The moral reform tradition

Roberts (in Making English Morals) talks about the creation of a "moral reform tradition" in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The modern inheritors are probably those organisations working on behaviour change campaigns (like Living Streets' Walk to School and Walking Works campaigns. In the nineteenth century this was seen as linked to but separate from more direct charity, a division that still continues to some extent.

In the nineteenth century, these were more likely to be campaigns for observation of the Sabbath, to stop animal cruelty (or at least working class animal cruelty), or to promote domestic life rather than the attraction of gin palaces or other distractions about trying to get the working class to accept and adjust to market values of self-control and self-reliance but was also a reaction to the unsettling nature of the market economy and its ability to corrupt (particularly for those whose viewpoint was more evangelical Christian). It was a form of "compensatory investment in ccultural stabilisation on behalf of the class most self-consciously 'implicated'" in the rise of the market. "Middle class society depended for its collective peace of mind on being able to recognise a limit to the legitimate operation of market forces and to patrol that limit on behalf of all classes".

Roberts also discusses the effect of these moral reform organisations in ways which I want to explore in relation to charities helping immigrants at this time. He concludes that the effects of technology, work routines, urban commercial leisure activity, a more stable economy and more reliable wage and employment prospects resulted the rise of "working class respectability" but that "volunteer experimental effort at the very least eased the transition from a predominantly rural face-to-face society to a predominantly urban, class segrated one". He also says that these groups also gave an opportunity to working people to "transform themselves" from being the objects of moral reformers to being its practitioners.

As well as the effect on those who were the targets of their work, those involved also built for themselves a sense of community which helped create both a middle class cultural mission and a cross-class, cross-regional "national opinion". It will be interested to see the extent to which the actions of those involved in Jewish or Catholic/Irish organisations helped create "Jewish" or "Catholic" opinion.