ABSTRACT
From the late eighteenth century, serious middle-class people increasingly claimed moral power for themselves, a claim fuelled by religious belief and the 'proud pretensions' of those who relied on heavenly approbation rather than earthly spoils. Their rejection of landed wealth as the source of honour and insistence on the primacy of the inner spirit brought with it a preoccupation with the domestic as a necessary basis for a good Christian life. Evangelical categorizations of the proper spheres of men and women provided the basis for many subsequent formulations and shaped the common sense of the nineteenth-century social world. Men were to be active in the world as citizens and entrepreneurs, women were to be dependent, as wives and mothers. In the pantheon of the serious middle class, feckless aristocrats and atheistic artisans had no place. They celebrated the converted, carefully placing them in a social hierarchy of the saved; the damned were execrated. The moral order which they attempted to impose had lasting effects, not only on relations between the sexes but also in definitions of who was properly part of the English nation. The 'teeming poor', the Irish, the gypsies, the unclean, all were consigned to the category of 'other'.1
