Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787-1886 (review)

This is an extremely fine and thoughtful book, based on an impressive range of sources; it is also demanding and densely written. It won the Royal Historical Society's 2005 Whitfield prize for the best first book on British history, and it shares a family resemblance to many first books by gifted historians. It is bursting with ideas and information, based on a colossal amount of reading and research. The style is highly condensed: in some parts of the book almost any paragraph could be taken at random and expanded into a journal article. While the style is not always easy reading, the language is accessible and jargon is minimized. Victorianists will find the second half of the book livelier than the first, as the author moves into the far more varied reform movements of that era.

The narrative is organized chronologically. Roberts sets out to establish a character for each period, linking the nature of charitable organization to the dominant anxieties of the time. He charts the rise and decline of societies for the suppression of manners, and then addresses anti-slavery, temperance, Sabbath observance, and other causes attractive to moral reformers. The book describes how anxieties about moral decline waxed and waned, and the ways in which crises of confidence in the national destiny shaped voluntary associations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Roberts shifts from movements propelled by anxieties about national safety during the French wars to the burst of legislative social shaping from 1829–34, the confident activism of the 1840s and 1850s, and the post-1867 reevaluation of the moral role of the enlarged state.

His stated purposes are to establish the chronology of moral reform organizations; to contextualize select initiatives; and to integrate the causes into an understanding of "moral reform as a diverse but distinctive mode of thought and action" (viii). Roberts depicts the two goals of moral reform societies in the period as a desire to change moral values and to modify behaviour, but he suggests three overarching explanatory devices into which these goals can be fitted. These are moral reform as "either the knowing or involuntary articulators of the new standards of labour discipline" (4); as the history of conflict "successfully mediated or resolved," also known as the stability-explaining perspective; and as a key factor in the emergence of civil society (11).

The book is also a cultural history of the charity-organizing classes, especially the commercial and professional middle class, who struggled with mixed feelings about the development of a market-oriented society (viii). "Middle class society depended...on being able to recognize a limit to the legitimate operation of market forces and to patrol that limit—on behalf of all classes" (293).

Roberts, however, moves far beyond the stereotyped and largely discredited view of moral reform movements as an oppressive form of middle-class social control. He rightly points out that most societies could not have survived if their membership and support had not expanded downward. He argues that with all its vagaries and failings, voluntary effort eased the rural-urban transition, and provided openings for energetic individuals. "As the nineteenth century unfolded, this gave an opportunity for some working people to transform themselves (as temperance activists did) from being the objects of moral reform to being its practitioners" (294). Moral reform associations are depicted as making a significant contribution to the creation of a society where issues could be debated without violence and where individuals felt far from powerless; believing that by joining and founding voluntary organizations aimed at moral improvement, they could effect positive change in their society.

Roberts is clearly influenced by Jürgen Habermas's thinking about the emergence of the preconditions necessary for social trust, which the book links to the history of voluntary associations. Among Roberts's many contributions is his sketch...