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IV. The Sunday Trading Riots of 18551

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2010

Brian Harrison
Brian Harrison
Affiliation:
Nuffield College, Oxford
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Extract

Wandering in his mind during his last illness in 1869, Bertrand Russell's maternal grandfather ‘heard a loud noise in the street and thought it was the revolution breaking out’. The memory of the Terror haunted educated early Victorians just as Belsen and Auschwitz haunt the modern intellectual: ‘one cannot shake off the feeling of disgust with such horrors and shame that Human Nature should be so bad’, wrote Wellington to Miss Burdett-Coutts in 1847 after reading a history of the Girondins. Attacks on aristocratic extravagance by William Wilberforce and Queen Victoria were inspired by dread of an English 1789—of those ‘women almost unsexed, men almost unhumanized’ whom Envy might summon forth at any moment from the backstreets of Victorian cities. Such fears helped push many reforming measures through nineteenth-century parliaments. Indeed, ‘the danger of revolution was in some degree as much a cause of change in England as the fact of revolution was abroad’.

Type
Articles
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 8 , Issue 2 , 1965 , pp. 219 - 245
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1965

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