Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles was the most ambitious English historical work of the sixteenth century. It was also the last work in the English chronicle tradition, and as such has remained relatively unappreciated both as an achievement in its own right and by its influence on contemporaries. Yet in its construction of national identity and its parsing of the proper relation between the royal estate and the commonwealth, it has much to say about the assumptions of late Tudor culture.

The reasons for Holinshed's historical neglect are not far to seek. Compared to newer Renaissance models such as Polydore Vergil's Anglicae Historiae that were already replacing it, it lacked the narrative cogency that characterized the best Continental historiography. As the product of several hands—Reyner (or Reginald) Wolfe, the printer-scholar who first conceived it as a universal geography-cum-history; Holinshed himself, Wolfe's former assistant, who produced the histories of England and Scotland; Richard Stanyhurst, whose history of Ireland was based on the work of Edmund Campion; and William Harrison, whose prefatory Description of England has received far more attention from scholars than the work it was meant to introduce—it lacked the unity that a single author could bring to disparate materials. Moreover, it was, like other chronicles, a composite that incorporated the work of earlier authors, a palimpsest that presented as history what was in good part uncritical historiography.

It is a cliché of literary history that the natives of the long eighteenth century were uniquely “clubbable” men and women. As Peter Clark points out, by the mid-eighteenth century voluntary associations of all sorts had become “an essential part of the social and cultural language of urban life.” Clark chronicles the rise of coffee houses, benefit societies, lodges, fraternal organizations, and clubs of every kind. As he points out, however, while the “image and concept of the voluntary society increasingly penetrated every nook and cranny of British social and cultural life” in the eighteenth century, there was no “extended philosophical justification for the importance and freedom of voluntary associations in society.” The absence of such justifications may be traced, at least in part, to a relatively wide-spread suspicion of voluntary association as manifested in “atheist” clubs and heterodox conventicles, forms of association that figured prominently in the imagination of Augustan pamphleteers, but whose history, as Justin Champion remarks, “is obscure and little studied.” As I argue in this essay, a brief study of atheist clubs that presumably flourished in the early decades of the eighteenth century reveals a resistance on the part of High-Church Anglican pamphleteers to the growth of clubs and private associations because they presumably posed a threat to the establishment both in Church and State.

The film era in Britain commenced in early 1896, but its moral impact on viewers was not considered very much during its first decade. This was primarily because film was dispersed in a variety of venues like music halls and fairgrounds where other entertainment was provided, or in unused shops and other premises that were temporarily rented. Film thus had no permanent, separate identity as a leisure activity that took place in one particular type of public space, hence it was difficult for moralists to recognize, much less discern and evaluate its moral influence. Moreover, many of the middle class (from whom most moralists came) dismissed the early film industry as a passing, vulgar fad of the working class that need not be taken seriously.

But moralists did begin to notice the impact of the industry when film acquired a conspicuous new identity of its own in the years after 1906 when thousands of purpose-built cinemas were constructed. The tremendous growth of both the cinemas and their mostly working-class, youthful audiences led some middle-class moralists to focus their attention on film for the first time. They soon concluded that the cinemas undermined the morality of their young audiences and launched a crusade against the film industry. The general outlines of the campaign are well known. Moralists charged that the darkened cinemas provided cover for couples to court and for some men to abuse children. They also asserted that many films were sensational ones about sexual indecency, crime, and violence. Such fare, they contended, encouraged immorality and incited juvenile delinquency among youth who imitated the crimes they saw enacted on screen. The moralists therefore demanded censorship of the films, brighter lighting in the cinemas to discourage sexual misbehavior, and police action against indecency. Moreover, Sabbatarians opposed the opening of the cinemas on Sundays as a further desecration of that holy day of rest.