ABSTRACT

Romantic England was an England of wars and rumours of wars. The market economy, especially in war time, offered new opportunities to the farmer and proprietor; the culture allowed them to be seen as such and grasped. The landed interest, the farming interest, was rethinking its role, its duties and its responsibilities. All agreed that the French wars had created anartificial economy. Individual education played its part in awakening interest in the world outside one community, in a world as it had been. The ideological and the physical war against Revolutionary France came to dominate English public life. Old legislation encouraging intervention in the market was repealed according to the dictates of the new political economy; whilst order necessitated a whole range of repressive legislation at various times through the 1790s for a generation: freedom of speech was restricted.