Publishing a senior scholar's collection of essays and articles, nearly all of which have previously seen the light of day, invites the crowding in of hostages to fortune. There is always the problem of internal coherence. How well do the pieces sit together? The likelihood is that they will have first appeared over a lengthy period, in this case two decades. Footnote references will vary in their value to any reader wishing to become acquainted with the most recent contributions to a debate. Even with careful editing, some references to ‘recent scholarship’ will stretch a point; some examples of repetition are likely to be encountered. Perhaps some contributions do not even accord well with the title of the book. Someone expecting a Victorian frame of reference will find it distinctly odd to find a first article which barely stretches beyond the end of the Napoleonic Wars and two more, which together comprise the final part of the book, dealing with a period well beyond the death of Queen Victoria.
The compensations of this volume, however, amply outweigh any such awkwardnesses and inconsistencies. Martin Daunton's book has a clear and important theme which is still only partially understood. It concerns the relationship of a liberal state with its citizens in the modern age. Though Daunton makes a number of deft comparisons and contrasts with the greater, and more usually more uniform, direction from a centralized state in France and Germany, his predominant focus concerns both the complexity and the diversity of Britain, politically, economically and culturally.
It is entirely appropriate for a volume whose specific focus concerns revenue-raising that more extensive consideration than is usual is given to local circumstances. How, for example, is a large industrial city to be provided with essential services, such as proper drainage and a reliably drinkable water supply? Both require substantial initial capital investment. Daunton expertly navigates between the various interest groups involved in the provision of these basic services to communities growing with unprecedented rapidly – and creating huge environmental and public health problems as they did so. How were conflicting economic and political interests to be harmonized? Neither the simple rise of an economy rooted in free-trade principles nor the uncanny (and usually oversimplified!) beneficence of Adam Smith's ‘hidden hand’ suffice as an explanation. Urban economic systems, as Daunton points out, depended to a substantial extent upon trust and involvement of varied propertied interest groups with varied associational organizations such as clubs, churches and chambers of commerce. A complex of inter-relationships was involved. Daunton explains the apparent paradox that urban public expenditure in Victorian Britain was usually highest when the franchise was at its most restrictive. Spending fell ‘when the franchise was widened to involve modest ratepayers who were more concerned about the immediate impact of the rates on their profitability; and it rose again when a wider [and substantially non-propertied] franchise was introduced’ (p. 107). Thus, to extend Daunton's argument – perhaps further than he would wish – the economic fearfulness and, as its many critics might have it, the narrow-spiritedness of the lower middle classes exerted their influence on public expenditure patterns and priorities as surely in mid-Victorian as in Margaret Thatcher's Britain.
A number of these pieces are dense in argument and thus of limited interest to a non-specialist in the period. Fortunately for the more general reader, Daunton has provided a substantial, up-to-date introduction. This splendidly wide-ranging, well-argued yet accessible piece explains how a ‘liberal state’ emerged in Victorian Britain as ‘an honest broker between interests, the opponent of monopoly and liberator of the individual and of associational life’ (p. 37). In the course of this journey, the state released itself from its ‘fiscal-military’ shackles during a century (1815–1914) in which it involved itself in only one brief European war. At the same time, it increasingly accepted responsibility for devising a fairer, less regressive, taxation system. Thus, although in the 1850s, direct taxation represented only 31 per cent of government revenue, Peel's recent introduction of income tax was already realizing almost 40 per cent of the direct-tax element. Peel was very careful to ensure that only the best paid and most secure of the labouring classes should pay any income tax at all. In the years leading up to World War I, direct taxation, now amply reinforced by the introduction of death duties, produced more revenue (52.3 per cent) than indirect for the first time, death duties and income tax between them realizing three-quarters of that proportion.
In the course of his lucid and informed exposition, Daunton exposes such fashionable catch-alls as ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ to a forensic examination from which they emerge as distinctly threadbare and outdated. Anyone wishing to understand how the inevitability of taxation became at least bearable in a rapidly changing ‘liberal state’ needs to become acquainted with this high-quality collection of contributions.
