Defining the Victorian state

In 1888, at the end of a series of lectures for the law tripos in the University of Cambridge, the constitutional historian, F. W. Maitland, remarked that modern statutes had vastly extended the powers of “councils and boards and officers, high and low, central and local.” England, he claimed, was fast becoming “a much governed nation.” This was a curious claim for Maitland to make. Maitland had just treated his students to several months of erudite consideration of the dense fabric of legal regulation that composed the English constitution. Yet this did not seem to count as “government,” even though Maitland was well aware that it was impossible to draw clear distinctions between, for example, constitutional law, administrative law, property law and even criminal law. By any account, Britain was a nation of laws that penetrated deep into the fabric of society, and from which it was impossible for even the lowliest to escape.

In proclaiming Britain to be a newly “much governed nation,” however, Maitland was reflecting a common conceit of his age. A. V. Dicey was to make the same point, in a different way, ten years later in a series of lectures at Harvard University. The main direction of modern legislation, Dicey argued, was to interpose upon individuals a collectivist regulation by the state. Whereas the main bias of government in the nineteenth century had been to permit the widest possible sphere for individual freedom, at the end of the century government had succumbed to the prescriptive spirit. Civic initiative as the source of social action was being displaced as the state shifted from a minimalist model to an intrusive and proactive force.