Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain PDF
Preview Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain
LIBERTY AND AUTHORITY IN VICTORIAN BRITAIN This page intentionally left blank Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain Edited by PETER MANDLER 1 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © The Several Contributors 2006 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2006 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–927133–X 978–0–19–927133–7 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 In memory of Colin Matthew This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgements The origins of this book lie in the conference, ‘Locating the Victorians’, organized by the Science Museum and held 12–15 July 2001 as part of the South Kensington extravaganza marking the 150th anniversary of the Great Exhibition and the 100th of the death of Queen Victoria. The purpose of that conference was to assess the ‘state of play’ in our under- standing of the Victorians after the interval of a century. Revealingly, acall for proposals to organize the conference into thematic ‘strands’ was met with a rush of creative proposals on matters roughly ‘cultural’, while politics and the economy elicited few or no proposals. Accordingly mem- bers of the conference steering group were drafted to organize strands in these under-served areas, and one result was mine on ‘Liberty and authority’. Although I didn’t respond so warmly at the time, I am now happy to thank Robert Bud (impresario of the whole enterprise) and the other members of the steering group for steering mein that direction. Like the other strands, ‘Liberty and authority’ aspired to be summative and inter- disciplinary, to link disciplines and methodologies in order to show as clearly and as broadly as we could where academic thinking had got on our subject matter. I like to think that the sessions and the resulting chap- ters displayed that spirit of open-minded goodwill, and even (or do Iimagine this?) a little yearning for better communication across some well-established disciplinary and methodological divides. I am grateful to Susan Pedersen, Peter Stansky, the late Josef Altholz, and Pat Thane for acting as chairs and commentators for the 2001 sessions. Astonishingly, all of the paper-givers in those sessions agreed to contribute to a book version and have generally produced their final products in a timely and collegial fashion; editors who complain about the difficulties of engineering jointly-authored volumes evidently don’t have access to the calibre of con- tributor that I have had. Two new chapters were commissioned to fill gaps that became apparent when the original papers were discussed during and after the conference, and their authors were just as responsive. Thanks toRuth Parr and Anne Gelling at Oxford University Press for eliciting some very constructive readers’ reports—particularly helpful to me in identifying some further gaps for filling, and incompatibilities for reconciling, in the viii Acknowledgements introduction—and then in keeping faith with the project. Dorothy McCarthy did a splendidly tactful editing job in the best traditions of Oxford University Press. A final thanks is rendered in the dedication, to one who has been much in evidence in spirit throughout, but still sorely missed. Contents Notes on Contributors x 1. Introduction: State and Society in Victorian Britain 1 Peter Mandler THE STATE 2. The Powers of the Victorian State 25 Philip Harling 3. The Victorian State in Comparative Perspective 51 Peter Baldwin LIBERTIES 4. Liberalism and Liberty 71 J. P. Parry 5. Radicalism and Liberty 101 E. F. Biagini 6. Women and Liberty 125 Helen Rogers AUTHORITIES 7. The Authority of the Law 159 Margot C. Finn 8. The Authority of the Church 179 Arthur Burns DISCIPLINES 9. Market Disciplines 203 Paul Johnson 10. Moral Disciplines 224 Boyd Hilton Index 247
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