ABSTRACT
The conclusive impetus for the establishment of the London Magdalen House, I have argued, was a sense of urgency created by deepening war with France. More specically, it was anxiety about population, the need, as Hanway sees it, “to save as many lives as possible.”1 But this anxiety about population is understood more fully if it is read as part of a broader anxiety about luxury: about whether Britain will be sapped of its martial strength as a result of luxury running rampant. It should be read, in other words, in terms of the history of the Fall of Rome as handed down to the eighteenth century by classical-republican political theorists such as Sallust, Livy and, later, Machiavelli.2
