When, in 1848, Macaulay had introduced an appreciative reading public to the view that the history of their society since 1688 had been ‘eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement’, it was not a judgement which could have been expected to persuade all, and, indeed, it did not. By the post-Crimean War era, however, it was a view at risk of becoming a platitude. ‘We live in an age of constant progress – moral, social, and political’, proclaimed a Conservative Prime Minister in 1858 echoing his Whig-Liberal predecessor's view of 1856 that ‘progressive improvement is the law of our moral nature’. The mid-Victorian years were years of demonstrably strengthening confidence in the stability of English society – which is not to say that they were years of complacency. The sense of unrelenting progress requiring constant awareness, calculation and adjustment was equally a characteristic of the times, especially in the peak phase of ‘the coming of democracy’, 1866–74.

In search of ‘progressive improvement’: contexts of mid-Victorian moral reform

On two fronts, however, it was possible to declare as early as the 1850s that England had indeed crossed over into a ‘new moral era’. The first anxiety to dissipate was the Malthusian anxiety about unrestrained population growth. The nightmare vision of two previous generations of educated elites more or less vanished from view.