The new prisons

Trevelyan's statement, that 'It is doubly impossible ... for the English historian to ignore religion, if he would explain other phenomena', ¹ is particularly appropriate to any consideration of eighteenth-century penological developments. The century opened with the Church reacting to the travail of the previous century, theologically becalmed, and largely bereft of the invigorating social criticism of Puritanism and other Calvinist traditions; it closed with more and more institutions and spheres of life being brought under the effective assessment and intervention of the Evangelicals. It was not that the prevailing latitudinarianism was indifferent to the world. On the contrary, it

emphasized the importance of good works of charity and benevolence. The Georgian period was the age of hospitals, alike in London, in the university towns, and in the widespread foundation of county hospitals; and in the rural life of the parish this solicitude found its counterpart. ²

This benevolent approach was very much in tune with the low-key intellectual and political temper of the reign of the first two Georges, which was not attracted to the polemics of Church government and the demarcation of religious beliefs. Latitudinarianism encouraged individual acts of charity, but did not have the qualities necessary to set in hand a radical re-examination of the key institutions of the times.