We began this book by noting that all attempts to establish moral order necessarily operate within a cultural frame. In the period we have explored, the cultural frame has been provided in varying combinations, by systems of religious belief and practice, of economic thought and organisation, and of socio-political hierarchy; also by assumptions about gender and by discourses of professional expertise. What conclusions can usefully be drawn from the survey of activity, now completed?

It will be recalled that one of the more repeated findings has been that moral reform was the exclusive territory neither of discipline-enforcing cultural insiders fearing displacement nor of credential-asserting outsiders demanding wider social recognition. It was, according to time and circumstance, both, neither and a blend of each. Looking rather more closely, we can trace three broad strands of contemporary justification for commitment to projects of moral reform.

The justification which was probably the most constantly in use was a strand of association linking moral reform with policy concern about the social and cultural implications of economic change. (The qualification ‘probably’ is added because there comes a point around the 1870s when, as we have seen, anxieties about the stability of urban working-class culture at last start to recede.) The motives for interest in moral reform of working-class character were, of course, intimately tied to the coming of a state-encouraged, increasingly nationally integrated market economy for urban and agricultural communities alike.