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

In this impressive and erudite book, the product of a quarter-century of research, Roberts clearly succeeds in his three broad goals: to establish a detailed chronology of organized moral-reform efforts in England across a century when such efforts were particularly conspicuous; to place these efforts in an appropriately rich political, cultural, and administrative context; and to synthesize the study of the many significant moral-reform projects of this era—anti-slavery, social purity, temperance, and the like—"into a study of moral reform as a diverse but distinctive mode of thought and action" (viii). The result is the first detailed analysis of moral-reform efforts as a whole during this long era. Its significance and usefulness will be immediately obvious to any serious student of the late-Georgian and Victorian eras.

Roberts' chronological account is divided into six chapters. The first focuses on the mid-1780s, which he sees as the pivotal moment in the making of a moral-reform agenda. The last is devoted to the late-Victorian and Edwardian decades, which witnessed the erosion of moral-reform voluntarism by the combined forces of social and scientific "causalism," which challenged the notion of autonomous moral agency, and "national efficiency," which at a time of deepening international competition turned Britain's physical and moral fitness into a state responsibility. Throughout, Roberts' methodology is that of a traditional historian chiefly interested in placing in a broader setting the voluntary societies that he examines. Massively researched, his monograph makes extensive use of a broad range of manuscript collections, official publications issued by voluntary societies and parliamentary committees, and newspapers and pamphlets.

Although resolutely a work of history, this book will be put to good use by the broad range of social scientists who are preoccupied with the analysis of social-stabilizing mechanisms and the evolution of civil society and its relationship with the state. Roberts identifies three master narratives of volunteer moral reform from the literature: one that emphasizes the imposition of labor discipline in the development of capitalist industrial society (à la Edward P. Thompson), one that emphasizes the emergence of social stability through the growth of consensual social values, cross-class cooperation, and civic improvement (à la Brian Harrison), and one that highlights the development of a bourgeois public sphere that facilitated social stability by helping "professional and commercial elites . . . to convince significant numbers of their own and other classes to see the world in a particular—hierarchical yet community-seeking—way" (298, à la Jürgen Habermas). He is sympathetic to the second and particularly the third.

Although Roberts' broader arguments are persuasive, his account features too much consensus and too little contestation. Plebeian agency is by no means entirely absent from his book, but he might well have devoted greater attention to the various ways in which the largely working-class targets of moral reform sought to, and frequently were able to, stymie such reform efforts or redefine them on their own terms.