Campaigns for moral reform were a recurrent and distinctive feature of public life in later Georgian and Victorian England. Anti-slavery, temperance, charity, cruelty prevention and "social purity" advocates promoted their causes through mobilization of citizen volunteer support. M.J.D. Roberts explores the world of these volunteer networks--their concerns, patterns of recruitment, methods of operation, and responses aroused--to provide an accessible period survey of moral reform.

The Politics of Commonwealth offers a major reinterpretation of urban political culture in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Examining what it meant to be a freeman and citizen in early modern England, it also shows the increasingly pivotal place of cities and boroughs within the national polity. It considers the practices that constituted urban citizenship as well as its impact on the economic, patriarchal and religious life of towns and the larger commonwealth. The author has recovered the language and concepts used at the time, whether by eminent citizens like Andrew...