Temperance reformation and Catholic Emancipation.

Although a strong Tory Patrick Bronte was sympathetic to many Whig ideas. He supported Roman Catholic Emancipation, was against the death penalty for minor crimes, like stealing a loaf of bread, against the workhouse system where families were separated, a man from his wife and parents from their children, and against rotten boroughs where the few voters were bribed to vote for particular members of Parliament. Patrick was one of the few Tories in Haworth, a great believer in the established (Church of England) church among a majority of Dissenters. In Haworth he was a founder member, as was Branwell, of the Haworth Temperance Society.  He was a great believer in education and fought hard to raise money for, first of all a Sunday School and later a day school. He raised money for the poor when there was little work. He raised a subscription to replace the three bells of the church by six new ones so the bell ringers could take part in competitions. brusselsbronte 

Temperance reformation
During 1830, at the beginning of the temperance reformation, twenty temperance societies were founded, totalling between two and three thousand members. The first period of the temperance movement was focused on controlling drunkenness rather than abolishing all alcoholic beverages. history/journal

This photograph proudly displayed alongside other Brontë mementos at the Temperance tea rooms in the family's home village of Haworth in West Yorkshire, the picture was auctioned by Sotheby's in 1898 when the Museum of Brontë Relics closed down and sold off everything it owned. It has not been seen since, although copies of the picture are known to exist. independent

Catholic emancipation

Catholic emancipation was the subject of political debate in the United Kingdom, which intensified in the 19th Century after the Act of Union in 1801. Catholics were not allowed to sit in Parliament¹ and therefore were represented by Protestants. Catholic emancipation — Catholic relief — was designed to give Catholics the right to sit in Parliament.

O'Connel

In 1823, Daniel O'Connell, an Irish Catholic lawyer and politician, began a campaign for Catholic emancipation. He was widely successful and raised a great deal of money through 'Catholic Rent', a subscription to an association which cost only one penny a month. His popularity led to his election for the county of Clare in Ireland, even though he could not take his seat in Parliament. Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington felt that the threat of insurrection in Ireland surpassed the threat of allowing Catholics to sit in Parliament⁴. The Catholic Relief Act was passed on 24 March, 1829. It contained a number of securities for the Protestants, including not allowing Catholics to attain certain positions and disenfranchising the 40-shilling freeholders. This meant that people who owned or lived on property worth more than forty shillings had previously been allowed to vote in Ireland, but that the property requirement would now be ten pounds.

Opposition to Catholic Emancipation
The Duke of Wellington, famous for his successes in the Napoleonic Wars, was the Prime Minister of Britain from 1828 - 1830 and the leader of the Tory party, which generally stood for the defence of the status quo. Both Wellington and his second-in-command and future Prime Minister Robert Peel had been against Catholic emancipation in the past, and their about-turn was seen as deceitful and disloyal. Wellington and Peel were of the opinion that the potential unrest in Ireland was preventable only by allowing Catholic emancipation. Many members of their own party opposed the measure, which was only passed with Whig support. The Duke of Newcastle was a strong opponent of Catholic emancipation, and in his diary described how Wellington and Peel 'betrayed their country'. He also attributes this speech to the Duke of Cumberland:

Nothing shall induce me to abandon the principles which I have always maintained and what is more to do my utmost to defeat measures which in my conscience I believe to be destructive of the Throne, the altar and the Protestant Constitution.

The opposition to Wellington and Peel's Catholic emancipation split the Tory party and led to the Whigs taking power for the first time in more than twenty years.
bbc.co.uk

The transition between the Georgian and Victorian eras

The transition between what are commonly termed the Georgian and Victorian eras is one of the great turning points of British history. The dividing line is often considered to be either 1830 (the death of George IV) or 1837 (the accession of Queen Victoria

The sphere in which the end of the Georgian Era can be mostly clearly witnessed is within the Church of England. The Church of England was transmuted from an essentially Latitudinarian Protestant sect, suspicious of ‘enthusiasm’, into a Church fully asserting its historic Catholicity, and strongly influenced by medieval ritual.

In the early 19th century, a parish vestry had wide-ranging responsibilities for such areas as poor relief, tax collection, registration of births, marriages and deaths, and road maintenance. A series of legislative measures of the 1830s gave such duties to secular bodies like poor law unions and civil vestries, making the Church’s sole concern religion.

It would be completely unjust to characterise the earlier Georgian Era as devoid of charity, but it is probably fair to state that it had never been accompanied by such spiritual fervour as shown by reformers like Wilberforce, Hannah More, Henry Thornton and Charles Simeon. Their main cause was the abolition of the slave trade, an object achieved in 1807, followed by the total abolition of slavery in 1833.

Despite the excessive pomp of George’s coronation in 1821, the monarchy – and thus the establishment – had reached its lowest point. In the eyes of many, including the growing number of political radicals, it had lost all moral integrity and could no longer command the respect of the nation. When Victoria became Queen at the age of 18, her unenviable task was to restore the moral authority of the British establishment.

Transition between the artistic cultures of the Georgian and Victorian eras, from ‘neoclassicism’ to ‘romanticism’. This was observable to some degree in all western cultures during the first half of the 19th century. Writers such as Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley and Bryon were mainly active during the Georgian Era, but were often dissident elements, refusing to conform to the Augustan society around them.

In the early 19th century, the dominant style of architecture was that of the Greek Revival. From the 1840s onwards gothic was the standard style for churches,

Female clothing changed drastically around the same time: dresses were no longer large and elaborate, but were simple and light in imitation of Grecian models. By the 1830s female dresses were gradually expanded and embellished, reaching the absurd extreme of the unapproachable crinoline dresses of the 1860s

It is clear that the transition between the Georgians and the Victorians has had profound consequences. The demise of the Georgian Era demonstrates how a complete set of assumptions can be undermined, and finally overthrown, from within. The battles between rationality and romanticism, moral leniency and strictness, materialism and mysticism, still affect us today. /georgian-victorian