[i]t is the most powerful moral machine in the world, and exercises a greater influence over the manners and opinions of society than the united eloquence of the bar, the senate and the pulpit.1
Deeply entrenched practices do not change overnight. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, some customary forms of behavior had changed; one, duelling, had even disappeared from Britain completely. But the other forms of vice considered in this book had also changed. The 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act fundamentally altered the nature of divorce, making adultery one, but not the only, ground for complete divorce, and allowed innocent women the right to remarry. The treatment of suicide had also changed, and by mid-century all who took their lives were allowed a dignified burial, even if not in daylight hours, and within sanctified ground. Gambling had gone “indoors,” and become private, occurring most frequently in private homes or gentlemen’s clubs. Society, both great and small, seemed more settled and more moral, and for many, that seeming was a great step forward.
These changes, or at least their appearance, had not been the result of any single, even if complex event. Neither the French Revolution nor the accession of the young Victoria to the throne did more than add impetus to the ground-swell which began a very long time before, and was manifest in a variety of sources. Duelling, after all, had been criticized by Francis Bacon as far back as 1614; suicide had been the subject of plays and poetry for almost as long; adultery was bemoaned by clerics even while becoming the subject of a new genre of pamphlets. Gaming too, and its offspring gambling, had been the subject of plays, of pamphlet attacks, and of legislation for several centuries. What then had finally “done the trick,” had converted Britain’s social elite from being the exemplar of such vice to becoming more sedate and decorous, more worthy of respect and leadership?
Of course there is never a single answer to any historical question, but this book has tried to demonstrate that the increasing frequency of newspaper coverage, that is, of publicity, through the eighteenth century, resulted in the transmutation of what might have been considered private matters into public concerns: the rencounter between two gentlemen, the breakup of marriage through adultery, the act of self-murder, and the loss of personal fortune at the gaming tables, became the subjects of popular discussion. As these issues became public, ordinary newspaper readers would have become aware of the magnitude and frequency of these acts, a dimension that they would never have encountered in their day-to-day lives. This awareness, over time, would have given those acts a greater significance, created more demand both for the cessation of what could be stopped or, in the absence of that, fairer and more equitable legal treatment for all affected.
Along with, and validated by the growing knowledge of the immorality of the fashionable world, came a proud assertion of the virtues of the middling orders. Two comments, one from the press, the other from a late eighteenth-century sermon, illustrate this trend. The first, from the Times, noted that “Among the middling and lower class of people some real hospitality yet exists–but in the higher order nothing but vanity or avarice …”; the second, even more damning, was part of Samuel Parr’s Discourse on the late Fast, which castigated England’s upper classes:
In the higher stations of life, we see rank without dignity, money without wealth, and voluptuousness almost without enjoyment. Our indignation, indeed, is somewhat stayed in its course, by the virtues which yet keep their ground among the middle orders of men.…2
Along with increased publicity given to the vices of the world of the Great was the direct articulation of the growing notion that the divide between personal and public character was artificial and misleading, and furthermore that the public had a right to know about the faux pas, the irregularities, of their rulers and betters. “Experience’s” letter to the Public Advertiser stated this position unequivocally:
I have ever been of opinion that a fair moral character was necessary toward forming a good minister of state, as it is highly improbable that those who are vicious in their private lives, should be virtuous in their public. And that there is no doubt that the people have as just a right and as much reason to enquire into and be informed of the private virtues and vices of those, who are entrusted with the care of their liberties and properties, as any gentleman hath, to require a character of a steward, who is to manage his estates; that we know by history and we feel by daily experience, how much private passions influence public actions.3
Despite the very significant coverage of these vices by the eighteenth-century press, most press historians have only looked at its relation to politics and political change. This may not be the only, or perhaps even the best way of considering press influence, especially when a great many of its readers were politically disenfranchised. Instead the great advantage of concentrating on moral issues is that, on the surface at least, there could be no disagreement. Anyone who rebuked adulterers could not be accused of being “a mere partisan,” and one could not accuse someone opposed to duelling of trying to overthrow established religion or its social system. All opponents to “vice” of any sort could make claims of an unimpeachable moral sanctity, of a concern for the common weal, and for the concept of equality before the Law. And it was these sorts of claims that the press encouraged.
Another great advantage of the press over other venues which also complained about the corruption of the age was its perceived ubiquity. Bemoaning “the follies and absurdities which are crept in amongst us, and are far more numerous than at any time for ages past,” “P,” in a letter to the General Evening Post argued that it was newspapers that both revealed the problems and suggested solutions to the many inconveniencies of the times. “It may be said,” he continued, “who reads newspapers? To which I answer, many more people than will own they do. They are read by the learned and unlearned, the wise and otherwise.…”4 As early as the late 1780s, the press had already claimed credit for improving the morals of the nation:
The follies, vices, and consequent miseries of multitudes, displayed in a newspaper, are so many admonitions and warnings, so many beacons, continually burning, to turn others from the rocks on which they have been shipwrecked. What more powerful dissuasive from suspicion, jealousy and anger, than the story of one friend murdered by another in a duel! What caution likely to be more effectual against gambling and profligacy, than the mournful relation of an execution, or the fate of despairing suicide.… “Talk they of morals”? There is no need of Hutcheson, Smith or Paley. Only take a newspaper and consider it well, read it and it will instruct thee.…
But it was not the morals of the great body of the people that many thought most needed improvement. “It has been justly remarked–that the middle and inferior ranks of society are much enlightened,” noted “Observator,” a correspondent to the Times, though he continued, “the superior [ranks] are much corrupted and depraved.” And we have already seen Corry’s argument that such “inquisitorial instrument[s]” as active press coverage would powerfully affect the sensibilities and perhaps even the behavior of the “most abandoned character[s] in high life.”5 While the long-fought skirmishes against a set of vices may have led to a change in the manners, if not in the morals, of the ton, they must also have promoted a sense of moral superiority and self-confidence in the middling orders, for whom, as E. P. Thompson noted, “the Press, itself [was] a kind of middle-class presence in advance of other articulated expression.”6
While not all the vices considered here had been eradicated, by the second half of the nineteenth century fashionable misdeeds could no longer be reported as mere lapses, aristocratic roués became the stuff of penny-romances and music hall sketches, gambling was more often confined to private spaces and less frequently hit the pages of the press than a hundred or more years earlier. While the skirmishing had not ceased, an odd class without any natural parameters of its own, defined largely by who and what it was not, had come into being.7 And the cultural skirmishes considered by this book were certainly responsible for a significant part of that self-consciousness, of that significant self-creation.