The Romantic age was arguably one of the most exciting and diverse periods of cultural, political and intellectual upheaval in British history. The period witnessed the transition from the relative stability of Church and State agrarian patriarchy to the frenetic pace of urbanization, industrialization, expansion and imperialism of Victorian culture – developments which took place against the backdrop of international warfare, revolution and the rapidly expanding self-consciousness of the working classes through increased literacy and education. Indeed, John Stuart Mill accurately characterized the period as ‘an age of change’ and proclaimed that ‘the nineteenth-century will be known to posterity as the era of one of the greatest revolutions of which history has preserved the remembrance’. But such developments resulted in the emergence of a rich array of competing political, religious and philosophical values, ideas and discourses which became hotly contested in the public arena through sporadic controversies and propaganda wars. Mill argued that such debates were symptomatic of the ‘transitions’ being witnessed, and that fundamentally, disagreements stemmed from the fact that ‘mankind have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines’ but ‘have not yet acquired new ones’. The ‘spirit of the age’, Mill thus proclaimed, was marked by its divisions, the division of men ‘into those who are still what they were, and those who have changed: into men of the present age, and the men of the past.’