Much scholarship on nineteenth-century English workers has been devoted to the radical reform politics that powerfully unsettled the social order in the century’s first decades. Comparatively neglected have been the impetuous patriotism, royalism, and xenophobic anti-Catholicism that countless men and women demonstrated in the early Victorian period. This much-needed study of the era’s “conservatism from below” explores the role of religion in everyday culture and the Tories’ successful...
