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Decency and Disorder
The Age of Cant, 1789-1837
- Author: Ben Wilson
- Category: Non-fiction
- Publisher: Faber (UK)/ Penguin (US)
- Pub date: April 2007
- Length: 400 pages
About Decency and Disorder
A dazzling work examining the riotous, exuberant and inebriated era immediately before the moralistic Victorian age… Wilson has a flair amounting almost to genius for animating what he calls the ‘street-level view’ of a world in furious transition, charting at the same time the parallel pincer movement of radical reform that led… to a sudden, spectacular victory for repression, coercion and ‘cant’
— Hilary Spurling, OBSERVER
His book is a terrific read that, thanks to its animated prose and unerring eye for a revealing anecdote, captures both the energy and hypocrisy of its era
— John Brewer, SUNDAY TIMES
We all see the Victorians as a respectable, well-mannered and sober people, on the outside at least. Yet a generation before Queen Victoria ascended the throne, the British were notorious for their boisterous pastimes, plain-speaking and drunkenness. They were lightly policed, if at all, and a fair amount of disorder was tolerated as the price a country had to pay for its liberty. They detested meddling busybodies and revelled in their gregarious popular culture.
But from the beginning of the century people sensed that things were changing. How was it that this free-spirited and pleasure-loving people embraced the kinds of values that we know as Victorian moralism?
Many people – most famously Byron – realized that the British were changing. But they weren’t becoming more moral: they were becoming censorious and hypocritical. In the modern age of industry and machines, everything was becoming artificial and false, people included. Some clung on to the old customs and ways of life in the midst of rapid progress, fearing that Britons in the nineteenth-century would become consummate hypocrites who played the part of virtue only in the pursuit of gain and imposed their false values on those that dissented. Byron called it the age of marble, because it was cold and polished.
DECENCY AND DISORDER is about the generation who grew up during the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars and who lived to see more stable and prosperous days in the middle of the nineteenth century. Ben Wilson recreates their age, when ideas of progress and propriety jostled with older notions of what it was to be British. He examines their world: popular culture and sports, quack doctors, high-society scandals, dandies, the criminal underworld, philanthropic do-gooders, playboy actors, religious reformers, Byronic rebels and middle-class conformists. From an age of revolution, licentiousness and anxiety came one of prosperity, empire and strict morality.
Today, when anti-social behaviour is a prominent political issue, when people pine for lost values, and when religious morality is re-establishing itself around the world, there are eerie parallels with the age of DECENCY AND DISORDER.
About the Author
Ben Wilson was born in 1980 and educated at Pembroke College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a first class degree and an MPhil in history. He is the author of three books and was named in 2005 as one of Waterstone’s 25 Authors of the Future. He has consulted on scripts for various TV history progammes, and has himself appeared on TV and on national radio in the UK, Ireland and the USA. He has given lectures at Tate Britain, Cambridge and Zagreb and at book festivals in the UK including the Edinburgh Festival. He has written for the Spectator, Literary Review, Independent on Sunday, Scotsman, Men’s Health, Guardian Online and GQ.