The fascination of the early Victorian period lies in the fact that it is at once close to and distant from us. It is distant not least because its politics were undemocratic, with unpaid white male MPs and cabinets largely drawn from the upper classes, and its Christian beliefs and practices shaped what can described as a shared religious culture. (Ruskin’s prose and Barrett’s poetry are ‘illegible’ in Carlylean terms without a working knowledge of the bible.) Norman Gash describes the ‘vast mass of static forces in the country’ in the age of Peel, ‘the great aristocracy, the country gentry, the Anglican Church, the universities, the legal profession, the established financial and commercial interests, the fighting services, the permanent civil service’, that ‘underpinned the traditional structure of the State’.1 On the first Reform Act he adds, ‘The middle-class banking, mercantile, and industrial elements were no stronger after 1832 than before.’