ABSTRACT
The meagre returns from middle-class efforts in religion and rational recreation eventually forced social reformers to conclude that middleclass initiatives were being undermined by the constant attrition of working-class culture and the contradictory values which it promulgated; that, as the Manchester Spectator expressed it in 1856, '[w]e are all the products of a society, rather than a schoolmaster'.1 The result, as Peter Bailey has suggested, was 'a significant retreat from unrelieved didacticism'.2 This involved not so much the admixture of a little harmless entertainment to dilute the unrelieved diet of intellectual improvement, but rather a steady reversal of the priorities of middle-class reforming initiatives. By 1854 it was possible for Nathaniel Card, the founder of the United Kingdom Alliance, to remark of abstainers that 'I do not think that religious grounds lead them at first to abandon their habits. They principally get out of their habits, and that is the means of their receiving religious instruction afterwards'.3
