For many people in Britain’s long 18th century, it was blindingly obvious that they lived in an era of irreversible national decline. Some called it a “Cheating Age”, others a “depraved Age”, still others an “Age of Vice”. For the firebrand Anglican preacher Henry Sacheverell, it was an era of “Sensuality, Hypocrisy, Lewdness, and Atheism”.
And even ordinary people’s letters betrayed a deep horror at the collapse of public morality, the travails of the economy and the catastrophic record of the nation’s fighting men abroad. “Formerly One Englishman was said to be the equal to Three Frenchmen,” an Essex grocer wrote in 1794. “But now the degenerate Brood cannot stand their ground against the scum of that rising nation of Men, their Sans Culottes.”
