Yet the reformers managed to get through the Vagrant Act of 1824, which gave zealous local magistrates scope to suppress popular pastimes, even to imprison canoodling couples. Social pressure, with and without legal reinforcement, bore on every front of pleasure. Funfairs were tamed or banned. Nude bathing was proscribed. The communal celebration of Christmas declined. Ballad-singers disappeared from the streets. Aristocratic pleasures waned too, as noblemen, having seen the fate of their counterparts in the French Revolution, acquired a sober and responsible bearing. The age of powdered wigs, satin, embroidered velvet and gold lace yielded to what a contemporary called ‘a monotonous modification of broad-cloth’.
Like political correctness, the rise of cant is easier to observe than to account for. Wilson points to a medley of explanations: the achievements of evangelicalism and utilitarianism; the strengthening of a middle-class identity; the social discipline demanded, and the hardships created, by the Industrial Revolution; the insecurities of the Napoleon- ic wars and the sense of national prowess and mission that victory bore. He places cant within the shift of values away from sincerity and candour and naturalness towards artifice and constraint and what Carlyle called ‘the undue cultivation of the outward’.
Yet the book is stronger on anecdote and quotation than on analysis. The startling thing about Decency and Disorder is to learn from the dust-jacket that Wilson has written it, his second book, in his mid-twenties. He has absorbed a huge array of material, and he writes with judgment and style. Even so, the book is diffuse and overlong. It needs a firmer chronological framework; a greater alertness to the limitations of the evidence, on which he heavily relies, supplied by periodicals and other organs of early 19th- century opinion; and a capacity to separate the distinguishing attitudes of that era from lasting patterns of social complaint and repression. I hope publishers, who are bound to compete for Wilson’s prodigious talent, will allow it time to grow.
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