheridan, Alan (New York: Pantheon, 1977)Google Scholar, originally published as Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975)Google Scholar. This theme was foreshadowed in Foucault's earlier Madness and Civilization, trans. Howard, Richard (1965; reprint, New York: Pantheon, 1967)Google Scholar. See also “Prison Talk: An Interview with Michel Foucault by J. J. Brochier,” Radical Philosophy 16 (Spring 1977): 10–15Google Scholar.

48 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, “The Haunted House of Jeremy Bentham,” in Ideas in History (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1965)Google Scholar, rev. in Victorian Minds (New York: Knopf, 1968), pp. 32–81Google Scholar.

49 Not surprisingly, Bentham's fall in prestige has spilled over onto the image of his chief practical disciple, Chadwick. His most recent biographer, Brundage, Anthony, England's “Prussian” Minister: Edwin Chadwick and the Politics of Government Growth, 1832–1854 (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1988)Google Scholar, highlights his subject's personal ambitiousness, authoritarian tendencies, and political ineptness, providing a far less “heroic” picture than the earlier biographies of Lewis and Finer (n. 19 above).

50 Ignatieff, Michael, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (New York: Pantheon, 1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51 Ibid., p. xiii.

52 In similar fashion, Jennifer Davis described how a criminal class was imaginatively constructed in the 1860s to justify the expansion of state power: “The London Garrotting Panic of 1862: A Moral Panic and the Creation of a Criminal Class in Mid-Victorian England,” in Gatrell, et al., eds., pp. 190–213Google Scholar.

53 See Clarke, John, “Managing the Delinquent: The Children's Branch of the Home Office, 1913–30,” in Langan, and Schwarz, , eds. (n. 30 above), pp. 240–255Google Scholar; and, most powerfully, Garland, David, Punishment and Welfare: A History of Penal Strategies (Aldershot: Gower, 1985)Google Scholar.

54 Gatrell, V. A. C., “Crime, Authority and the Policeman-State,” in The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1950 (hereafter CSH), ed. Thompson, F. M. L. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3:244, 310Google Scholar.

55 On this distinction, see Lenman, B. and Parker, G., “The State, the Community, and the Criminal Law in Early Modern Europe,” in Gatrell, et al., eds., pp. 11–48Google Scholar.

56 See, for example, Emsley, Clive, “The English Magistracy, 1700–1850,” Bulletin, no. 15 (February 1992), pp. 28–38Google Scholar. The still comparatively unprofessional Victorian magistrates have also risen in scholarly esteem; see Davis, Jennifer, “‘A Poor Man's System of Justice’: The London Police Courts in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Historical Journal 27 (1984): 309–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On magisterial resistance to incarcerative expansionism, see Saunders, Janet, “Magistrates and Madmen: Segregating the Criminally Insane in Late-Nineteenth-Century Warwickshire,” in Policing and Punishment in Nineteenth Century Britain, ed. Bailey, Victor (London: Croom Helm, 1981), pp. 217–41Google Scholar; Radzinowicz, Leon and Hood, Roger, A History of English Criminal Law and Its Administration, vol. 5, The Emergence of Penal Policy (London; Stevens & Sons, 1986), pt. 4Google Scholar; Forsythe, W. J., Penal Discipline, Reformatory Projects and the English Prison Commission, 1895–1939 (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1991), chap. 6Google Scholar; Zedner, Lucia, Women, Crime and Custody in Victorian England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), chap. 6Google Scholar.

57 On prereform jails, see Sheehan, W. J., “Finding Solace in Eighteenth-Century Newgate,” in Crime in England, 1550–1800, ed. Cockburn, J. S. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 229–45Google Scholar; Innes, Joanna, “The King's Bench Prison in the Later Eighteenth Century: Law, Authority and Order in a London Debtors' Prison,” in An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Brewer, John and Styles, John (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1980), pp. 250–98Google Scholar; on private prosecution associations, see Schubert, Adrian, “Private Initiative in Law Enforcement: Associations for the Prosecutions of Felons, 1744–1856,” in Bailey, , ed., pp. 25–41Google Scholar; and David Philips, “‘Good Men to Associate and Bad Men to Conspire’: Associations for the Prosecution of Felons in England, 1760–1860,” and King, Peter, “Prosecution Associations and Their Impact in Essex,” both in Policing and Prosecution in Britain, 1750–1850, ed. Hay, Douglas and Snyder, Francis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), pp. 113–70, 171–207Google Scholar.

58 Davey, B. J., Lawless and Immoral: Policing a Country Town, 1838–1857 (Leicester: Leicester University Press; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983)Google Scholar. Davey emphasized that, contra the lasting impression created by Chadwick, “policing in rural areas was much more widespread and much more effective before the County Police Act than is usually thought” (p. 7).

59 See Swift, Roger, “Urban Policing in Early Victorian England, 1835–56: A Reappraisal,” History 73 (1988): 211–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Paley, Ruth, “‘An Imperfect, Inadequate and Wretched System’? Policing London before Peel,” Criminal Justice History 10 (1989): 95–130Google Scholar.

60 For example, see Robert Storch, “Policing Rural Southern England before the Police,” in Hay and Snyder, eds.; Robert Storch and David Philips, “‘Community’ and Private Policing in Early Nineteenth Century Provincial England” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Social Science History Association, November 1991).

61 Blaug, Mark, “The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New,” Journal of Economic History 23 (1963): 151–84CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “The Poor Law Report Reexamined,” Journal of Economic History 24 (1964): 229–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Such revisionist tendencies have been reinforced from across the Atlantic. In his prize-winning book on Philadelphia in this period, Allen Steinberg has provided an even more direct critique of the rise of “state justice.” The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Philadelphia, 1800–1880 highlights the attractions of the “community justice” (many of whose characteristics were English legacies) prevailing in early nineteenth-century Philadelphia—in particular, its closeness to the people, especially the working classes (Steinberg, Allen, The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Philadelphia, 1800–1880 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989])Google Scholar.

62 Arthurs, H. W., “Without the Law”: Administrative Justice and Legal Pluralism in Nineteenth Century England (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

63 See Norman McCord on the extent of private charity and C. G. Hanson on the friendly societies in The Long Debate on Poverty: Eight Essays on Industrialisation and ‘the Condition of England’ (London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1972)Google Scholar.

64 See, for example, several of the essays in Donajgrodzski, ed. (n. 29 above); Digby, Anne, Pauper Palaces (London: Routledge, 1978)Google Scholar; Crowther, M. A., The Workhouse System, 1834–1929 (London: Batsford, 1981)Google Scholar; Vincent, David, Poor Citizens: The State and the Poor in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Longman, 1991)Google Scholar.

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66 Johnson, Richard, “Educating the Educators: ‘Experts’ and the State, 1833–9,” in Donajgrodzski, , ed., p. 89Google Scholar. Johnson was at pains to challenge, very much from the Left, “the assumption … that the development of state educational systems has been an unambiguously progressive process consisting of the provision, in stages, of a self-evidently necessary service” (p. 77). See most of the other essays in this collection, particularly the editor's introduction and his own contribution, “‘Social Police’ and the Bureaucratic Elite: A Vision of Order in the Age of Reform.”

67 Roberts, David, Paternalism in Early Victorian England (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1979), p. 206Google Scholar.

68 See John Brown, “Social Control and the Modernisation of Social Policy, 1890–1929,” J. R. Hay, “Employers' Attitudes to Social Policy and the Concept of Social Control,” P. A. Ryan, “Poplarism,” and Macnicol, John, “Family Allowances and Less Eligibility,” in The Origins of British Social Policy, ed. Thane, Pat (London: Croom Helm; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1978)Google Scholar.

69 See John, Angela V., By the Sweat of Their Brow: Women Workers at Victorian Coal Mines (London: Routledge, 1980)Google Scholar; Lewis, Jane, “The Working Class Mother, State Intervention and the Bourgeois Family Model, 1870–1918” (paper presented at the Social History Society Conference on the Roots of Welfare, December 1983)Google Scholar; Shanley, Mary Lyndon, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), pp. 93–101Google Scholar.

70 See Walkowitz, Judith, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gorham, Deborah, “‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ Re-examined: Child Prostitution and the Idea of Childhood in Late Victorian England,” Victorian Studies 21 (1977–1978): 353–79Google Scholar; Bland, Lucy, “‘Cleansing the Portals of Life’: The Venereal Disease Campaign in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Langan, and Schwarz, , eds. (n. 30 above), pp. 192–208Google Scholar.

71 See Dyhouse, Carol, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981)Google Scholar; Gorham, Deborah, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

72 A pioneering critique was Elizabeth Wilson, Women and the Welfare State (n. 35 above). Much scholarly work is now being done on this question; a leading example is Pedersen, Susan, “Gender, Welfare, and Citizenship in Britain during the Great War,” American Historical Review 95, no. 4 (October 1990): 983–1006CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

73 A phrase coined by a late Victorian female philanthropist, quoted in Prochaska, Frank, The Voluntary Impulse: Philanthropy in Modern Britain (London: Faber, 1988), p. 74Google Scholar.

74 See Ibid., pp. xiv, 52–58; Lewis, Jane, Women and Social Action in Victorian and Edwardian England (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

75 A fairly late example is M. W. Finn's argument concerning health services that local guardians fairly consistently restrained development, held back resources, and overemphasized deterrence. In the end, he concluded, the central authority of Parliament was required to “prod the dinosaur of the Poor Law into movement” (“Medical Services and the New Poor Law,” in The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Fraser, D. [New York: St. Martin's, 1976], pp. 45–66)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 See, for example, Thane, Pat, “Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian England,” History Workshop Journal, no. 6 (August 1978), pp. 29–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Like Davey on the control of crime, John Prest has shown early and mid-Victorian local government to have been more effective in addressing new social needs than once thought (Prest, John, Liberty and Locality: Parliament, Permissive Legislation, and Ratepayers' Democracies in the Nineteenth Century [Oxford: Clarendon, 1990])CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Along with a new willingness to entertain the virtues of localism often came an upward revaluation of preeminently local pre-Victorian welfare arrangements. Such a reappraisal was pioneered in Blaug, “The Myth of the Old Poor Law and the Making of the New” (n. 61 above), followed up by J. D. Marshall in 1968, arguing for the superiority of the old Poor Law to the new in “flexibility and sensitivity to human need, adjustment to local circumstances, comprehensiveness and local participation” (The Old Poor Law, 1795–1834 [London: Macmillan, 1968], p. 46)Google Scholar. More recently, the “fundamentally popular” character of early nineteenth-century rural society has been argued (Foster, Ruscombe, The Politics of County Power [Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990])Google Scholar, and “the will and the capacity” of the “unreformed” political system to “carry substantial measures of social reform” has been asserted (Eastwood, David, “Men, Morals and the Machinery of Social Legislation, 1790–1830” [Pembroke College, Oxford, 1992])Google Scholar. Similar arguments, as we have seen, have been made for “unreformed” law enforcement.

78 Vincent (n. 64 above) sums up much of this recent work in regard to post-1900 history.

79 Johnson, Paul, “Social Risk and Social Welfare in Britain, 1870–1939” (Working Paper in Economic History no. 3/92, London School of Economics, April 1992), p. 3Google Scholar. This paper was prepared for a conference on “public-private relations in the shaping of social welfare in Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States,” one of several at the opening of the nineties attempting to widen welfare history beyond its former preoccupation with state policy making; see also the proceedings of conferences on “Community, Locality and Welfare: The History of the Welfare State from Below,” Queen Mary College, University of London, April 1990; and “Poverty, Self-Help and Welfare,” conference of the Social History Society of the United Kingdom, January 1990.

80 Thane, Pat, “Government and Society in England and Wales, 1750–1914,” in CSH, 3:32Google Scholar, quoting Matthew, H. C. G., Gladstone, 1809–1874 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), p. 169Google Scholar. See also Matthew, H. C. G., ed., The Gladstone Diaries, vol. 10, 1881–83 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), p. xxxvGoogle Scholar. While Matthew rather disapproved of this minimalism, such disapproval was less noticeable in Thane's essay or elsewhere in the CSH.

81 CSH 3:33.

82 Already in a 1984 essay, Thane had significantly departed from the state focus of earlier work to acknowledge the importance of working-class antistatism and the welfare role of friendly societies, embracing many more people than did trade unions (“The Working Class and State ‘Welfare’ in Britain, 1880–1914,” Historical Journal 27 [1984]: 877–900)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

83 Harris, Jose, “Society and the State in Twentieth-Century Britain,” CSH 3:68Google Scholar.

84 Ibid., p. 113.

85 Thompson, F. M. L., “Town and City,” CSH 1:57Google Scholar.

86 As in his “Social Control in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” Economic History Review, ser. 2, 34 (1981): 189–208CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

87 Thompson, F. M. L., The Rise of Respectable Society: Britain, 1830–1900 (London: Fontana, 1988), p. 356Google Scholar.

88 Ibid., p. 289.

89 R. J. Morris noted enthusiastically that “voluntary societies have an enormous potential for enabling a society experiencing rapid and disturbing change to adapt to that change, to experiment with and devise new values” (“Clubs, Societies and Associations,” CSH 3:400Google Scholar). This claim is elucidated in Morris, R. J., Class, Sect and Party: The Making of the British Middle Class: Leeds, 1820–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990)Google Scholar.

90 Prochaska (n. 73 above), p. xiii. While “rehabilitating” upper- and middle-class charity, Prochaska even more strikingly emphasized the prevalence and persistence of working-class charity, an important form of collective self-help.

91 Daunton, M. J., “Housing,” CSH 2:195–250Google Scholar.

92 Sutherland, Gillian, Elementary Education in the Nineteenth Century (London: Historical Association, 1971), p. 12Google Scholar. For another such dismissal, citing Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby and referring to dames' schools in “squalid basements,” see Midwinter, Eric, Nineteenth Century Education, Longman Seminar Studies in History (Harlow, 1970), pp. 18–19Google Scholar. Both dismissals ignored West's 1965 book (n. 42 above), which cited much evidence of their ubiquity (but described them as market rather than class institutions).

93 Gardner, Phil, The Lost Elementary Schools of Victorian England: The People's Education (London: Croom Helm, 1984)Google Scholar. But see also E. G. West's follow-up, more thoroughly historical volume, Education and the Industrial Revolution (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1975)Google Scholar.

94 Sutherland, Gillian, “Education,” CSH 3:128Google Scholar. An early and influential example of the new “consumerist” approach to popular educational history was Hurt, J. S., Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes, 1860–1918 (London: Routledge, 1979)Google Scholar. Hurt stressed that “historians have tended to neglect one important way in which the 1870s mark a great divide for the parental consumer. Up to 1870 the voluntary system was a voluntary one for both principal parties. Not only was the establishment of schools a matter of individual choice for local persons, the sense in which the system is usually seen as a voluntary one, it was also a voluntary one for parent and child alike. Before this date the majority of parents could decide how much, if any, formal schooling their children should receive. After the decade of the 1870s they lost the freedom of choice. The state decreed a minimum that all had to receive. Parental choice was, and still is, limited to deciding the maximum” (p. 25). David Vincent has since provided a history of “informal” education, in the process demonstrating how hostility to working-class family strategies and choices was embedded in the imposition of compulsory elementary education by the late Victorian state (Vincent, David, Literacy and Popular Culture: England, 1750–1914 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989], esp. pp. 73–94)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The convergence of these left “alternative histories” of education with a right “rational choice” economic model can be seen in Mitch, David F., The Rise of Popular Literacy in Victorian England: The Influence of Private Choice and Public Policy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Johnson, Richard, “Thatcherism and English Education: Breaking the Mould, or Confirming the Pattern?” History of Education 18 (1989): 96CrossRefGoogle Scholar: “Labour leaders did not see education as & popular activity to stimulate and guide, but as state institutions for the professionals to run.”

95 Other areas of social policy have produced similar recent revisionist work to that discussed above; for health, see Green, David G., Working-Class Patients and the Medical Establishment: Self-Help in Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century to 1948 (Aldershot: Gower, 1985)Google Scholar; Bynum, W. F. and Porter, Roy, eds., Living and Dying in London (London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1991)Google Scholar; and Prochaska, F. K., Philanthropy and the Hospitals of London: The King's Fund, 1897–1990 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As Bynum and Porter observed (p. xiii), the contributors to their collection “demonstrate that individual citizens, private enterprise initiatives, and parochial action should not be ignored” in the history of public health.

96 See, most notably, Joyce (n. 37 above).

97 “Populism” of course bears very specific associations from U.S. history, but despite that may be illuminating of recent British history. Indeed, this may be one aspect of the “Americanization of Britain” passed over by recent commentators on that phenomenon.

98 Hadley, R. and Hatch, S., Social Welfare and the Failure of the State: Centralised Social Services and Participatory Alternatives (London: Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. 3Google Scholar. See also Clode, Drewet al., Towards the Sensitive Bureaucracy: Consumers, Welfare and the New Pluralism (Aldershot: Gower, 1987)Google Scholar.