It has been twenty years since E. P. Thompson introduced the term “moral economy” into the historian's vocabulary. Since then it has exerted a paradigmatic force in explanations of the motivations for, and responses to, various forms of popular action. Pitted against this has been the notion of political economy, most often presented as a subsequent (and eventually triumphant) ideological development that was necessarily antithetical to a moral economy. Together these two models have served as fundamental reference points around which accounts of popular protest and public policy have been constructed. Recent explorations into past assumptions regarding the proper functioning of the marketplace have served to open this conventional schematization to debate. Thompson himself has once again entered the fray with a further refinement and restatement of his original arguments and a spirited riposte to his critics. The purpose of the following essay is to focus and further develop this debate in light of the author's ongoing research into the City of London in the late eighteenth century.

In seeking to loosen the constructs through which past economic relations and ideologies have been characterized, this essay will concentrate on two main areas of enquiry. The first follows the work of other historians in attempting to probe more deeply into the diverse and often conflicting understandings of the marketplace articulated in this period, thus revealing alternate possibilities in the interstices of moral economy and political economy. The second as yet remains relatively unexplored and concerns a series of assumptions as to who might be expected to advocate these various conceptions of market relations and why.

In the waning years of the seventeenth century Sir William Petty, F.R.S., a talented statistician, champion of trade and commerce, and “projector” of schemes for national betterment, drew up a plan to cope with what he, at least, saw as a major problem. Petty had observed that there were large numbers of English youth from respectable families who had not the leisure, money, nor opportunity to travel to foreign countries. He was concerned that these worthy young men would miss the chance to develop the expansive faculty of mind and commercial acumen that foreign travel provided and national progress demanded. The crux of his scheme was that these youths would repair to London, where they would encounter businessmen around the Royal Exchange “who have fresh concerne & correspondance with all parts of the knowne world & with all the Commodityes growing or made within the same.”

On June 27, 1777, the Reverend William Dodd, “the Macaroni Parson,” Master of Arts and Doctor of Laws in the University of Cambridge; first Grand Chaplain of Modern English Freemasonry and sometime Chaplain-in-Ordinary to His Majesty; Chaplain of Magdalen House, a “Public Place of Reception for Penitent Prostitutes”; proprietor of the Charlotte Street Chapel, and a principal instigator of such other charities as the Society for the Release of Debtors and the Humane Society for the Resuscitation of the Apparently Drowned, was hanged at Tyburn for forging the signature of his patron and former pupil, Philip Stanhope, fifth earl of Chesterfield, on a bond for £4,200. Dodd's story, culminating in his trial, condemnation, and execution, despite massive efforts to procure a mitigation of the law's severity, survives best in the literary history and biography of the period. On the other hand, historians, whether political, social, or cultural, have had little or nothing to say about his predicament and suffering except as either the deserved nemesis of a swindler or an early cause celebre in the raising of public concern about the state of the criminal law. The probable reason for this neglect is that, for all the sentimental frisson which it aroused, Dodd's case was a middle-class melodrama which lacked plebeian dimension and appeal.

In early 1831, the novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton contributed a comparative essay to the Edinburgh Review on “the spirit of society” in England and France. A key issue for discussion, of course, was that of fashion. “Our fashion,” stated Bulwer-Lytton, “may indeed be considered the aggregate of the opinions of our women.” The fundamental dichotomy which ran through these pages was that between public and private: “the proper sphere of woman,” Bulwer-Lytton continued, “is private life, and the proper limit to her virtues, the private affections.” And in antithesis to the aggregate opinions of “the domestic class of women”—in his view, the only virtuous kind of women—which constituted fashion, stood “public opinion”; that exclusive masculine realm, that should remain free of “feminine influence.”

Some two years later, in his two-volume England and the English, Bulwer-Lytton restated the antithesis between fashion and public opinion, both repeating his earlier formulation and at the same time significantly modifying it. By 1833, his definitions of fashion and opinion ran as follows: “The middle classes interest themselves in grave matters: the aggregate of their sentiments is called OPINION. The great interest themselves in frivolities, and the aggregate of their sentiments is termed FASHION.” Here, Bulwer-Lytton no longer designated fashion as the aggregate of the opinions of women but, instead, as the aggregate of the opinions of the upper classes; and public opinion was no longer the domain of men but, instead, the aggregate of the opinions of the “middle class.”