Every age, perhaps, is an age of transition, but not every age is as anxiously and exquisitely conscious of this condition as the 1820s was. Contemporaries were quick to identify the decade as marking the passing of a more stable epoch and presaging the uncertain emergence of a new era. In an 1831 essay that, like many of its contemporaries, laboured to catch ‘The Spirit of the Age’, John Stuart Mill contended that ‘the first of the leading peculiarities of the present age is, that it is an age of transition’. Shortly afterwards, Edward Bulwer Lytton, in England and the English, employed a more exact characterisation, describing his time as one of ‘visible and violent transition’. He warmed to the theme later in the book:

Such foreboding characterisations were not uncommon. In ‘Signs of the Times’, Thomas Carlyle saw Catholic emancipation and the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts as astonishing transformations in the order of things: ‘Those things seemed fixed and immovable—deep as the foundations of the world; and lo! in a moment they have vanished, and their place knows them no more!’

On the more optimistic side of the equation, Mill claimed that by the end of the 1820s a great change had ‘taken place in the human mind’. Looking forward to the Reform Bill of 1832, he celebrated the appearance of ‘new men, who insisted upon being governed in a new way’. Bulwer Lytton, on the other hand, was far from sanguine about the prospects of a reformed society: