ABSTRACT
Amidst a voluble debate concerning Victorian values, the importance of free trade has been strangely neglected.1 Yet there is a good case for arguing that free trade was the most commonly held of all Victorian values. It formed part, as Adelman has suggested, of ‘the mental furniture of every educated Victorian’, furniture whose sheen was so resplendent that from the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 until the opening of Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform campaign in 1903 it scarcely needed dusting or repolishing.2 Such a pervasive hold upon the Victorian mind owed its strength to free trade’s origins in the two most fundamental pillars of the Victorian age, long ago identified by G.M.Young, those of utilitarianism and evangelicalism.3 Both bodies of dogma have been expertly dissected, especially as we have been boldly counselled to locate the roots of economic policy-making more in evangelical religion than in secular models of free trade.4
