"I wish everyone would stop believing that early Victorian England, or more specifically early 19th century England, rural England in particular, was a quaint, comfortable, peaceful, orderly sort of place that violent revolution is alien to the English character. Lovely. Expand. Okay. Well, this is an idea that I think comes largely from sort of prejudice and popular understanding. I mean, in a way, it's the idea that was put forward by the Victorians themselves when they're looking back at the period that immediately preceded them. So they're looking back at the 1830s specifically, the 1820s, 1830s, and they're contrasting it with their own time, and they're wanting to show it I think as somewhere that was quite distinctly orderly and unrevolutionary because we always have the spectre of the French revolution hanging over this entire period. Even decades later, the English were still contrasting themselves with the French and portraying the French as an inherently tumultuous and revolutionary people constantly overthrowing their governments and so forth. And the idea is that this kind of thing didn't happen in England, that the English were orderly, they were much more respecting of authority. They didn't tend to start, you know, waving clubs in the air and burning things."