The end of merriment

‘Political correctness’, which divides and galls our society, is a modern manifestation of an old impulse which periodically demands, in the cause of social improvement, the curtailment of pleasure and the inhibition of language and thought. It happened with the rise of Puritanism midway through the reign of Elizabeth I, when stage-plays and popular enjoyments came under fire. Something like it occurred a century or so later, in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, with the cult of ‘politeness’. Ben Wilson’s subject is the emergence of what contemporaries called ‘cant’ over (roughly) the first three decades of the 19th century, when the preconditions of Victorian propriety and conformity were established. ‘The truth is’, declared Byron in 1821, ‘the grand “primum mobile” of England is cant; cant political, cant poetical, cant religious; but always cant, multiplied through all the varieties of life.’

He had reason to know, for during the previous five years he had been ostracised for leaving his wife and had endured the vituperative reception of Don Juan. Even the milder critics of his verse charged him with ‘strewing flowers over the boundary which separates virtue from vice, so that the mind wanders over it unconsciously’. Similar scrutiny was visited on other art forms. The Times, under an editor of bohemian lifestyle and unctuous views, campaigned to persuade ‘respectable’ people to boycott the performances of the great Shakespearean actor Edmund Kean, ‘that obscene little personage’, who had been exposed as an adulterer.

There was more to cant than war on sexual immorality. The colour and variety of life were in retreat. In the year of Byron’s lament on the ubiquity of cant, the writer Pierce Egan defied the movement with his sensationally successful fictional work Life in London.