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The Condition of England Question: Carlyle, Mill, Engels. By Michael Levin. London: Macmillan, 1998. 194p. $65.00.
Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain. By G. R. Searle. Oxford: Clarendon, 1998. 300p. $85.00.
G. W. Smith, University of Lancaster, England
Writing in 1866 James Fitzjames Stephen declared that the unyielding commitment displayed by the English to the principles of free trade revealed them to be, contrary to the common view, a thoroughly logical rather than a merely pragmatic people. Even so, by the time of the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 laissez-faire had been under intense pressure in Britain for decades, one reason being increasing foreign industrial and commercial competition, another the growth of antiindividualist moral and political ideas associated with socialism of various descriptions. In Morality and the Market in Victorian Britain G. R. Searle takes the high point of the doctrine to be the radical policy of tariff reform represented by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, and "Victorian" means for him the period between 1830 and 1870. Certainly, by the latter date the reputation of the market as being both economically efficient and "natural" was in serious decline and did not rise to similar heights again in Britain until the advent of Thatcherism in the 1980s. Searle's survey embraces a broad range of activities and institutions, and he is convincing in showing how, even at the height of laissez-faire, Victorians were prepared to recognize and contend anxiously with profound moral problems arising from the tectonic pressures exerted upon customary and valued ways of thinking and doing by the apparently relentless advance of commercial society. Logical or not, Searle shows that they were never doctrinaire.
The author presents a wide range of detailed examples to illustrate the Victorian response to the permeation of market ideas, including the question of the moral standing of capitalism and of profits (frauds, joint liability, entrepreneurialism, business integrity), slavery, problems of poverty and pauperism, the...