Roy Porter on Georgian era

“Upright citizens – not just blackguards and bravoes but the village Hampden too – did not shrink from force to get their due. There was a cacophony of verbal violence: newspapers, cartoons and street ballads blasted their targets with scabrous insults and Billingsgate scurrility; political sermons thundered from pulpits.”

“Out of doors, crime was rife and often bloody: smugglers had little compunction about slaying excise officers. And, from the rough-house of the crowd to the dragoons' musket volley, violence ran through public and political life, as English as plum pudding. Force was used as a matter of routine to achieve social and political goals, smudging hard-and-fast distinctions between the world of criminality and politics.”

“The lava flow of violence ran through the political landscape, sometimes underground, sometimes on the surface. Unpopular politicians were often ragged, peers' carriages pelted and rocked, and their windows smashed, as they left Westminster... Minorities were tempting targets. Methodists were treated as cockshies (John Wesley saw it as a mark of Divine favour that no brick hit him personally), as were homosexuals, witches, bawds and Frenchmen. The Act of 1753 legalizing the naturalization of Jews brought baying anti-Semitic mobs on to the streets: it was immediately repealed. Irish-baiting and Scots-baiting were national sports. Fear of popery sparked the Gordon Riots in London in 1780, though targets broadened to include the rich, Lord Mansfield, breweries and Newgate goal.”