ABSTRACT
English attitudes toward violence were evolving before the nineteenth century, continued to change during the twentieth and remain unsettled in the twenty-first. However, in the nineteenth century attitudes toward violence assumed a particular configuration. Prior to the growth of new, civilized attitudes toward violence, there had been periodic tensions regarding the legitimacy of physically injurious force, but these had been defined within the confines of a shared mentality. The relevance of customary attitudes was noticeably fading by the 1870s. A section of the working class sought to distance itself from the negative associations of working-class life and adopted various elements of Victorian respectability, thereby appearing more civilized and contributing to social reform through their disapproval of customary culture. The increased importance of respectability for working-class life had an important spatial component. Not only did some workers leave "unrespectable" or "less respectable" neighborhoods, but they also changed the ways in which they themselves lived.
