It was a commonplace in eighteenth-century England that in terms of importance, both fiscally and morally, the middling sort occupied a significant position. It was they who were “the sinews and strength of a nation …” This was thought to be so not only because “out of their Labour, Industry and Skill the greatest Part of all our Taxes are raised …” but also since in terms of national moral stability “the middling People are certainly more happy in the married State, than Persons of a more elevated Dignity …”1 In contrast, both the upper and lower orders were chastised for their improvidence and immorality:
Cast but a single glance of the eye on the Great Vulgar, all devoted to Pleasure and Extravagance, even in a Christian Country; and then look again at the Little Vulgar, and you’ll find ’em all aping the Great ones, even to ruin and destruction … What! is to be Great and Good, a Meanness of Spirit? and all Order and Decency become the Scorn of the People? … the Great neither see, nor hear, nor regard any of these Things: but the Country Gentleman, and the middling sort of People, both hear and see, and feel it too.2
Still, some recognized that this middle sort were not exempt from vice, that they, like their betters, enjoyed prodigious and unnecessary spending.
this Vice [is not] confined to those alone who affect a Prodigality beyond the real Profusion of their Plenty: But the same with glorious Extravagance, that drains off so much more than the Superfluities of the Affluent in high Life, is no less frequent among the middling sort of people.
Even here, however, the implication was that such middling irresponsibility was more a matter of imitation than an innate tendency. For it seemed obvious to many, as one newspaper reported, without any need for explication or justification, that “so much more honest and incorrupt are the Middling people than the Great, as they are vulgarly nick-named!”3
However, while many historians have noticed “a deep ambivalence among trading people” in eighteenth-century England “toward upper-class mores—as middling people defined them, at any rate”—few have considered such ambivalence in detail; “It was commoner by far,” notes one, for contemporaries “to dwell on the superior moral credentials and industry of the middle class than to analyse its make-up.” And yet very little historical analysis exists about this clichéd and much-repeated trope.
Surely this lack of engagement can be explained by the sanctimonious and perhaps hypocritical quality of such self-applause: a fine example of which can be found, early in the century, in Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe’s “middle station,” his father noted, spared him not only from the poverty of “the lower orders,” but equally, and as fatally, from the “vicious living, luxury, and extravagancies” of the upper ranks. While, then as now, no segment of society was free of fault, no group pure of failings, whatever its qualities, perhaps the reiterative and insistent repetition of such comments through the eighteenth century can tell us something important about the society from which they sprang. That is the underlying premise of this study.
We get some sense of the significance of frequent praise for the moral middle when we recall the purpose of the Societies for the Reformation of Manners of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the similar aims of the Proclamation Society, formed almost a hundred years later, i.e. the reformation of the manners and morals of the lower classes. By the late eighteenth century, however, there were expressions of disquietude that such reform was aimed only downwards. Thus one letter-writer, addressing “the Noblemen and Gentlemen” of the Proclamation Society, noted that:
You must also be sensible that you will with great difficulty obtain, what appears to be the peculiar object of your Association, the reformation of the inferior branches of the community, while the grossest abuses prevail uncensored, at least unreformed, in the higher orders.4
The desire of the letter-writer, Theophilus, to improve the morals and manners of both the lower and upper orders was perhaps the less self-congratulatory side of the common assertion of middling virtue, and it is this element in the development of the social understanding of the period that has largely been neglected. This book seeks to examine some of this vast body of disapproval to see whether, and in which ways, these critiques of their superiors served some positive function. By considering four practices which contemporaries saw both as linked to each other, and as largely identified with the upper classes, we can perhaps gain some insight into why upper-class vices were thought by many to be pernicious, and what could, should, and must be done to ameliorate them, to guard Britain’s national prosperity and internal unity of purpose.
There is much in the structure of this book that needs explanation, and it will illuminate some of my central themes to consider the decisions that have gone into its adoption. First is the notion that, in the very long eighteenth century, there was an attack on something that might be called ‘aristocratic vice.’ Second is the question of why I have called it ‘aristocratic’ since many of its practitioners were not noble men or women. And why is Vice singular?—for surely, whoever they were, they indulged in more than one. And why Vice? why not Sin or Crime?
On the one hand there are good reasons for seeing the repeated attempts to curb certain forms of elite immorality as parts of an ongoing movement, as a sort of extended conversation, or an argument, between a social elite and its critics about the best ways to promote a powerful and healthy polity. On the other hand, it would be wrong to see these efforts as part of a concerted and organized movement by a united group of campaigners, entirely aware of well-defined goals and conjoined in their efforts. These critics of fashionable vice, who tended to be neither aristocrats nor working people, formed at best a very loose alliance, brought together at specific times and places, but as yet with no abiding and distinct group identity. Sociologically, in so far as they produced and read a wide variety of printed material, they tended to belong to the middle strata of society, with few aristocrats and even fewer working people represented. Not surprisingly many of these critics were clerics. But in matters of belief, the entire group was very diverse, separated not only in time but by general outlook, by political allegiance and vehemence of concern. This movement then can be seen as both one and multiple—an issue to which we will return throughout the following chapters.
Almost as disparate a group as their critics, the habitués of the world of aristocratic vice, although they all required and possessed some measure of wealth and birth, were defined by other qualities. We get some clue to their essential attributes when we consider the names frequently used to describe them. Tags such as “the Great” or “the better sort” situated them on the social ladder; others such as the beau monde, “people of fashion,” the ton, haut ton, or bon ton, or most inclusively, “the polite world” delineated their manner of living. These were the trend-setters, the arbiters of style, the celebrities of eighteenth-century Britain.5 And many of them, at least in the popular imagination, were practitioners of the multiple modes of aristocratic vice, ranging from minor follies to major sins.
However, there were four activities singled out by eighteenth-century contemporaries as belonging to a system of vice, as being archetypical immoralities, as constituting a sort of constellation of corruption. These practices were duelling, suicide, adultery, and gambling.6 These four, it was said, owed their origin to the besetting failing of the upper class—pride. And though it was claimed that all these vices originated with society’s elite, a great danger of their practice, as we have already noticed, was in their effects upon the rest of society. Not only would social inferiors inevitably imitate their superiors, but also, in the commission of illegal acts for which they escaped punishment and in the engagement in sinful activity which met only with mild censure, aristocrats would fatally weaken the force of the laws of Man and God. For Vice was something that not only hurt individuals but also harmed the public weal. To be overly schematic (for often eighteenth-century writers used vice, sin, and crime interchangeably), sin is that which corrodes the individual soul, while vice, like crime, corrupts public life. While there were many attempts to criminalize the vices of duelling, gambling, suicide, and adultery, most thought that the law would continue to turn a blind eye until public opinion raised the awareness of juries to the gravity of aristocratic transgressions. Crime was to be dealt with by the heavy hand of the law, but since vice was sustained or attacked by “opinion,” only a concomitant change in opinion would resolve the problem.
What sorts of specific vices made up the general category, what constituted the acts that composed prideful vice? Vices could be minor ill-acts, like over-drinking or ingratitude, or major and serious breaches of morals, like gaming, adultery, or duelling, but most were seen as damaging the nation, as directly and harmfully weakening its moral stamina. When Thomas Erskine asked, “Of what consequence is the finest system of laws, if the morals of the people that are to obey and to defend them, are contaminated and lost; their dictates will be despised, and their execution cannot long continue,”7 he was only repeating a widely held notion, the primacy of morality to the nation’s welfare and the fatal effects of vice on its continuing vitality. In sum, a vice was a breach of morality, an act which had consequences far beyond the harm it did to the private world of the vicious person.
On occasion, all three terms—sin, vice, and crime—were used more or less interchangeably. Even so, there were four particular sets of actions in which this sort of confused and multiple description was common and which are the subjects of this book. All were called vices, all were against both God and man’s law, and none was punished, at least by the courts, if the offenders were well-born.
Let us first consider contemporaries’ descriptions of adultery, duelling, gaming, and suicide as sins and crimes. In Henry Fielding’s Amelia, Dr. Harrison wondered whether “in the great sin of Adultery, for instance, hath the Government provided any law to punish it.…” while in his Covent Garden Journal Fielding thundered: “By what means our Laws are induced to consider this atrocious Vice as no Crime, I shall not attempt to determine. Such however is the Fact …”8 The rector of Waltham Parva preached a sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1727, entitled “The Obliquity of the Sin of Duelling” while the London Chronicle noted that “Through the inefficacy of our boasted laws, does not the fell aggressor in a duel commit a most atrocious crime with impunity; while the meek and injured person is exposed to general contempt.”9 A letter signed ‘Francisco Grimaldi’ sent to the Public Advertiser in 1765 concluded that “card-playing is unfortunately a sin that cannot be practiced alone” while a correspondent to the Gazetteer argued that “it appears on the whole that gaming is the particular crime to which the destruction of this country (if ever it happen) will be ascribed.”10 A mid-century tract against suicide, entitled A Discourse Upon Self-Murder, concluded that “if a Man, through the Habit of Sin, and the long Government of the Devil, should at last become thereby disorder’d in his Senses, or a Lunatick, and then kill himself, his Madness in that Case would be no more Excuse than Drunkenness would be.” Thirty years later, a Times correspondent lamented, “That self-murder has become a crime frequent among us is a truth too generally and too justly lamented; and the ill forbearance of the Coroner’s juries of late perhaps have not a little contributed to its frequency.”11 For these four misdeeds, the terms vice, crime, and sin were used interchangeably.
One of the main reasons for such denunciatory descriptions of these four activities was, as I have already suggested, the inability or unwillingness of the Church or the State to tackle them practically. Neither seemed to punish miscreants of fashion, men and women of the upper orders, in the same manner that they punished less well-connected folk. The law’s partiality, its failure to bring the well-born to condign punishment, was recognized to be a special and especially dangerous quality in relation to these upper-class immoralities. It is clear that for many, these four transgressions were vices, sins, and crimes simultaneously. While sins broke divine law, and crimes human law, vice, while often breaking both of these, also had clear damaging practical effects on the nation.
Having considered vice, let us look at another central concern of this book, that of “cultural skirmishes.” Given its complexity, it will be necessary to disassemble the notion, and consider its individual parts. First, I will explain what I mean by culture, and why a cultural conflict might be significant and worthy of attention. Second, I will discuss why the phrase “cultural skirmishes” is used to describe the waves of criticism which are the subject of this book. And finally I will examine where, in what venues or sites, and under what conditions such skirmishes occurred.
Cultural history is a relatively new and diverse sub-genre in British historiography. One strand of this new history of culture considers the creation and dissemination of what we often call High Culture. To oversimplify somewhat, this sort of cultural history describes the world of works and objects whose artistic or intellectual worth transcends the period in which they were created. Recently, this sort of study has also been enhanced by a consideration of delivery and reception: who read novels in family circles, and how this could lead to different sorts of experiences for the hearers or how readers could find notions within literature which were totally unintended by its creators.12 Another sort of cultural history is more influenced, perhaps, by anthropology, and considers as its subject for investigation “how people live.” These histories are informed by Geertzian notions of culture as a web of significance, a study of the largely unconscious habitus of lives, the roadmap or diagram of strategies available to people in particular times and places.13 I cite these two predominant types to distinguish the sort of history considered in this study from its better-known and more well-worked relations. Unlike histories of high culture, this study looks at culture more widely considered. That is not to say that works of drama, of art, of thought will not be examined, but that, on the whole, they will be considered for what they say as part of the ongoing arguments of the day and not for their atemporal insights into the human condition. And unlike histories of the unthinking structures and codes by which most people conducted themselves most of the time, this study will focus specifically on conscious or semi-conscious arguments. As we shall see, these arguments and those who propounded them were often confused or held contradictory opinions, lacking the clarity of grand concepts and the venerability of received wisdom. They formed a changing body of musings on that society of which they were a part. This sort of cultural history can be called the “history of opinion.” There is no better recommendation for, or explication of, this sort of study than David Hume’s well-known analysis of the force of opinion in the upholding and sustaining of social order:
Nothing is more suprizing to those who, consider human affairs with a philosophical eye, than to see the easiness with which the many will be governed by the few; and to observe the implicite submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of their rulers. When we enquire by what means this wonder is brought about, we shall find that as FORCE is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. ’Tis therefore, on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.14
Sometimes, as Hume pointed out, such opinion sustained elite control. At other times, however, it challenged elite authority, claiming either that the governors themselves were not abiding by their own rules, or that those rules were wrong, wicked, or outmoded. On important practical issues of social principles or correct morals, these sorts of arguments were especially significant. In an age where political opposition was still seen as dangerously divisive, where economic and military strength resided in the hands of a relatively small cadre, where religious argumentation still smacked of “the world turned upside down,” discussions and disagreements about morals and manners were in no way so tainted. Concerning themselves with something to which everyone paid lip service, the moralists and critics of improper behavior could safely and public-spiritedly speak their minds. Thus, if we can come to some understanding of these diffusive and sprawling sets of views and arguments, if we can use them as the largest frame of reference or box in which arguments about politics, religion, or economics might “sit,” we might recover an important though misunderstood strand of the history of the period, and also construct a framework in which older sub-genres of research could reveal insights.
Though meant ironically, the entry in the Gentleman’s Magazine for 1752, under the heading of “A Modern Glossary,” which defined “virtue and vice” as “subjects of discourse”15 captured this freedom of expression. This book is informed by a consideration of such discourse, not only as “discourse” (that is to say, ideas or notions without particular anchors in the everyday world) but as constitutive elements in a world of discourse/practice. For often discourses about virtues or vices were not only about what was correct and proper, but about what particular persons had done in specific circumstances that was immoral and improper. Such discourses not only criticized actual actions, but also recommended actual solutions to habitual indecencies. In this way, the history of opinion seeks to combine the methods of studying high culture with the objectives of anthropological history.
The Oxford English Dictionary gives as its first definition of “skirmish”–“to engage in a skirmish or irregular encounter; to fight in small parties.”16 The irregular, inconclusive, hit-and-miss small scale of the term “skirmish” seems to fit perfectly the outbursts of criticism that characterized the attack on aristocratic vice. Whereas a war, even a cultural war, presupposes a coherent body of like-minded forces fighting a well-defined foe, the skirmishes I will be analyzing contain no such definition. Indeed, the very diversity of the opponents is one of the things that testifies to the significance and strength of these encounters. However, it does complicate the shape of the narrative, since it is hard to gather like-minded types together in these critical engagements. Thus, for example, we find both Enlightenment thinkers and Methodist preachers agreeing about the pernicious influence of custom, the authority for such vice; both the progressive feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the conservative philanthropist Jonas Hanway seeing eye-to-eye on the world of fashion, the scene of such vice; both Thomas Erskine, supporter of radical causes, and Hannah More, defender of the old order, chastising the spurious honor of the Great, the cause for such vice. Coming together from different parts of the political and ideological spectrum, such folk found few things they could agree on beyond the need to purify social mores and eradicate genteel vices.17
This analysis, then, depends upon an investigation of both discourse and practice, and attempts to trace outbreaks of largely negative commentary about four aristocratic practices over a period of almost two hundred years, the “long” eighteenth century. It is grounded in and relies for its main methodological impetus on the use and investigation of all genres of writing on these vices, to see what difference different forms made, to consider continuities and changes between and within genres, and to get a sense of both dominant and minor contemporary evaluations, as well as to contrast “real life” with its various representations. It is the history of notions, swirling in the air, never entirely forgotten, but still periodically rediscovered and reinvigorated. It is the history of the activities that these notions combated (the duel unpunished, the adultery implicitly allowed) as well as those recommended as prophylactic (a raft of proposed new laws, new institutions, and new punishments).
But where did people come to share these swirling notions, how and where did they imbibe this charged “air”? The answer to this, is, of course, diffuse. A summary of some of the sites for such interchange reveals, in fact, the sources for this volume. Of course, there is much that history and historians can never recover; the important though unrecorded conversations at breakfast tables, at coffeehouses, doing the shopping, or chatting with the postman. But there is a world of communication and interchange that is available to us, which allows us partial insights into this larger lost world. I have already mentioned some of these in my discussion of culture, though I rely more on really evanescent novels, plays, and poetry than I do on great artistic achievements, since it is in these transient literary forms that repeated segments of condemnation of aristocratic vice emerge. Not surprisingly, perhaps, aristocratic vice offered just the sort of spectacle that eighteenth-century consumers (like their modern descendants) seemed to be unable to resist—beautifully clothed, often physically attractive rich people doing bad things publicly. Whether on the stage, in a book or newspaper, or even in a poem or satire, the scandalous doings of the wicked and well-born, offered as objects of vicarious pleasure under the guise of information and condemnation, were a clichéd though popular trope. In addition to these ambiguous portrayals, an enormous number of serious pamphlets, which often originated as sermons, were available and cheaply priced. There were even a number of defences of various aristocratic activities, some quite sober, and others more ironic or satiric. Most of the memoirs and collections of letters of the day contain references to recent outrages or reflections on the causes of such improprieties. London’s popular debating societies also discussed the frequency and seriousness of such sins, and their debates were reported in the newspapers of the day.18
This brings us to what is perhaps the most significant, and until recently, most understudied form of popular discussion, the British periodical press.19 Although not the first European nation to have newspapers, England was unusual for the size and nature of its press. With the lapse of the Licensing Acts in 1697 and even before the permission to print Parliamentary proceedings was granted in 1774, England had an extraordinary range of periodical publications. Magazines of various types flourished, ranging from essay-journals, like the Athenian Mercury, to the better-known works of Steele and Addison in the Spectator and Tatler, through England’s first storehouse of information, the Gentleman’s Magazine, and including such notable and influential works as Johnson’s Rambler and Thornton’s Connoisseur and the less reputable but equally popular Town and Country Magazine or the Bon Ton Magazine. An important feature of all these journals was the opportunities they offered not only for moralists to broadcast their complaints to a wide and growing reading public, but also for that public to respond with letters to the editor. Such letters as often took exception to as agreed with the pieces to which they were responding. Here then was yet another forum for debate, a forum more anonymous and perhaps more “open” than even the debating clubs. In the many newspapers of the day, in the weeklies, tri-weeklies, and dailies that proliferated in extraordinary numbers, the letters-to-the-editor section was often one of the liveliest features. As significant as its function as a communicative site was the press’s growing willingness to publicize and excoriate instances of upper-class misdeeds. Newspaper editors soon realized that aristocrats hated to see their names and follies spread over three-penny sheets, abhorred the thought that butchers and watermen might know of their personal lives and sins. It is said that suppression or omission fees were significant sources of income to early eighteenth-century newspapers.20 But by the early 1760s, newspaper editors had realized that much more could be made from selling such items, by publishing such deeds in their papers, than they could ever hope to make by suppressing them. Opponents of such tell-all journalism were shocked by such publicity. Other commentators, however, were delighted, and argued that the press and publicity were the only means by which a thoroughgoing reform of the upper classes could be achieved.
One can see how attractive a tool this press must have seemed to critics of the upper classes. Finding existing legal recourse to be too ineffectual in preventing or punishing vicious acts, the opponents of aristocratic vice, while seeking to stiffen existing statues and make enforcement both more dependable and resolute, turned largely to that quasi-legal moral force, the “court of public opinion,” and attempted to educate, convince, and mobilize the power of that opinion as the best, perhaps the only moral social regenerator. For the power of the law against aristocratic offences seemed puny and ineffective when contrasted with the refusal of juries to punish, and with the loyalties of the Great themselves sworn to another code than the Law of the Land.
While historians and others have, in recent decades, written fine books on a number of the topics covered in this volume—on honor, duelling, gaming, suicide, and adultery21—no one, to my knowledge, has considered the vices over such a very long period of time, or as an ensemble, as a “constellation of corruption,” neither for Britain, nor for any other of the countries of Europe. I aim to demonstrate that this sort of endeavor is possible for eighteenth-century Britain, in large part because of the relative development and sophistication of the British newspaper and periodical press, a press which, I shall argue, did more to familiarize its readers with, and promote popular objection to, aristocratic vices than any other written form. In a population that was largely literate, such daily and reiterative broadcast of fashionable immorality unpunished by the law must have acted as a constant irritant, and convinced those who did not belong to “Society” that its code was deleterious to the well-being of the nation’s polity and welfare.
When Thomas Erskine noted the need for virtue for a successful polity, he used two phrases interchangeably which we might hesitate to see as equivalents. For Erskine, however, “general manners” and “morals” stood for the same sort of actions and beliefs. In contrast to these necessary and positive attributes, Erskine selected “the vices of the times,” introducing, if only by implication, a third positive synonym for manners and morals, and that was virtue. For the modern historian, and perhaps the modern reader, these three notions, so closely allied in Erskine, have come to have three rather different inflections, if not meanings. For us manners are accomplishments that can be learned and taught. They vary with time, place, and circumstance. They are matters of accommodation and sociability, making it easier to get along in the company of strangers and even of friends. They have, even now, a faint flavor of arbitrariness about them, of form without substance. Morals on the other hand have come to carry a weightier load. Morals cannot be acquired as manners can, but are the outcome of early education, of inward belief or faith, or of the mandates of conscience. Often they are seen as the teachings of particular religious systems or ethical codes. If present, they regulate life’s significant decisions and hard choices. Morality is unconcerned with gracefulness, with social amity, considering only what is correct belief or action, important. It is uncompromising, stern, and usually forbidding. And the third term, virtue, sits perhaps most uncomfortably in modern parlance. It is remote and faintly chilly, not involved in the messiness of everyday life and everyday decisions.
What does it matter what these words meant then and what they might mean now? I have taken time with terminology since this is a book about manners, morals, virtue, and vice, and about a series of attempts made over a long time to redefine, to rehabilitate, and to control their meanings. This is a book about a series of contestations, of challenges over moral authority, of symbolic struggles over who gets to decide what manners, morals, and virtue should be. And, because, in practice, such contests are always undertaken piecemeal, holus-bolus as it were, it is not at all surprising that, at their most effective, these challenges were not so much in favor of a new system of morals or a new code of manners, as against immoral activities; against current vices, against current outrages, against current evils. That is not to say that gradually, and in a semi-submerged manner, such a new code of conduct did not come to be, as we shall see. But rather what I wish to argue is that for most of the period under investigation, such attacks remained negative, inconclusive, and oppositional.22
Having considered the argument of this book, let us discuss its structure and its themes. Structurally, after a general introduction to that system of unwritten though pervasive rules that some called “the code of honor,” and to which others took grave exception (chapter 1), each of the vices (duelling, suicide, adultery, and gambling) will be examined in turn, with contemporary criticisms of such misconduct drawn from a wide range of sources, detailing continuities and changes in thought and practice over the “long eighteenth century.” Finally, Chapter 6 will sketch the fate of these vices in the first several decades of the nineteenth century. Though the history of each of these vices has received scholarly attention, this study considers them as a combined moral (or rather immoral) complex. When they are brought thus together, it will become evident that an examination of this knot of miscreancy reveals more than the consideration of its parts would suggest.
While gender is an important theme of this volume, it perhaps should be noted that although some of these vices, like duelling, were only or mainly practiced by men, others found practitioners among members of both sexes. Chapter 1 examines various desired masculine and feminine attributes in the early eighteenth century, and briefly considers the effects of the new code of politeness. Chapter 3 features a micro-history of the suicide of a very prominent man, casting some light on the ongoing debate on manly virtue, while chapter 5 contains a similar micro-history of a gaming woman, whose story, told throughout the century, became an exemplar of the old saw about the wages of sin, especially for women.
An animating theme is the effect, broadly considered, of press coverage, specifically the publication of the vices under consideration, on the reading public. For the newspaper and magazine press of the eighteenth century did not just provide news and views to its readers, but also exposed their audiences to immoral acts they might never have personally “seen,” and gave them repeated instances of such acts that they may have thought infrequent or unusual.23 Though most of the papers and magazines examined were metropolitan, their influence, though no doubt greatest in London, surely spread throughout the realm.
Second only to the press in the extent of its appeal was the topical and lively theatrical scene. From the plebs who sat in the “heavens” to the patricians who occupied grand boxes, eighteenth-century drama appealed to all classes, though perhaps in very different ways. Plays feature in both chapters 4 and 5; in the former the reception of a single play over a period of time discloses important changes in the understanding of adultery; in the latter, a succession of plays on the same topic reveals changes in attitudes toward gambling, while chapter 2 examines plays in the context of other literary commentary on duelling and chapter 3 looks at changes in plays in which suicide was the central leitmotif.
Finally, a central theme of this book is the ways in which contemporaries thought the vices of the haut ton weakened and threatened to overthrow the Law—both human and divine. In their campaign against aristocratic vice, critics argued for the necessity of thorough legislative reform and the passage of more punitive and more enforceable laws against the misdeeds of the Great. In this way legal sanctions would not only be, but would be seen to be, operating equally against the powerful and the powerless; men and women of the ton were not exempt from penalties that were enforced against those of the town.24
In studying these reiterative attacks we will chart the growth of a consciousness, an understanding that “we” were not vicious like “them” and through this growing awareness the development of what might be called proto–class consciousness. For, as E. P. Thompson, echoing Marx, noted: “class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.” And, by the early nineteenth century, we can see the beginnings of such a consciousness: “What a state should we be in … if we had, as was the case with France, only two classes—great nobles and the common people! Happily we have another class, the middle class—a class, the glory and characteristic feature of England—a middle class more intelligent, more educated and more virtuous than either of the extremes.”25 While this view was by no means universal, it did express the sense and the hope that many must have shared that a new and much better, more moral and virtuous age was dawning.
But before we can arrive at the end of our story, we must begin in the “bad old days” when the code of honor and the behavior it gave rise to was beginning to come under attack.