‘God is dead’, said Nietzsche in 1882  – that is, he added, ‘belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable’. As a result, the whole of European morality would collapse, he predicted, though this might take some time. Similar tidings had come from the Cambridge lecturer Henry Sidgwick in 1874. Sidgwick believed that morality actually consisted in promoting the greatest happiness of the greatest number, but he also urged that utilitarian ethics should be restricted to ‘the enlightened few’ capable of handling such complexities; ‘the vulgar’ must continue to obey Christian-based moral rules. 

Undoing the Moral Empire examines Britain after Nietzsche’s and Sidgwick’s prediction was realised and disbelief in God and Christian values became widespread. After the barbarities and upheavals of the Second World War, with the Empire unravelling and a freer press monitoring the situation, clerics, politicians and academics were no longer able to define and impose moral standards that they themselves often failed to follow. And by the same token, the duty, deference and ‘buttoned-up “decency”’ traditionally expected of the other classes ceased to be on offer.

‘Is it a book that you would … wish your wife or your servants to read?’ asked prosecutor Mervyn Griffiths-Jones at the 1960 Lady Chatterley’s Lover trial. His question – informed with what Lesley Chamberlain calls the ‘almost measureless disingenuousness and self-deceit’ of the old Establishment – struck the jury