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Our understanding of the relationship between state and society in England can all too easily be impoverished by adopting a very narrow conception of what constituted the public sphere. Few would doubt that there has always been an intimate connection between the holding of major offices of state and active participation in English public culture. The symbiosis between public office and public life at the centre of the English polity is too obvious to be laboured. The politics of the court, office-holding, and court life were of a piece. Similarly, the development of the London Season and the establishment of annual parliamentary sessions were not unconnected.1 Also, historians of the early-modern period have demonstrated the ways in which the development of county government, notably the greater sophistication of the Quarter Sessions, rested on the emergence of a distinctive, self-referential, and vibrant ‘county community’.2 What has been less fully appreciated, and largely ignored by historians of the Hanoverian period, is the extent to which the development of the parish as a political unit was predicated on the parallel development of a distinctive parochial political culture.

By their very nature, towns and villages projected a public identity. Here residence created an immediate sense of belonging, while political and social hierarchies were persistent and generally visible. Such communities were animated by a public and political life which, intentionally or incidentally, gave substance to parochial and civic identities. The English counties, by contrast, commanded no real presence. Everyone lived in a county, but this was sensed, if at all, through processes of incomplete revelation. Some counties might have reached their frontiers naturelles, with the Tamar marking off Devon from Cornwall and the Thames elegantly defining the boundary between Berkshire and Oxfordshire. Other county boundaries were altogether more ambiguous. Lancashire and Yorkshire met on Pennine uplands; and the vigorous walker might move from Hampshire, to Wiltshire, and into Devon without the physical landscape so much as hinting that important boundaries were being traversed. Writers who entertained the public with accounts of their travels rarely commented on the passage from one county to another, but almost always remarked on the towns and even the villages through which they passed.

Historians are fond of describing urbanization in terms of the growth of towns. At one level this kind of analysis satisfies by constructing a positivist language through which to map a conceptually complex process. If we define a town as a settlement with over 2500 inhabitants, urbanization seems both impressive and ineluctable. In 1700, 18.7 per cent of the population of England and Wales lived in towns. By 1750 this had risen to 22.6 per cent and by 1801 it reached 30.6 per cent. In the nineteenth century urban growth, thus measured, was still more striking, with 54 per cent of the population living in towns by 1851 and 78 per cent by 1901.1 But such figures distort as much as they describe. In 1700 some settlements that we might regard as characteristically urban contained fewer than 2500 inhabitants, while by 1900 many settlements of 2500 were hardly towns at all. Viewed in another light, these figures reveal the profoundly rural character of large areas of England and Wales until well into the Victorian period. As late as the census of 1871, agriculture was the largest single employer of male labour, and only after this census did the population of rural England begin to fall in absolute terms.2 What gave Victorian towns and cities their increasing cultural and political power was not that they were home to a majority of England’s people but, rather, that they were home to England’s new wealth and economic elites.

Viewed from the perspective of the provinces, the English polity of the mid-nineteenth century differed profoundly from that of the mid-eighteenth. The state’s institutional superstructure had been dramatically modified. The Old Poor Law had given way to the New; Municipal Corporations had been remodelled, given a representative character, and were being extended to new industrial towns; the challenge of public health was increasingly likely to be confronted not by traditional authorities but by new public health unions; constables were becoming policemen; and inspectors of factories, prisons, and schools, were busily carrying a gospel of efficiency and good practice from the centre into the localities. The changes which were remodelling the English state were often couched in the language of ‘reform’. The transition from the eighteenth-century language of improvement to the nineteenth-century language of reform is of itself important, but the language of reform, at least as deployed in the years after 1820, carried increasingly heavy ideological and social baggage. Behind changes in the superstructural apparatus of the English state lay perhaps more important — and certainly more elusive — transitions in the social distribution of power.

Public authority in Hanoverian England consisted in a careful play on the symbolic and the substantial. Where formal powers were relatively weak or ill-defined, symbols that impressed, or simply dignified officials were instrumental in the social construction of power. Thus, civic rituals in provincial towns, notably mayoral processions or meetings of municipal sessions, ordered the urban community while simultaneously dignifying the exercise of authority. Typical was the inauguration of the Mayor of York on St Blaise’s day (3 February) in a ceremony which moved impressively between the council chamber, the Guildhall, and the new mayor’s residence. Elaborate oath-taking rituals were hors-d’œuvres to drinking three gallons of wine at Pavement’s Cross and then proceeding to a lavish dinner.1 In early-nineteenth-century Boston, the Mayor’s Procession began with bells which summoned townsfolk to observe the robed corporation, led by a silver oar and maces, accompanied by a band, and treading over cowslips carefully strewn by children of the Blue Coat School.2 Without such rituals, corporate authority would have appeared less definitive and more remote. Indeed, even the routine exercise of personal power was enacted in ways which dramatized social authority.