The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians (review)

Roberts' The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians chronicles the struggle between classical political economy and humanitarianism to guide Victorian social policy and to cope with such social problems as poverty and crime. Building on his earlier studies of paternalism and state welfare policy, Roberts has produced an extremely judicious survey that is both broadly conceived and minutely researched. Its strength lies in its detailed reconstruction of networks of friendship and influence among the individual politicians, editors, writers, and philanthropists who influenced thought and action regarding the poor. The book should be of interest to historians, political theorists, and sociologists. Depending on one's tastes, it is either encyclopedic and wonderfully detailed, or else sprawling and unfocused. It is probably longer than it needs to be, and the focus and arguments in each section could certainly stand tightening.

Roberts' work is an ambitious synthesis of intellectual and social history. He makes a strong case for the influence of ideas, but also gives plenty of evidence to the contrary—of people using paternalism or free-trade ideology as window dressing to disguise naked political or class interests. Roberts also argues that the supposed triumph of political economy was neither as sudden nor as dramatic as has been imagined. A central premise of the book is that the laissez-faire policies of Victorian England (for example free trade and the New Poor Law) derived as much from older Protestant religious beliefs about self-reliance as they did from the teachings of Adam Smith or Thomas Malthus. For example, in the parliamentary Poor Law debates of the 1830s, no politicians ever invoked Smith or Malthus. They were primarily motivated by the age-old desire to limit taxation for which they could seek justification intraditional ideas of the sacredness of property or of a divinely ordered society.

Political economy never reigned supreme; its tenets were continually attacked by Tory paternalists, churchmen, and humanitarian writers like Charles Dickens or Henry Mayhew, whose reports in the Morning Chronicle during the 1850s revealed a world of suffering that was beyond the reach of self-help. Despite political economists' warnings that charity undermined individual initiative, vast networks of philanthropic societies sought to alleviate the sufferings of the poor. Roberts gives Victorian charity its due, but concludes that the problems were too enormous for private organizations to manage. Furthermore, the concentration of poverty in great cities like London and Manchester made it more difficult to ignore than in the past.

Industrial society had created social ills—pauperism, disease-ridden slums, pollution, crime, and prostitution—that were far beyond the capacity of wealthy individuals, the Church, or charitable organizations to remedy. These social problems refused to go away, and they affected the quality of life among the rich as well as the poor. Thus, Roberts demonstrates, the Victorian state reluctantly took up significant powers of regulation and humanitarian intervention. Child labor laws, sanitary reforms, railway regulation, and mandatory education all chipped away at laissez-faire and the rights of the individual, in the process helping to lay the groundwork for the modern, leviathan state. Yet the powerful rhetoric of individual initiative and small government never entirely vanished, as its resurrection in Margaret Thatcher's Britain and Ronald Reagan's America amply demonstrates.