Popular conceptions of Victorian morality often conjure a world of stark contrasts wherein a tightly buttoned culture of bourgeois domesticity stands vigilant against the temptations and horrors of the city's dreadful delights. Mike Huggins's Vice and the Victorians, written for undergraduate students and a broader public, reminds us that vice and virtue were contested categories with mutable meanings contingent upon gender, class, and location. As the book's title suggests, his account focuses on vice, defined as “those behaviours, actions, and habits that by general consensus amongst the respectable were considered immoral, degrading, or depraved” (viii). However, his study helpfully complicates the definition of “respectable,” while his case studies show that despite the ubiquitous condemnation of vice in popular and political discourse, the identification, regulation, and mitigation of “vice” was tenuous and moreover that the rhetorical reach of moral reformers largely exceeded their political influence.
Two opening chapters introduce a longer history of vice regulation within Britain and provide an accounting of the myriad locales—urban slums, music halls and theaters, pleasure grounds, fairs, and horse races—in which Victorian reformers saw vice. Such spaces populated an expansive “landscape” of potential perils and formed legible manifestations of vice subject to reform according to the metrics of respectable society. The difficulty reformers faced was that music halls, racecourses, and pubs were neither universally virtuous nor vicious. An urban park could simultaneously offer a place for respectable sociability and covert opportunities for betting, courting, or illicit sexual encounter. Imbricated and spatially coterminous, rough, respectable, and aristocratic leisure cultures frustrated reform efforts.
Huggins's case studies—addressing an “unholy trio” of alcohol, gambling, and sex—demonstrate how Britons perceived and practiced vice. These activities were pervasive though the middle and upper classes were largely able to avoid censure for their transgressions. Huggins argues that lukewarm regulatory efforts and lax enforcement reveal a laissez-faire attitude toward restricting activities like gambling, considered a leisure activity enjoyed by a wide range of the British people. Further undermining anti-vice arguments was the potential profitability to be derived from selling alcohol, taking bets, or publishing the latest odds. Opponents of vice found themselves thwarted by countervailing forces that saw a drink at the pub or a flutter at the track as a leisurely pursuit or entrepreneurial opportunity and not a signifier of systemic depravity.
Two final chapters focus on moral reform and the culture of respectability. Like the variability of vice, reform movements drew their support from a broad social spectrum, and these chapters are attuned to the significant presence of Nonconformist and, to a lesser degree, Anglican voices. Though never truly popular, a wide mix of backgrounds and origins allowed anti-vice advocates to operate on a range of discursive and experiential registers. The fruits of reformers’ efforts, however, were uneven, with efforts at curtailing drinking becoming the most successful. Disagreement about the ways and means of mitigating vice, and the association of reform politics with the Liberal party, complicated efforts at systemic reform. Huggins concludes by noting that anti-vice lobbyists were a well-organized if self-referential group and that their message was dulled by the flexibility and permeability with which many of their contemporaries regarded both vice and respectability.
Following an attention to the diversity of spaces in which vice was thought to reside, one of the Huggins’ strengths in this book is the incorporation of material from beyond the metropolis. Ireland and the empire, however, only appear fleetingly in this volume, as does any consideration of the role of race in constructing a discourse of vice. While vivid details from newspapers, novels, and parliamentary committees add texture and richness to his account, they occasionally obscure a larger explanation of how attitudes regarding vice and virtue changed over time. As examples within a chapter jump between the eight decades of Victoria's reign, it can be hard to determine what Huggins sees as the mechanisms driving this change. The importance of rising working-class income and leisure time, increasing secularism, and the close connection between the Liberal party and moral reform are all mentioned, but at moments a larger arc of how Victorian society interpreted vice gets lost amidst the detail.
Perhaps the plurality of explanations is exactly the point, however, since Huggins's central contribution is bringing together a range of historiographical interpretations and sources, revealing the world of vice and virtue to be more muddled and contested than the book's intended audience might realize. Indeed, contemporary stereotypes of the Victorians are partly due to the rhetorical success with which reformers made their case. Vice and the Victorians encourages a heightened attention not only to the methods and limitations of moral reform campaigns, but also to spatial components of respectability and morality.
