2 - The dark satanic mills: the Victorian state

Summary

When William Blake, in a prefatory verse to the epic poem Milton which he etched between 1804 and 1808, asked whether Jerusalem had been “builded here Among these dark Satanic Mills”, he was looking back in time. But when in the next stanza he called for his bow of burning gold and his arrows of desire and promised to fight on “Till we have built Jerusalem In England's green & pleasant land”, he was speaking for the generation which was to bring about the administrative and legal changes that did much to shape modern public law.

The Industrial Revolution

Great Britain's massive commercial, industrial and imperial takeoff in the nineteenth century was unanticipated, unprecedented, unplanned and pretty much uncontrolled. We have learnt to call it the Industrial Revolution, but the Victorians saw the spectacular growth of their trade and industry as progress rather than revolution. In a sense they were right. It was the conditions of the people which were most obviously revolutionised, as hundreds of thousands of displaced rural workers and famine-stricken immigrants swarmed into Britain's conurbations. The consequent proliferation of pollution, waste, disease, injury, poverty and unplanned development drove the more farsighted members of the political class into action and the courts from time to time into reaction.

This chapter looks at three interlocking elements of this teeming story: the use by Parliament of primary legislation to regulate commerce and industry, principally by hugely expanding executive and devolved powers; the deployment of these powers by central and local government and official bodies; and the use by the judiciary of old and new legal tools to keep public administration within the bounds of legality as the judges understood it. It was in the course of this multi-faceted process that much of what we have learned to regard as modern public law took shape. Why another generation of judges let it go to sleep for the first half of the twentieth century, and how in the latter half of that century it rose from what seemed to be the grave, are the two main questions addressed in the previous chapter.