THE Victorian mandarins formed and re-formed themselves in the spirit of Clapham Sect morality, thoughts on the government of India, the repeal of the Test Acts, Catholic emancipation, the removal of Jewish political disabilities, and the Northcote–Trevelyan Report. This book is about the interactions of ideas and institutions which shaped British civil life after 1815.Whatever is “modern” about “modern” Britain emerged from the rubble of the wars of the French Revolution. The rather standard account of the period following 1815 is one of growing stability, progress, and improvement into an age of equipoise. This story is enshrined in a Whig interpretation of history written by the likes of Thomas Babington Macaulay; a story of confidence and self-satisfaction. This is, however, to forget the period's rubble and disor¬ganization: Peterloo, Chartist disruptions, famine in Ireland, Continental revolutions in 1848, the emergence of another Napoleon, and mutiny in India. It was an age in which ruling elites, so far as they could rule at all, felt the anxieties of revolutionary terrorism. As Henry James said at the time he was writing The Princess Casamassima (1886), Britain “is gloomy and London reflects its gloom.” He noted the increase of terror: “Westminster Hall and the Tower were half blown up two days ago by Irish Dynamiters” and that there was a “general sense of rocks ahead.”

The nineteenth century was a “Victorious Century,” but, as its historian makes clear, its “victory” was deeply ironic and uncertain and there was nothing preordained or inevitable about its stability