The law and minority groups in nineteenth-century Britain

This thesis interrogates the substance behind the rhetorical 'rule of law' in Great Britain between 1829 and 1895. It is the argument of this thesis that in order for the law to be a strong force for national unity it had to be made by those who professed a 'British' Protestant faith and upheld a 'British' morality. For the first half of the nineteenth-century, Jews, atheists and Roman Catholics were all prevented on religious grounds from entering Parliament to make British law. As the century progressed, these bans were progressively lifted, leaving lawmakers to create a replacement class of scapegoats; 'moral criminals'. Prostitutes, homosexuals and the Irish came to dominate the imagination of the late Victorians as threats to the moral integrity of Britain. These people were not truly 'British' and could thus safely be made the targets of 'British law'. The thesis seeks to build on Linda Colley's work on British nationalism in the eighteenth century, and her stress upon the need to have an 'other'. It is argued here that Colley's concept of the need for 'otherness', can be applied within British society as well as with regard to those who lived elsewhere. The British needed 'outsiders' within their own society against which to define themselves as religiously, racially or morally legitimate. This extended beyond Roman Catholic 'others', already identified by Colley, to a whole series of religious and moral minority groups that could be seen as `un-British'. The rhetoric of the 'rule of law' underpinned a society that was encouraged to believe that it was the law which stood between it and the tyrannies and turbulence that the Continent experienced throughout the nineteenth century. The values of government as they were espoused through the law became the values of Britain. Hence, those who believed themselves to be 'British' were encouraged to support the moral and religious standards that were set for them. This meant being hostile to the 'others' who were not seen to support those standards. Over the course of the period 1829-1895, from Roman Catholic emancipation to the Oscar Wilde trials, governments moved from seeing religious groups as 'others' to seeing moral 'deviants' as the outsiders against whom the truly British should unify in shared disdain. As Jews, Roman Catholics and atheists were brought into a genuine sense of partnership in the British constitution, homosexuals, prostitutes and the allegedly innately criminal Irish found themselves further and more vehemently displaced. Legal 'otherness' slowly stopped being a religious question and became rather a moral one.