Newcastle-under-Lyme College

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The article argues that the development of Permissive Morality in Britain cannot be seen narrowly as a product of the 1960s. Offering a critique of critics as disparate as Arthur Marwick and Margaret Thatcher, it suggests that the evolution of morality from the Victorian era onward has to be seen as a long‐run dialectic between a restrictive moral code, developing out of the triumph of Respectability in the middle classes in the later nineteenth century, and a libertarian morality. The article sketches the emergence of Respectable morality through the tightening of the legal codes and the submergence of libertinism, notably in the development of the Criminal Law Amendment Acts. The contestation of this restrictive morality is traced through increasingly vocal criticism of the Divorce and Obscenity Laws, and the hypocrisy surriounding much official morality, which began to merge from the 1890s onward. The attack on Respectability is traced through a critique of the Victorian divorce law, beginning before the First World War and sustained till the 1969 Matrimonial Causes Act; the struggle over censorship of books and the theatre; and the debate over official views on homosexuality and illicit sexuality which emerged into the open in the 1950s. The article demonstrates that the changes in public morality which emerged as if from nowhere in the 1960s were preceded by a sustained contest between Respectable morality and its critics with roots in the late nineteenth century. Assessments of moral development in Britain in the later twentieth century must, the author argues, take into account this long‐run dialectic to be fully comprehensive.