“In Darkest England and the Way Out”

In the past decade a prominent theme in the historiography of nineteenth-century Britain has been the imposition of middle-class habits and attitudes upon the populace by means of new or re-invigorated mechanisms of “social control”. To the apparatus of law enforcement and to the disciplines of the factory and wage labour, historians have added the less overt instruments of social welfare, education, religion, leisure and moral reform. Philanthropists, educators, clergymen and moralizers have all become soldiers in a campaign to uproot the “anti-social” characteristics of the poor and to cement the hegemony of the elite.