The second half of the nineteenth century occupies a particular place in the national imagination. And whilst more contemporary invocations of “Victorian values” seek to return a fractured and transformed polity to a more cohesive and traditional collective past, in truth the Victorian era was also one of fracture and transformation. By the latter half of the century, imperial expansion and industrial urbanization provoked appeals to religion and morality at the same time as they themselves were implicated in the secularization of knowledge – for instance, the new sciences of eugenics and political economy.

Commercial shifts in land use and social hierarchies set the scene for the turbulent Victorian era. Chartering was an eighteenth-century process of establishing corporate ownership through privatizing public land. Enclosure was the process of establishing private property on what had once been communal lands for peasant farmers. By the end of the eighteenth-century, chartering and enclosure had robbed common land from the people, forcing them to dwell more and more in industrial cities in search of work. The landed elites and the mercantile classes who had amassed wealth through industrialism and empire held to a philosophy that their own freedom was bound to their property. They feared the anarchy of the urban poor living in abominable conditions, “masterless men” who had no social standard or economic investment to bind their energies to. The right to vote was for the propertied only, the tyranny of the masses had to be prevented and order imposed upon them.

Many of the chattering classes – those who wrote pamphlets and discoursed in parliamentary halls, tea houses and private clubs – saw in the urban poor the prospect of civilizational decline and a return to “primitive humanity”. The poor, they supposed, lacked a proper work ethic. Self-reliance would have to be their salvation. To civilize domestic indigents meant to build worthy habits by destroying corrupting influences, with particular attention to gin – the devil’s drink. With horror, the chattering classes realized that what was commonplace in the colonial periphery could now be gleaned in the heart of the metropole: encamped in the slums were a race “apart”.