Containing disorder in the 'Age of Equipoise': troops, trains and the telegraph

Abstract

Historians of nineteenth-century Britain often note the contrast between the tumult and turmoil of the first half of the century and the relative calm and stability of the second, especially in the third quarter. It is a dramatic but justifiable contrast. After mid-century there were no major outbreaks of civil disorder to match the political agitation of popular radicalism between 1815 and 1832 and Chartism after 1837, nor were there any industrial protests on the scale of Luddism and the Plug Plot riots or rural disturbances to equal the Swing and Rebecca riots. Although London had been threatened by upheaval briefly in 1848, the moment passed and, compared to what had gone before, the period from 1850 to 1870 encouraged mid-century Victorians to look back with some complacency. By 1864 it seemed to the aristocratic clergyman S. G. Osborne that Britons were 'a people at peace among ourselves'. Contemporaries were very conscious of a change of mood and later historians have offered widely differing explanations for it, from the fortuitous 'balances of freedom and constraint' and the consequences of prosperity to the influence of a labour aristocracy, embourgeoisement and the erosion of working-class combativeness.