ABSTRACT
Custom and improvement are linked together like chalk and cheese, sweet and sour, gin and tonic. ey are not bipolar opposites and yet in a strange way one is the antithesis of the other. Custom is perceived as anti-modern, indeed, backward-looking. Improvement is seen to be a process of modernization. It is the desirable sweeping away of the irrational and inecient practice of the past. To improve attracted applause, for improvement was seen to be a public benet: it might even have been a responsibility placed on man by biblical injunction.1 Not to improve was reprehensible, a denial of this duty, a wasting of God-given possibilities. Both might be characterized as casts of mind: the one believing past practice to be a guide to present observance, the other believing in the promise of future achievement. e idea of improvement was never subjected at the time to the critique it deserved, but many people expressed reservations about improvement as it aected them, and sometimes it attracted resistance, occasionally violent opposition. Hence we can talk of a streak of antiimprovement sentiment within society, even a fear of improvement.
