This chapter examines the self-descriptions used by petitioners when addressing Parliament. Through these labels, petitioners forged and asserted their collective identities and made claims on the state and the wider political community. Petitions did not merely reflect existing identities, but actively constituted them. The chapter first examines the broadening of the petitioning public. There was a shift from the typical mode of self-styling used by eighteenth century petitioners, which reflected perceived economic interests and the hierarchical structuring of local communities, to demotic, ostensibly egalitarian labels such as ‘inhabitants’ in the nineteenth century. The second half of the chapter examines how Catholics, Protestant Dissenters, and women, came forward as petitioners to claim rights and assert their collective identities. Supporters, opponents, and parliamentary advocates interpreted petitions in favour of Catholic emancipation as representing Irish Catholics as a collective force. Dissenters asserted their collective identity as petitioners claiming civil rights, but also in presenting themselves as moral authorities. Finally, women became more forthright in claiming rights as ‘women’ rather than limiting their interventions to moral and religious issues permitted by the norms of Victorian gender ideology.

As the century progressed, there was an increasing emphasis on more moderate forms of discourse and behaviour that rejected the divisive social and religious attitudes of the previous century. Supporters of the primacy of the Established Church now needed other weapons, beyond legal recourse and vituperative argument, to challenge the position of Dissent. As all parties tried to work out their shifting roles in the wake of legislative change, religious prejudice began to find its expression in new forms. Chapter 3 argues that politeness, in particular, became a mode of behaviour through which tacit religious exclusion could be reframed in new, more socially acceptable, ways. Focusing particularly on how the idea of politeness interacted with the accusation of Dissenting hypocrisy, it highlights how this discourse did not wholeheartedly reject the religious divisions of the previous century, but rather re-configured them for a new era of supposed moderation.

Amid an Enlightened era, dissenting religious groups clamored for toleration and/or religious freedom, mobilizing their own campaigns and helping staff with those of the era’s other prominent movements. British Dissenters had long sought repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which limited their rights of office-holding and other honors – while American colonists bristled against official churches that had also taken hold in the colonies. The American Revolution led to an upsurge in favor of religious freedom in America that overturned almost all religious restrictions by the 1790s, though British Dissenters’ movements over the same years met reversals from a stronger Establishment.