ABSTRACT
The development of early industrial Britain rested on two pillars, free trade and a new moral order. Between 1780 and 1830 the dominant behavioural ethos of Britain underwent a remarkable transformation. The aristocratic hegemony of the eighteenth century was characterized by an expansive, bucolic and roistering culture. Its lavish entertainments and expensive hobbies could be sustained only by a large income. Gambling debts run up on the turf or at the table ran into thousands of pounds; CharlesJames Fox's losses caused financial embarrassment for even such a hugely wealthy figure as the fifth earl of Carlisle of Castle Howard who frequently stood surety for him. Mistresses were flaunted as a badge of status, a source alike of public approval and private pleasure. George Ill's sober domestic circumstances were attributed to the personal idiosyncrasy of a dull fellow; they did not persuade men to change their own habits and George's eldest son, later Prince Regent and George I~ was working feverishly by the 1780s to restore the faded Hanoverian reputation for licentiousness. All activities, political and social, were washed down by huge quantities of liquor. Both Pitt, who drank himself into an early grave, and Fox attended the Commons in varying states of intoxication, frequently too inebriated to follow closely the arguments of others, sometimes too sozzled to articulate clearly themselves. Nor was insobriety the prerogative of the wealthy The excesses of the London poor, for whom alcohol offered welcome oblivion from the common round of toil, are preserved for posterity by the genius of Hogarth.
