ABSTRACT
Contemporaries were acutely aware of the social alienation of the lower orders, but attributed it to diverse causes. Walter Scott blamed the steam engine; Engels, the sheer scale of urban factory production and the consequent estrangement of masters and men; Thomas Chalmers, the withering effect of the poor laws and the manufacturing town on personal charity; Lord Liverpool, ‘the extensive circulation of seditious and blasphemous publications…(which) have gradually weakened, among the lower orders, the attachment to our Government and Constitution, and the respect for law, morality and religion.’1 Only a few in the higher ranks glimpsed their own share in the process, like the anonymous contributor to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine who in 1820 lamented the change in ‘the style and structure of society’ since ‘the time of our fathers’:
Everywhere, in every walk of life, it is too evident that the upper orders of Society have been tending, more and more, to a separation of themselves from those whom nature, providence, and law have placed beneath them…. The rich and the high have been indolently and slothfully allowing the barriers that separate them from their inferiors to increase and accumulate…. Men have come to deride and despise a thousand of those means of communication that in former days knit all orders of the people together.
