Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain (review)

Political liberty and religious freedom depend upon the power of the state, inspired, controlled, and guided by the mind of the community.

So wrote the historian A. F. Pollard in 1911, in closing his popular History of England, 55 B.C.-1911 A.D. Despite a sustained presentist approach to history, the book was consciously anti-Whig, emphasising the state, rather than the individual, as the hero of the Liberal times in which Britain now lived. The organs of the state had been subjected to a cumulative process of "common control," compelling—after the medieval fashion of peine forte et dure—the "obstinate individualist" to "surrender his ancient immunity and submit to the common law." The confidence with which Pollard expressed his faith in the state as the salvation of the individual, "who can do little by himself," is striking. How could liberty have come to be so intertwined with authority within the space of half a century, when Liberals had been preoccupied with "peace, retrenchment and reform"? (246, 243–44, 247)

Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain—the product of a 2001 symposium to mark the centenary of the death of Queen Victoria and the 150th anniversary of the Great Exhibition—supplies many possible answers to this question. Not least, it emphasises the close interrelationship in the nineteenth century between conceptions of liberty and the imperatives of authority in a densely populated urban society where traditional methods of regulating behaviour were breaking down. The editor, Peter Mandler, cautions against assumptions of the discontinuity between (Old) Liberalism conceived in Foucauldian terms and the (New) Liberalism of Pollard's time rooted in ideals of social justice (16–17). He maintains that the shift was within—not outside—a complex and often messy system of relations between state and civil society in which the overall libertarian climate of Britain was maintained.

Still, as Philip Harling contends, the greatly enhanced role of the state in Victorian Britain should not be underestimated; it was particularly evident in a series of moralistic measures by W. E. Gladstone's First Ministry, although its presence in this and other realms was often concealed by the delegation of its powers to the agencies of local government and other bodies at the local level. The Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s brought many of the tensions in this dialectic between liberty and regulation to the surface. This Helen Rogers brings out forcefully in analysing the different professional and ideological interests at play in attempts to control deviant sexual behaviour, particularly that of women. Similar conclusions about the heavy-handed measures that a laissez-faire regime required to maintain a greater liberty are evident in Peter Baldwin's analysis of the indirect taxation and the "sanitationist" approach to public health that distinguished Britain from other industrialising nations in the middle of the nineteenth century; this approach was more intrusive but effective in maintaining the conditions of free trade. Finally, Boyd Hilton explores the changes in religion—and the moral disciplines it reinforced—before and after the mid-century divide, emphasising the sanction it gave to the market and free trade as optimistic belief in an evolutionary, open-ended future supplanted the Evangelical emphasis on a static, sinful present.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of this book is its reminder that liberty was no abstract ideal in Victorian Britain; it was certainly not an economic tool alone, designed primarily to maximise wealth and utility. Crucially, as Jonathan Parry argues, Liberalism sought to build an "effective national political community" from the 1870s (83). By this means the threats to democracy that had galvanised Liberals two decades earlier—vested interests with echoes of "old" corruption on the one hand, and slackness of morals and character consequent upon commercialism, on the other—would continue to be addressed, but through greater state intervention. The fortunes of nationhood, "manly citizenship," and a stronger state thus became closely associated as the Liberal agenda was subordinated to the higher...