ABSTRACT
Describing the late 1820s and early 1830s in her 1893 biography of the Scottish Evangelical minister Thomas Chalmers, Margaret Oliphant explained that it was a time when “Parliamentary Reform and Catholic Emancipation were both questions hotly discussed, and still capable of different solutions to those which we have known all our lives. The very conditions upon which our present life is founded did not exist” (Oliphant 164). For Oliphant, the opening of the present life of the Victorians, and, I would argue, of modern culture generally, is predicated on a series of acts that granted civil rights to groups previously disenfranchised.1 At the time these acts were passed, however, they triggered an emotional ambivalence captured in the idea of vulgarization, a word that, for the Victorians, carried both a positive and a negative valence. While it could mean the extension of rights and privileges to a wide range of individuals,2 that very extension also led to its being associated with a general lowering of taste. Vulgarity signified at one and the same time democracy and disgust.3 I examine below a trio of writers who both articulated and examined the disgust that was experienced in the wake of the legislative act that preceded the two Oliphant references. If, as Linda Colley has argued, “Protestantism lay at that core of national identity” (369), then it is not surprising that the 1828 repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, a repeal that would allow Dissenters to hold political office without having to take communion in the Anglican Church, triggered a panicked response, a sense of the collapse or
leveling of the hierarchical values and relations that seemed, in the past, to have bound society together and given it meaning. 4
Looking back on the era of repeal from the comfort of her position at the end of the Victorian period, Oliphant could write that “It is very difficult for us, amid the broader lines of our present living, to realize that condition of affairs in which all this network of bonds and restrictions caught the feet at every turn” (164). She is obviously thinking of the democratizing effects of legislations like repeal, the ways in which they enabled new possibilities for social movement. But, at the moment of repeal, the image of the network or web was invoked to represent not restrictions that needed to be undone but bonds that, it was feared, were being irrevocably severed. Thus Edward Irving could ask, in his 1828 tract The Last Days: A Discourse On the Evil Character of These Our Times, Proving Them To Be the ‘Perilous Times’ of the ‘Last Days’ (1828), “whether these fine multitudinous threads which wove strong and durable the texture of the web of human life be not, many of them, wholly dissolved, and all of them grown so bare as no longer to endure the convulsions of former times, hardly to sustain the tear and wear of life, and surely no longer able to keep warm and comfortable the hearts and souls of men” (109). Though Thomas Carlyle disagreed with Irving on the issue of repeal, still, in his review of The Last Days in his famous 1829 essay “Signs of the Times,” 5 he echoed Irving’s imagery, describing England as experiencing “a deep-lying struggle in the whole fabric of society; a boundless grinding collision of the New with the Old” (486).
