Two differing ideas characterized the city of Toronto throughout the twentieth century. The first, Toronto the Good, represented the aspirations of religious leaders, reformers, politicians, and police officers to create a city modelled after Christian morality. Sexuality was meant to be expressed in the confines of the private, monogamous, heteronormative family home. Sex was for procreation, not pleasure. Contrary to Toronto the Good was a second idea, Toronto the Gay, a 1950s tabloid reference to the variety of spaces available for sexual exploration and desire. Sex work, queer sex, interracial marriage, divorce, birth control, and abortion endured despite intense enforcement of sexual morality. This chapter explores the tensions between the idealism of Toronto the Good and the sexual opportunities of Toronto the Gay.

The chapter traces the project of reforming the Anglo-West Indies from early missionary efforts through the post-emancipation. Abolitionists’ assessments of moral reform in the British colonies served as a compelling argument of the experiment’s success. In the United States, influenced by the Great Awakening, morality, religious instruction, education, and spiritual uplift were appealing indicators on the success or failure of emancipation. Some American reformers journeyed to the West Indies to take part in this “civilizing mission.” But as I argue, freedpeople had their own perceptions of moral behavior, challenging the expectations of reformers in both England and America.

Public petitions to the Commons encompassed a diverse range of political, religious, social, and economic topics. This chapter examines the 33,000 or so different issues that were raised by petitioners to the House of Commons. The initial expansion of petitioning in the late eighteenth century was associated with subjects relating to economic regulation and taxation. From the early nineteenth century, the volume of petitions (and signatures) on economic topics was outstripped by the surge of petitioning on religious and social issues. The analysis reveals that petitions were a crucial means for addressing religious issues across the four nations, as well as for debating the UK’s constitutional arrangements. The chapter then considers the different types of issue, from those linked to mass campaigns, to the ‘long’ tail of petitions concerning medium and small-scale topics. Petitions remained an important mechanism for raising individual grievances, particularly from women, in Parliament. Finally, one of the limitations of the petitions data is the relative absence of petitions concerning the empire or foreign policy, which is attributable to the clerks’ system of categorisation and the appeal of petitioning other authorities.

This chapter examines an apparent paradox, the existence and further development of significant body of laws prohibiting different forms of gambling and gambling in certain places, and their overwhelming inefficacy. The law provides, nevertheless, a very useful prism through which to plot changing and fluctuating attitudes towards gambling among the authorities and politically powerful, and, indeed, rather lower down in society. The heart of this chapter is an analysis of successive drives to clamp down on gaming houses in London and their fairly negligible impact viewed in the longer term. This is partly a story of the resourcefulness and resources of the gaming house keepers, and their ability to evade or blunt the effects of law and magisterial campaigns to enforce the law. But it is also a story of how ineffective the law and contemporary forms of policing were when faced with an extensive, well-embedded and well-capitalized gambling industry, often supported by or at least tolerated by local communities. This is quite apart from the flagrant double standards which were entertained by the state and Parliament towards gambling.

Frederick Douglass’s perspective on temperance had much in common with the arguments articulated by northern free black conduct writers, reformers and institution builders. Like many of them, Douglass believed that the rhetoric and daily practice of temperance served the larger fight against slavery and racism by contributing to the forms of black self-mastery, independence, and self-determination most feared by proponents of slavery in the United States. Alcohol consumption, meanwhile, cultivated exactly the kind of dependence preferred by slaveholders. Emphasizing its revolutionary potential for African Americans, Douglass characterized temperance as essential for the black freedom struggle throughout his career, continuing to make his case for temperance even in the last decades of the nineteenth century when African Americans faced the specter of the rise of Jim Crow and the encroachment of new forms of oppression and servitude.