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Decency and Disorder: The Age of Cant 1789-1837 by Ben Wilson
Faber and Faber, £25

I ONCE wrote a book which I wanted to call Red Ruin. We settled for Lines of Most Resistance. It was barely reviewed. On the same principle, Ben Wilson’s captivating book has one fault: the wrong title. Decency is an abstract noun, so is disorder. Decency and Disorder is enervating, puts you off, bad for sales. His sub-title The Age of Cant says it all.
Prudery and moral intolerance were never a Victorian monopoly. Cruel-minded sanctimony got going early. Wilson ends with Victoria’s accession and starts in 1789. The French Revolution, scything through a nobility identified in the English mind as having far too good a time, was worse than a nasty shock. It was more like the Day of Judgment tried out on the neighbours.

English preachers, as avidly followed then as football managers are today, had their text, subject and Awful Warning. It was very southern states of the USA. The congregation of one preacher was “seized with demoniacal convulsions; shrieks and yells were set up by frantic women; men fell as if shot through the heart.” Yet furious religion co-existed with riotous excess. A brilliant quotation from the German traveller, Prince Puckler Muskau, catches the whole perspective. Punch and Judy shows, he thought, summed up England. Mr Punch, like the nation, was wooden and heartless, but, unlike the standard Englishman, “he conquers everything by his invincible merriment and humour, laughs at the laws, at men and the devil himself.”

The unsanitised late 18th century Punch was the riotous and readily criminal lower class – wife-beating, constable-assaulting, non-Methodist, drunken, violent and contemptuous of all authority. Naturally, authority responded and did so with the newest technology. Samuel Cubitt, an Ipswich magistrate, invented the treadmill. From this penal improvement the prisoner was in danger “of cramp, breaking the Achilles tendon, and forming aneurismal and varicose swellings in the legs.”

The great apostle of repressing the disorderly poor was the author of A Treatise on Indigence. Patrick Colquhoun was horrified by the undeserving poor and their feckless way of enjoying themselves. “Such is the thoughtless improvidence of this class of labouring people, that they are generally the first who indulge themselves by eating Oysters, Lobster and pickled Salmon &c, when first in season.”

There was no doubt about the solution. They must be broken, their prospect in life one of reproach, labour, punishment and subjection. Colquhoun, a Scottish magistrate come south, frantically loyal to the established order, was human awfulness undiluted.

Cleverly, Wilson intertwines him with Francis Place, a skilled workman, unsentimental and self-improving but observing the same rough scene with a critical intelligence.
The most enjoyable bits of a thoroughly enjoyable book concern the sins of the upper class. The House of Lords, of all places, proposed in 1800 an Adultery Prevention Bill, rejected by the more worldly Commons. William Wilberforce considered adultery “of more importance than any question about peace or war.”

Henry Paget, unreservedly in love with Lady Charlotte Wellesley, took off with her. Shop girls didn’t count, and famous but unacknowledged liaisons flourished. These two belonged to the same class and the affair was public. Paget, said The Examiner “deserved to be hunted out of society like a wild beast.”

The Age of Cant it was and a wonderful read it is.

Edward Pearce