The years which followed the close of the French wars have always presented historians with something of a labelling problem. Are they best identified as a last declining phase of England's ancien régime, or as the seed-bed of a modernised Victorian society to come? Both labels catch a good part of the whole: neither catches all of it. The true character of the times was also a puzzle to contemporaries, often an alarming one. The external threat to stability was gone, yet the years of Spa Fields, Peterloo, Cato Street, Queen Caroline, Catholic Emancipation, Captain Swing and the Reform bill agitations (not to mention the onset of the first discernible modern trade cycles) were years hardly in danger of being called stable by anyone who had lived through them. Most members of the opinion-forming classes sensed a society adrift from precedent and past certainties. Some of them went further, to diagnose decay of respect for old ways as a potentially terminal social illness. Others claimed it as a necessary condition of social renewal, an uncomfortable but morally invigorating phase of the struggle to shape a ‘more enlightened, more virtuous, and more happy’ society. As we shall find, it was the latter who came to dominate over the post-war period as a whole, though not without recurrent challenges at moments of social and cultural emergency.

Restoration versus renovation: contexts of post-war concern

Whatever the diagnosis, it encouraged a continuing interest in the direction and quality of national morals.