Wanting and having: Popular politics and liberal consumerism in England, 1830–70 9781526101822

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Nineteenth-century England witnessed the birth of capitalist consumerism. Early department stores, shopping arcades and provision shops of all kinds proliferated from the start of the Victorian period, testimony to greater diffusion of consumer goods. However, while the better off enjoyed having more material things, masses of the population were wanting even the basic necessities of life during the ‘Hungry Forties’ and well beyond. This book argues that the emergence of modern consumerism was not merely a neutral and progressive transformation but involved heated political contests between different historical alternatives, which were based on competing visions of economy and society. Drawing on a wealth of contemporary evidence and adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Wanting and having focuses particularly on the making of the working-class consumer between the First and Second Reform Acts, in order to shed new light on key areas of major historical interest, including Chartism, the Anti-Corn Law League, the New Poor Law, popular liberalism and humanitarianism. By returning to the fraught gestation of consumer society in Victorian England, Wanting and having urges us to consider whether we can change our practice as consumers in any fundamental way unless we also radically revise our practice as citizens. It will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in the origins and significance of consumerism across a range of disciplines, including social and cultural history, literary studies, historical sociology and politics. Peter Gurney teaches British Social History at the University of Essex Cover image: ‘Christmas Cheer – the Producer and Consumer’, Odd Fellow, 2 January 1841, p. 1 © British Library Board, LON 40A

Wanting and H AVING

H AV ING

Popu la r polit ics a n d li ber a l consu m er ism i n Engla n d, 1830 –70

and

Popu la r polit ics a n d li ber a l consu m er ism i n Engla n d, 1830 –70

GURNEY

Wanting

Wa n t i n g AN D

H A V ING

Popu la r polit ics a n d li ber a l c o n s u m e r i s m i n E n g l a n d, 18 3 0 –70

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

P ETER GURNE Y

Wanting and having

Wanting and having Popular politics and liberal consumerism in England, 1830–70 Peter Gurney

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York

Copyright © Peter Gurney 2014 The right of Peter Gurney to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 0 7190 9145 2 hardback First published 2014 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

List of illustrations Preface 1 ‘A new order of things’: mapping popular politics onto consumption 2 ‘Rejoicing in potatoes’: the politics of consumption in England during the ‘Hungry Forties’ 3 ‘The Andover Cannibalism’: popular entitlement and the New Poor Law 4 ‘Yours in the cause of Democracy’: democratic discourse and the Chartist challenge 5 ‘Consumers of their own productions’: popular radicalism and consumer organising 6 ‘Please, sir, I want some more’: Dickens on working-class scarcity and middle-class excess 7 ‘The Sublime of the Bazaar’: the religion of free trade and the making of modern consumerism 8 ‘The lion turned into a lamb’: the consumer politics of popular liberalism Epilogue: ‘The Age of Veneer’: the limits of liberal consumerism Index

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Illustrations

1 ‘Rejoicing in potatoes’, Struggle, 61, February 1843. © British Library Board. 41 2 ‘Attack on the Stockport Workhouse’, Illustrated London News, 20 August 1842. © Sloman Library, University of Essex. 47 3 ‘Law making a meal in the manufacturing districts’, Odd Fellow, 10 December 1842. © British Library Board. 49 4 The Poor Law Commission’s dietary tables in Jonathan Pereira, A treatise on food and diet (1843). © British Library Board. 74 5 ‘The pauper’s vision’, Odd Fellow, 9 January 1841. © British Library Board. 81 6 Frontispiece by Robert Cruikshank to the comic song, ‘Just starve us’ (1843). © British Library Board. 83 7 ‘The Andover Bastile’, Penny Satirist, 6 September 1845. © British Library Board. 89 8 George Cruikshank, ‘The Charter – a Commons scene’, Comic Almanack, 1843. © British Library Board. 119 9 ‘Christmas cheer – the producer and consumer’, Odd Fellow, 2 January 1841. © British Library Board. 157 10 C. J. Grant, ‘The great captain’s opinion of the present distress among the labouring classes of England’, Penny Satirist, 16 October 1841. © British Library Board. 158 11 George Cruikshank, ‘Oliver asking for more’, in Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist; or the parish boy’s progress (1838). © British Library Board. 186 12 Hablot Browne, ‘Miss Tox pays a visit to the Toodle family’, in Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848). © British Library Board. 207

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List of illustrations Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar, Illustrated London News, 10 May 1845. © British Library Board. Shopping at the League Bazaar, Illustrated London News, 17 May 1845. © British Library Board. George Cruikshank, ‘The dispersion of the works of all nations from the Great Exhibition of 1851’, in Henry Mayhew, 1851: or, the adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys and family (1851). © British Library Board. Tickle Street, Deansgate, Manchester, Illustrated London News, 29 November 1862. © Sloman Library, University of Essex. Southern Street, Liverpool Road, Manchester, Illustrated London News, 29 November 1862. © Sloman Library, University of Essex. Relief in the Lancashire ‘Cotton Famine’, Illustrated London News, 29 November 1862. © Sloman Library, University of Essex. Stalybridge Riot, Illustrated Times, 4 April 1863. © British Library Board. George Cruikshank, ‘Buy cheap furniture’, Comic Almanack, 1852. © British Library Board.

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Preface

The idea that all history is contemporary history is no less true for being rather a cliché. Indeed, this book is framed, both consciously and unconsciously, by three major current debates that have exerted an influence far beyond the relatively narrow confines of academia. It seems appropriate to make these explicit and tie them to the major themes of the book. First, capitalist states across Western Europe have faced a long-standing crisis of welfare provision that has been brought to a head by a protracted economic slump as well as by changes in the structure of global capitalism, most obviously the challenge posed by emergent economies such as China, India and Brazil. At the heart of the crisis of welfare lies the problem of incentives, that is, how to motivate the mass of workers given what many regard as overgenerous state-funded benefit systems enjoyed in the West since the Second World War. In Britain, what we can call the ‘social norm of consumption’ of poor and unemployed consumers has been continually redefined by government and their entitlements renegotiated in recent years. Crudely put, this norm has been ratcheted downwards in an effort to make the incentives of the labour market bite more effectively. At least, that is the theory. The early nineteenth century presents a very different context but there are important similarities. Early industrial workers and consumers had to be taught how to respond to market incentives, to work for wages to enable them not only to purchase commodities in order to satisfy immediate needs but also to want more goods, to expand their ‘comforts’. They were initially protected from the most pressing incentive of all – hunger – by the compact between the poor, the parish and the state codified as the Old Poor Law that had developed over centuries and which was underpinned by

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Christian ethics. This compact was broken partly in the belief that modern workers but also consumers would be more easily made without it; the poor needed to learn that the benefits provided by the capitalist market, including an expanding diversity of goods, would not be accessible without the pain of labour. This helps explain the disciplinary micro-politics that was such a characteristic feature of the New Poor Law introduced in 1834, including the precision of workhouse dietary regimes, which fuelled revolt among ordinary consumers. Admittedly, then as now, elites were divided and not all of them shared this harsh view. Humanitarian criticism transcended political and class lines and sometimes modified the system in practice, though by the end of the period covered by this book the new regime pressed hard on the lives of those the Victorians condescended to as ‘the residuum’ and whom we call ‘the underclass’. Second, there is a great deal of interest among political elites as well as intellectuals across the humanities and social sciences in the linkages between consumption and citizenship. Since the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’, mass consumerism and the march of democracy have often been regarded as two sides of the same coin. Consumer desire has been credited with helping to bring down autocratic statist regimes in Eastern Europe. In the New World Order rolled out by the United States and her allies after the Second Gulf War, the spread of free trade capitalism if not yet mass consumerism, by means of armed force when necessary, has been construed as a corollary of democratic state building across the Middle East. Very different links between democracy and consumption have been proposed, certainly, with advocates of fair trade in the West arguing that their ability to mobilise relatively affluent consumers has shown a way to break down the political apathy that is often seen to characterise the consciousness of the majority. Looking at English developments between the First and Second Reform Acts, which gave citizenship rights to middle-class men and then skilled male artisans, provides an interesting perspective on this issue. Chartists and their antagonists configured the relationship between consumption and democracy differently. For the former, democracy was a pure concept; it had a spiritual, quasi-religious significance. It was not dependent on one’s ability to consume goods but was seen as a natural or human right, though not straightforwardly. They were suspicious of the identity of consumer as a separate category

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and questioned the splitting of individuals into different roles, arguing that the problem was that the real producers were often unable to become consumers. Chartists contested what they called ‘the extension of commerce’, maintaining that markets needed to be controlled and arguing for community and government regulation of consumption as well as production. In short, they desired to establish, or re-establish, a society constructed around the idea of protection instead of competition, where the social norm of consumption for the majority was guaranteed at a decent level by the democratic will of the people. For their part, the Anti-Corn Law League, the vanguard of economic liberalism in early Victorian England, championed ‘freedom’, especially freedom of exchange, which they believed would bring material but also moral improvement to the masses at home and abroad. They sought to mobilise consumers against protectionism and helped to re-evaluate the language of consumption and consumer, wrenching it free from older connotations of frivolous and feminine aristocratic dissipation, with which it had been conflated during the eighteenth century and earlier. Scared off by Chartist appropriation of the language of democracy, League spokesmen did not use democratic discourse much, though they did link up growing consumerism with the expansion of citizenship rights. Richard Cobden, for instance, saw democracy as an effect of the growth of commerce and industry – the latter were the materials out of which democracy was constructed. From this perspective, the vote was nothing less than a reward for hard work and thrifty, rational and masculine consumption practices evidenced by the accumulation of the right kinds of commodities: John Bright grasped the internal connection between a good coat and the franchise early on. Bourgeois revolutionaries like Cobden and Bright were the real economic determinists in Victorian England; such instrumentalism was anathema to Chartists for whom political democracy was never a mere reflection of prior and more fundamental economic relationships. Instead, they hoped that democracy would enable people to rise above self-interest and greed in order to construct proper communities where all would be protected from exploitation. But this could not be done piecemeal or without fundamental change. Finally, the current economic crisis, precipitated by the often-illegal operation of banks and financial institutions, has caused an outpouring from political and to a lesser extent business elites about

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the urgent need to moralise capitalism. Though mostly hot air from those on the political right, critics further to the left correctly point out that the recent near catastrophe was made much more likely by the wave of deregulation initiated under Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States. Again, a consideration of the early- to mid-nineteenth-century experience provides illumination here. Chartists proffered their own solution to the demoralisation of relations of production and consumption they believed was wrought by ‘the extension of commerce’. For them, free trade as preached by the League represented the apotheosis of the separation of the economic realm from the rest of the common social life of the people, which would have disastrous results. A few of them even used the neologism ‘moral economy’ to describe the solution. Again, control of markets lay at the centre of their critique; poor consumers had to be protected from market exploitation, not by a paternalistic state but by themselves, through institutions of self-government such as consumer co-operatives and the Land Plan. The Anti-Corn Law League denounced all this. Not that their vision lacked a moral dimension. They believed that commercial freedom paid moral dividends. Free trade was a great cause that involved overthrowing an aristocratic ancien régime that retarded the consuming appetites of the majority. Liberating ‘the people’ as consumers would generate further material progress and would even give some workers the vote, as we have noted. For many of the League free trade was a religion, as they often boasted, and we should not doubt their sincerity on this score. Like all religions, it had a utopian dimension, promising a peaceful world in which the global exchange of goods would civilise both light- and darkskinned consumers. The Tory romantic Thomas Carlyle dismissed all this as a ‘bagman’s’ or salesman’s ‘millennium’ but it was no less real for those who believed in it. The contest between Chartism and the League was a contest between different ways of life, between competing cultures. Both sides thought they stood at the threshold of a new world and tried to force the times to run in their direction. This book argues that liberal consumerism managed to steer a course between these historical alternatives and helped defuse the heat generated by their clash. Liberal Tories such as Sir Robert Peel and William Gladstone came to embrace the free trade utopia, though they had been deeply rocked by the social and political crisis of the 1840s and sought

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therefore to project an image of the state as just and impartial, above the world of class but also willing when necessary to intervene to help and even protect the interests of poor consumers. The chapters that follow represent a group of studies, organised around the themes outlined above, rather than a consecutive narrative. In them, I track the momentous clash between historical alternatives that generated so much political contention in the early to mid nineteenth century and provide a different perspective on these alternatives, from the point of view of the consumer, particularly the poor consumer. I try to show how liberal consumerism helped maintain stability in a society that was on the brink of collapse but also what was lost in that victory for both consumers and citizens. This book is marked no doubt by the pernicious influence of the ‘Research Excellence Framework’, which has increasingly determined the academic production of scholars employed by universities in the United Kingdom over the past two decades. I have tried to turn its effects to my advantage, though readers must judge with what success. On a more positive note, I would like to thank participants who commented on work in progress at conferences at universities in Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Oxford, Santa Cruz (California), Sunderland, Victoria (British Columbia) and the Royal College of Art, London. Different versions of some chapters have appeared as journal articles: Chapter 2 in Past and Present, 203 (2009); Chapter 4 in the Journal of Modern History, 86:3 (2014); Chapter 5 in Labour History Review, 74:1 (2009); and Chapter 7 in Journal of Social History, 40:2 (2006). The following people also read and commented on parts of the text, or offered encouragement and advice at various stages, for which I am most grateful: Joan Allen, Isobel Armstrong, Owen Ashton, Lawrence Black, Malcolm Chase, Paul Corthorn, James Epstein, Matthew Hilton, Gareth Stedman Jones, Joanna Innes, Jeremy Krikler, Keith Laybourn, Rohan McWilliam, Mark Philp, Paul Pickering, Norris Pope, Helen Rogers, Steve Smith, Peter Stearns, Frank Trentmann and John Walton. Thanks also to Jamie and Danielle and most especially to Tonie, for giving me hope. Finally, Rosie was my constant companion while the book was written, and though she showed not the slightest interest in it, she helped pull me through.

1

‘A new order of things’: mapping popular politics onto consumption

In July 1846 no fewer than 500 members of the Council of the Anti-Corn Law League, drawn from all over the country, packed into Manchester Town Hall. The atmosphere was both euphoric – for they were celebrating what they perceived to be a world-historic victory over the Corn Laws – and tinged with deep regret, for they were meeting to disband the organisation that had successfully spearheaded the campaign for the liberalisation of trade during the preceding seven years. There was no short supply of hubris among the speakers. Richard Cobden referred to the abolition of the Corn Laws as the most important event since the beginning of the Christian church: ‘it is a world’s revolution, and nothing else.’ John Bright declaimed that the League ‘will stand before the world as a sign of a new order of things’ and told the audience that ‘we have been living through a revolution without knowing it’. The new order Bright spoke about was one in which the power of ‘the people’, understood to mean the intelligent, respectable sections of the middle and working classes, rather than the aristocracy, would determine the course of national economic and political life. However, it also involved the widening of material prosperity that free trade made possible both at home and abroad. At the core of the campaign for free trade lay the interests of the mass of consumers, conceived in abstract terms. It guaranteed ‘improvement’ for consumers in the widest sense; the prosperity free trade promised to deliver would, it was thought, trickle down through the social structure, civilising and comforting the lives of the majority.1 Abolition of the Corn Laws was highly symbolic because it was seen as the first step on the road to laissez-faire, a thorough separation of the economic from the political domain, which would allow capitalists to function more efficiently and maximise output

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by observing the ‘natural’ laws of the market, laws that the modern science of political economy had only recently revealed. Bright and others warned the audience not to be complacent, however; only a few years previously the country had been on the edge of an abyss and social harmony between classes would only continue along the promising lines exhibited recently in northern manufacturing districts if capitalists shouldered fully their responsibilities and worked hard to increase the ‘enjoyments’ of the working class. This was a truly utopian vision, a secular religion or Weltanschauung that gave purpose to action in the present and inspired hope for a better future. Things were central to it, even the most mundane things conferring rights of citizenship and manhood. As the great liberal historian G. M. Trevelyan remarked in his monumental biography of the leader of the League, for Bright the ‘connection between a good coat and the right to the franchise seemed an obvious first postulate of civilised society; it was an instinct beyond the assault of argument, outside the proper limits of political controversy’.2 We should not be surprised perhaps that a carpet manufacturer like Bright should have such faith in the power of goods to change people’s circumstances and selves. Nor should we be surprised that critics such as Thomas Carlyle sneered at what they regarded as crass materialism, memorably condemning the League as offering nothing more than a ‘bagman’s’, or commercial traveller’s ‘millennium’.3 For good or ill, this is the world that we have inherited. Against free trade and free markets, activists in the Chartist movement urged protection by government and communities, which would only be achieved by the establishment of what they called ‘pure’ or ‘true democracy’. They counterpoised an alternative vision of regulated markets and commercial activity as a solution to the scarcity experienced in the present by poor consumers who could ill afford to wait until the arrival of the ‘bagman’s millennium’. Some of them, including the ideologue and radical journalist James Bronterre O’Brien, picked up the neologism ‘moral economy’ to try to communicate this stress on connection. Contesting the fashionable views of ‘social quacks’ early in 1837, for example, O’Brien argued for what he termed ‘true political economy’, which involved balance and a sense of fairness. Drawing on an idealised view of handicraft and artisan production, O’Brien praised ‘true domestic economy’ that he believed characterised relations within the home and which transgressed any simple dichotomies

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between production and consumption, the moral and the economic. Domestic relations involved the whole person, making it impossible to reduce individuals to hands or gaping mouths. Such truths, he argued, were disregarded by those who ‘make wreck of the affections, in exchange for incessant production and accumulation … It is, indeed, the MORAL ECONOMY that they always keep out of sight.’4 Whatever the shortcomings of this term – and we shall return to these presently – it is important to note how Chartists like O’Brien partly invented and sought to appropriate it within a particular historical conjuncture for their own ends, as a weapon in the struggle against the free trade utopia. The concept of moral economy drew on a partly imagined past in order to project a vision of a regulated economy in the future. Nearly two years later in the radical London paper the Operative, a writer who described himself ‘A Disciple of Bronterre’ (probably O’Brien himself) provided a fascinating sketch of the world of fairs and public markets that had served ordinary consumers until fairly recently. According to the article, relations between producers and consumers had been far more direct before such forms were driven out by ‘shopocrats’ that frequently defrauded or even poisoned poor consumers. The rise of the abstract free market and free trade and the ‘revolution in the exchange of domestic produce and manufactures’ had impoverished consumers and exposed them to ‘the Maltho-Martineau-Broughamic discoveries that very nutritious and finely flavoured soup — for the poor — may be made from bone-powder, brick-dust, and hide-parings seasoned with stinging nettles, and sweet marjoram’. O’Brien and others believed that modern capitalism systematically exploited workingclass consumers, stripped them of any power they had once had and interposed a rapacious class of middlemen between consumers and commodities.5 Chartists were not always opposed to free exchange of goods, certainly, but the free trade project was something quite different, a key component part of what they sardonically dubbed ‘the extension of commerce’, that is, the generalisation of capitalist social relations.6 They would have fully concurred with John Maynard Keynes’s later definition of free trade as the ‘most fervent expression’ of laissez-faire.7 The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman predicted some years ago ‘that sooner or later, we will rewrite the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because we understood nineteenth-century

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history only as the production of industrialism’, and he went on to ask: ‘What about the production of consumerism?’8 This study is intended as a contribution to this wider investigation. For sure, early historians of consumption documented the emergence of the middle-class consumer in the eighteenth century, and that century continues to hold an enduring fascination.9 However, the reach of consumer markets was limited during this period and it was only from the mid nineteenth century that the majority could afford much more than the necessities of life. This book is concerned with how middle- and working-class consumers were configured and mobilised by popular political movements during a crucial period of capitalist transition. It is about the struggle between alternative paths of historical development as they affected the mass of consumers, which played out from the early nineteenth century. It foregrounds particularly the contested and uneven development of the working-class consumer in England between the First and Second Reform Acts and explores the making of a social order in which consumer interests and consumption practices were considered increasingly to lie at the root of society, economics and politics, providing a shared focus, which transcended particular domains. It aims therefore to bring the historiographies of popular politics and consumption into closer dialogue with one another. A particular concern is with the political and ideological production of the worker as desiring consumer and with the construction of the idea that social advance could best be gauged in terms of the acquisition of material things. The intention is not to be exhaustive but to illuminate by means of detailed analysis of important sites of ideological and practical contention the three key questions that inform this work: in what ways and with what success did working-class and middle-class radicals think about and organise around consumption; how did political ideologies attempt to speak for and represent the mass of consumers; and how was the gulf between poor and rich consumers, between scarcity and excess, handled or naturalised by working-class and middle-class radicals? In fine, this study explores how new ways of being a consumer meshed with political identities and belongings. John Bright’s words provide a useful departure point: the argument of this book is that the new order that emerged during the mid nineteenth century put things firmly centre stage.

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Historiographies The field of nineteenth-century popular politics has attracted generations of historians, constituting the empirical terrain on which many important methodological and theoretical breakthroughs have been made. How relative social and political stability was maintained despite severe strains in the world’s first industrial nation has understandably exerted an enduring fascination. Writing from the turn of the century, radical liberal and Fabian historians interpreted Chartism as a more or less inchoate protest against the development of free market capitalism, limited in various ways by the nature of its critique.10 Whether a profound caesura occurred at mid-century was a key theme in the literature from the start, with some socialist scholars narrating the decline of Chartism as a kind of fall.11 As labour and social history became more firmly established institutionally after the Second World War, the exact filiations between popular radicalism and popular liberalism began to be explored more fully. Following Eric Hobsbawm’s seminal studies, historians sought to better understand how workers had been ‘incorporated’ into capitalism, eventually accepting the economic system as the only possible framework for action. A variety of approaches were adopted: Marxist scholars emphasised structural factors such as the emergence of a ‘labour aristocracy’ as well as the deliberate defeat of Chartism by the state; while those influenced more by Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony accented shared values that encouraged the growth of ‘reformism’.12 The Marxist legacy made it harder to grasp the significance of the period for the birth of the modern consumer, for if the sphere of consumption featured at all in this work it was merely as a site of class conciliation and ‘false consciousness’.13 Many commentators have noted how Marx marginalised if not ignored the consumer entirely and concentrated on the experience of working people as producers, despite an early concern with the loss of customary rights such as gleaning among peasant proprietors in the Rhineland.14 Like many other nineteenth-century thinkers, Marx believed work had an ontological significance, defining what he called ‘species being’, whereas consumption was of secondary importance or else negatively freighted. He fully grasped the messianic appeal of free trade for important sections of the middle class but read it as nothing more than freedom of capital, the motor of capitalist globalisation

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that would inevitably pitch class against class, thereby hastening ‘the social revolution’.15 Moreover, Marx had little understanding of the role of consumer organising in forging political identities and class consciousness, and for an analyst of the commodity form he showed remarkably little interest in things.16 Although his later work revealed a growing fascination with the plethora of goods that crowded the Victorian metropolis and also sketched a highly suggestive way of making sense of them with the notion of commodity fetishism, Marx tended to view commodities merely as signs of ‘alienation’.17 Thus, he underestimated both the ability of market capitalism to spread material benefits more widely and how consumer goods or ‘comforts’ could be signs of hope and improvement, for workers as well as those better off. It is hardly surprising that critics have never tired of pointing out that, notwithstanding Marx’s prognosis, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a general if often limited and precarious rise in living standards. This blind spot on Marx’s part is one reason why the historical study of consumption has only emerged relatively recently. Much is understood about how modern workers as producers were ‘made’ by such means as the spread of the wage relation and capitalist labour market, increased competition and intensity of labour, the imposition of time discipline and the development of the factory system and so on, and we know much about workers’ responses to these changes, but the making of the worker as consumer is far more shadowy. Little light has been shed on this subject by more recent studies of popular politics either. As the transition to industrial capitalism along with the question of ‘class’ slid off the academic agenda during the 1980s, so continuities between popular radicalism and popular liberalism post-mid-century began to be stressed. Of seminal importance here was the work of Gareth Stedman Jones, who related Chartism back to eighteenth-century discourses of reform that prioritised constitutional change, therefore minimising the Chartist challenge to the British state as well as the movement’s working-class character.18 A strange mix of bedfellows followed his lead, becoming more or less enthusiastic advocates of the socalled ‘linguistic turn’. Some asserted ‘the basically constitutionalist nature’ of Chartism, while others went further still, claiming that constitutionalism represented no less than a ‘master narrative’, which dominated the political field.19 Patrick Joyce, the dean of the postmodernist school, sought to substitute ‘the people’ for ‘class’

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as the master category of historical analysis, a category deeply inscribed in both Chartism and popular liberalism.20 The heated debates that occurred during the 1990s over such issues were partly a struggle waged by a younger generation of historians against what they construed to be the dead weight of classical Marxism, embodied particularly by Edward Thompson’s work that was frequently misrepresented as crudely reductionist.21 The current scholarly orthodoxy is that there was a fairly unproblematic relationship between earlier and later phases of the history of popular radicalism, that Chartism was not defeated but ‘mellowed’ inevitably into liberalism.22 Popular liberalism has been read by Eugenio Biagini, for example, as an authentic expression of working-class aspirations, rather than an index of incorporation, which reached its apogee with the sanctification of the Liberal leader Gladstone as the ‘People’s William’ in the early 1860s.23 However, such an approach underestimates both the way in which contemporaries themselves felt a profound caesura had occurred around mid-century and the persistence of class conflict, as Philip Harling has argued in a judicious review of the field.24 Although it has not exerted the same fascination as Chartism perhaps, the Anti-Corn Law League has been well served by historians, especially in recent years. Earlier works that portrayed the League as a fairly ineffective middle-class pressure group have now been supplemented by studies that adopt a much more wide-ranging approach. Alex Tyrrell and Paul Pickering in particular have shown how the organisation attempted, with varying degrees of success, to address the concerns of working people and build an imaginative nationwide campaign around free trade ideology.25 Remarkably, however, neither the way in which the League sought to represent consumers, nor the importance of the League as a form of consumer organising, have been properly assessed. The influential work by Frank Trentmann on the Edwardian defence of free trade is relevant here, for he has forcefully argued that ideas about free trade permeated all levels of civil society, involving far more than abstruse economic doctrine and projecting a vision of how society and economy should be organised domestically and internationally.26 His claim that the ‘citizen consumer’ was a product of the early years of the twentieth century seriously underestimates the earlier contribution of the League, however, which is also best approached as an ambitious cultural project. It was no accident surely that leaders of the

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League spoke of the ‘religion of free trade’, as the doctrine, liturgy and symbolism of free trade culture helped imbue individual and national life with meaning, for the most zealous converts at least. Like Anglicanism, free trade was a broad church, its culture flexible enough to accommodate trenchant critics of unregulated capitalism such as Charles Dickens and others who, as we shall see, had deep misgivings about laissez-faire and ‘Manchesterism’, but who agreed with the leaders of the League that free trade represented the best hope for consumers in general, both at home and abroad. We might also note in passing how free trade culture was communicated through commodities: one thinks for instance of how the cult of Cobden, Bright and Gladstone was created by means of a plethora of commemorative mugs, plates and teapots that were produced throughout the second half of the nineteenth century.27 Cultural historians have taught us a great deal about middle-class consumption practices in recent decades, focusing particularly on the impact of more spectacular forms like department stores, but they have tended not to pursue links between politics and consumption.28 Deborah Cohen, for example, has sensitively explored how middle-class women but also men learnt to be consumers during the long nineteenth century and lays particular stress on the way in which religious hostility to consumerism during the ‘age of atonement’ in the earlier decades gave way from around the 1850s to an incarnational theology that legitimated the love of domestic things.29 Household furniture in particular came to be evaluated in moral terms, though too much weight is put on this aspect and political relationships and conflicts are largely ignored. As the preceding discussion indicates, it makes more sense to argue that free trade ideology rather than furniture helped dispel middle-class anxieties about consumerism. Of more direct relevance to the present study is the important research of historical geographers and economic historians who have sought to map the quantitative, spatial development of the ‘mass market’ in nineteenth-century Britain, including changes in systems of retailing, wholesaling and distribution that made it possible to feed the new urban populations.30 Though older forms such as markets and itinerant traders expanded to meet rising demand, the number of shops increased in early Victorian England and the experience of shopping consequently became a more salient feature of working-class life. Between 1830 and 1853, for example,

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the number of shops listed in trade directories for the mostly working-class Halifax–Calder Valley area in West Yorkshire more than doubled, rising from 865 to 1,775 and reflecting the increased purchasing power of factory workers. Most of these shops sold foodstuffs, though clothing and footwear made up almost a third of the total.31 Market functions were already separated into wholesaling and retailing by 1800 in many towns and this specialisation accelerated during the first half of the nineteenth century and beyond. Though continuities in retailing were certainly important and small traders were to predominate before the so-called ‘retailing revolution’ and the rise of multiple, chain and department stores in the late nineteenth century, profound changes were in train.32 Branded goods like Colman’s mustard, Reckitt’s starch and Holloway’s pills, for example, were common before and just after mid-century, marketed nationally and puffed by advertisements that were plastered on any available space in the urban environment, much to the disgust of Thomas Carlyle, who denounced the practice as pathological, a specifically modern ‘mania’.33 Despite the views of some recent scholars, workers were not shut out from the development of a ‘commodity culture’ but were deeply affected by it.34 Though the emphasis in much of the historical literature has been on how the lives of ordinary people were ameliorated by the changes briefly sketched above, the experience of poor consumers was much more complex than that. Transformations on the supply side meant that workers lost what little non-market means of subsistence they had previously enjoyed, though some clung on as best they could, keeping pigs in the most unlikely circumstances, for instance; Friedrich Engels notoriously observed how Irish immigrants in Manchester let ‘the pig sleep in the room with himself’.35 Inexorably, however, the majority lost any ability they had once had to ‘gnaw it out’ during hard times, simultaneously also becoming more vulnerable to the threat of exploitation as consumers.36 Constrained by quotidian realities, their consumption practices made them an easy target. The poorest workers often shopped daily for small quantities of staple commodities such as tea and sugar and frequently had little choice but to accept underweight and adulterated goods. Vegetables and meat were usually purchased on Saturday nights after they had been paid, by which time the best produce had invariably been sold.37 The golden age for popular consumers sketched by ‘A Disciple of Bronterre’ was

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undoubtedly mythical; changes had been occurring since the late eighteenth century and immoral market practices went back to time out of mind.38 However, such views contained more than a grain of truth and, more importantly, they provided a useful tool with which to criticise present unfairness. They also serve to underscore how the politics of consumption has been remarkably understudied, particularly during the ‘Hungry Forties’ when consumer issues were at the centre of popular politics. In this book, ‘hunger’ provides a bridge between popular politics and consumption. The term needs to be understood as both a noun and a verb, in the narrower sense – the pain in the gut – and in its more expansive meaning – the intense desire for things. James Vernon’s stimulating history of the former has demonstrated how even the most basic issue facing consumers, the satisfaction of daily nutritional requirements, has always been filtered through culture and embedded in a complex web of power relations. Hunger was represented, made sense of and controlled in novel ways by the capitalist state in England from the early nineteenth century onwards. Vernon sheds a good deal of light on the management of hunger, though his work is disabled by its Foucauldian underpinnings; we learn much about those nutritionists and bureaucrats working through the social democratic state who sought to handle the manifold problems generated by the persistence of scarcity but little about how plebeian consumers responded to the difficulties they faced.39 This book takes a different approach. Focusing on a narrower time period, the intention is to hold together in tension the alternative explanations for and representations of hunger by Chartists and members of the Anti-Corn Law League, in order to situate contemporary debates on hunger more concretely in their appropriate field of force. Moreover, I am also interested in the practical efforts made by these bodies to organise the political power of consumers for social change. Lastly, this study is also concerned with the way in which wanting and having were invariably intertwined within popular political discourses. Chartists wondered why the common people went hungry in a land of increasing plenty at the same time as supporters of the League celebrated the cornucopian world of goods that, they argued, free trade had brought about. To write the history of the emergence of the consumer is necessarily, then, to write a political history. For as the anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued – and both Chartists and members of the

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Anti-Corn Law League fully understood – consumption raises major questions concerning the distribution and allocation of resources and is therefore centrally about political relationships, about relations of power.40 Although my study commences in the 1830s, this is not because this decade can be seen as the putative origin of modern consumerism. After all, in England the roots of a culture in which the consumer assumed a central importance have been traced back variously to the early modern period; the commercial revolution of the eighteenth century; the expansion of advertising and branding in the late nineteenth century; and the onset of mass consumption after the Second World War.41 Besides the general problem of timing, it is also worth bearing in mind Margot Finn’s apposite criticism of ‘culturalist’ generalisations about the so-called modernity of Victorian consumer society; continuities were undoubtedly important and we will return to them later in this study.42 Nevertheless, although the making of the modern consumer was a long-drawn-out, open-ended process, the early to mid-Victorian period witnessed a most significant confrontation that pitted competing visions of consumption against one another. The tendency of recent work to ignore or jettison notions of transition has gone too far and we still do not fully understand what changed from the point of view of the consumer in the course of the nineteenth century. Karl Polanyi, for example, saw the early Victorian decades as a watershed, and although he got it wrong about Speenhamland and ignored the experience of consumers, his approach to the general problem remains highly suggestive.43 Before outlining the structure and argument of the book in more detail, it is important to briefly look at how plebeian consumers featured in the work of those ‘social quacks’ ridiculed by O’Brien. For some prominent intellectuals, expanding the desires of poor consumers was of the utmost importance in securing national greatness. The heated debate over the treatment of the poor at the start of our period brought such ideas to the surface. Fear and hope in the age of improvement As an emergent form of knowledge, political economy cut its teeth on the English poor from the late eighteenth century. Searching for ways to reduce state expenditure on the poor laws, the Reverend Joseph Townsend coolly observed: ‘Hunger will tame the fiercest animals.’44 However, it was the Reverend Thomas Malthus who

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launched what was to be the most influential intellectual assault on the existing system of relief in the late 1790s. For Malthus, the poor laws greatly contributed to the trend whereby population growth outstripped the means of subsistence and had necessarily ‘demoralised’ the labouring poor, encouraging them to have families before they were able to support them without parish relief. There was no alternative, therefore, but to abolish the poor laws entirely.45 Nassau William Senior sharpened his own views against those of Malthus. An optimistic bourgeois revolutionary – Marx called him the ‘bel-esprit’ of economists – Senior was appointed to the first chair of political economy at Oxford University in 1825.46 He agreed with Malthus that something urgently needed to be done, that the poor represented a serious drain on the nation’s finances that retarded economic growth. Senior argued, however, that reform rather than abolition was necessary in order to make workers more efficient. The Old Poor Law he thought no less than a form of slavery, which undermined the self-respect and independence of labourers. The operation of the poor laws, particularly the way wages were supplemented out of the rates by a complex system of allowances that varied from region to region, held back labour productivity and hampered the proper working of the labour market and the capitalist economy more generally. In lectures delivered at Oxford early in 1830, he sketched ‘the natural state of the relation between the capitalist and the labourer’, whereby each party benefited one another by pursuing their own interests. Basing his argument on the wage fund theory, Senior stressed how the ‘natural’ laws of the market were undermined by the poor laws, which reduced workers to the condition of slaves: ‘the instant wages ceases to be a bargain – the instant the labourer is paid, not according to his value, but his wants, he ceases to be a freeman.’47 According to Senior, the allowance system had led to a fundamental confusion of categories, which would require much ideological and practical effort to put right. In particular, Senior criticised the capacious meaning of the word ‘poor’. Encompassing the minority who were unable to maintain themselves for good reason and who therefore deserved to be provided for, the word was generally used much more loosely: ‘In its widest acceptation it is opposed to the word rich; and in its most common use it includes all, except the higher and middle classes – in short, all who derive their subsistence solely from manual labour … In this sense all the labouring classes,

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that is to say, nine-tenths of the inhabitants of England, are poor.’48 Senior argued that this conflation was specifically written into the poor laws from the time of Speenhamland in 1795, with disastrous results. Although the poor laws had largely removed fear from the lives of the labouring population, they had also extinguished hope, and this fundamental defect undermined the whole edifice. Senior attacked the labour-rate, for example, in a letter to Lord Althorp in 1833, stating: We deplore the misconception of the poor in thinking that wages are not a matter of contract but of right; that any diminution of their comforts occasioned by an increase of their numbers without an equal increase of the fund for their subsistence is an evil to be remedied not by themselves, but by the magistrate – not an error, or even a misfortune, but an injustice.

The ultimate effect of this pernicious system, Senior continued, was the conversion of labourers into ‘a semi-servile populace, without fear but without hope’ (my emphasis) and he went on to ask, if this happened, ‘where can we look for the materials of improvement?’49 The dialectic of fear and hope is a guiding thread that runs through all Senior’s writings on the poor laws. Senior believed that a reformed Poor Law could help produce consumers as well as workers. For him, the ‘comforts’ or consumer goods that were becoming more widely diffused than ever before embodied the hopes of the majority, signified the dawning of an age of improvement, qualitatively as well as quantitatively better than the past. In this respect, Senior can be regarded as a prophet of modern consumerism. He developed his position in two lectures in 1828, in which he distinguished between ‘necessaries’, ‘decencies’ and ‘luxuries’. The first category was required to maintain life, while the second enabled one to maintain one’s station. ‘Luxuries’, rather vaguely, included everything else. Senior stressed that these terms were relative, overlapped and changed according to time and place. Different levels of civilisation could be gauged by the diffusion of goods; national identity and consumption habits were bound closely together. Shoes were necessaries in England, while ‘To the lowest class of the inhabitants of Scotland they are luxuries … When a Scotchman rises from the lowest to the middling classes of society they become to him decencies. He wears them not to preserve his feet, but his station in life.’50 What gave Malthus’s preventive checks

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real force, according to Senior, was the ‘apprehension of a deficiency of necessaries, decencies, or luxuries, or, in other words, of prudence’. English workers did not fear actual want as they were protected by ‘the fence of the poor laws’, but they were anxious about their social status and were thus frequently induced to postpone marriage ‘not merely by the fear of sinking, but also by the hope, that in an unencumbered state, they may rise’.51 The unproductive consumption of luxury goods, often censured by earlier economists, now figured as an index of improvement: ‘As wealth increases, what were the luxuries of one generation become the decencies of their successors. Not only a taste for additional comfort and convenience, but a feeling of degradation in their absence becomes more and more widely diffused … increased comforts should not only accompany, but rather precede, increase of numbers.’52 Such views had yet to find majority support among political economists at the start of our period, though John Ramsay McCulloch – a prolific populariser of this emergent ‘science’53 – was among those who were persuaded. McCulloch had initially followed Malthus in rejecting the poor laws but, finding Senior’s arguments more appealing, changed his mind. The role of the worker as consumer is vital for understanding this shift in his thinking. McCulloch emphasised the central part played by the consumer in the capitalist economy in a widely read textbook first published in 1825. Like Senior, he argued that labourers exercised more restraint when they had developed the desire for an expansive range of comforts, and he strongly advocated the importance of a high-wage economy as a means of facilitating this. Once ‘new and improved tastes and habits’ have been formed, McCulloch argued, population fell as labourers practised moral restraint.54 Agreeing with Adam Smith’s dictum that ‘Consumption is the great end and object of all human industry’, he nevertheless rejected Smith’s unhelpful, moralistic distinction between ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ consumption.55 For McCulloch, the march of civilisation and the growth of consumer desire – the demand for more ‘conveniences and luxuries’ – were inextricably linked. He made this clear in a remarkably modern-sounding passage: No progress can be made in civilization, in any country, until this desire has been excited: and the more powerful and urgent it becomes, the more rapid will be the accumulation of wealth, and the more

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prosperous will every individual become … To make men industrious – to make them shake off that lethargy which is natural to them, they must be inspired with a taste for the luxuries and enjoyments of civilized life. When this is done, their artificial wants will become equally clamorous with those that are strictly necessary, and they will increase exactly as the means of gratifying them increase. Wherever a taste for comforts and conveniences has been generally diffused, the wants and desires of man become altogether unlimited. The gratification of one leads directly to the formation of another. In highly civilized societies, new products and new modes of enjoyment are constantly presenting themselves as motives to exertion, and as means of rewarding it.56

McCulloch later presciently observed that although the enjoyment of consumer goods ‘may pall upon the sense’, such disappointment ‘invariably tempts to new efforts; so that the pursuit of even imaginary conveniences – of riches, distinctions, and enjoyments that can never be realised, is productive of an intensity of gratification, unknown in the apathy of a fixed or permanent situation’.57 Thus, modern acquisitive consumers had their apathetic ‘other’, those accustomed to ‘a fixed or permanent situation’; McCulloch believed that barbaric or semi-barbaric peoples lacked the desire for things that characterised more advanced societies.58 Not surprisingly perhaps, it was the Irish that were frequently singled out as an example of backwardness, not only by McCulloch but also by James Phillips Kay in an influential pamphlet that condemned the way the Irish poor in Manchester ‘have discovered, with the savage, what is the minimum of the means of life, upon which existence may be prolonged’. Kay thought the habits of Irish immigrants especially threatening because they were contagious: The paucity of the amount of means and comforts necessary for the mere support of life, is not known by a more civilised population, and this secret has been taught the labourers of this country by the Irish … Instructed in the fatal secret of subsisting on what is barely necessary to life, – yielding partly to necessity, and partly to example, – the labouring classes have ceased to entertain a laudable pride in furnishing their houses, and in multiplying the decent comforts which minister to happiness.59

Intellectuals like McCulloch and would-be state servants like Kay came to support the poor laws because Senior’s work had convinced them that it was possible to radically reform the legislation

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in order to simultaneously discipline labour while still providing a safety net that would protect against the long-term degradation of the poor consumer, whose expanding desires served to drive the capitalist economy forward. All ardent free traders, they believed a reconstructed Poor Law was vital in order to maintain the spark of hope and the whip of fear, both equally necessary for continued material improvement.60 Structure The relatively high-wage, high-consumption economy that liberal intellectuals such as Senior and McCulloch believed had helped bring about Britain’s remarkable transformation has lately been rediscovered by economic historians. For Jan de Vries, for example, it was the desire of plebeian as well as middle-rank consumers for material ‘comforts’ that powered the ‘industrious revolution’ from the late eighteenth century. He therefore rejects the notion that collectivist-minded pre-capitalist workers waged a heroic if doomed struggle to protect the ‘moral economy’ against the ineluctable rise of the free market, a view that de Vries ascribes to Edward Thompson and his followers.61 Many other scholars have voiced dissatisfaction with the concept of moral economy during the last decade or so. In his study of the ‘politics of provisions’ over three centuries, John Bohstedt has found little evidence to support the idea that challenges to a paternalist moral economy in the second half of the eighteenth century explain food rioting, which occurred over the longue durée.62 Others have also reminded us that commercial relations in Victorian and Edwardian England were invariably shaped by moral considerations.63 The intention in this work is not to try to resuscitate this concept, which may or may not be of some use still in understanding eighteenth-century social relations. But I am interested in the historical context within which the term emerged and how radicals used it to critique the disaggregating effects of laissez-faire capitalism and the free trade utopia, as my opening discussion indicated. What historians wedded to the continuity thesis continue to underestimate is the profound trauma felt by working people before mid-century as relations of consumption as well as production were subject to continual transformation. Again, and despite undeniable continuities, we need to recover a sense of transition.

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The present book attempts to uncover a genealogy of the modern consumer as well as links between the consumer and changing democratic discourses. Between the First and Second Reform Acts popular movements acting in the interests of consumers came to exert a major influence on the operation of state power and their views impinged directly on debates concerning the extension and meaning of citizenship. The idea of the ‘citizen consumer’, elaborated by Lizabeth Cohen in her important work on the political history of the United States after the First World War, is useful here. Admittedly, the ‘intermeshing of the economic and political rights’ of people was not formally constituted in Victorian Britain in the same way or on the same scale as it was in New Deal America. Nevertheless, government officials and politicians in Britain did embrace the consumer more wholeheartedly from the 1840s as it became clear that consumer interests lay at the heart of popular political contention.64 Both the Anti-Corn Law League that effectively mobilised middle-class consumers in civil society and the Chartist movement, which sought to harness working-class consumer power as part of its anti-state strategy, offered alternative agendas for consumers and democratic change. The contest between these bodies helped bring consumers squarely onto the historical stage and made it impossible (and highly dangerous) for government to ignore their wishes. The inauguration of Peel and Gladstone’s fiscal regime by the ‘Bombshell Budget’ of 1842 made this recognition explicit. The League mobilised middle-class consumers behind a utopian image of plenty and, with less success, attempted to popularise this image among working-class consumers. Consumption was configured as having both private and public significance: rising demand for goods across classes was regarded as the bedrock of moral as well as material progress, while parliamentary reform was thought necessary by Cobden and Bright so that those workers who had accumulated sufficient property by means of their thrifty consumer practices could be brought within the polity. For their part, Chartists organised workers as consumers in civil society by means of exclusive dealing and later, more formally, in joint-stock retail co-operatives. The latter were vital training schools of practical self-government and many of them were formed from the late 1830s, especially in northern industrial districts. For both the League and the Chartists, then, politics was both ordinary and extraordinary; their competing ideologies and activities harnessed seemingly mundane, quotidian

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acts of buying and selling in order not merely to tinker at the margins but to change the world. This book aims to illuminate this tangled relationship from a new perspective. The overt contest between the League and the Chartist movement in 1842 provides the major focus in Chapter 2, for it was during the ‘sacred month’ or general strike of that year that alternative paths of development for consumers as well as producers were most clearly polarised. Contests over the representation and meaning of ‘hunger’ as well as its causes and possible cures were particularly acute at this juncture and the chapter therefore pays close attention to the gothic and melodramatic tropes that marked competing discourses. Government appeasement of poor consumers played a vital role in defusing the violent social conflicts that convulsed the country that year. Growing inequalities between consumers posed difficult problems for successive governments; Peel’s fiscal strategy was expressly designed to smooth things over and though it was highly imaginative and effective in the longer term, during the ‘Hungry Forties’ this proved an impossible task. Chapter 3 takes up the story of Poor Law reform once again, moving back briefly to the 1830s before concentrating on the various scandals that blew up over workhouse dietaries, particularly the scandal of the Andover workhouse in 1845. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 can be regarded as a means by which the entitlement or ‘social norm of consumption’ of the labouring poor was recalibrated.65 Balancing hope and fear was a very tricky business, however, and conflicts over what constituted the basic rights of poor consumers continued throughout the 1840s; indeed, Chartist ideas about consumption were shaped profoundly from the beginning by a measure that was deeply resented. Continued pressure from Tory paternalists such as John Walter at The Times and from the popular movement on the ground led eventually to modification of government policy and also generated a ‘humanitarian’ campaign that attempted to cut across class boundaries. Chapter 4 analyses Chartist discourse in depth. It contests the idea that Chartism was characterised by a ‘constitutionalist’ idiom and argues instead for the centrality of democratic ideas and languages within the movement. Rejecting paternalist solutions to the problem of scarcity, Chartists argued instead for self-government over all aspects of economic and social life, and this included democratic control of consumer markets in order to protect and empower

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working people as consumers. A contrast is drawn here with middle-class radicals’ advocacy of household suffrage, which reduced the vote itself to a commodity or thing and asserted an indissoluble link between citizenship and property that was anathema to most Chartists. Leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League desired a kind of pocketbook democracy – to adapt Meg Jacobs’s term – and regarded the growth of consumerism and rights of citizenship bound together as parts of the same world-historical project: the triumph of capitalist modernity.66 The ideals of what working-class radicals often called ‘pure’ or ‘true democracy’ embodied in Chartist culture had to be defeated, then, before the modern consumer could fully emerge. Chapter 5 goes on to analyse Chartist consumer politics in more detail, paying particular attention to both the nature of their ideological criticisms and their practical attempts to democratically control and regulate markets for consumers. Contesting the pernicious results of ‘exclusive power’ and ‘exclusive law’, the Chartists took up the weapons of their adversaries and tried to effect change by means of political shopping or ‘exclusive dealing’. The chapter discusses the reality of consumer exploitation faced by the poor in more depth and assesses the extent and success of Chartist jointstock retail co-operatives in solving these problems. It closes with a consideration of the tendency towards the depoliticisation of these forms after the defeat of 1842, when economic and political solutions were increasingly fractured within the popular movement. The early work of Charles Dickens is important to this study. As Chapter 6 demonstrates, not only was Dickens an incisive observer of Victorian consumers but also he was deeply troubled about the kind of society whose emergence he witnessed. On the one hand, Dickens had deep sympathy for poor consumers and joined forces with Tory critics of the New Poor Law in the late 1830s, launching an attack on the workhouse dietary that has survived until today. On the other hand, Dickens had no time for either Tory protectionists or the popular democratic movement and threw in his lot with free trade radicals from the mid 1840s, though his support was conditional. Dickens’s fully mature work in fact presented a powerful critique of the philistinism and anti-humanism represented by the ‘bagman’s millennium’. It helped moralise the progressive mission of free trade capitalism and disseminate it to a wider audience, though not immediately as Dickens was only gradually taken up by many of ‘the people’, who often preferred the more combative writings

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of G. W. M. Reynolds in the 1840s and well beyond. Picking up the theme of the popularisation of free trade radicalism, Chapter 7 then looks at the National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar held at Covent Garden, London, in the spring of 1845 as exemplary of the League’s ambitious cultural project. All too often the League has been treated as a fairly lifeless economic think tank or political pressure group, when in reality it was characterised by a vibrant cultural life, which fired the enthusiasm of masses of middle-class consumers and helped invent new ways of talking about commodities. Despite the contradictions that marked the event, the free trade utopia found effusive expression in the plethora of goods on display at the Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar, an exhibition that for many presaged a cornucopian future for all. This message of hope continued as a dominant motif at both the Great Exhibition held six years later as well as at the Crystal Palace after the structure was moved to Sydenham in south London in 1854. These later chapters argue that popular liberalism depended for its success to a hitherto unacknowledged extent on what we might call liberal consumerism, that is, a historically contingent engagement with the mass of consumers, which was embedded in particular forms and practices. In short, popular liberalism was a hegemonic political project that managed to reconcile successfully the ambition and identities of free trade utopianists and affluent middle-class consumers with a concern for the specific experiences of workers as consumers, experiences that were all too often shaped by the continuing reality of scarcity and exploitation. The dynamic Cobdenite view of an expanding economy was tempered in practice by an evangelical understanding of free trade found particularly in the writings of the Christian economist Thomas Chalmers, who exerted a strong influence on Peel. Thus, the latter was prepared to expose landowners to the justice of the ‘God-given’ market, while simultaneously using fiscal policy to help create social and political stability.67 By the end of the period covered by this book, many among the dominant elites frequently articulated the belief that spreading affluence would not only materially improve the lives of workers but also encourage more of them to actively participate in what was regarded as the legitimate political field, a view that sharply contrasts with the presumed effects of affluence on workers nearer our own time. However, a major problem for liberalism before

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and after the middle of the century remained: how to normalise the growing gulf between scarcity and excess – vividly dramatised by the struggle between free traders and Chartists – and demonstrate meaningfully that free trade would guarantee more comforts for the majority. Gladstonian liberalism represented an attempt to moralise the capitalist market; poor consumers were assured that free trade would eventually deliver the good life for all but that in the bad times help would be provided by the state as well as by private humanitarian effort when that proved inadequate.68 Chapter 8 explores these imperatives in the context of the Lancashire ‘Cotton Famine’ in the early 1860s, which tested the optimism of free trade ideologues to the limit. In the course of a few years, workers whose experiences seemed to prove the correctness of the League’s vision of plenty were reduced to begging in the streets, provoking the world’s first successful international humanitarian campaign to alleviate the suffering of the poor and prop up the social norm of consumption that had only lately been enjoyed by hard-working, deserving Lancashire consumers. The epilogue briefly considers the forces that threatened to unravel liberal consumerism as it reached its zenith in the late 1860s. Though the new order of things that had emerged by this time was the antithesis of that envisaged by the Chartists, it was also far from that desired by Cobden and Bright. If popular liberalism now managed to speak successfully for the mass of consumers – or at least for those who had a political voice – its hegemony was neither totally secure nor assured in the longer term. Notes (The place of publication is London unless otherwise specified). 1 Manchester Times, 3 July 1846, pp. 3–4. 2 G. M. Trevelyan, The life of John Bright (1913), p. 60. 3 The description can be traced to Thomas Carlyle, who is reported to have referred to Cobden in 1849 as ‘an inspired bagman who believes in a calico millennium’. T. Wemyss Reid, The life, letters and friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes (1891), vol. I, p. 436. The shortened version appeared soon after and it stuck; see W. E. Aytoun, ‘The industry of the people’, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 68 (July 1850), 114; John Morley, The life of Richard Cobden (1881), vol. I, pp. 206–7; Richard Gowing, Richard Cobden (1885), pp. 19–20; ‘The “Bagman’s Millennium”’, Fair Trade, 31 December 1886, p. 134;

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‘A new order of things’ Henry Sidgwick, The elements of politics (1891), p. 293; Andrew Williamson, British industries and foreign competition (1894), p. 86. Bronterre’s National Reformer, 21 January 1837, p. 21, cited in E. P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy reviewed’, in Customs in common (1991), p. 337. Operative, 4 November 1838, p. 4; Alfred Plummer, Bronterre: a political biography of Bronterre O’Brien, 1804–1864 (1971), p. 87. For examples, see Northern Star, 18 December 1841, p. 4; 24 December 1841, p. 4; 1 January 1842, p. 5; 8 January 1842, p. 4; 22 January 1842, p. 1; 30 July 1842, p. 4. ‘The end of laissez faire’ (1926), in The collected writings of John Maynard Keynes (Cambridge, 1972), vol. IX, p. 278. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of postmodernity (1992), p. 223. From an expanding list, see Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The birth of a consumer society: the commercialization of 18th century England (1982); Lorna Weatherill, Consumer behaviour and material culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (1988); Beverly Lemire, Fashion’s favourite: the cotton trade and the consumer in Britain, 1660–1800 (Oxford, 1991); Amanda Vickery, The gentleman’s daughter: women’s lives in Georgian England (New Haven, CT, 1998); John Styles, The dress of the people: everyday fashion in eighteenth-century England (New Haven, CT, 2007); Jon Stobart, Sugar and spice: grocers and groceries in provincial England, 1650–1830 (Oxford, 2012). Sidney and Beatrice Webb, History of trade unionism (1896) and Industrial democracy (1897); John and Barbara Hammond, The rise of modern industry (1925). For the context, see P. F. Clarke, Liberals and social democrats (Cambridge, 1978); Royden Harrison, The life and times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb: 1858–1905, the formative years (Basingstoke, 2000). Theodore Rothstein, From Chartism to Labourism: historical sketches of the English working class movement (1929); G. D. H. Cole and Raymond Postgate, The common people, 1746–1938 (1946). From a very large literature, see Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring men: studies in the history of labour (1964) and Worlds of labour: further studies in the history of labour (1984); Royden Harrison, Before the socialists: studies in labour and politics, 1861–1881 (1965); Robert Gray, The labour aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford, 1976); Trygve Tholfsen, Working class radicalism in mid-Victorian England (1976); John Foster, Class struggle and the Industrial Revolution: early industrial capitalism in three English towns (1977); Geoffrey Crossick, An artisan elite in Victorian society: Kentish London, 1840–1880 (1978); Patrick Joyce, Work, society, and politics: the culture of the factory in later Victorian England (1980); Neville Kirk, The growth of working

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class reformism in mid-Victorian England (1985); John Saville, 1848: the British state and the Chartist movement (Cambridge, 1987). I explored this issue more fully in my monograph, Co-operative culture and the politics of consumption in England, 1870–1930 (Manchester, 1996). See his articles from 1842 in the Rheinische Zeitung, republished in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, collected works [MECW] (New York, 1975), vol. I, pp. 109–47; Harry Lubasz, ‘Marx’s initial problematic: the problem of poverty’, Political Studies, 24:1 (1976), 24–42. See Marx’s speech in 1848 to the Democratic Association of Brussels, ‘On the question of free trade’, MECW, vol. VI. Margot Finn, The character of credit: personal debt in English culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 6–7. Note Marx’s observation in Contribution to a critique of political economy (1859): ‘The busiest streets of London are crowded with shops whose show cases display all the riches of the world, Indian shawls, American revolvers, Chinese porcelain, Parisian corsets, furs from Russia and spices from the tropics, but all of these worldly things bear odious, white paper labels with Arabic numerals and then laconic symbols £. s. d.’ MECW, vol. XXIX. Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in Languages of class: studies in English working class history 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983); ‘The determinist fix: some obstacles to the further development of the linguistic approach to history in the 1990s’, History Workshop Journal, 42 (1996), 19–35. Miles Taylor, The decline of British radicalism, 1847–1860 (Oxford, 1995), p. 100; James Vernon, Politics and the people: a study in English political culture, 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 296–7, 320; James Vernon (ed.), Re-reading the constitution: new narratives in the political history of England’s long nineteenth century (Cambridge, 1996). Patrick Joyce, Visions of the people: industrial England and the question of class, 1840–1914 (Cambridge, 1991); Democratic subjects: the self and the social in nineteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1994). Geoff Eley and Keith Nield, The future of class in history: what’s left of the social? (Michigan, 2007), provide a balanced overview of the debates. For a more personal account, see Geoff Eley, A crooked line: from cultural history to the history of society (Michigan, 2005). For a formative example of this approach, see Brian Harrison and Patricia Hollis, ‘Chartism, liberalism and the life of Robert Lowery’, English Historical Review, 82 (1967), 503–35. Early liberal accounts took a similar line. See, for instance, P. W. Slosson, The decline of the Chartist movement (New York, 1916); Mark Hovell, The Chartist movement (Manchester, 1918).

24

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23 E. F. Biagini and A. J. Reid (eds), Currents of radicalism: popular radicalism, organised labour and party politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1991); Eugenio Biagini, Liberty, retrenchment and reform: popular liberalism in the age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1992). 24 Philip Harling, ‘Equipoise regained? Recent trends in British political history, 1790–1867’, Journal of Modern History, 75:4 (2003), 901. 25 Paul Pickering and Alex Tyrrell, The people’s bread: a history of the Anti-Corn Law League (Leicester, 2000). Norman McCord’s The Anti-Corn Law League, 1838–1846 (1958) was a useful corrective to earlier enthusiastic histories of the League. Both C. R. Fay’s pioneering The Corn Laws and social England (Cambridge, 1932) and Norman Longmate’s accessible, The breadstealers: the fight against the Corn Laws, 1838–1846 (1984) contain pertinent material on the culture of the League. Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey brings the tools of the political scientist to bear on the ‘puzzle’ of repeal in From the Corn Laws to free trade: interests, ideas, and institutions in historical perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2006). 26 Frank Trentmann, Free trade nation: commerce, consumption, and civil society in modern Britain (Oxford, 2008). Trentmann’s work builds on Anthony Howe’s meticulous Cobdenite study, Free trade and liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997). 27 Asa Briggs, Victorian things (1990), pp. 168–9; Rohan McWilliam, ‘Liberalism lite?’, Victorian Studies, 48:1 (2005), 103–11; Simon Morgan, ‘Material culture and the politics of personality in early Victorian England’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 17:2 (2012), 127–46. 28 Department stores have received disproportionate attention. Recent works include Bill Lancaster, The department store: a social history (Leicester, 1995); Geoffrey Crossick and Serge Jaumain (eds), Cathedrals of consumption: the European department store, 1850– 1939 (Aldershot, 1998); Erika Rappaport, Shopping for pleasure: women in the making of London’s West End (Princeton, 2000). 29 Deborah Cohen, Household gods: the British and their possessions (New Haven, CT, 2006). Cohen leans heavily on Boyd Hilton’s influential work, The age of atonement: the influence of evangelicalism on social and economic thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988). Other studies of middle-class formation and identity that consider consumer practice include Leonora Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class 1780–1850 (1987); Simon Gunn, The public culture of the Victorian middle class: ritual and authority and the English industrial city, 1840–1914 (Manchester, 2000); Thad Logan, The Victorian parlour: a cultural study (Cambridge, 2001); Lisa Tiersten, Marianne in the market: envisioning consumer society in fin-de-siècle France (Berkeley, CA, 2001).

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30 See J. B. Jefferys, Retail trading in Britain, 1850–1950 (Cambridge, 1954); David Alexander, Retailing in England during the Industrial Revolution (1970); W. H. Fraser, The coming of the mass market, 1850–1914 (1981); John Benson and Gareth Shaw, The evolution of retail systems, c. 1800–1914 (Leicester, 1992); John Benson, The rise of consumer society in Britain, 1880–1980 (1994). 31 M. T. Wild and G. Shaw, ‘Population distribution and retail provision: the case of the Halifax–Calder Valley area of West Yorkshire during the second half of the nineteenth century’, Journal of Historical Geography, 1:2 (1975), 202–3; Gareth Shaw, ‘Changes in consumer demand and food supply in nineteenth-century British cities’, Journal of Historical Geography, 11:3 (1985), 291–3. 32 Peter Mathias, Retailing revolution: a history of multiple retailing in the food trades based upon the Allied Suppliers group of companies (1967); Michael Winstanley, The shopkeeper’s world, 1830–1914 (Manchester, 1983); Finn, The character of credit, pp. 280–1; John Benson and Laura Ugolini (eds), A nation of shopkeepers: five centuries of British retailing (2003). 33 Roy Church, ‘Advertising consumer goods in nineteenth century Britain: reinterpretations’, Economic History Review, 53:4 (2000), 629, 634–5. For Carlyle’s views, see Past and Present (1843). 34 Thomas Richards, The commodity culture of Victorian England: advertising and spectacle, 1851–1914 (1991). 35 Friedrich Engels, The condition of the working class in England (1845; 1969), p. 124. 36 See Mick Reed, ‘“Gnawing it out”: a new look at economic relations in nineteenth-century rural England’, Rural History, 1:1 (1990), 83–94. 37 Shaw, ‘Changes in consumer demand’, 286. 38 Roger Scola, ‘Food markets and food shops in Manchester, 1770– 1870’, Journal of Historical Geography, 1:2 (1975), 193–210; Feeding the Victorian city: the food supply of Manchester, 1770–1870 (Manchester, 1992). 39 James Vernon, Hunger: a modern history (Cambridge, MA, 2007). For a fuller discussion of Vernon, Cohen and Trentmann, see my review article, ‘Wanting and having: new histories of scarcity and excess in modern Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, 20:1 (2009), 97–109. 40 Mary Douglas, ‘Why do people want goods?’, in Shaun Hargreaves Heap and Angus Ross (eds), Understanding enterprise culture (Edinburgh, 1992), p. 30. 41 See the useful appendix in Jan de Vries, The industrious revolution: consumer behaviour and the household economy, 1650 to the present (Cambridge, 2008), pp. 37–9. 42 Finn, The character of credit, p. 17.

26

‘A new order of things’

43 Karl Polanyi, The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time (1944; Boston, 2001). The best study of Polanyi’s thought is Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi: the limits of the market (Cambridge, 2010). 44 Joseph Townsend, A dissertation on the Poor Laws, by a well-wisher to mankind (1785), cited in Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Poor Law history, part II: the last hundred years (1929; 1963), vol. I, p. 11. 45 Thomas Robert Malthus, An essay on the principle of population (1798). Though his views hardened over time, even Malthus supported relief for the sick and assistance for families in special circumstances. Marion Bowley stressed the diversity of opinion among political economists in Nassau Senior and classical economics (1937), p. 284, n. 1. See also J. R. Poynter, Society and pauperism: English ideas on poor relief, 1795–1834 (1969), pp. 144–77; Gertrude Himmelfarb, The idea of poverty: England in the early industrial age (1984), pp. 100–44. 46 Karl Marx, Capital: a critique of political economy (1867; 1889), vol. I, p. 207. 47 Nassau William Senior, Three lectures on the rate of wages, delivered before the University of Oxford, Easter term, 1830: with a preface on the causes and remedies of the present disturbances (1830), p. x. 48 Nassau William Senior, ‘English Poor Laws’, Edinburgh Review, 149 (October 1841), 14. 49 Cited in Bowley, Nassau Senior, pp. 290–1. Senior thought this letter so important that he incorporated it into the text of the Poor Law Commissioners’ Report of 1834 and published it in Appendix D to the first Report from the Commissioners on the Poor Laws (1833). Condemning the effects of the allowance system on labourers in the Poor Law Report, Senior wrote (on p. 33), ‘All the other classes of society are exposed to the vicissitudes of hope and fear; he alone has nothing to lose or to gain.’ 50 Nassau William Senior, Two lectures on population delivered before the University of Oxford, in Easter Term, 1828 (1831), p. 4. For more on consumption standards and national identity, see also his letter to Lord John Russell, April 1836, cited in Bowley, Nassau Senior, pp. 294–5. 51 Senior, Two lectures on population, pp. 25–7. 52 Ibid., p. 35; Himmelfarb, The idea of poverty, pp. 157–8; John Sekora, Luxury: the concept in Western thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, 1977). 53 See Mary Poovey, A history of the modern fact: problems of knowledge in the sciences of wealth and society (Chicago, 1998). 54 J. R. McCulloch, The principles of political economy: with a sketch of the rise and progress of the science (1825), p. 346.

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55 Ibid., p. 390. 56 Ibid., pp. 397–8; see also pp. 399, 401; M. G. Marshall, ‘Luxury, economic development, and work motivation: David Hume, Adam Smith, and J. R. McCulloch’, History of Political Economy, 32:3 (2000), 643. McCulloch’s views were in turn disseminated by John Wade’s popular work, History of the middle and working classes (1833), pp. 249–51. 57 J. R. McCulloch, The principles of political economy: with some inquiries respecting their application, and a sketch of the rise and progress of the science (1849), pp. 579–80. An influential sociological study that emphasises the insatiable desire for goods is Colin Campbell, The Romantic ethic and the spirit of modern consumerism (Oxford, 1987). 58 McCulloch, Principles (1825), p. 344; Principles (1849), pp. 579–80. 59 J. P. Kay, The moral and physical condition of the working classes employed in the cotton manufacture in Manchester (1832), pp. 21–2. Mary Poovey provides a stimulating close reading of this work in Making a social body: British cultural formation 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1995), pp. 55–72. 60 See McCulloch, Principles (1825), p. 348; D. P. O’Brien, J. R. McCulloch: a study in classical economics (1970), p. 322. McCulloch became more convinced of the importance of consumer desire over time, amending later editions of his work accordingly. See Principles (1849), pp. 448–9. However, he eventually opposed the operation of the New Poor Law as too degrading and, according to O’Brien, ‘was perhaps the one major economist to advocate the more flexible system of the old Poor Law’; J. R. McCulloch, p. 331. Unsurprisingly, both Senior and McCulloch were also sensitive to the political threat from below, particularly after the Swing riots, believing that it was preferable for ratepayers to contribute to state relief than be forced to protect their property ‘at the point of a sword’. See McCulloch, Principles (1849), p. 453; Nassau Senior, Remarks on opposition to the Poor Law Amendment Bill: by a Guardian (1841), pp. 25–6. 61 Jan de Vries, The industrious revolution, pp. 113–16. See also Chapter 3, n. 7. 62 John Bohstedt, The politics of provisions: food riots, moral economy, and market transition in England, c. 1550–1850 (Farnham, 2010), pp. 7–15. 63 Margot Finn, ‘Working-class women and the contest for consumer control in Victorian county courts’, Past and Present, 161 (1998), 119–20, 128–9; Martin Daunton, ‘The material politics of natural monopoly: consuming gas in Victorian Britain’, in Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (eds), The politics of consumption: material culture and citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford, 2001), pp. 69–70, 72–4; James

28

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65 66 67 68

‘A new order of things’ Taylor, Creating capitalism: joint-stock enterprise in British politics and culture, 1800–1870 (Woodbridge, 2006); Trentmann, Free trade nation, pp. 63–5, 429. Biagini referred to the ‘moral economy of free trade’ in Liberty, retrenchment and reform, pp. 93–102. Lizabeth Cohen, ‘The New Deal state and the making of citizen consumers’, in Susan Strasser, Charles McGovern and Matthias Judt (eds), Getting and spending: European and American consumer societies in the twentieth century (Cambridge, 1998), p. 111; A consumers’ republic: the politics of mass consumption in postwar America (New York, 2003); Charles McGovern, Sold American: consumption and citizenship, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2006). For government interaction with consumer organisations in this country, see Matthew Hilton, Consumerism in twentieth-century Britain: the search for a historical movement (Cambridge, 2003). Michel Aglietta developed the idea of a ‘social norm of consumption’ in A theory of capitalist regulation: the US experience (1979). Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook politics: economic citizenship in twentiethcentury America (Princeton, 2005). Boyd Hilton, The age of atonement; A mad, bad, and dangerous people? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 543–65. See G. R. Searle, Morality and the market in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998); Philip Harling, The modern British state: an historical introduction (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 78–88.

2

‘Rejoicing in potatoes’: the politics of consumption in England during the ‘Hungry Forties’ In the winter of 1842–3 the protectionist spokesman Dr Robert Bullock Marsham, Warden of Merton College Oxford, flippantly remarked that although workers could not buy bread they could at least ‘rejoice in potatoes’.1 For a while, during what were undoubtedly some of the hungriest years of the nineteenth century, the hapless Marsham was nearly as notorious as Marie Antoinette had been for a wrongly attributed phrase. Nicknaming him ‘potato Dick’, leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League such as Charles Villiers and Richard Cobden poured scorn on Marsham, the latter warning the House of Commons: ‘There are 7,000,000 or 8,000,000 of people without wheaten bread. If the people continue to descend in the scale of physical comfort, and to eat potatoes, the hope of moral improvement which the friends of humanity indulge, must be altogether disappointed.’2 Thomas Carlyle also intervened, hinting ominously that the Corn Law controversy could have far wider repercussions than was generally appreciated: ‘When two millions of one’s brother-men sit in Workhouses, and five millions, as is insolently said, “rejoice in potatoes”, there are various things that must be begun, let them end where they can.’3 If some observers preferred to ignore hunger entirely, others regarded it as the major cause of working-class unrest. As every student of the period knows, it was the radical Methodist preacher, Joseph Rayner Stephens, who described Chartism as ‘a knife and fork, a bread and cheese question’, a view first simplified then rehearsed ad nauseam by prominent contemporaries and early historians of the movement.4 It was in this context that the Anti-Corn Law League argued that cheaper goods would lead to social peace and class harmony; William Rathbone, free trade Mayor of Liverpool, reckoned that Feargus O’Connor appealed

30

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only to workers with ‘empty bellies and bare backs’.5 The London Chartist John James Bezer mocked such condescending reductionism, insisting that although politics was for him a ‘bread and cheese question’, he had always ‘loved freedom, and its inevitable consequences, and not only for what it will fetch, but the holy principle’.6 Conflicting perspectives abound in the evidence and highlight both the salience and complexity of the debate on hunger at this juncture. Modern historians have rightly pointed out that the notion of the ‘Hungry Forties’ was a retrospective invention, coined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by supporters of free trade who used it as part of their historical case against tariff reform.7 However, this should neither obscure the fact that a great many working people suffered the gnawing pain in the gut, especially during the early years of this decade, nor lead us to underestimate the political centrality of the debate on hunger and consumer issues more generally at this time. The struggle over the representation of scarcity was particularly acute during this crucial period. In short, hunger had no obvious, straightforward meaning or political effect but, as in other contexts, was itself culturally and discursively constructed.8 This chapter considers the ways in which not only Chartists but also their antagonists in the Anti-Corn Law League, the vanguard of economic liberalism, made sense of hunger and mobilised around consumption. Both these organisations talked incessantly about the problem of scarcity, often utilising similar idioms, as we shall see. They proposed very different solutions to it, of course. The League argued that complete economic freedom, the separation of the political from the economic realm, would put matters right, and pitched their message at ‘the people’ imagined as a body of consumers. Chartists, on the other hand, recommended a combination of government intervention and community regulation to help poor consumers squeezed by industrial capitalism as well as protectionism. Chartism was able to draw on earlier traditions of plebeian consumer consciousness and action, which had been key parts of the eighteenth-century ‘moral economy’, according to Edward Thompson.9 As we have already seen, the term ‘moral economy’ was first employed in the early Victorian period by those who contested, from various ideological positions, the theoretical and practical separation of politics and morality from economics.10 As so often, then, Chartists looked to the past but also developed

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new ways of addressing and organising the consumer for social and political change. Hunger and consumption were overtly politicised by both Chartists and supporters of the League, and this chapter pays particular attention to the gothic melodramatic tropes that were such a general feature of the highly charged atmosphere of the early 1840s, when it was feared that workers were eating carrion or even each other in order to avoid starvation. Differences between the League and the Chartists were exposed during the strike wave of 1842, which witnessed a resurgence of ‘moral economy’ crowd action, and this episode therefore is discussed in some detail. From this time on there was an almost irrevocable breakdown in communication between these groups as the free trade explanation of distress was discredited in working-class circles. The chapter also considers the Chartist trials held in late 1842 and early 1843. Clear distinctions were drawn between economic and political action at the show trial at Lancaster in particular, and this encouraged the formal uncoupling of the political and the moral from the economic domain, with serious consequences for working-class consumers. The language of the League The Anti-Corn Law League directly addressed the issue of workingclass hunger from its formation in 1839 and conducted an extensive propaganda campaign to expose the distress caused by one of the worst economic depressions of the nineteenth century. The League’s solution to scarcity was appealingly simple: repeal of the Corn Laws and the wider system of protection in order to effect the absolute separation of the economic from the political domain, in theory at least.11 According to the League’s ideologues, this would enable the abstract market or economy to work freely according to the ‘natural’ laws of supply and demand. Cheaper bread would soon satisfy workers, release more income for expenditure on other goods and thus stimulate general improvement to the benefit of all consumers. The mill owner, W. R. Greg, made the case for a highwage, high-consumption economy most forcefully in a pamphlet published in the depths of depression. In it Greg argued that the country was experiencing a crisis of underconsumption rather than overproduction as some claimed, and he pointed an accusing finger

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at statesmen who continued to impose an ‘excessive and unwarrantable limitation of consumption’.12 In an effort to mobilise across divisions of class and gender, the League deliberately pitched its appeal at ‘the people’ imagined as a body of exploited consumers. We can isolate at least four interconnected themes or tropes that structured the League’s consumerist discourse. First, pursuing a critique that ran back to the Painite attack on indulgent bloated aristocrats, the League demonised and denounced ‘Monopoly’, as previous commentators have noted.13 From the outset the enemy was represented as ‘aristocratic monopolists’, while repeal was frequently conflated with the final and historically overdue abolition of feudalism, defined essentially as a society based overwhelmingly on monopoly rights and inherited privilege. According to the Anti-Corn Law Circular, the Corn Laws ‘support the aristocratical principle of the constitution and cherish feudalism’. The defeat of monopoly was regarded as a crucial part of the struggle against an ancien régime that retarded progress and impoverished the mass of consumers by constraining the operation of the free market and the natural laws of supply and demand.14 Leaders of the League were keen to appropriate the popular Sheffield poet Ebenezer Elliott in their struggle against aristocratic monopoly; John Bright, for example, larded his speeches with Elliott’s poetry from the very beginning of his public career.15 The work had to be carefully trimmed, however, as Elliott could be highly subversive, as in his revenge poem, ‘The Black Hole of Calcutta’, which lamented the fate of ‘Britons sty’d to eat/Wheat-priced roots instead of wheat’, and looked forward to a time when the bloodsucking gentry would get their just deserts. The problem was one of containment and the long review of a cheap edition of Elliott’s Corn Law Rhymes that appeared in the League, though commending the work to both rich and poor, also apologised for the ‘unnecessary coarseness’ and ‘vindictive feeling’ that characterised much of the verse.16 Elliott, it must be remembered, had no sympathy for those he termed ‘Palaced paupers’, arguing that their dissolute consumption practices exerted a demoralising influence across society as a whole: ‘Pamper’d fox-hounds, starving men/Whores and bastards, nine or ten/Paid informer, poacher pale/Sneaker’s licence, poison’d ale/Fiddling parson, Sunday card/Pimp, and dedicating bard.’17 As the League’s reviewer fully realised, in the present context it might seem to some of Elliott’s less refined readers that factory masters as

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well as the aristocracy were wallowing in luxury and indulging in conspicuous consumption made possible by the toil of others. The existence of monopoly and the social order it characterised, the League argued, had reduced people to slavery, the second key trope. In May 1841 Lawrence Heyworth of Liverpool argued that monopoly and slavery were internally connected: ‘Before they looked at the black slaves, they ought to look at the white slaves at home. He had never heard of 50,000 black slaves being driven out of house and home, but he had heard of so many whites being thus oppressed by the wicked laws of the English aristocracy.’18 Developing the critique pioneered decades before by the Anti-Slavery Society, the League maintained that sugar produced by inefficient slave labour in the colonies simultaneously demoralised metropolitan consumers and ought therefore to be boycotted.19 Links to the gendered dynamics of the abolition campaign are apparent here; the anti-slavery movement had organised boycotts of slave sugar in the 1790s and 1820s in which middle-class women played an important role in moralising consumption. Women also made a vital contribution to the culture of the Anti-Corn Law League and their earlier activism was often remarked upon.20 Third, the League maintained that the repeal campaign served the interests of the British nation and their propaganda played on this patriotic theme incessantly. In fact the League attempted to make consumption the national question above all others; the world-historical destiny of the nation was to finally break free from the last shackles of absolutism and lead the internationalist mission of free trade.21 When the Covent Garden Bazaar was opened in May 1845 the editor of the League underlined the symbolic and practical importance of an event ‘fraught with moral meaning … It is a national expression of a nation’s idea and purpose. It is a nation’s attestation of a grand truth. It is a nation’s protest against an enormous wrong. It is a nation’s manifesto against an enormous iniquity.’22 In the rhetoric and historical imaginary of the League, it was the consuming majority of the British people, unfairly taxed and beaten down by a corrupt aristocracy, that constituted the authentic nation, struggling to throw off the dead weight of the past. Perhaps most importantly, it was also frequently asserted that the twin evils of class conflict and protection undermined domestic stability and the patriarchal family form, particularly among the working classes. John Bright’s famous address, ‘To the Working

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‘Rejoicing in potatoes’

Men of Rochdale’, played on this trope to great effect. Bright accused strikers of harming both their own families and those of other mill workers who had been forced to turn out in the summer of 1842: ‘you relentlessly, and contrary to every principle of justice and freedom, deprived them of bread! … Unhappily, you have wives and children, and all of you have the cravings of hunger, and you must live, and, in order to live, you must work.’23 A perceived threat to the domestic realm made the participation of women in the campaign even more imperative. The bazaars set up to raise funds for the League were predominantly organised and run by female supporters who, according to the Anti-Bread Tax Circular, ‘saw the importance of making this a “family” question’.24 It was in the home that the new consumer politics of free trade would have the most immediate impact; more wheaten bread and comforts for working-class consumers, greater choice and luxury for middleclass shoppers. As the major site of private consumption, the family often figured as a metonym for the consumer in the language of the League, enabling ideologues to bridge private and public realms by linking increases in national wealth with the individual consumption practices of ‘the people’. This discourse enabled the League, for a significant period at any rate, to speak to working-class concerns and build bridges between often-disparate middle-class interest groups. The organisation drew its major support from at least five different constituencies that included self-interested industrialists, humanitarian businessmen, pacifists, Philosophic Radicals, as well as the broad base of middleclass radicals who made up the backbone of the movement for free trade in the country.25 Sometimes prioritising and celebrating the role of the abstract, desiring consumer generated discord within its own ranks, as we shall see in Chapter 7. The groups that supported the League did not share a coherent ideology, nor had they all read and understood the central tenets of classical political economy: the so-called Manchester School was heterogeneous in composition and outlook; even the term itself, as is well known, was not coined until 1848 when Benjamin Disraeli first used it.26 Nevertheless, during this critical decade class fractions that were often bitterly divided managed to put their differences to one side for the sake of what was frequently portrayed as a religious or ethical crusade against a protectionist system that they believed worked against the interests of the majority of consumers.

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Chartism and consumer politics It is a historiographical commonplace that Chartists were generally hostile towards the League, arguing that repeal of the Corn Laws ought to follow the winning of the Charter.27 There was, however, considerable common ground between them, not least on the discursive level. Underconsumptionist arguments were employed by Chartist lecturers, who rejected claims that repeal of the Corn Laws alone would solve the problem of acute poverty in the midst of plenty; the ex-handloom weaver, Jonathon Bairstow, for instance, insisted that working-class distress would continue ‘so long as the productive powers exceeded the consumptive’ in a public debate at Leeds in the summer of 1840.28 Moreover, the key tropes identified above – monopoly, slavery, nation and family, invariably bound together with scriptural authority – also structured Chartist language and propaganda.29 Like the idiom of popular constitutionalism, the rhetorical figure of the people as exploited consumer was part of a shared code that made communication possible across class and gender boundaries.30 The League was able to capitalise on long-standing radical support for free trade. ‘No Bread Tax’ was seen on banners at Peterloo, while Feargus O’Connor and many other leaders of working-class radicalism sympathised with the cause, even if they reviled the League. As well as the six points, Kettering Chartists demanded the abolition of taxes on corn and other basic goods including tea, coffee, sugar and soap.31 Thus, the languages of Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law League cannot be regarded as hermetically sealed but were both imbricated within radical culture. The Chartist National Petition of 1842, for example, deplored ‘monopoly’, though significantly went on to deconstruct this abstraction with more discriminate attacks on ‘monopolies of the suffrage, of paper money, of machinery, of land, of the public press, of religious privileges, of the means of travelling and transit, and of a host of other evils too numerous to mention, all arising from class legislation’.32 ‘The Government of England is a Despotism and her Industrious Millions are Slaves’, declared the Manifesto of the General Convention, published in May 1839. Chartists also claimed to be speaking for the nation, maintaining that they alone were true patriots.33 And not surprisingly, the deleterious effects of continual want and exploitation on the working-class family was a common theme within Chartist

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rhetoric, frequently expressed in a highly melodramatic manner. At the first Convention, for example, Richard Marsden, delegate for Preston, narrated a graphic and deliberately moving tale of ‘clemming’, made worse by the fact that his wife had a child at her breast, ‘like a leech draining her of her life’s blood’.34 The League skilfully exploited these thematic and linguistic connections, promoting Anti-Corn Law Operative Associations in various localities with some success. A recent study notes that twenty-three such groups were established between spring 1839 and summer 1843, though many of these were ephemeral or only poorly supported.35 Chartists and free traders may have often spoken a similar language but the former invariably drew on other sources to explain and critique consumer exploitation. The New Poor Law, for example, was a constant reference point for working-class radicals, particularly because of its impact on the working-class family. Modern scholarship has rightly emphasised the centrality of the domestic within Chartism and this helps explain Joseph Rayner Stephens’ immense popularity in the early years of the movement.36 In his sermons Stephens regularly excoriated masters who lorded it over the market as well as the workplace, arguing that the ‘famine’ that working people currently endured was a sign that the devil ruled the land: ‘if there be a hell upon earth comparatively with other nations of the world, it is England’. The food dished up in New Poor Law ‘Bastille’ was a favourite subject for Stephens as it clearly demonstrated how the poor were stripped of their humanity. Workhouse bread was ‘devil’s dung’ and, it was claimed, the thin soup or ‘skilly’ that formed the staple diet of inmates was laced with resin, a substance fed to pigs to stuff them up and lend a plump appearance: ‘Good God! and art Thou merciful, and art Thou just – merciful to those poor whose bodies are lined and pitched with resin, that the “skilly” may not scour them into the cholera morbus.’ Stephens understood that the politics of consumption lay at the centre of Chartism and that is why he referred to it as a ‘knife and fork’ question. He frequently asserted that the New Poor Law undermined the entitlement of the poor to relief in times of dearth, widely regarded in the movement as a right grounded in history and Tudor statute.37 Like many other Chartists, Stephens concluded that even theft and violent resistance were appropriate responses to scarcity.38 Those fortunate enough to avoid pauperism and the workhouse were still vulnerable to market exploitation. Adulterated and

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poor-quality food were inescapable facts of life for the majority that often drew radical criticism. More particularly, payment of wages in tokens that could only be spent either at the employer’s store – referred to as truck – or else in overpriced ‘tommy shops’ that accepted such tokens played a key role in igniting working-class protest in the early 1840s. Some sympathetic elite politicians recognised this possible flashpoint. The Tory ‘working man’s friend’, William Ferrand, for example, was an uncompromising critic of truck, an ‘infernal system’ that caused untold suffering. Ferrand accused prominent members of the League of lending their support to this system in the House of Commons. He also reminded Sir Robert Peel that he had spoken in favour of the woefully ineffective Truck Act in 1830 and eventually managed to persuade the Commons to appoint a select committee to consider abuses at the end of April 1842.39 Peel later raised the issue of truck in a letter to the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, after the worst of the unrest of 1842 had died down and Graham despatched Thomas Tancred to investigate conditions in the South Staffordshire coalfield, an area that had witnessed a good deal of violence during the dispute.40 In his report Tancred drew attention to various ‘non-political’ grievances that underpinned the miners’ actions including, most importantly, truck and the hated tommy shops. He noted the resolutions passed at miners’ meetings that condemned truck as a form of slavery and quoted an unnamed butty who was sure that ‘the tommy-shops have had much to do with the present stand out. The working people are putting their heads together to stand against the shops.’41 Chartists certainly supported government action against adulteration and truck but they also advocated co-operative practice as a remedy for market exploitation.42 The potential power of consumers to regulate the market themselves in order to meet the problem of scarcity and exert political pressure on an oligarchic state was hardly new. Co-operative stores, for example, had been enthusiastically promoted by Owenites across the country during the 1820s. Despite the fact that Robert Owen himself disparaged such initiatives, the sphere of consumption was regarded as a key priority for the majority movement and the organisation of the market was seen as a route to the New Moral World by theoreticians like William Thompson and local leaders such as William King of Brighton. It is difficult to know exactly how many consumer societies were established but the Co-operator claimed that there were

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300 by August 1830 and the number continued to grow.43 By the end of the decade, exclusive dealing had become deeply embedded within radical culture. Exclusive dealing, or ‘friendly dealing’ as it was sometimes known, found a ready and enthusiastic response at the Chartist Convention in the spring of 1839, unlike the general strike or ‘sacred month’, which was regarded by many delegates as impractical.44 In many localities exclusive dealing led naturally and rapidly to the establishment of Chartist co-operative stores, discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. Clearly, in its early years especially, when whole families and communities were drawn into the agitation, Chartism was as much a movement of consumers as of producers. Above all else, Chartists argued for the integration of politics and economics in order to control the market, drawing on a re-imagined ‘moral economy’ to support their arguments; exclusive dealing and co-operatives appealed precisely because they held out the promise of regaining some control for poor consumers. Interestingly, although the statutes that dated back to Henry III against forestalling, regrating and engrossing had long fallen into disuse, they were not formally abolished until 1844, when Lord Monteagle’s bill was passed with little dissent.45 Free traders in Parliament had routinely condemned what Monteagle described as ‘a mass of obsolete rubbish’ for years; Joseph Hume, Henry Grey, T. B. Macaulay and Lord Brougham were among those who ridiculed earlier attempts by government to protect consumers, the last observing during a debate on Corn Law repeal that this legislation was ‘now laughed at by universal consent. But it was no laughing matter when those laws were in force; it was an offence for people to forestall and regrate, and men were punished by imprisonment for committing that offence.’46 In contrast, Feargus O’Connor regularly denounced modern forms of forestalling and other corrupt market practices as instances of monopoly power and, drawing on William Blackstone’s account, invoked the old legal statutes to underline how things had once been very different. In a letter written while he was imprisoned at York, for example, O’Connor pointed out that ‘by law, “forestalling” is still a very serious offence; but wealth makes crime virtue, and virtue crime’. He continued to denounce the way in which practices that had been traditionally condemned as immoral had been normalised so that nowadays ‘a few capitalists, without reference to the supply in the country, may easily create an apparent

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scarcity and raise provisions to famine price’. Chartists agreed with O’Connor that it was imperative to cut out the middleman as far as possible and thus lessen opportunities for consumer exploitation: ‘We must have no traffic, except between farmer and miller, miller and baker, baker and consumer, and, Heaven knows, that’s enough.’ The object was to reconstruct rather than simply resurrect what the editor of the Northern Star referred to in 1848 as ‘those palmy days of universal protection’.47 Cannibalism and civilisation The preceding schematic account has paid insufficient attention to the imagery used by Chartists and members of the Anti-Corn Law League; a more concrete analysis reveals much common, though often disputed, imaginative ground. Discursive overlaps continued to be important even during the crisis year of 1842, when, as George Kitson Clark observed in a classic study, ‘a disaster of the first magnitude had struck the working classes of this country’.48 Commentators across the ideological spectrum worried about the possible effects of widespread distress and used the most inflammatory language to convey their concerns. Free traders tried to capitalise on the situation and saturated their discourse with blood and gothic imagery. The Unitarian minister William Field, for example, based a sermon delivered at Warwick in March 1842 on a text from Ecclesiasticus: ‘The bread of the needy is his life; he, that defraudeth him of it, is a man of blood.’ Clearly, Chartists were not the only ones to deploy scriptural authority to buttress their arguments and intimidate the authorities at this time.49 Field warned his listeners that hunger could lead to despair and barbarity; in Lancashire ‘the starving multitudes’ had been forced to dig up and consume diseased meat, while in Brecknockshire individuals ‘were seen feeding themselves, out of the same trough, with the same food, which the swine were eating!’50 Hunger undermined the bedrocks of civilisation, namely home and family, Field intimated, and could even, in the severest cases, result in the most unnatural of all crimes, infanticide: ‘lifting up that hand of violence, in the first instance, against the little object of their fondest affection – as if to extinguish the miserable life, they unfortunately gave, were but a just requital – or as if, in giving an easy grave, where hunger gnaws not, a beggared parent’s best of all gifts were given’.51

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The League represented the effects of scarcity on working-class domesticity by various means, including the woodcut ‘Rejoicing in Potatoes’, which portrayed a typical mealtime in a factory operative’s home and poked fun at the good Dr Marsham (Figure 1). It appeared in the Preston radical Joseph Livesey’s populist weekly, the Struggle, and employed some of the key tropes discussed earlier to great effect, especially family and nation.52 Produced at a time when some people were literally dying for, rather than rejoicing in, potatoes, the image was framed by the conventions of popular melodrama, like much of the written and visual discourse produced by the League.53 Bread was still the staple food in English workingclass diets but as incomes fell in the late 1830s potatoes had been increasingly substituted.54 Consumers undoubtedly resented this, especially northern industrial workers who were often used to better fare and whose status was bound up with their ability to consume certain foodstuffs, most importantly wheaten bread. There was also a racial twist to all this talk of potatoes, as the woodcut made clear. The fear was that such diets would produce uncivilised workers: ‘we are become a sort of English Irish’, exclaims the mother in the print. It is worth recalling that Ebenezer Elliott referred to the Irish as ‘Erin’s root-fed hordes’.55 The consumption of wheaten bread was thus racialised and represented as a basic building block of civilised society. Thomas Carlyle intimated that if scarcity continued English workers might eventually be driven – like the ‘primitive’ Irish peasantry had supposedly been before them – not only to eat potatoes but also to completely reject the norms of Christian society and devour their own kind. Past and Present plumbed ominous depths, including cannibalism, with its allusion to an ‘Ugolino Hunger Tower’, which conjured up the horrific tale from Dante’s Divine Comedy that obsessed early Victorians.56 Carlyle was not the only one to invoke cannibalism either; William Field quoted tales of becalmed sailors eating their comrades in his sermon: ‘is it not on record, that some of the wretched number have been deliberately slaughtered, that the rest might feed upon their bodies?’57 As scholars in different disciplines have demonstrated, the practice of cannibalism provided an important boundary line between savagery and civilisation, a boundary firmed up by the discoveries and writings of Victorian ethnographers and anthropologists.58 More common than cannibal tales were rumours that working people were digging up and eating diseased meat or even dead

Figure 1. ‘Rejoicing in potatoes’, Struggle, 61, February 1843.

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dogs. Free traders were keen to strengthen such rumours and a few months before the strike wave began in August 1842 the League plastered the walls of Lancashire cotton towns with placards headed ‘Murder of Englishmen’, detailing, according to The Times, ‘an absurd falsehood about a starving family being obliged to live upon dead dogs’.59 In the House of Commons, William Ferrand and Sir James Graham contested stories of families subsisting on dog flesh and potatoes.60 The lurid nature of much of this alimentary discourse in which rumour played such a key role is one index to the profundity of the crisis of the early 1840s. No wonder then that many believed the Quarterly Review’s notorious account of the subsequent disturbances, which pinned the blame squarely on the League.61 For their part, Chartists also painted a gothic picture of the effects of hunger and its possible consequences. They insisted, however, that the problem was not that workers were turning into cannibals but rather that the commercial system itself was essentially cannibalistic. ‘To put an end to the present cannibal system – We must! We will!! have universal suffrage’, declared the Manifesto of the London Democratic Association.62 The pages of the Northern Star in the early 1840s documented the effects of this cannibal system in graphic detail. The most moving examples were perhaps the numerous reports of cases of starvation taken from coroner’s courts, where the bodies of the poor were literally opened up to the readers’ gaze. Many examples could be given here. The surgeon who examined the body of Frances Stocking, aged sixty-six, from London, ‘found the intestines inflated with wind, evidently showing that she had not partaken of solid food for some time’, and the coroner duly returned a verdict of ‘Natural Death, accelerated by want and destitution’.63 An article entitled ‘Death from Want’ contained a detailed report of the post-mortem on a 24-year-old cloth dresser from Leeds named Halstead. The effects of clemming were written in the man’s guts and the paper quoted the findings of the local surgeon, Christopher Brown, who had observed that throughout the abdomen there was a complete absence of fat, none whatever being on the muscles. The viscera were contracted as if in severe pain. The stomach was contracted and empty, except about a gill and a half of greenish brown-coloured fluid … The intestines were empty except a small quantity of fluid, and the

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abdominal intestine was contracted, by nothing having passed it for some time.

Brown concluded that the man had died from ‘want and starvation’ and the coroner, John Blackburn, agreed.64 According to the editor of the Northern Star, the Swedenborgian minister William Hill, all this suffering was eloquent proof that ‘the whole system of society is one of oppression, cruelty, and blood’. For Hill, starvation ‘in a land of Christians, exporting coal, and having shops and stores innumerable, filled to repletion with all manner of necessary comforts’, was a portent of inevitable apocalypse and he asserted that capitalist trade was by definition destructive and cannibalistic: ‘the rent-mongers, the money-mongers, the profit-mongers eat up the earth, till there is neither place nor provender remaining for the poor’.65 For Chartists, questions of subsistence and provision were inseparable from questions of politics and power; economics and morality were always internally connected. Chartists and free traders may have frequently represented the effects of want in similar ways, but this should not lead us to underestimate fundamental differences in analysis and argument, differences that became more apparent during the febrile atmosphere of the ‘Hungry Forties’.

The crisis of 1842 Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, attempted to defuse this highly volatile situation. He had been sensitive to the key issues for a long time and had accused the Whigs of attempting ‘to inflame the mind of the people on the dangerous issue of food’ during the general election that returned the Conservatives to power in late 1841.66 Peel’s budget in March – which introduced income tax, modified the sliding scale to reduce the duty on corn and cut indirect taxes on hundreds of other articles of consumption – aimed to placate repealers but was primarily designed to take some of the heat out of the debate on hunger. ‘We must make this country a cheap country for living’, Peel wrote to his friend, John Wilson Croker, in early August, ‘and thus induce parties to remain and settle here – enable them to consume more, by having more to spend.’67 Though this intervention failed to head off the immediate crisis, there is no doubt that it helped boost Peel’s popularity in the country.68 Even the most

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hostile critics had to admit that, though Peel’s reforms had neither ‘dispersed nor broken’ that ‘great ice-field which lies between the consumer and cheap food’, they had at least put a ‘crack in it’.69 At this critical moment Peel’s political prescience went well beyond that of the Anti-Corn Law League, which launched an unsuccessful campaign against the introduction of an income tax, a measure warmly welcomed by their Chartist antagonists. A poem by John Fraser in the Northern Star captured Peel’s strategy nicely: ‘The Cobdens, Smiths, and Aclands, too/And all the heartless freetrade crew/Are in a most confounded stew/About the “Bombshell Budget”/Oh! Had the wicked Chartists join’d/They might, for once, have rais’d the wind/And not been left to lag behind/Through Bobby’s “Bombshell Budget.”’70 That generalised working-class distress would soon result in a crisis of national proportions was increasingly asserted in the Chartist press. Just before the strike broke, the editor of the Northern Star recommended ‘caution and prudence’ and underlined the shared interests of labourers and the ‘middling classes’, but also argued a careful, qualified and patriotic case for direct action, partly grounded in the ‘moral economy’ of the crowd. For Hill, the passive demise of his fellow countrymen was simply unthinkable: ‘Come plague; come pestilence; come fire; come sword; come water; come invasion; come civil war: come all these things a thousand times o’er; but come not the day when ENGLISHMEN will quietly starve to death!’ Hill drew on an eclectic mix of constitutional and historical precedent to support popular action in order to spread the burden of dearth more equally. The chain of relief stretched from the destitute individual to the overseer, magistrate, Lord Lieutenant, then finally to the Queen herself. Like Stephens and others, Hill maintained that if no relief were given to starving individuals, people had the right to take the law into their own hands – to act collectively and ‘SEEK OUT FOR FOOD!!’ – a right agreed by eminent authorities on jurisprudence, including Grotius and Puffendorf. Thus if the proper channels of relief were for some reason blocked and the magistracy refused to put pressure on the central state to remedy the situation, ‘the law of nature returns in full force; and a man, according to reason and to nature, is not guilty of theft or larceny who takes food to keep himself from pining to death!’71 The story of the strike has been told many times.72 Diverse groups of workers were affected from the industrial Midlands, South

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Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, lowland Scotland and South Wales, upwards of half a million in total, perhaps. It would be difficult to overstate the seriousness of these disturbances that were described by the Home Secretary, Sir James Graham, as ‘the mad insurrection of the working classes’.73 The focus here is on a number of aspects relevant to the major theme. Most importantly, the 1842 strike was characterised by the widespread adoption of ‘traditional’ forms of consumer action, with food riots a prominent feature. At Salford the crowd demanded bread from a local shopkeeper, ‘which was instantly torn to pieces … There seemed at first an inclination amongst some of the younger portion of the crowd to enter the shop and see if they could not get some more bread, but the main body of the rioters forced them away, exclaiming that it would ruin their cause should they begin to plunder.’ At Rochdale, after encouraging workers at Bright’s mill to join their cause, the crowd visited provision shops where owners handed out loaves and gave money to the leaders, ‘who immediately went and purchased bread which they divided among their followers’. A limited amount of looting occurred. Richard Beswick, the chief constable of Manchester, later reported that only seven men were arrested for stealing bread.74 Although Archibald Prentice denied this aspect in his early history of the League, the collective self-discipline exhibited by these crowds fits well with earlier traditions of ‘moral economy’, as does the central role of ritual and symbol. William Cooke Taylor overstated the crowd’s decorum but his judgement generally rings true: ‘In most of the crowds there appeared rather the fun and frolic of truant schoolboys than the earnestness of persons engaged in a conflict with law’, he recorded after the outbreak had died down in September, ‘in fact, the whole affair had much more the aspect of a holiday than a riot.’75 There were some violent incidents, usually focused on particular local targets. In the Potteries in June, for example, some weeks before the major outbreaks, a band of 200 colliers paraded around their district, ‘with flags and banners and loaves of Bread on poles’. Two months later strikers first ransacked then torched the house of the Reverend Benjamin Vale, Rector of Longton, a bon viveur noted for the excellence of his wine cellar, who had advised the poor to use dock leaves and broom seed as a substitute for tea and coffee earlier that year.76 Vale’s hardhearted advice points to the breakdown of Christian charity in the 1840s, a common complaint

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among concerned middle-class observers as well as Chartists.77 At his trial at Lancaster after the strike, Richard Pilling, the Ashtonunder-Lyne Chartist, reduced the jury to tears with the story of his 16-year-old son – ‘a good and industrious lad’ – who died from ‘a consumption’ just before the strike, ‘having nothing to eat but potatoes and salt’. Unable to afford medical care, ‘nor any of the common necessaries of life’ for his son, Pilling recalled that someone went to ‘a gentleman’s house in Ashton, to ask for a bottle of wine for him; and it was said, “Oh, he is a chartist, he must have none.” (Great sensation in court.)’ Pilling’s narrative counterpoised this mean act with the mutual support offered by the local community, who collected £4 towards the boy’s burial.78 Despite this widely publicised case, channels of communication still existed and sympathy between classes was still possible in many localities; better-off neighbours often gave relief directly, even if a little arm-twisting was sometimes needed to remind them of their duties.79 Moreover, many magistrates were loath to take punitive action against strikers who gave charity a nudge, much to the chagrin of members of the political elite, including Sir James Graham and Queen Victoria.80 Flashpoints that were more serious involved the perceived erosion of public entitlements in the form of the New Poor Law. One of the most notorious clashes occurred at Stockport where antagonism towards the local ‘Bastille’ and Board of Guardians, which had introduced a harsh labour test for outdoor paupers, had been brewing for months before the strike.81 Emboldened by the general unrest, on 11 August an armed crowd attacked the workhouse and distributed about 700 large loaves found in the store.82 Even in this instance crowd action was highly disciplined and restrained. The liberal Illustrated London News adopted a sympathetic stance and represented the episode as a kind of carnival (Figure 2). A force of military and special constables made arrests and an extremely volatile situation gradually eased. A few days later Pilling visited the town and playfully castigated his audience for their dangerous actions: ‘They then went to the bastile; but I did not consider that right; but this winter we may all become thieves, and then the soldiers and police will have to look after us; and that will eat up the system, as there are more ways than one of eating up the system.’83 The Stockport rioters felt that their individual entitlements – in Amartya Sen’s terms, ‘the set of alternative commodity bundles that a person can command’ through various legal channels – had

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Figure 2. ‘Attack on the Stockport Workhouse’, Illustrated London News, 20 August 1842.

been seriously eroded by the ‘Malthusian’ New Poor Law. They responded, however, not merely as individuals but on behalf of their families and community, to enforce socially determined entitlements understood in terms of an imagined ‘moral economy’. In anger and desperation they defied the law and turned to direct action.84 It was hardly surprising that the strike made the Anti-Corn Law League reassess its attitude to the working class. Many of the leaders were personally affected. In a letter to George Wilson, Chairman of the League, Bright described the invasion of his hometown by 2,000 women and girls singing hymns: ‘it was a very singular and striking spectacle – approaching the sublime – they are dreadfully hungry – a loaf is devoured with greediness indescribable, and if the bread is nearly covered with mud it is eagerly devoured’.85 He also wrote to Cobden about a visit from ‘the mob Government’ and a private conversation with leaders who had stressed the non-violent nature of their protest, as well as their determination to ‘have something to eat

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as long as I or any one else had something’.86 Popular protest no doubt helped undermine the appeal of the League’s inclusive discourse. Just as Chartists increasingly used the language of class to make sense of the crisis, so too did the leadership of the League.87 Although both Bright and the League undoubtedly preferred to speak to ‘the people’ in their role as consumers, in the heady atmosphere of 1842 the language of class became impossible to avoid. Accused in the Tory press of fomenting a general strike, the editor of the Anti-Bread Tax Circular, for example, appealed to ‘the judgement of the middle class and the sound part of the working class upon the conduct of the League’. The concept of ‘the people’ unravelled as distinctions were drawn and redrawn. According to the editor, the authentic source of progress and rationality was to be found precisely in the ‘virtuous, intelligent and patriotic’ social middle, that stratum that lay between ‘the aristocratic monopolists on the one side, and the irrational fools, the advocates of confiscation and confusion, on the other’.88 After the strikes died down in early September, Cobden made an important and widely reported speech to the Council of the League, in which he blamed Chartist activity for the open and unfortunate polarisation of classes but also hoped for reconciliation in the near future.89 He was to be sorely disappointed. Only three Operative Anti-Corn Law Associations were founded after the industrial unrest of 1842, and the ‘Daily Bread Society’, which had been formed the year before in a deliberate attempt to garner working-class support for Corn Law repeal, drew opprobrium from both the Council of the League as well as the Northern Star and soon fell flat.90 The League’s version of free trade remained largely a lost cause in working-class circles for the rest of the decade and well beyond.91 Coercion and consent Pilling had prophesied that poor workers might soon be ‘eating up the system’ in the summer of 1842. He may have regarded this as overdue revenge for the way in which his own family and the wider community in Ashton were themselves being devoured by the factory system.92 As we have seen, themes of ingestion, often with a cannibalistic inflection, were common at this time and served to reinforce the precariousness of the social and political order; a barbarous society was one in which people would eat anything they could – potatoes, dogs, even one another. For the metropolitan radical Henry Hetherington the strike proved beyond question that

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Figure 3. ‘Law making a meal in the manufacturing districts’, Odd Fellow, 10 December 1842.

the government as presently constituted had signally failed to fulfil its chief responsibility that he believed to be ‘the sustenance of the people’, which ought to be ‘the grand creed of the present age’. The widespread suffering of the majority, who had been forced to become ‘plunderers of potato fields and provision shops’, demonstrated the urgency of real democratic reform. Only by such means could the people elect representatives who would ensure their wellbeing rather than commit ‘the sin of slaughtering those starving ones who take from the government that sustenance which the government ought to have itself offered’.93 The state quickly reasserted its authority after the strike collapsed, and by the autumn the law was literally as well as metaphorically ‘making a meal in the manufacturing districts’, as the radical press reported (Figure 3). Hundreds of prisoners were tried at the Salford Sessions and the Special Commissions held in October at Chester, Liverpool and Stafford, arranged with embarrassing speed to deal with the threat. The notorious anti-Chartist judge James Scarlett – whose prodigious appetite for radicals was captured perfectly in the gruesome illustration in Figure 3 – presided at Chester and made sure that draconian sentences were passed for such flagrant violations of the rights of property as

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bread-stealing.94 Four of the Stockport prisoners were transported for life, while others were transported for up to fourteen years or given terms of imprisonment with hard labour. Many of those tried for offences in the Black Country also received severe treatment.95 The most famous trial took place at Lancaster the following March, when fifty-nine local and national leaders of the movement faced charges of seditious conspiracy. The experience of hunger and understandings of entitlement came to the fore on the sixth day of the trial when defendants addressed a packed court. Echoing the metaphors employed in League propaganda, George Julian Harney referred to ‘free-born Britons … actually begging the carrion flesh of diseased, destroyed animals, that they might stifle the gnawings of hunger with food which the wolf might refuse to tear and the vulture disdain to gorge’, a claim later repeated by other defendants.96 One of these, Samuel Parkes, asserted that there was no biblical authority for the ‘doctrine of contentment’, preached by men ‘who have their cupboards full, and their backs well clad’. Parkes went on to contrast the condition of the impoverished working-class producer with that of upper- and middle-class consumers whose ‘tables are furnished with all the luxuries that can be gathered together from the four corners of the globe, by the industry of others – their tables are groaning beneath these delicacies, while those who bring them together are starving for the common necessaries of life’. Like many radicals, Parkes saw the problem of poverty fundamentally in terms of an unjust system of distribution and exchange.97 As Christopher Doyle enquired later that day: ‘where is the man so bold and daring as to say that he who produces should not have a fair chance of consuming that which he does produce?’ Along with other defendants, Parkes believed that reform of an ‘imagined’ constitution was the best way of tackling this imbalance between consumption and production.98 As Parkes underlined in his defence, the disjuncture between producer and consumer was evidenced daily in the most tangible manner by the visible and growing divide between rich and poor, excess and scarcity. The presiding judge, Baron Rolfe, found this stress on the relative nature of poverty particularly exasperating, and he soon interrupted Parkes to remind him that the contrasting conditions of rich and poor had nothing to do with the specific charge – that Parkes had intimidated workers to strike until the

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Charter became law – and that reflections on this subject would only serve to prejudice his case. Thus any proper discussion of causation, including the experience of poverty in the midst of plenty, which Parkes and other Chartists found so galling, was entirely ruled out. Subsequent defendants were consequently seriously constrained, though some ignored Rolfe’s advice, including Richard Pilling in a famous defence that was to linger in the popular memory for decades.99 Much to the judge’s dismay, the final defendant, James Leach, also called for a complete remodelling of the constitution in order to solve the fundamental problem: ‘They will never be content to see these things consumed, even wasted by others, while they themselves are wanting even the scantiest portion of that which they themselves created.’100 Such arguments resonated widely within the radical movement. Kettering Chartists, for example, asked local elites to imagine how they would react if ‘every stackyard exhibited unequivocal proofs of plenty’ while they suffered deprivation, ‘and the sons and daughters of indolence, as though in mockery of your woe, frequently rolled past you in all the gorgeousness of wealth’.101 At the height of the strike, the National Charter Association issued an address that contained this key passage: Labour … has been convinced that all wealth, comfort, and produce, everything valuable, useful and elegant, have sprung from his hands and he feels that his cottage is empty, his back thinly clad, his children breadless, himself hopeless, his mind harassed, and his body punished, that undue riches, luxury, and gorgeous plenty might be heaped on the palaces of the taskmasters, and flooded in the granaries of the oppressor. Nature, God, and reason, have condemned this inequality, and in the thunder of a people’s voice it must perish forever.102

There is evidence to suggest that some members of the lower middle class had a good deal of sympathy with this analysis, even if they rejected Chartist solutions. A small shopkeeper writing in the Stockport Advertiser, for example, observed that although the ‘labouring classes of England’ had quadrupled manufacturing output over the preceding thirty years, the only result they can see was ‘that masters have been enabled to erect palaces on every hand, and crowd the roads and streets with glittering carriages of every description … thus increasing in a vastly disproportionate degree

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the original difference subsisting between himself as the producer, and the capitalist as the consumer’. The writer went on to condemn Cobden and the panacea of free trade finance.103 In his summing up at Lancaster, Baron Rolfe again advised the jury to disregard much of the defendants’ evidence and not conflate political and economic aspects of the question. Chartists had little choice but to publicly accept the separation of political and economic domains; O’Connor, for instance, later thanked Rolfe for prescribing ‘the exact limits by which agitation should be bound’.104 Unlike a few months before, the path of conciliation was now favoured and although thirty-one of the defendants were found guilty, the indictment had not been properly framed and all the prisoners were eventually allowed their freedom. The Chartist leadership was understandably much relieved and the radical publishers Abel Heywood and John Cleave immediately issued a full text of the proceedings, dedicated by O’Connor to the ‘Just Judge’. The trial represented an important turning point, certainly, though its significance should not be over-emphasised. For one thing, dominant elites remained divided about how best to deal with the Chartists. The Times welcomed the outcome and praised Rolfe for his sympathy and cool-headedness, but both Peel and Graham had wanted blood.105 Moreover, Peel’s budget of the year before was a clear sign that the process of so-called ‘liberalisation’, which crucially involved appeasing the poor consumer as the argument above has suggested, was already well under way. Conclusion This chapter has explored how consumption and consumer issues lay at the heart of popular politics during the early 1840s. I have sought to show the ways in which Chartists and supporters of the Anti-Corn Law League made sense of hunger and consumption issues more generally and how these organisations offered competing solutions to the problem of working-class underconsumption. According to the League, the only real answer to scarcity was an unfettered abstract market, freed to work according to its own ‘natural’ laws. Its supporters subscribed to a spasmodic view of popular protest; free trade, they believed, would spread material benefits, which in turn would civilise workers and undermine the appeal of radical political solutions to economic and social problems.

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Chartists alternatively insisted that relations of consumption were necessarily power relations, argued that government intervention was often required to put matters right and that this would be the case regardless of whether or not free traders’ ambitions were achieved. Crucially, they also stressed the necessity for community organisation and regulation of the sphere of consumption by means of co-operative forms. The Chartist position became harder to maintain in exactly the same terms after the defeat of 1842. It was not that the issues disappeared, nor the awkward questions. Despite the optimism of some middle-class commentators keen to provide proof that material comforts had trickled down to workers, radical criticism of poverty in the midst of plenty continued to furnish a more accurate representation of reality.106 In May 1845, the editor of the Northern Star could still contrast ‘a poverty-stricken, discontented, ignorant mass of toilers on the one hand, and a sensual, enjoying, squandering, voluptuous class on the other’. Exposure of these extremes was regarded as more vital than ever before, a task taken up by G. W. M. Reynolds that year in his hugely popular work, The Mysteries of London, which was prefaced with a discourse on ‘WEALTH AND POVERTY’.107 Moreover, the politics of provision remained centre stage as famine began to ravage Ireland from 1845. Mass immigration of the Irish into England put even more strain on relief agencies and shaped the contours of late Chartism in important ways.108 Muddle-headed landowners and their hangers-on also continued to give helpful advice to starving and malnourished English labourers; the geologist and Dean of Westminster, Dr William Buckland, and the Duke of Norfolk both suggested alternative diets for the poor. John Bright was quick to pounce, declaiming before a meeting of the League at Covent Garden Theatre that ‘a fat and sleek dean, a dignitary of the Church and a great philosopher, recommends for the consumption of the people … swede turnips and mangel-wurzel; and the Hereditary Earl Marshall of England, as if to out-herod Herod himself, recommends hot water and a pinch of curry-powder’.109 Chartists vehemently opposed the Anti-Corn Law League, not because they were against free trade necessarily, but because they believed that the League’s version of free trade entailed the hegemony of the abstract market, which would further erode their position as poor consumers.110 Some tried to invent a new ‘moral economy’, from popular memory and current practice, to contest what they

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sardonically dubbed the ‘extension of commerce’, and they also began, in faltering and partial ways, to develop a new democratic politics of consumption that sought to maximise popular participation and control. It was not a coincidence that the Chartist leader James Bronterre O’Brien was among the first to use the term ‘moral economy’ to point up fundamental differences between Chartism and those who trumpeted the new political economy, notably the League. Likewise, the leaders of the Sheffield trades – who had previously been ‘mere tools of Freebootery’ according to William Hill – came out strongly against free trade in the summer of 1843, explaining that the ‘chief consideration of the political economist is production, leaving distribution to regulate itself. The moral economist would unite both, so as to produce “the greatest happiness to the greatest number.”’111 Thus, the consumer politics of early Chartism held together, albeit briefly, imagined traditions of ‘moral economy’ with newer understandings of consumption as a vital route towards a truly democratic and equal society. The Chartists faced momentous obstacles for sure; as we shall see in the next chapter, breaking links between morality and economics – the separation of which was vital to the emergence of the worker as modern consumer – was a key objective of the New Poor Law of 1834. Radicals and the poor understood this very well, which is why the introduction and enforcement of this hated measure was met with such staunch resistance. Notes 1 Marsham later defended his remarks in The Times, explaining that he had actually stated that workers ‘rejoiced’ in ‘oatmeal with potatoes’, not merely potatoes! See 16 February 1846, p. 5; 18 February 1846, p. 5. For a stimulating discussion of the cultural significance of the potato, see Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, ‘The potato in the materialist imagination’, in Practicing new historicism (Chicago, 2001). 2 Alexander Somerville, The whistler at the plough (Manchester, 1852), p. 138; Annual Register 1843 (1844), p. 110; Alfred Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn-Law League (1853), vol. II, p. 51; Norman McCord (ed.), Free trade: theory and practice from Adam Smith to Keynes (1970), pp. 72–3. 3 Thomas Carlyle, Past and present (1843; 1897), p. 228. 4 Northern Star, 20 October 1838, p. 7. For similar views, see Mark Hovell, The Chartist movement (1918; Manchester, 1966), p. 118; Theodore Rothstein, From Chartism to Labourism (1929), p. 50;

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5

6

7

8

9

10

11

55

G. D. H. Cole, Chartist portraits (1941), pp. 1–2, 74; W. W. Rostow, British economy of the nineteenth century (Oxford, 1948), pp. 122– 5. Gammage, the movement’s first historian, had a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between want and politics. See R. G. Gammage, The history of the Chartist movement (1854; 1976), p. 9. Note also Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in Languages of class: studies in English working class history 1832– 1982 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 100; Gertrude Himmelfarb, The idea of poverty: England in the early industrial age (1984), pp. 263–6. The Times, 18 January 1839, p. 5. Saunders, a Birmingham Chartist, accused the League of representing the movement as ‘an eating and drinking concern’. Ibid., 31 October 1842, p. 3. John James Bezer, ‘Autobiography of one of the Chartist rebels of 1848’, in David Vincent (ed.), Testaments of radicalism: memoirs of working-class politicians 1790–1885 (1977), p. 187 (emphasis in original). Bezer’s views are discussed in more detail in Chapter 5. The ‘myth’ of the ‘Hungry Forties’ was criticised by W. O. Chaloner in The Hungry Forties: a re-examination (1958), an important pamphlet that traced the origins of the term to the propagandist collection of memoirs, The Hungry Forties: life under the Bread Tax (1904), edited by Cobden’s daughter, Jane Cobden-Unwin. See also Anthony Howe’s more recent observations in Free trade and liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 232, 259. A contextual understanding of hunger is stressed by, inter alia, John Walter and Keith Wrightson, ‘Dearth and the social order in early modern England’, Past and Present, 71 (1976), 22–42; Patrick Joyce, Democratic subjects: the self and the social in nineteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 25–6; James Vernon, Hunger: a modern history (Cambridge, MA, 2007), pp. 7–8. E. P. Thompson, ‘The moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century’, Past and Present, 50 (1971), 76–136. For attempts to apply Thompson’s model to the later period, see K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the labouring poor: social change and agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1984); Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth (eds), Moral economy and popular protest: crowds, conflict and authority (Basingstoke, 2000). For other uses of the term besides Chartist, see David Eastwood, ‘Robert Southey and the intellectual origins of Romantic conservatism’, English Historical Review, 104 (1989), 323; K. D. M. Snell (ed.), The whistler at the plough, Alexander Somerville (1989), p. 257. See, for example, Henry Dunckley, The charter of the nations (1854). For an important discussion of how context modified theory, see Peter Gray, ‘Famine and land in Ireland and India, 1845–1880: James Caird

56

12

13

14 15 16

17

18 19

20

‘Rejoicing in potatoes’ and the political economy of hunger’, Historical Journal, 49:1 (2006), 193–215. W. R. Greg, Not overproduction but deficient consumption, the source of our sufferings (1842), p. 27; Alon Kadish, ‘Free trade and high wages: the economics of the Anti-Corn Law League’, in Andrew Marrison (ed.), Free trade and its reception 1815–1960 (1998), pp. 24–5; G. M. Trevelyan, The life of John Bright (1913), p. 57. Howe, Free trade and liberal England, pp. 5–6, 30; Cheryl SchonhardtBailey, From the corn laws to free trade: interests, ideas, and institutions in historical perspective (Cambridge, MA, 2006), pp. 102–4. Anti-Corn Law Circular, 28 May 1839, p. 3. See also ibid., 1 October 1839, p. 2; 27 August 1840, p. 5. Asa Briggs, Victorian people (1954; 1965), p. 214. League, 16 March 1844, pp. 14–15. Elliott’s Corn Law Rhymes were first published by the Sheffield Mechanics’ Anti-Bread Tax Society in 1830. For his cross-class appeal, see Asa Briggs, ‘Ebenezer Elliott, the Corn Law rhymer’, Cambridge Journal, 3 (1949–50), 686–95; Martha Vicinus, The industrial muse: a study of nineteenth century British working-class literature (1974). The poetical works of Ebenezer Elliott (Edinburgh, 1840). For Elliott’s continuing popularity in working-class circles in the late nineteenth century, see Anthony Taylor, ‘Commemoration, memorialisation and political memory in post-Chartist radicalism: the 1885 Halifax Chartist Reunion in context’, in Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson and Stephen Roberts (eds), The Chartist legacy (Woodbridge, 1999), p. 262. Anti-Bread Tax Circular, 26 May 1841, p. 1. See also ibid., 21 April 1841, p. 7. Ironically, the League fell out with the Anti-Slavery Society, which opposed free trade in sugar, maintaining that relaxing the duty on imports from Brazil would serve to strengthen the institution of slavery. This doctrinaire policy was also contested by some leading advocates of repeal, including Joseph Sturge. For the heated debate, see the League, 8 June 1844, pp. 1–2; 23 November 1844, pp. 2–3; 4 January 1845, pp. 3–4; Alex Tyrrell, Joseph Sturge and the moral radical party in early Victorian Britain (1987), pp. 140–2; Catherine Hall, Civilising subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830–1867 (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 338–9. Tariffs were gradually lifted between 1846 and 1854. Note also G. R. Searle, Morality and the market in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 1998). Anti-Corn Law Circular, 5 November 1840, p. 1; Clare Midgley, ‘Slave sugar boycotts, female activism and the domestic base of British anti-slavery culture’, Slavery and Abolition, 17:3 (1996), 137–62;

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21

22 23 24 25 26

27

28 29

30 31

32 33

57

Charlotte Sussman, Consuming anxieties: consumer protest, gender, and British slavery, 1713–1833 (Palo Alto, CA, 2000). For the eighteenth-century roots of this view, see Linda Colley, Britons: forging the nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, 1992). For the internationalist strand, proclaimed with messianic fervour by Richard Cobden, see Howe, Free trade and liberal England. League, 10 May 1845, p. 1. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn-Law League, vol. I, pp. 376–7. Anti-Bread Tax Circular, 10 February 1842, p. 3. William Grampp, The Manchester School of economics (Palo Alto, CA, 1960), pp. 5–11. Michael J. Turner emphasises divisions within the elite over the policy of laissez-faire in ‘Before the Manchester School’, History, 79:2 (1994), 216–41. See also his article, ‘“The Bonaparte of free trade”: Peronnet Thompson’, Historical Journal, 41:4 (1998), 1011–34. Norman McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League, 1838–1846 (1958), pp. 51–3, 96–103, 111–16; Lucy Brown, ‘The Chartists and the AntiCorn Law League’, in Asa Briggs (ed.), Chartist studies (1959); Norman Longmate, The breadstealers: the fight against the Corn Laws, 1838– 1846 (1984), pp. 81–95; Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: popular politics in the Industrial Revolution (1984), pp. 274–5; Paul Pickering and Alex Tyrrell, The people’s bread: a history of the Anti-Corn Law League (Leicester, 2000), pp. 139–64. Northern Star, 15 August 1840, p. 1. The League’s religiosity was fairly diffuse and not evangelical in the strict sense, as Boyd Hilton points out in The age of atonement: the influence of evangelicalism on social and economic thought, 1785– 1865 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 246–9. For Chartist uses of religion, see Eileen Yeo, ‘Christianity and Chartist struggle’, Past and Present, 91 (1981), 109–39; Eileen Groth Lyon, Politicians in the pulpit: Christian radicalism in Britain from the fall of the Bastille to the disintegration of Chartism (Aldershot, 1999). See James Epstein, Radical expression: political language, ritual and symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 5–28. The just claims of the working classes (Kettering, 1839), reprinted in Dorothy Thompson, The early Chartists (1971), p. 106. See also David Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (1975), pp. 123–8. Hansard, vol. 62, col. 1379 (House of Commons, 2 May 1842); Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, pp. 108–10. See Hugh Cunningham, ‘The language of patriotism, 1750–1914’, History Workshop Journal, 12 (1981), 8–33; Margot Finn, After Chartism: class and nation in English radical politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge, 1993).

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34 Northern Star, 2 March 1839, cited in Thompson, The early Chartists, p. 183. 35 Pickering and Tyrrell, The people’s bread, p. 144. 36 Especially Anna Clark, ‘The rhetoric of Chartist domesticity: gender, language, and class in the 1830s and 1840s’, Journal of British Studies, 31:1 (1992), 62–88. 37 Northern Star, 9 March 1839, p. 4; Snell, Annals of the labouring poor, p. 112; Lyn Hollen Lees, The solidarities of strangers: the English poor laws and the people, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 162–5. 38 Northern Star, 23 February 1839, p. 6; 9 March 1839, p. 7; J. R. Stephens, The political pulpit (Manchester, 1839), pp. 62, 89; John Knott, Popular opposition to the 1834 Poor Law (1986), pp. 137–8, 233–4. 39 Northern Star, 30 April 1842, p. 7; J. T. Ward, W. B. Ferrand: ‘The Working Man’s Friend’, 1809–1889 (Edinburgh, 2002), pp. 32–7. 40 Charles Parker, Sir Robert Peel from his private papers (1899), vol. II, p. 543. 41 Midland Mining Commission, pp. lxxxvii, c, 28. 42 The Truck Acts did not solve the problem of tommy shops and exChartists continued to campaign against them in the 1850s and 1860s, as Raymond Challinor notes in A radical lawyer in Victorian England: W. P. Roberts and the struggle for workers’ rights (1989). 43 See G. D. H. Cole, A century of co-operation (Manchester, 1945), pp. 24–5, 67–8; J. F. C. Harrison, Quest for the new moral world: Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (New York, 1969), pp. 197–203; Iorwerth Prothero, Artisans and politics in early nineteenth-century London (1979), pp. 239–64; Robin Thornes, ‘Change and continuity in the development of co-operation, 1827– 1844’, in Stephen Yeo (ed.), New views of co-operation (1988), pp. 29–35; Martin Purvis, ‘Co-operative retailing in England, 1835– 1850: developments beyond Rochdale’, Northern History, 22 (1986), 198–215. 44 Northern Star, 20 July 1839, p. 4; Malcolm Chase, Chartism: a new history (Manchester, 2007), pp. 62–3. 45 Morning Post, 17 April 1844, p. 2; Era, 14 April 1844, p. 4. The relevant Act was 7th and 8th Victoria, cap. 24. 46 Hansard, vol. 1, col. 1141 (House of Commons, 14 December 1830); vol. 61, col. 316 (House of Commons, 9 March 1842); vol. 86, col. 1030 (House of Commons, 22 May 1846); vol. 86, col. 1188 (House of Lords, 25 May 1846). Their opponents sometimes spoke up for ‘the consumer’ against modern corn merchants or ‘forestallers’. See, for example, Lord George Bentinck in vol. 89, cols 246–8 (House of Commons, 21 January 1847).

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47 Northern Star, 10 February 1838, p. 3; 29 August 1840, p. 4; 26 June 1847, p. 1; 2 September 1848, p. 4. 48 George Kitson Clark, ‘Hunger and politics in 1842’, Journal of Modern History, 25:4 (1953), 357. 49 An aspect overlooked by Yeo, ‘Christianity and Chartist struggle’, and Lyon, Politicians in the pulpit. 50 William Field, A lecture on the provision laws, chiefly considered as a moral and religious question (Warwick, 1842), pp. 29–30. 51 Ibid., pp. 19–20. Lyon discusses Field in Politicians in the pulpit. See also Josephine McDonagh, Child murder and British culture, 1720– 1900 (Cambridge, 2003). 52 On the popularity and influence of the Struggle, see John Pearce, The life and teachings of Joseph Livesey (1886), p. lxxii; McCord, The AntiCorn Law League, p. 119; Longmate, The breadstealers, pp. 113–14; Pickering and Tyrrell, The people’s bread, pp. 153–4. 53 Reports of farmers shooting people caught stealing potatoes appeared in The Times, 25 December 1841, p. 6; 28 December 1842, p. 7. Rohan McWilliam surveys the literature on Victorian melodrama in ‘Melodrama and the historians’, Radical History Review, 78:3 (2000), 57–84. 54 For the importance of bread in the working-class diet, see William Neild, ‘Comparative statement of the income and expenditure of certain classes of the working classes in Manchester and Dukinfield in the years 1836 and 1841’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 4:4 (1842), 320–34. 55 Cited in E. P. Thompson, The making of the English working class (1963), p. 315. Note also Elliott’s speech reported in The Times, 1 January 1839, p. 6; John Wade, History of the middle and working classes (1833), pp. 247–8. 56 Carlyle, Past and present, pp. 6–7; John D. Rosenberg, Carlyle and the burden of history (Cambridge, MA, 1985), pp. 118–23; Roger Swift, ‘Thomas Carlyle, Chartism, and the Irish in early Victorian England’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 29:1 (2001), 67–83; Frances A. Yates, ‘Transformations of Dante’s Ugolino’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 14:1 (1951–2), 100–1. Imprisoned with his sons by the Archbishop of Pisa in the late thirteenth century, Count Ugolino was reputedly driven to eat their flesh. Ugolino became a potent symbol of the struggle against despotism, not just in England but across northern Europe in the nineteenth century – Yates refers to an ‘Ugolino craze’. Lee Sterrenburg emphasises the role of Fraser’s Magazine and Carlyle in spreading cannibal tales in ‘Psychoanalysis and the iconography of revolution’, Victorian Studies, 19:4 (1975), 241–64. 57 Field, A lecture on the provision laws, pp. 17–18.

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58 See G. W. Stocking, Victorian anthropology (New York, 1987); H. L. Malchow, Gothic images of race in nineteenth-century Britain (Palo Alto, CA, 1996); Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: the discovery and representation of the cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne (Cambridge, 1997). Lord John Russell denied rumours of Irish cannibalism during the Great Famine, while twenty years later stories of cannibalism in Algeria were rife. See The Times, 2 June 1849, p. 3; 8 June 1868, p. 10. 59 The Times, 15 June 1842, p. 8. 60 Ibid., 14 June 1842, p. 5; 17 June 1842, p. 4; Penny Satirist, 13 August 1842, p. 2. 61 Sir James Graham and Robert Peel instigated the article, as Kitson Clark noted in ‘Hunger and politics in 1842’, 366. 62 Cited in Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, p. 108. 63 Northern Star, 26 February 1842, p. 3. 64 Ibid., 18 November 1842, p. 3. 65 Ibid., 2 April 1842, p. 4. The cultural centrality of cannibalistic tropes is further underlined by the popularity of James Rymer’s gothic novel, Varney the vampyre; or, the feast of blood: a romance (1845–7). 66 Cited in Betty Kemp, ‘The General Election of 1841’, History, 37 (1952), 151. 67 Parker, Sir Robert Peel, p. 530. For Tory deployment of underconsumptionist arguments, see Anna Gambles, Protection and politics: Conservative economic discourse, 1815–1852 (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 50–1, 73–4. 68 Martin Daunton discusses the high politics of Peel’s fiscal strategy in Trusting Leviathan: the politics of taxation in Britain, 1799–1914 (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 77–90. See also Howe, Free trade and liberal England, pp. 37, 143; Donald Read, Peel and the Victorians (Oxford, 1987), pp. 287–94. 69 Examiner, 14 May 1842, p. 306. 70 Northern Star, 26 March 1842, p. 8; 2 April 1842, p. 4; 23 April 1842, p. 4. For Bright’s reaction to the income tax, see Keith Robbins, John Bright (1979), p. 34. Cobden later dropped his opposition, as Colin Matthew notes in ‘Disraeli, Gladstone, and the politics of mid-Victorian Budgets’, Historical Journal, 22:3 (1979), 617. 71 Northern Star, 25 June 1842, p. 4. 72 Major studies include A. G. Rose, ‘The Plug Riots of 1842 in Lancashire and Cheshire’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, 67 (1958), 75–112; F. C. Mather, ‘The General Strike of 1842: a study in leadership, organisation and the threat of revolution during the Plug Plot disturbances’, in Roland Quinault and John Stevenson (eds), Popular protest and public order: six studies in British history,

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73

74

75

76 77

78 79

80

61

1790–1920 (1974); Mick Jenkins, The General Strike of 1842 (1980); Robert Fyson, ‘The crisis of 1842: Chartism, the Colliers’ Strike and the outbreak of 1842 in the Potteries’, in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (eds), The Chartist experience: studies in working-class radicalism and culture, 1830–60 (1982); Anthony Smith, ‘The strike for the People’s Charter in 1842’ (University of London PhD thesis, 2002). In a letter to Lord Brougham on August 21. Charles Parker, The life and letters of Sir James Graham (1907), vol. I, p. 323. Five days later a relieved Graham noted in a letter to Lord Galloway that ‘the insurrection is overawed; but the rebellious spirit is unbroken’. Ibid., p. 324. Manchester Guardian, 13 August 1842; 17 August 1842; Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, 13 August 1842; The trial of Feargus O’Connor and fifty-eight others on a charge of sedition, conspiracy, tumult and riot (1843; New York, 1970), p. 105. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn-Law League, vol. II, p. 371; William Cooke Taylor, Notes of a tour in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire (1842; 1968), pp. 320–1. See also R. A. Sykes, ‘Popular politics and trade unionism in south-east Lancashire, 1829–42’ (University of Manchester PhD thesis, 1982), pp. 712–15. Fyson, ‘The crisis of 1842’, pp. 198, 208, 210–11. The Metropolitan Visiting and Relief Association was established in 1843, a body that attempted to put charitable endeavour in the capital on a sounder footing. See David Owen, English philanthropy 1660– 1960 (Cambridge, MA, 1965), pp. 140–3. Five years later Elizabeth Gaskell denounced the deformation of the gift in Mary Barton: a tale of Manchester life (1848; 1970), pp. 99, 109. Reviewing this novel in the Edinburgh Review 89 (April 1849), 406–9, W. R. Greg hoped that it might remind the middle classes of their duty to the poor. The political context of giving is under-emphasised by Frank Prochaska in his chapter ‘Philanthropy’, in F. M. L. Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge social history of Britain 1750–1950, vol. III: Social agencies and institutions (Cambridge, 1990). Trial of Feargus O’Connor, pp. 250–1. See John Mills, Protection’s ‘good old days’: some early century recollections (Manchester, 1903), pp. 4–5; ‘Chester Special Commission’, Public Record Office, London (hereafter PRO), TS 36/26, pp. 210–11; The Times, 15 August 1842, p. 5. Parker, Sir Robert Peel, pp. 530, 540; The life and letters of Sir James Graham, pp. 320, 322. Graham and others also blamed Anti-Corn Law mill owners, ‘who were at first inclined to smile at the disturbance, but when it reached their own doors were the first to cry aloud for soldiers’; Parker, The life and letters of Sir James Graham, p. 324.

62

81 82

83 84

85 86 87

88

89

90

91

‘Rejoicing in potatoes’ See also Kitson Clark, ‘Hunger and politics in 1842’, 367; Jenkins, The General Strike of 1842, pp. 195–7. Northern Star, 7 May 1842, p. 8. T. D. W. and Naomi Reid, ‘The 1842 “Plug Plot” in Stockport’, International Review of Social History, 24:1 (1979), 55–79, is misleading in its stress on the ‘instinctive’ nature of the riot and the lack of Chartist involvement. Trial of Feargus O’Connor, p. 55. For conditions in Stockport, see Cooke Taylor’s graphic description in Notes of a tour, pp. 182–222. Amartya Sen, Poverty and famine (Oxford, 1981); Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen, Hunger and public action (Oxford, 1989). Michael Watts points out that Sen underestimates the importance of both socially determined entitlements and non-legal entitlements in ‘Black acts’, New Left Review, 9 (2001), 130–1. Letter dated 12 August, cited in McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League, p. 127. Letter dated 11 August, cited in Trevelyan, Life of John Bright, pp. 80–1. See Dorothy Thompson, ‘Who were “the People” in 1842?’, in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (eds), Living and learning: essays in honour of J. F. C. Harrison (Aldershot, 1996). Anti-Bread Tax Circular, 25 August 1842, p. 2. For earlier constructions of the social and political ‘middle’, see Dror Wahrman, Imagining the middle class: the political representation of class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1993). Anti-Bread Tax Circular, 8 September 1842, p. 1; John Morley, The life of Richard Cobden (1879; 1903), pp. 248–9. For Bright, see The Times, 31 October 1842, p. 3. Pickering and Tyrrell, The people’s bread, pp. 144–5; Northern Star, 23 October 1841, p. 4; 6 November 1841, pp. 4, 6. The ‘Daily Bread’ scheme involved using penny subscriptions to local societies to buy foreign corn and land it duty free, resisting the authorities if necessary. The idiosyncratic Johann Lhotsky published a number of pamphlets that deployed lurid hunger stories to support the idea. See Daily bread, or, taxation without representation resisted: being a plan for the abolition of the bread tax. By one of the millions (1841); Hunger and revolution. [An anti-corn-law tract.] By the author of ‘Daily Bread’ (1843); On cases of death by starvation and extreme distress among the humbler classes considered as one of the main symptoms of the present disorganization of society (1844). The journeyman tailor William Duffy of Liverpool, for instance, who had once used his Irish influence to protect League meetings, rejected the panacea of free trade by the time the 1842 strikes broke out and represented the tailors in the Conference of Trade Unions at Manchester.

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92 Trial of Feargus O’Connor, p. 249. 93 Odd Fellow, 10 September 1842, p. 2. 94 See Scarlett’s instructions to the Grand Juries that presided at the Chester and Lancashire Special Commissions, reprinted in Peter Campbell Scarlett, A memoir of the Right Honourable James, First Lord Abinger (1877), pp. 175–91. 95 Northern Star, 15 October 1842, p. 3; 22 October 1842, p. 4. Five individuals were transported for life from the Black Country. See David Philips, ‘Riots and public order in the Black Country, 1835– 1860’, in Quinault and Stevenson (eds), Popular protest and public order, p. 157. 96 Trial of Feargus O’Connor, pp. 239, 264. 97 Ibid., pp. 242–3. For the prioritisation of distribution and exchange within Owenite socialism, see Noel Thompson, The people’s science: the popular political economy of exploitation and crisis, 1816–34 (Cambridge, 1984). 98 Trial of Feargus O’Connor, p. 270. Contributors explore the malleable nature of the constitution in James Vernon (ed.), Re-reading the constitution: new narratives in the political history of England’s long nineteenth century (Cambridge, 1996). 99 Trial of Feargus O’Connor, p. 254; Ben Wilson, ‘The struggles of an old Chartist’ (1887) in Vincent (ed.), Testaments of radicalism, p. 202; Frank Peel, The risings of the Luddites, Chartists and Plug-drawers (1880; 1968), pp. 344–5. 100 Trial of Feargus O’Connor, p. 252. 101 Thompson, The early Chartists, p. 113. See also Penny Satirist, 11 July 1840, p. 2. 102 PRO, HO 45/249c, f. 218, cited in Smith, ‘The strike for the People’s Charter in 1842’, p. 59. This address helped convict Chartists at Chester. See ‘Chester Special Commission’, PRO, TS 36/26, pp. 301–3. 103 Ten letters addressed to Richard Cobden, Esq., M.P., originally published in the Stockport Advertiser, under the signature of ‘A Shopkeeper’ (Stockport, 1842). The relative nature of poverty was understood by Adam Smith, as Himmelfarb observes in The idea of poverty, pp. 531–2. The League conveniently chose to ignore this aspect of Smith’s thought, though it frequently denounced aristocratic ‘luxury’. For a good example, see George Thompson’s speech reported in The Times, 29 October 1842, p. 6 and below, Chapter 7. 104 Trial of Feargus O’Connor, pp. 358–90; Jenkins, The General Strike of 1842, p. 236. 105 The Times, 11 March 1843, p. 5; Smith, ‘The strike for the People’s Charter in 1842’, pp. 243–8. 106 George Porter, The progress of the nation, in its various social and economical relations (1836; 1847), p. 523; W. R. Greg, ‘England as it is’, Edinburgh Review, 93 (April 1851), 305–39.

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107 Northern Star, 31 May 1845, p. 4. See also ibid., 14 June 1845, p. 4; Himmelfarb, The idea of poverty, pp. 438–9. 108 See Rachel O’Higgins, ‘The Irish influence in the Chartist movement’, Past and Present, 20 (1961), 83–96; J. H. Treble, ‘O’Connor, O’Connell and attitudes of Irish immigrants towards Chartism in the north of England’, in J. Butt and I. F. Clarke (eds), The Victorians and social protest (Newton Abbot, 1973); Dorothy Thompson, ‘Ireland and the Irish in English radicalism before 1850’, in Epstein and Thompson (eds), The Chartist experience. 109 The Times, 11 December 1845, p. 4; Bradford Observer, 4 December 1845, p. 7; Francis W. Hirst (ed.), Free trade and other fundamental doctrines of the Manchester School (1903), p. 217. 110 Consequently Henry Miller’s article, which suggests that some workers signed petitions against the Corn Laws, does not prove popular support for the League or even free trade in any straightforward sense: ‘Popular petitioning and the Corn Laws, 1833–46’, English Historical Review, 127 (2012), 882–919. 111 Northern Star, 6 August 1843, p. 4.

3

‘The Andover Cannibalism’: popular entitlement and the New Poor Law

It is a commonplace of recent scholarship that the Poor Law Amendment Act passed by the Whig administration in 1834 meant different things in different places. Importantly, and much to the chagrin of Edwin Chadwick, one of the chief architects of this revolutionary measure, many Boards of Guardians continued to grant outdoor relief after 1834, particularly but not only in northern manufacturing districts.1 Greater understanding of regional variation has also forced a re-evaluation of the impact the New Poor Law workhouse had on the lives of the poor, and it is now widely accepted that not all institutions were as bad as contemporary critics such as Charles Dickens frequently imagined. Thus, many historians have cautioned against writing the early history of the New Poor Law in terms of the many scandals that blew up, as such an approach sidelines majority practice.2 While much of this revisionism has been valuable, it has tended to underplay the overall significance of the Act, particularly for poor consumers. Notwithstanding local particularities, this chapter explores the legislation’s wider project, which, as Larry Patriquin has recently emphasised, was not to create a capitalist labour market – that was in fact already fast maturing – but was rather to contest the right of poor consumers ‘to live at a basic level of comfort’, a right underwritten by the state.3 The notorious Report that presaged the Act loudly trumpeted this objective in propagandist style. The Speenhamland system of allowances, which had reinvigorated ‘moral economy’ or the paternalistic elements of the Old Poor Law by linking relief to family size and the cost of bread, was the bête noire of Chadwick and Senior, who drew it up. They asserted that these and other allowances had produced idleness and vice, that they sapped the physical and moral resources of workers and drained poor consumers of all ambition. Such views

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were highly partial to say the least, and though some unlikely figures have often accepted them, including the liberal-socialist intellectual Karl Polanyi, historians have revealed them to be largely mythological.4 The number of localities in which the Speenhamland system operated, for example, was in fact already in decline long before 1834.5 Nevertheless, allowances did provide a safety net or nascent ‘welfare state’ in many localities after the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the New Poor Law attacked head-on the existing consumption practices of the poor, which were widely interpreted from below in terms of entitlement. The law enforced the notion that more extensive consumption habits should only be enjoyed by independent labourers who could support their families without state aid. By seeking to abolish the allowance system and outdoor relief for able-bodied labourers and standardising workhouse conditions, in theory at least, the New Poor Law was therefore explicitly designed to radically transform popular entitlements and redefine the expectations of poor consumers. The labouring poor were categorised as deserving and undeserving, pauperism and poverty were distinguished from one another and the social norm of consumption of the poor was recalibrated downwards.6 If the workhouse regime was the whip, the promise of more things or ‘comforts’ constituted the incentive. In short, the New Poor Law spoke to and configured the labourer not only as a worker but also as a consumer. What made this project more difficult was that the poor English consumer was not a blank slate. Besides the fact that many were used to allowances of some kind when things got tough, when in work they enjoyed good wages compared to their European counterparts.7 Indeed the standard of comforts enjoyed by English workers – a topic that drew frequent comment from foreign observers such as Alexis de Tocqueville – was intimately bound up with notions of national difference and patriotism.8 Writing in 1842, W. R. Greg, for instance, opined that ‘the same sum which maintains a Frenchman or a Saxon in comfort and abundance, will still be insufficient for an Englishman’s support. His wants are more numerous.’9 English workers enjoyed spending their money on a wide range of consumer goods that reached down to the plebeian market and historians have convincingly demonstrated how the labouring poor, including many near the bottom of the social scale, were not simply consumed by the so-called ‘consumer revolution’ of the eighteenth century. They were not only comparatively well

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fed; labourers sometimes even managed to accumulate goods and could perhaps become as emotionally attached to them as their social superiors often were; evidence from pauper inventories has recently deepened our as yet slight understanding of the engagement poor people had with the world of goods.10 In this context, the poor laws represented a safety net, a degree zero that helped to define the basic standard of comfort necessary to sustain a civilised English existence. Clearly, it would be wrongheaded to draw an overly simplistic contrast between an emerging and luxurious consumer culture and a necessitous plebeian culture. This chapter explores the hypothesis that the New Poor Law aimed to produce consumers by first looking at how ideas concerning the reform of popular consumption practices shaped the Poor Law Commissioners’ Report of 1834, drafted by Nassau Senior and Edwin Chadwick. Attention is paid to some of the major scandals that rocked the New Poor Law through the late 1830s and 1840s, for despite the note of caution sounded by some historians, these scandals can reveal a great deal about popular perceptions of the reformed Poor Law. As Dickens well knew, issues of entitlement often focused on the question of workhouse dietaries and provoked some heated local conflicts. The Bridgwater scandal in 1837 brought the so-called ‘gruel question’ into the national political arena; while the scandal of the Andover workhouse in 1845 – when rumours of cannibalism were widely circulated – became a cause célèbre that led eventually to the abolition of the Poor Law Commission itself. Scandals such as these again help to underline how hunger was both politically charged and represented differently by various constituencies in early Victorian England. They also demonstrate how paternalist middle-class critics of the New Poor Law as well as radical workers and the poor themselves modified legislation on the ground. Finally, the chapter argues that although workhouse scandals may have done something to protect the entitlement of poor consumers in the short term, their most important effect was to help forge a middle-class humanitarianism, which was already well advanced before the Irish Famine occupied centre stage after the mid-1840s.11 Disciplining poor consumers After decades of controversy and numerous earlier investigations into the problem of the poor and various aspects of relief, the Whig

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Government finally established a Royal Commission of Inquiry in 1832. The all-party commission of nine included Nassau Senior and Walter Coulson, both members of the influential Political Economy Club, the Bishops of London and Chester, William Sturges-Bourne, a former Tory MP who had chaired the Select Committee on the Poor Laws in 1817, and Jeremy Bentham’s former secretary, Edwin Chadwick. Twenty-six Assistant Commissioners were despatched throughout the country to collect evidence; they in fact visited only 3,000 out of 15,000 parishes in England and Wales.12 Senior was undoubtedly ‘the chief analytical force’ on the commission, providing a bridge with the government, explaining the issues and cajoling policy-makers on the hoof.13 He also wrote the final report, in a hurry, aided by Chadwick. Not surprisingly, the evidence was shaped to strengthen the case Senior had already made against the existing system in his Oxford lectures a few years earlier. McCulloch was not alone in accusing the commissioners of deliberately setting out to find abuses in order to speed up abolition of the Old Poor Law. His verdict on the report – a medley of ‘exaggeration, partiality, and quackery’ – was not far wide of the mark.14 In the Poor Law Commissioners’ Report of 1834 Senior and Chadwick predictably attacked what they considered to be the fundamental defect of the whole edifice, namely the complex structure of allowances in aid of wages, including the roundsman systems and the labour-rate. These, they justifiably argued, mainly served to strengthen the financial position as well as the local political power of wealthy tenant farmers, who often controlled rural vestries and exploited the cheap pool of labour that these interventions helped create.15 Allowances undermined the wage-form and had reduced labourers to the position of abject dependency. Thus, ‘all that sweetens labour’ had been lost, especially in rural districts where these practices were rife and labourers now performed their work ‘with the reluctance of a slave’. The authors maintained that the poor had regrettably embraced their dependent status for they had come to look upon allowances as their right and had consequently become thoroughly ‘demoralised’. They quoted extensively from the evidence submitted by Mr Okeden, an Oxfordshire magistrate, who observed: The character and habits of the labourer have, by this scale system, been completely changed. Industry fails, moral character is annihilated,

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and the poor man of twenty years ago, who tried to earn his money, and was thankful for it, is now converted into an insolent, discontented, surly, thoughtless pauper, who talks of ‘right and income’, and who will soon fight for these supposed rights and income, unless some step is taken to arrest his progress to open violence.16

Senior and Chadwick were careful not to suggest that the allowance system was practised to the same extent everywhere and admitted it was found more often in rural districts where farmers dominated the vestries.17 They argued forcefully, however, that this was the direction of travel and that the situation was getting worse. Expectations had been raised unreasonably by the present system over preceding decades, so that some even thought a daily ration of meat was now the poor man’s due. Paupers’ desires, they warned, ‘always wait on the imagination, which is the worst regulated and the most vivid in the most ignorant of the people’.18 An inflated sense of their rights not only made labourers easily dissatisfied; it also made them arrogant and this had fed the recent agricultural unrest; the ‘Swing riots’ were a shadowy but nevertheless very real presence in the report. The generalisation of the wage-form, by contrast, would bring contentment and class harmony, as labourers received fair remuneration for work performed.19 Though largely unremarked by recent historians, the consumption practices of the labouring poor were a major theme in the Poor Law Report. The much-publicised ‘demoralisation’ of the poor was evidenced by their dependence on allowances and the hasty marriages these encouraged, of course, but it was also visibly manifested in daily acts of profligate consumption. These were easily overlooked because the true state of the poor was often hidden by a deliberate display of poverty. Senior and Chadwick cited Mr Brushfield’s evidence from Spitalfields at length to demonstrate the extent to which the poor had internalised the rules of the game in order to turn it to their own advantage: In the pauper’s habitation you will find a strained show of misery and wretchedness; and those little articles of furniture which might, by the least exertion imaginable, wear an appearance of comfort, are turned, as it were intentionally, the ugliest side outward … the clothes of both parents and children, in nine cases out of ten, are ragged, but evidently are so for the lack of the least attempt to make them otherwise.20

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Brushfield went on to explain that when he had looked past these surface impressions, reality was somewhat different. Peering into their homes, he had discovered provisions ‘of the best quality’, while local tradesmen, including butchers and chandlers, had assured him that the poor ‘will not have anything but the best’. Brushfield compared this haphazard and dissolute culture with the order and regularity written on the habitations and bodies of the independent labourer and his family. In their cottages it was easy to discern ‘a sense of moral feeling and moral dignity … they purchase such food, and at such seasons, and in such quantities, as the most economical would approve of’.21 So parish paupers, the report suggested, frequently lived, if not exactly like lords, then very well indeed, at local ratepayers’ expense. Even more scandalously, much of the outdoor relief they were granted they threw away at beer shops, which had proliferated following Goulburn’s Act of 1830.22 This was one of Chadwick’s favourite hobbyhorses. He quoted magistrates who opined that workers were ‘accustomed to carouse, during one or two days in the week, gambling and indulging in the most vicious habits’, and was horrified to learn that this was common practice among those receiving parish relief as well as independent labourers. Apart from the moralistic aspects, the problem focused on the status of alcoholic beverages, over whether they should be considered necessities or luxuries for the labouring poor. Clearly, many of the poor thought of them in terms of the former and were reluctant to give them up when times got hard. Chadwick was tortured by the diversity of opinion on the subject, even among local magistrates themselves, whom he insistently questioned, to no avail: ‘Do you consider beer or gin a necessary of life to the paupers? – if it be admitted that beer is a necessary of life to the independent labourers, at all events the quantity required for intoxication can hardly be necessary. Ought you not, then, to ascertain and deduct the amount of money spent in drunken revelry?’23 As a good pupil of Bentham, the ‘irrationality’ of this system of poor relief stuck in Chadwick’s craw.24 He found it hard to swallow the fact that it was administered by magistrates who could not even agree on what kinds and quantities of commodities constituted the ‘absolute necessaries’ required by labourers to maintain themselves and their families. Senior and Chadwick explored various remedies designed to discipline profligate consumers. Emigration was one of these, though

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even here good beer and parish relief stood in the way. Under the present system paupers had been reduced to ‘moral helplessness’, behaving like spoilt children and complaining bitterly if anybody thwarted their desires. Just as children were often put out by minor alterations, so the poor labourer ‘is often disgusted to a degree which other classes scarcely conceive possible, by slight differences in diet; and is annoyed by any thing which appears to him strange and new’. In the colonies, the emigrant had to become accustomed to novel food and customs, which often proved impossible to individuals made soft by a lax regime. Senior and Chadwick cited evidence from Mr Stuart that featured a letter from a ‘troublesome pauper’ who had emigrated to Montreal only to later save up for a return fare, ‘apparently moved to that determination, as much by the want of well-tasted beer in Canada and a longing for old associations, as by the fact that he was obliged punctually to pay rent for his lodgings, instead of being provided with a cottage at the parish expense’.25 The more immediate solution, however, lay closer to home and was to be found in those parishes that had already abolished allowances and reformed their workhouses. Denying the need to reduce the workhouse diet as a form of punishment, they nevertheless emphasised the importance of order as well as the prohibition of goods that they regarded as unnecessary extras: ‘the restrictions to which the inmates are subject in respect to the use of acknowledged luxuries, such as fermented liquors and tobacco, are intolerable to the indolent and disorderly’.26 Chadwick celebrated the many signs of improvement apparent in the cottages and dress of independent labourers in the parishes that had tightened up relief. Asked by Chadwick whether standards had improved among labourers in a reformed parish, Mr Whately answered in the affirmative, asserting that the change had been simultaneously material and moral: ‘I find them less jealous of acknowledging their real condition than formerly; they now rather value themselves upon their respectability, than, as formerly, attempt to impose and extort money by pretended destitution.’27 One of the most promising examples of the possibilities of voluntary effort was the workhouse at Gravesend in Kent. Here the cause had been taken up by a committee of concerned ladies from the local community, headed by Mrs Park, sister-in-law of the explorer Mungo Park and wife of the parish surgeon. Before their intervention, the workhouse had been run as a kind of women’s

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refuge, according to Park at least. Out of about fifty female inmates, twenty-seven were ‘young, stout, active women’ who lounged about all day; some even spent mornings lying in bed. Old women were just as ‘ill regulated’ and often sent children to a nearby public house for spirits. Though lazy through and through, incredibly some paupers were still keenly fashion-conscious. Hitherto they had purchased the most gaudy prints for the females, and ready-made slop shirts for the men in the house, whilst the young women were lying in bed idle. One of the paupers, a girl of eighteen years of age, who refused to work, was dressed in a dashing printdress of red and green, with gigot sleeves, a silk band, a large golden or gilt buckle, long gilt earrings, and a lace-cap, turned up in front with bright ribbons, in the fashion of the day, and a high comb under the cap, and abundance of curls.28

How dare such women ignore their abject state and continue to express themselves by means of fashionable dress, Park thought – gigot sleeves indeed! Facing down obstructive parish officers who resisted change, the committee set about its work with gusto and soon abolished the paupers’ curls; female inmates had to wear their hair braided under caps. The attempt to impose a uniform met with ‘violent opposition’ from the mistress of the house as well as the inmates but, undaunted, the committee eventually triumphed and the women were dressed in ‘gowns of blue linsey-woolsey, check aprons, dark handkerchiefs, and close white caps’. Adding insult to injury, inmates had received instruction in knitting and needlework so had made the uniforms themselves, saving the parish a significant sum into the bargain. One measure of the resounding success of this experiment for Senior and Chadwick was that ‘in almost two months about one-half of the workers left’.

Workhouse rebellions and hell’s broth Based on the Royal Commission’s recommendations, the Poor Law Amendment Bill met little resistance in either the Commons or the Lords. As Senior remarked in his anonymous pamphlet: ‘Never did a great measure pass through Parliament more easily, we might say more triumphantly.’29 The establishment of a centralised bureaucracy, the Poor Law Commission, consisting of three Commissioners – Thomas Frankland Lewis, George Nicholls and

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George Shaw-Lefevre, with Edwin Chadwick as secretary – was the cornerstone of the Act that shifted power away from local overseers, vestries and magistrates to paid officers, elective guardians and the Commission itself, which exercised power over the whole system of relief. Parishes were to be reorganised into much larger Poor Law Unions administered by Boards of Guardians elected by ratepayers. By 1836, twenty-one Assistant Commissioners had been appointed to monitor progress throughout the country and enforce the Commission’s General Orders on the ground. They had to keep check, for instance, on the dietaries used in Union workhouses. One of Chadwick’s pet subjects, six dietaries were issued in 1836 by the Commission that demonstrated a fine sense of discrimination between degrees of frugality – a little more or less cheese or vegetables here and there (see Figure 430).31 The measure gained wide support across governing elites, and although the question of continuities with earlier provision has been debated, it seems clear that it marked a turning point and that many local landlords had come to embrace the principles of market capitalism that underlay the Poor Law Report.32 The Act represented no less than a revolutionary transformation, though this was deliberately downplayed by the architects of the ‘amendment’. An appreciation of local variation was built into the structure of the New Poor Law – hence the six dietaries – much to the disappointment of an ideological zealot like Chadwick, who wanted more rapid results, and this caused friction between the influential secretary and some of the other Commissioners from the outset, especially the Tory chairman Frankland Lewis who accepted that progress would be faltering and uneven.33 One of the most assiduous Assistant Commissioners, Dr James Phillips Kay, an ambitious young surgeon with a reputation to make, busied himself in Suffolk and Norfolk. Kay visited workhouses and sang the praises of the New Poor Law at numerous public meetings. Suffolk witnessed an early, violent wave of protest against the Act and Kay was keen to help put this down. At the Guildhall in Bury St Edmunds in December 1836, he denounced allowances as a form of slavery and explained the operation of the new legislation. Kay assured his listeners that after ‘a most careful inquiry’ Commissioners had found that independent labourers could buy 121 ounces of solid food per week for each member of their family, which was about half of what the poor had received in some Suffolk

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Men.

Men.

Women. Children above 9.

Men.

Women. Children above 9.

Men.

Women. Children above 9.

DIETARY No. 6.

Women. Children above 9.

DIETARY No. 5.

Women. Children above 9.

,, ,,

DIETARY No. 4.

Men.

oz. ,, ,,

DIETARY No. 3.

Men. Bread .......... Cooked meat .. Potatoes ........ Suet or Rice Pudding .. Cheese ......... Meat Pudding with vegetables † .... Butter ......... Bacon .. ...... Yeast dumpling Vegetable ....

DIETARY No. 2.

Women. Children above 9.

DIETARY No. 1.

84 15 24 14

70 15 24 12

112 – – 32*

98 – – 20*

132 8 24 –

106 6 24 –

116 – – 24*

92 – – 20*

98 10 48 14

84 10 48 12

102 8 24 16

88 8 24 12

8

8

18

4

18½

16½

14

10½

8½

8½

15

3

,,

–

–

16

10

–

–

12

10

–

–

–

–

,, ,, ,, ,,

– – – –

– – – –

– – – –

7 – – –

– 5 – –

– 4 – –

– 6 – –

– 5 – –

– – – 24

– – – 24

1 – 22 –

6 – 22 –

Total ..........

145

129

178

139

188

163

Gruel ...... pints Soup ......... ,, Broth ......... ,, Vegetables ........

10½ 4½ 4½ –

10½ 4½ 4½ –

– – – ?

– – – ?

– – 2 –

– – 2 –

187½ 156½

172

137½ 202½ 186½

10½ 1½ – –

10½ 6 – ?

10½ 4½ – ?

10½ 1½ – –

10½ 3 – –

10½ 3 – –

* Besides vegetables. † The vegetables are extra, and are not included in the weights specified.

Figure 4. The Poor Law Commission’s dietary tables (weekly allowances) in Jonathan Pereira, A treatise on food and diet (1843).

parishes under the old regime. To prove how ludicrously generous the old dietary had been, Kay experimented himself and asked Mr Barnes, a local guardian, ‘to eat the quantity provided for a meal, and he was unable to get through it … This was called a beneficent system – it was simply a way to make men die of indigestion, and to perpetuate idleness, pauperism, and vice’. Kay also referred to a similar test made independently by Mr Hughes, who with ‘various well-disposed persons’ he claimed had lived on the new workhouse diet for a month to no ill effect.34 Kay attacked old workhouses as breeding grounds of disorder and singled out the Cosford Hundred where, the winter before, paupers ‘pulled down the walls, broke the windows, and gutted the house, in defiance of the administrators of the law’. The new workhouse system would quell such riotous behaviour, Kay maintained, and would root out impostures; he flourished a pauper inventory as proof that undeserving paupers were still getting relief: ‘He held in his hand the catalogue of a pauper’s effects in Hoxne Hundred, including card tables, coal ranges,

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etc., which would sell for £80 or £100. This person was receiving a large weekly allowance from the parish.’ Here Kay was being particularly disingenuous as paupers’ goods were invariably seized by the parish when the recipient of relief died.35 Though he often misrepresented things to suit the case, Kay clearly loved the detail of his work and no other Assistant Commissioner had a firmer grasp of the microtechnics of power than he did. In the summer of 1836, he wrote to George Cornewall Lewis from Cromer in Norfolk, contesting the ‘popular delusion, that the efficacy of the workhouse system mainly depends on the meagreness of the diet provided in these houses’. Kay chirpily narrated the following story for Lewis’s edification: I had observed that the custom of permitting the paupers to retain in their possession, while residing within the walls of the workhouse, boxes, china, articles of clothing, etc., had been perpetuated from the discipline of the old Houses of Industry in some of those Houses which had recently been converted to Union workhouses. I explained to the Masters that the Union was bound to provide the paupers with clothing, lodging, and food … but that the paupers were supposed to be destitute persons, and were not to have in their possession any property while they resided in the Union workhouse. I therefore directed these articles to be taken into the possession of the various Governors, marked with the names of the paupers to whom they respectively belonged, and deposited in the store-room. In effecting this change in the Cosford Union workhouse, Mr Plum found considerable quantities of bread secreted in these boxes (showing how abundant the dietary is), and likewise soap and other articles, purloined from the workhouse stores, which had been used by the paupers in the domestic arrangements of the house. On the morning after this change twelve able-bodied female paupers left the house, saying they preferred labour out of doors.36

The new criminalisation of the poor, encoded in the Poor Law Amendment Act, meant that paupers now forfeited all except their most basic needs as consumers. They had lost the right to possess and enjoy even the small personal effects they had managed to cling on to and no doubt cherish in their hard-pressed lives. The historian can only speculate on the psychological hurt felt by the poor as their trinkets were stolen from them. We should not, however, presume that moral revolutionists like Kay always got their own way. In 1838 the Ipswich Board of Guardians, for example, split

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on whether or not to allow paupers in the workhouse to receive extras that were increasingly condemned as luxuries. Though they eventually clamped down, a compromise was reached whereby aged paupers were provided with tobacco and snuff at the expense of the Union, while their relatives could bring in small supplies of groceries, fruit and confectionery. In ways such as these, the system was often humanised in practice, partly because of sustained pressure from below.37 Overt protests against the new regime were inevitable, prompt and often focused on the dietary, which frequently bore little relation to the Commission’s published tables. We saw in the last chapter how the Anti-Poor Law movement played a vital role in the mobilisation of working-class consumers in the early Chartist phase in northern industrial districts and how leaders of the movement such as Joseph Rayner Stephens regularly fulminated against the ‘devil’s dung’ found in the new workhouses.38 This theme will be further explored in Chapter 5, which looks at Chartist attempts to mobilise poor consumers for economic as well as political change in more detail. However, much resistance to the Act by the inmates themselves was often hidden and quotidian in nature, as recent research has shown.39 Early in 1837, thirty-five inmates at a workhouse in the Guildford Union, for example, complained to Lord King, a visiting magistrate, in no uncertain terms about the dirty soup that was dished up; they kicked at the door of the committee room and called for the cook to be sacked. A devotee of the new regime, King promptly ordered them to be put on bread and water for three days. On hearing this, the paupers in the workhouse became ‘very violent … made a great noise, and some of them threw stones, and with working tools proceeded to break down the palings which separated them from the female paupers’. Though the Mayor of Godalming and a more tactful magistrate managed to calm the situation for a while, when constables arrived they faced stiff opposition. Nine young men were subsequently imprisoned at Surrey Sessions in February 1837 for between a week and a month with hard labour. In passing sentence, the chairman of the bench ‘observed that the prisoners should find that the gaol allowance was not superior to the workhouse allowance’.40 The defiance manifested at the Braintree workhouse a few months later was wider in scope. Pleading ‘insufficiency of food’, inmates went on strike and refused to perform labour unless they were

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given half a pound of bread extra a day. As in Guildford, ringleaders were put on bread and water, which only served to inflame the situation. A few years before, many of the impoverished silk weavers who had been forced to ask for assistance owing to a downturn in trade would have been granted outdoor relief, but the Poor Law Commission had insisted that help must only be given within the workhouse.41 Twenty-four men and boys were eventually brought before the magistrates; a man named Reed presented their case and boldly declared, ‘they were treated as slaves, although slavery had been done away with in foreign parts’. The magistrates sought a compromise, promising to drop the matter if the paupers returned to work, but their offer was flatly rejected and the inmates were despatched to Halstead gaol. No doubt these refractory elements were heartened by support they received from the local community, for as a hostile observer noted: ‘they were cheered by a large concourse of weavers, etc., who were loud in their expressions of encouragement to the paupers during the investigation. The Magistrates, on leaving the bench-room, had to encounter some few symptoms of disapprobation on the part of the mob.’42 Though generally not as well organised as the Braintree protest, acts of insubordination were a common feature of the new regime, even in rural East Suffolk, where 111 paupers were gaoled for disorderly conduct in workhouses in the year ending 31 March 1843.43 Inmates’ grievances had much more chance of a sympathetic hearing if concerned members of the local governing elite took them up. We see this clearly in the case of the Bridgwater workhouse in Somerset, which achieved national notoriety in early 1838 through the propagandist efforts of John Bowen.44 A Tory paternalist in the old mould and local guardian, Bowen’s writings on ‘the gruel question’ first appeared in January 1838 in The Times, which had spearheaded a vigorous campaign against the New Poor Law under its owner, John Walter. A few weeks later, as the serial publication of Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist was nearing its end (Walter had reproduced some of it in The Times), the Chartist Northern Star published Bowen’s revelations under the headline ‘Hell’s Broth’. Radical working-class and sympathetic middle-class readers were equally fascinated by the story of the workhouse dietary. Following instructions from the Poor Law Commissioners, local guardians had introduced gruel in the summer of 1836, against the wishes of the medical officer. An outbreak of diarrhoea followed, which soon

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produced serious distress among a population that was already physically weak. Reports painted a most graphic picture of the scene and featured evidence from eyewitnesses including the workhouse master, who stated: ‘it ran away from them while they were standing up as they took it. It affected them upwards and downwards. All the way down the stairs across the hall, and down the garden path, was all covered every morning, and the stench was horrible all through the house; making the people ill and sick who had not got the diarrhoea.’45 Unmoved by a number of deaths and pleas from the medical officer who wanted to substitute rice milk, the guardians stuck to their guns. Backed by Chadwick, their chairman George Warry spoke of the ‘immutability of the Commissioners’ dietary table’. And so the paupers’ suffering went on unabated; twenty-two alone died in one week in April 1837.46 The dietary was changed but not until inmates had been ‘GRUELLED OUT OF EXISTENCE’, according to the editor of the Northern Star, who argued that the Bridgwater case exemplified the faults of the entire system and roundly condemned the ‘Gruel Boon’ conferred by the Duke of Sussex, ‘the infamous Brougham’ and ‘the whole gang of Whig, Tory, and Sham-radical Scoundrels’ who had pushed the New Poor Law through Parliament.47 Bowen was a remarkable man. A wine merchant who had worked for the East India Company, he had opposed the new law in print from the start and his cogent pamphlets were widely read.48 The Chartist leader James Bronterre O’Brien referred to him as, ‘next to Oastler and Stephens, the most effective Anti-Poor Law combatant we have in our ranks’.49 Bowen doggedly kept the issue alive after the Poor Law Commissioners despatched Robert Weale, Assistant Commissioner for the area, to investigate or rather to put the lid on things. Bowen employed the cannibalism trope to expose the limitations of Weale’s inquiry: ‘The fatal diarrhoea, the extent of its ravages, and the fresh victims with which it was supplied, were all tabooed subjects – concealed, as cannibals are said to conceal their initiatory rites from those who will not participate in the abomination of their feast.’50 Eventually in the summer of 1838 the details were turned over by a Select Committee of the House of Lords. Although the signs pointed to another coverup – Lord Wharncliffe’s committee included many supporters of the New Poor Law – Bowen was urged to give evidence by Lord Stanhope.51 He presented a convincing account based on a wealth

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of evidence. Although the committee questioned the purported link between the dietary and the fatal diarrhoea, most of the medical officers agreed with Bowen’s version of events.52 His answers to the committee revealed his own close acquaintance with and sympathy for the lives of the poor. Asked about how agricultural labourers in the area made ends meet, Bowen replied: ‘I never could understand how a poor man could live on 7s. a week; I have tried many times but cannot understand it.’53 Although he freely admitted that money allowances caused many difficulties, including a downward pressure on wages, Bowen insisted that individual circumstances required particular solutions and that no general principles could possibly meet all cases. In other words, he countered the rigid, ‘scientific’ handling of the problem of pauperism under the New Poor Law with earlier forms of relief, which entailed a much more flexible, human relationship with the poor. Thus, Bowen spoke out strongly for the continuation of luxuries; a pint of beer daily he thought ‘highly necessary’, especially for the elderly.54 Some members of the committee encouraged Bowen to impugn the character of the poor, who, they hinted, might steal to avoid the workhouse. Bowen’s answer again showed just how wide the gulf in understanding was between him and his interlocutors: ‘It is so; but I feel it an extremely delicate thing to give an answer which will lower the character of persons whom I have known from my childhood, – persons who have been subject to all kinds of temptation, and who have had, as a body, as much honesty as any other class; but men will not die from hunger.’55 Though the dietary improved somewhat in the Bridgwater workhouse, the report of the Select Committee – which failed to come to a conclusion – was effectively buried. A year later Stanhope observed in the Lords that the Bridgwater case had been ‘broken off in the middle, like the story of the bear and fiddle’.56 Although the Poor Law Commissioners managed to deflect criticism to an extent by such means, both working-class Chartists and middle-class humanitarians continued to keep up the pressure. The new regime had been administered in a softened form in some localities in its early years, including the north-east of England, but this changed as economic recession bit hard from the late 1830s and pressure to cut local poor rates increased.57 One measure of this shift was a hardening of attitudes towards the provision of luxuries and treats in workhouses, including Christmas dinners, the

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latter often funded through charitable donations. Contests did occur early on, at Petworth in West Sussex, for instance, where Assistant Commissioner Hawley thought it best to deprive workhouse children of their Christmas dinner in 1836. The guardians at Stamford in Lincolnshire, who wanted to give inmates a pound of beef and a pint of beer at Christmas, caused a similar stir.58 Citing John Bowen’s work in the spring of 1840, the Hull Packet noted how guardians had sometimes supplemented paupers’ rations out of their own pockets and that inmates used to be given gifts from family and friends but that these practices had been stamped out by ‘the lawmakers of Somerset-house, who are glutting themselves on the very vitals of the poor’.59 Later that year the Commissioners tried to prohibit Christmas dinner in the workhouse, and the radical press cast Chadwick as the arch villain (Figure 5). In the top left-hand corner a grinning Chadwick extinguishes with a giant candle snuffer the seasonal treat of the poor, who look on, powerless. It is worth remembering that this struggle occurred at a time when Christmas was being reinvented as a festival of profligate consumption targeted specifically at middle-class shoppers; a booming toy industry was only the most obvious manifestation of this change.60 As we shall see in Chapter 6, Charles Dickens attempted to remind the well off of their Christian duties in A Christmas Carol, which first appeared in December 1843 and which memorably argued that whatever the dictates of political economy, all members of a truly Christian community were entitled to a good Christmas dinner. The liberal Morning Chronicle was also keen to show that not all Unions followed the Commissioners’ advice and that Christmas continued as usual, in spite of Chadwick. The paper carried long articles from the early 1840s that listed the Christmas fare provided in London workhouses, which ranged from five ounces of roast mutton and half a pound of plum pudding but no beer or extras given to the poor by St George in the East, to the more fortunate inmates of St George, Hanover Square, who received roast beef ‘without limitation’, vegetables, a pound of plum pudding, a pint of porter and 2d each.61 Such attempts to prove that middle-class humanity was still alive by this mouthpiece of free trade radicalism failed to impress the Northern Star, which instead contrasted the deprivation experienced by the poor with the ‘splendour’ and ‘vanity’ displayed by the rich, most apparent during the festive season in this city of glaring extremes.62

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Figure 5. ‘The pauper’s vision’, Odd Fellow, 9 January 1841.

The Andover scandal Despite the clamour of radicals, nascent humanitarians and inmates themselves, many Poor Law officials squeezed paupers ever more tightly. Loss of entitlements and the yawning gulf between rich and poor – manifested most obviously by their contrasting consumption habits – were common themes in the popular songs of the period. One of these, published by James Catnach in 1838, was entitled ‘Just Starve Us’; by turns imploring and threatening, it captured the mood of the metropolitan poor perfectly: Mend, oh mend, our amended laws, Give employ to our useless jaws, Or we will strike out our starving claws, Hear us, oh hear!

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‘The Andover Cannibalism’ Thou man of venison, turtle, cash, Of callipee and callipash, We will settle soon thy hash, Great overseer! Hear, oh hear, the distressed and poor, Who for relief besiege thy door, Though many, we shall be no more, Just-starve-us, hear! See, oh see, what a motley group, For neck, and shins, and scrag-ends stoop, Or a jug of parish soup, Great overseer!63

The illustration by Robert Cruikshank, reproduced in Figure 6, that first appeared on the title page of an 1843 edition of this ‘comic song’, which had by this time been set to music filched from the French composer Daniel Auber, also communicated the people’s outrage.64 In the popular iconography of the period, the workhouse poor were invariably represented as emaciated creatures, walking skeletons on whose bodies were written the physical effects of ‘less eligibility’. For the modern viewer such images bring to mind the horror of Nazi concentration camps and Third World famine. Here, the victims of ‘slow starvation’ display their pitiful, ragged forms to the corpulent, well-dressed workhouse master. One male pauper holds his hands out in mute supplication, the other grips his empty gut, while in the background a cadaverous mother and tottering child look on helplessly. Ignoring their pleas, the master stares arrogantly out of the frame, his power and status signified by the walking stick and fob watch he wears on his fat belly. The issue of the workhouse dietary and the entitlement of dependent consumers came to a head in the middle of the decade, when the gruesome story of the workhouse at Andover in Hampshire became a national scandal. Although the case is referred to routinely by Poor Law historians, it remains remarkably understudied.65 If Thomas Mackay’s early dismissive assessment should not surprise us perhaps – he reckoned the scandal rested on ‘the uncorroborated testimony of some worthless women’ – the way in which this major cause célèbre has been generally overlooked by modern scholars is more concerning. This omission underlines just how damaging the

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Figure 6. Frontispiece by Robert Cruikshank to the comic song, ‘Just starve us’ (1843).

tendency to push scandals to the margins, considering them to be mere aberrations, has been.66 The Times broke the story early in August 1845. Andover had been a flagship Union and a model of financial rectitude as far as the Poor Law Commissioners were concerned. Dominated by the bullish Reverend Christopher Dodson, its Board of Guardians had carried out instructions to the letter and driven down costs for over a decade. Sir James Graham, the Home Secretary, was most embarrassed, then, when the radical MP Thomas Wakley claimed in the Commons that inmates at the Andover workhouse were so deprived of food that they had been reduced to gnawing rancid animal bones sent to the house for grinding into fertiliser.67 As at Bridgwater, the intervention of a local guardian proved vital in getting the story out. Hugh Munday, a long-standing antagonist of Dodson, had written to Wakley with the details of his own investigation. Some

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labourers on Munday’s farm had first alerted him to rumours of bone-gnawing that had spread among the local community, and Munday immediately interviewed about a dozen inmates who had worked at grinding bones; most readily admitted that when they found a fresh bone they were ‘almost ready to fight over it’. Not only this, it was asserted that although most of the bones were from horses and other animals, they even included ‘some from churchyards occasionally’.68 Graham was left little choice but to instigate an inquiry and so the Assistant Commissioner for the area, Henry Parker, was ordered to investigate matters soon after. The Times immediately sent a special correspondent to cover proceedings, as did the Morning Chronicle, and these sent back detailed reports each day. The Times especially blew the local rumours raked over by Parker’s inquiry into a scandal of national proportions. Parker quickly discovered that the stories were true and that they in fact touched on only one abuse among a whole catalogue. For a fortnight or so, around two hundred people packed the workhouse hall to listen to what was effectively an unofficial trial. Witness after witness recounted the many cruelties inflicted on them by the workhouse master, Colin McDougal, a violent, alcoholic bully and sexual predator. Like many workhouse masters, McDougal was an exsoldier, a veteran of Waterloo, who with the backing of the guardians and help from an equally brutal wife had held the workhouse and its inmates in an iron grip for over eight years.69 A reduced workhouse diet was the key to McDougal’s rule; though dietary number 3 had been adopted officially, inmates were kept on short rations – hence the bone gnawing – and denied any extras, even when the medical officers had recommended them for the sick and infirm. One of these, Dr Westlake, played a key role in exposing these abuses, despite determined opposition from Dodson and the majority of guardians. This came out at the start of the inquiry in Sarah Barrett’s evidence. Described by The Times as ‘an aged woman in a weak condition’, Barrett had given birth to an illegitimate child in the workhouse in June and Westlake had ordered extras including meat, beer and gin because of her condition. Barrett recalled that she had asked for something when she had been unable to suckle her baby, but that the mistress had replied, ‘Shall I go up into my room, and order a joint of meat for you?’ In pain following the birth, the nurse had propped Barrett up with an extra mattress. Mrs McDougal promptly removed this and asked, ‘Shall I send you

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my sofa out of my drawing room?’70 Despite the testimony of some local guardians who tried to cast doubt on the woman’s evidence, Barrett’s story proved true. Hardly able to stand up at the inquiry, she eventually collapsed and died two months later.71 Screwing down allowances provided McDougal with more income and also served to weaken inmates both physically and psychologically. Most of the male paupers were old and could offer little resistance to the regime. William Hatcher and Edward Jacob, for example, both in their eighties, had nothing to say against the food, and some of the women also spoke up for McDougal.72 Not surprisingly, those who had been given a little power within the workhouse supported the McDougals and maintained that the paupers and Westlake were lying. The cook, Mary Grace, and the schoolmistress, Lititia Laws, for instance, claimed that the diet was good and that Barrett had received extras.73 The clearest example of the effectiveness of McDougal’s tyranny was furnished by Hannah Joyce’s story. Joyce had given birth to an illegitimate child in the workhouse, which had died after five weeks. This was not the first infant Joyce had lost and the idea was spread that she had murdered the baby herself. As Joyce later remembered, McDougal ‘called me a whore and a faggot, and told me I should go to hell’.74 She was made to carry the baby’s corpse through the streets of Andover to the church, which was about a mile away. Female inmates were also instructed to organise a ‘skimmington’ when Joyce finally left the workhouse a week later; twenty women rattled her out of the house with tin plates and spoons, much to the amusement of some of the guardians, including Dodson, who, it was claimed, had remarked, ‘Mr Mac is a little exceeding his authority now.’75 There is evidence to suggest that paupers tried overt resistance at Andover. Twenty-five-year-old Ann Knight, who had acted as a nurse in the workhouse until being dismissed for her feistiness, testified that the sick had been ‘almost stinking for want’ and that inmates were ‘disorderly’ sometimes.76 This is corroborated by the fact that between August 1837 and March 1846 there were sixty-three committals to Andover Gaol and Winchester House of Correction, though this figure underestimates the total as some inmates were sent directly to prison on McDougal’s orders without coming before a magistrate.77 More often than not, however, paupers learned to negotiate the system to improve their situation. For many women this included tolerating McDougal’s frequent

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sexual assaults. Some he attacked spontaneously but older women were usually approached with more caution. Elizabeth Rout, for example, a widow and mother of eleven, deliberated coolly after McDougal had propositioned her: ‘My children were almost starved, and I thought I would consider of it. He said he would give me some victuals and beer if I would. I thought, if he asked me again, I would. He did ask me again, and I gave consent.’78 Inmates also defended themselves with humour. Indeed, despite the nature of the revelations made at the inquiry, the event was not unremittingly sombre; often the laughter of the poor cracked the face of tyranny in this public space. The evidence is replete with examples. The barrister who defended McDougal accused Sarah Barratt of being an alcoholic for wanting the gin the doctor ordered. Barratt replied: ‘Do you call it gin when it is mixed with Godfrey’s cordial? (Laughter.)’ Asked when he first realised he was not getting his full allowance, seventy-six-year-old William Norris answered: ‘I found it out when some gentlemen spoke to me; but my belly found it out before that.’ Another old man, William Bulpitt, who had entered the workhouse the Easter before ‘in a wretched state of health’ and who had received no extras, admitted that things had improved since Parker’s arrival and he had been given a small quantity of gin and beer: ‘I have had a cupful. (Laughter.) A great deal more than I had afore. It is stronger and better. (Laughter.)’79 The most spirited, such as Elizabeth Rout, were fearless in defence of their rights and culture. Parker looked down his nose at this poor woman who had once been sold at Andover market and whose eldest son had been hanged for rick-burning ten years before. Pursuing the story of the wife-sale, Parker sarcastically inquired who had made ‘such an excellent bargain’. Completely unruffled, Rout immediately rounded on him: ‘As good a bargain as you live with at the present time. (Laughter, and clapping of hands.)’80 The Poor Law Commission had set Parker the impossible task of smoothing over things at Andover and it was no wonder that he failed dismally. Parker’s method was crude: he defended the dietary, tried to pin the whole affair on Dr Westlake’s poor bookkeeping, badgered and harassed witnesses in the most obvious ways and was clearly on the side of McDougal and the local board from the start. The Times spotlighted every act of partiality and, worryingly for the Commissioners, so did other organs of the metropolitan press

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that had staunchly defended the New Poor Law hitherto, such as the Examiner.81 Recalled to London, Parker was eventually fired for bungling the inquiry and a welter of recriminations followed.82 The situation at Andover remained volatile throughout the autumn and winter as the Board of Guardians, most of whom were farmers under Dodson’s influence, tried to prop up McDougal for a while against an alliance of local ratepayers and agricultural labourers. Punch published ‘The Andover War Song’ lampooning their intransigence: ‘We’ve got no ears for paupers’ groans/What signifies their gnawun’ bones?/What matter what be workus meat!/We wunt be beat! We wunt be beat!’ In the Andover marketplace, itinerant vendors sold pamphlets and verses ‘detailing and bewailing the horrors of the workhouse, and holding up the master and guardians to public reprobation’. Many ‘pictorial representations’ were also exhibited, including ‘a “contrast”, showing the “ratepayer” and his family dining on a scanty meal, while the “Waterloo soldier” and his on the other side were regaling themselves upon a profusion of victuals and wine’. A poor man collared Dodson in the street and threatened him: ‘I be a goin to put up for your zeat, zur. I hope ee won’t go into a pulpit after this.’83 The Times continued to press for a public inquiry and, against the wishes of Sir James Graham – who hoped that what he tactlessly described in the House of Commons as merely a ‘workhouse squabble’ would be completely overshadowed by the crisis over the Corn Laws – a Select Committee was appointed the following spring.84 From the outset, the paper’s campaign had played on the cannibalism trope to great effect. The initial rumours had contained the claim, suggesting perhaps that paupers had exposed this nerve deliberately in a desperate bid to make their predicament public knowledge. This seems likely, as scholars have shown how subaltern groups have often deployed rumour in other contexts to make themselves heard.85 Moreover, there was a tradition here, as links between the workhouse and cannibalism went back years. An inmate of St Paul’s workhouse at Shadwell accused the authorities of serving ‘Nattomy Soup’ full of human bones in 1829; magistrates gave him twenty-one days in the House of Correction. Such claims became undoubtedly more common after the introduction of the New Poor Law. A street ballad entitled ‘The Poor Workhouse Boy’, probably dating from the late 1830s, concerned the fate of a young pauper who also ended up in the soup.86 Similar stories circulated

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at a more elite level. Early in 1838 the Tory periodical Blackwood’s Magazine published an article proposing that workhouses could be made self-supporting if paupers were fed to one another: ‘I have been told by a retired sausage-vendor that children under twelve years of age, particularly females, are as good and as tender as chicken’, the author observed. A year later, rumours spread through Kent that workhouse children were being made into pies.87 As we saw in the last chapter, cannibal tales were popular during the early years of the ‘Hungry Forties’ and revealed deep-seated anxieties concerning political and cultural degeneration. At the heart of the Andover scandal was the question: how could it be possible that poor people had been so brutalised that they were consuming human flesh in the richest and most civilised country in the world? Fears of cannibalism provided local rumours with the charge necessary to break through a wall of indifference. The Times picked up the theme and developed it ad nauseam. The inmates Munday had originally interviewed emphasised that there were definitely human bones intermixed with others. A gruesome talisman had once adorned the yard where the bone crushing took place, conjuring scenes of primitive savagery: ‘A human lower jaw, found by the bone crushers, was hung upon a nail for several days before it shared the common fate’, an image that drew much attention from the paper’s correspondents. On hearing these revelations, Munday later recalled that he told his companions that ‘it would be no wonder after, if they ate each other. A young child would not be safe.’88 Readers were bombarded with lurid, stomach-churning descriptions of rotten bones, the consumption of which provided ample proof that the inmates had been reduced to an animal existence. William Frumen, for example, said that the bones ‘were stale, “vinny” and “fousty.” Some of the marrow I have seen the men eat was red, black, purple, and all manner of colours. It smelt very badly, enough to knock me down … What they eat was not fit for a dog to eat, nor for a dog hardly. Very few dogs would eat it.’ Frumen, who stated that he had not eaten bones himself, had asked the other men how they could: ‘They said I should if I bided there long.’89 Such melodramatic accounts featured widely in the metropolitan press. The woodcut that appeared in the Penny Satirist, for instance, represented Andover paupers as Neolithic beasts, and contrasted their animal hunger with the abundance enjoyed by Poor Law officials (Figure 7).

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Figure 7. ‘The Andover Bastile’, Penny Satirist, 6 September 1845.

Representations like these were designed to shock and disgust readers, as well as sell more copy, but they also raised very awkward questions that struck at the root of the early Victorian achievement, for they suggested the limits of progress and the fragility of Christian civilisation: ‘the poor are famished into the use of food and the adoption of practices which desecrate the image of the CREATOR’.90 Andover paupers had been so brutalised by the workhouse regime, particularly the diet, that they had lost both their Englishness and their humanity, one and the same thing for many readers, no doubt. As a correspondent to The Times wrote: Shall it be said and heard patiently throughout the length and breadth of this empire – nay, of the world – that whilst to glut our appetites, or even to tickle our palates, the whole of the known globe is daily ransacked, for once it was a common thing to see men of our own race and blood snarling and fighting doglike over a foul heap where the mouldering bones of horses, oxen, sheep and pigs, mingled – oh, horror! – with the dishonoured remains of mortality?91

Although reports and editorials in The Times tended to encourage readers to react with straightforward disgust and horror, more complex responses were provoked. A letter entitled ‘The Andover Cannibalism’, for example, drew on tales of shipwreck and cannibalism at sea, which enjoyed wide popularity throughout the nineteenth century, in order to produce a more historical and rather less sensationalist explanation of events. According to the writer who signed himself ‘A Hampshire Man’ and who claimed to have

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visited the workhouse at Andover on business, disaster stories demonstrated what ordinary men and women were capable of when driven to extremes. Lack of food induced a kind of madness, and shipwrecked sailors had often sacrificed one of their own to satisfy a ‘furious hunger’. Even more chilling, cannibalism had not always been practised in ‘blind passion’ but had frequently involved ‘cool deliberation, lots being cast to decide who should be the victim, and the victim placidly resigning himself to his horrid fate’.92 As the Andover scandal spun out through the press more generally, others articulated similar views. A correspondent in Lloyd’s Weekly argued that the case underlined the barbaric state of the times and the continuing relevance of the story of Count Ugolino, for at Andover, ‘there are no less than eight Ugolinos undergoing the torment and horrors of starvation – eight human beings compelled to have recourse to the most nauseous carrion to appease the cravings of their hunger!’93 The same writer later detailed contemporary medical understandings of the physiology of hunger, which provided a scientific account of how ‘slow starvation’ induced hunger madness.94 These alternative discourses on hunger – mythological, historical and scientific – differed in many respects from the melodramatic discourse preferred by The Times, most importantly because they brought the Andover scandal even closer to home for middle-class readers. For the paupers at Andover were not heathen savages but English men and women; indeed some of them had known better days and had once been quite prosperous, as The Times itself admitted.95 Thus, extreme hunger could strip everyone of the veneer of civilisation. As a correspondent to the paper reminded readers, ‘gentlemen of rank and command had eaten “strange flesh”, a circumstance that they afterwards spoke of with a shudder, but which did not lower them in the esteem of their comrades and chiefs’.96 In other words, cannibalism was a human practice and its persistence in a land of plenty therefore required a humanitarian response. Aftermath The Select Committee on the Andover Union that met in the summer of 1846 proved in many respects an anti-climax. It began promisingly enough. Although the chairman, Lord Courtenay, was a supporter of the New Poor Law and had been initially

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hostile to an official inquiry, its membership was fairly evenly split and included some leading critics of the Act, including the radicals Thomas Wakley and John Fielden, as well as the ‘Young England’ Tory, Benjamin Disraeli, whose novel, Sybil, or the Two Nations had been published the year before.97 National and local Poor Law officials were interrogated, along with witnesses who had more intimate knowledge of the regime. The ground was raked over once again, though this time with different emphases. Hannah Joyce was given the chance to tell her harrowing story in detail and a wave of sympathy broke over the metropolitan press. Spirited characters such as Elizabeth Rout, however, were not interviewed.98 The general tenor of the proceedings was bureaucratic and administrative, focusing on issues of poor management rather than inhumanity. Tales of bone gnawing and cannibalism were completely sidelined in the somewhat sanitised final report published in August; human jawbones and the local graveyard were studiously avoided. From the start, the investigation was handled very carefully indeed by Sir James Graham and his supporters in an effort to take some of the heat out of the scandal. Wakley faced a determined struggle, for example, to allow the committee to report its proceedings to the House of Commons on a daily basis. Graham’s object, as The Times quickly pointed out, was to make certain that the evidence was ‘buried in a blue-book’. Here Graham was only partly successful; though The Times did not include daily reports, it did publish the ‘most striking portions’ of witnesses’ evidence.99 The issue of the dietary at Andover featured prominently in the final report, which admitted that the diet had been insufficient, lacking particularly in bread, and that McDougal had swindled inmates out of their extra allowances. It was also noted that inmates had been so pinched that they had consumed ‘raw potatoes, grain and refuse food which had been thrown to the hogs and fowls’, while those set to bone crushing had eaten marrow and gristle.100 A mass of evidence supported these conclusions. The quality of the food was often appalling and the subject of complaints from the more self-confident. Elizabeth Gates, for example, demanded to see the Board of Guardians after having endured thin broth for a year, despite the fact that the dietary table that hung on the dining room wall stipulated bread and cheese. Although McDougal assured Dodson that the broth was fine, Gates insisted that ‘it was

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very little better than grass that they might gather and boil up’.101 Children suffered particularly badly. McDougal literally took the food out of their mouths, as they were fed mainly on bread soaked in skimmed milk, which was then skimmed again, the fat going to make butter for the master’s family. Many mothers and fathers must have been heartbroken to see their children reduced to eating scraps thrown to the pigs and poultry.102 Inmates bitterly recalled the Andover workhouse as quintessentially a place of hunger. Fifty-year-old labourer Charles Lewis, for example, was forced to enter the workhouse when his wife died, leaving him to support their seven children alone. Deprived of food in the house, they all got weaker and weaker. When Lewis had finally found work and left, he tackled Dodson on the street about conditions inside, but the latter just ‘smiled a little’. Lewis had watched his own children eat raw potatoes in the workhouse: ‘poor things; mine looked starved when they came out’.103 Thirty-five-year-old labourer William Newport told the committee that one night he had been so hungry that he had eaten a bit of candle. Though they knew they were kept short, most inmates were too afraid to speak out. On leaving the house Newport thought, ‘I should never stop my hunger.’104 Chadwick’s defence of the dietary before the committee was illuminating. He commenced by arguing that if meat was considered a luxury among the majority of ratepayers and independent labourers, then it should not be given inside the workhouse. After studying the practice in Scottish prisons, his own preference was for simple foods such as potatoes and oatmeal to be provided ‘ad libitum’, depending on the region, and he denied that ‘animal food’ was necessary at all. The committee listened to these abstract speculations for a while, then turned to the central issue of whether or not Chadwick had advised Boards of Guardians to reduce the workhouse diet to the minimum required to maintain existence. Having explained that the principles on which the law was framed meant that Commissioners were empowered to fix a maximum but that local officers were at liberty to reduce this if they thought it safe to do so, Chadwick was asked whether inmates had been screwed down in practice. This was a raw nerve, and the cool, supercilious Chadwick turned first evasive, then irritable, finally losing his composure when the term ‘coarser food’ was mentioned, calling it ‘a libellous expression’.105

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John Walter had produced a document in the House of Commons purporting to have originated from the Commission that recommended ‘coarser food’ be provided in workhouses, the authenticity of which Chadwick did not for a moment deny. However, loath to shoulder the entire blame himself, he first insisted that it had been drawn up by the original committee of inquiry, then changed tack and admitted that he had indeed drafted the document for the government but contested the popular interpretation of ‘coarser food’. Chadwick had come to hate this term that had been quickly taken up by opponents of the New Poor Law, and obviously wished he had never used it: ‘It is a misfortune inadvertent in the uncorrected document being the word “coarser”, it being a word which, taken from its context, any man may misapply to any extent he chooses.’106 Chadwick explained that as far as he was concerned, ‘coarser food’ referred to the importance of setting the standard of the workhouse diet below that of independent labourers and ratepayers in any locality; thus inmates should not receive wheaten bread if brown bread was the norm outside. At this point in the proceedings, the committee recalled Dr Westlake, who brought with him a sample of bread from the Andover Union that was sour and mouldy. Chadwick agreed that the bread certainly appeared to be very inferior but opined that he thought sailors would not turn their noses up at it!107 The Times was not impressed by Chadwick’s contradictory discourse, which clearly exposed the tension between the neat exactitude of Benthamite theory and the messy reality of lived experience. No matter how Chadwick twisted and turned, it was difficult to avoid the conclusion that at the core of the New Poor Law lay a systemic tendency to drive down the condition of the poorest members of the community and thus lower standards for working people as a whole. That was the meaning of ‘coarser food’ and ‘less eligibility’ according to the paper – bone gnawing was only an inevitable extension. The editor reminded readers that the maxim of Chadwick’s favourite, the workhouse contractor Charles Mott, which had been to reduce relief ‘“penny by penny and ounce by ounce”, was ostentatiously set up as the standard of merit, panegyrized by Commissioners, patronized and rewarded by Government’. The Times pursued the line that the Andover scandal was merely ‘the natural result of the general system’ throughout the affair.108 Thus, responsibility lay neither just with the local Poor Law officials at

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Andover nor with Chadwick but had to be traced to the principles underlying the law. Some members of the committee had wanted to frame Chadwick but, as the editor stressed, ‘It is too late to throw over Mr. Chadwick … If he is to be given up, the law is also.’109 The Morning Chronicle, which had played an important role in keeping the scandal before London readers, took a very different view, hoping that it might be possible to sacrifice the Commissioners in order to save the law, and this view won.110 Conclusion Lord John Russell’s Whig ministry replaced the Commission with a Poor Law Board in July 1847, mainly as a sop to middle-class opinion. The new Board retained central control, though its two senior members now sat in Parliament, which gave the appearance of tighter public scrutiny. The change was in form only; one historian concludes that ‘there is no indication that this direct ministerial responsibility made any substantial difference to the conduct of the Victorian Poor Law’.111 George Cornewall Lewis, who had been appointed Commissioner after his father had resigned in 1839 and who lost his post in the reorganisation, warmly approved Russell’s move. He was in no doubt, however, that the changes were purely cosmetic, as he admitted in a letter to his friend George Grote: ‘Lord John completely threw over the report of the Andover Committee, and said that the government intended to found no measure upon it. But he added that there was a state of feeling in Parliament, and a relation between the Home Office and the Commissioners, which rendered a change in the constitution of the Department expedient.’112 Despite all the noise, the Andover scandal achieved very little, for the poor at least. The diet at the Andover workhouse improved slightly afterwards but there is no evidence that the benefits lasted or that they were felt more widely. In fact, the opposite was nearer the mark as the workhouse dietary generated controversy beyond mid-century; the ‘gruel question’ re-emerged when riots broke out at Barham workhouse in Suffolk in 1851, for example.113 The architects of the New Poor Law had managed to effectively ratchet down the social norm of consumption of the labouring poor and there was to be no going back. Workhouse scandals played an important role in the new regime because they helped instil fear in working-class

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communities. Any kind of independent life with a few comforts was preferable to entering the workhouse, which continued to strike terror into working-class communities throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and well beyond.114 Public entitlements had been recalibrated and clearer distinctions drawn between what constituted ‘necessities’ and ‘luxuries’ for dependent consumers. If local officials keen to reduce costs went too far on occasion and degraded inmates to the point of barbarism this was not the fault of either Senior or even Chadwick. It was, however, an inevitable result of a system that depended on fine moral judgements about whether or not poor consumers had forfeited their right to a pint of beer or a Christmas dinner.115 Interestingly, the radical press paid relatively little attention to the Andover scandal. The Northern Star, for example, declared early on that the revelations demonstrated how ‘human beings, in this Christian England, are forced by law-produced poverty and law-administered “charity,” to turn cannibals!’116 The paper did publish extracts from The Times as the investigation unfolded, but editorial comment was rare. Why was this? One reason was that by this time Chartists had become more interested in finding practical methods of transforming the lives of poor consumers, particularly by developing various co-operative schemes, discussed in Chapter 5. However, it also seems likely that many working-class radicals recoiled from tales of cannibalism, considering them to be too demeaning. As we have seen, the representation of Andover paupers by The Times frequently rendered them as suffering, passive victims that required urgent help from their fellow Christians but lacked the agency necessary to change circumstances themselves. The real significance of the Andover scandal, then, was as a formative moment in the making of middle-class humanitarianism, a process in which a campaigning press played an integral role. As the editor remarked in his encomium on the power of the modern press that appeared immediately after the Select Committee published its findings: ‘but for the press there was no remedy … What recourse had the labourer thus beaten down to the verge of starvation?’117 However, for Chartists, to whom paternalism in any form was anathema, the solution to brutal law as well as economic exploitation lay in the hands of the common people themselves and was dependent on the generalisation of democratic principle and practice. In fine, they believed that the fate of poor consumers

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as well as producers was inextricably bound up with the success or failure of active self-government, with the cause of ‘pure’ or ‘true democracy’. Notes 1 Regional differences are stressed by, inter alia, Anne Digby, Pauper palaces: the economy and Poor Law of nineteenth century Norfolk (1978); M. E. Rose, The relief of poverty, 1834–1914 (1986); Steven King, Poverty and welfare in England, 1700–1850 (Manchester, 2000). 2 See David Roberts, ‘How cruel was the Victorian Poor Law?’, Historical Journal, 6:1 (1963), 97–107; Ursula Henriques, ‘How cruel was the Victorian Poor Law?’, Historical Journal, 11:2 (1968), 365– 71; M. A. Crowther, The workhouse system, 1834–1929: the history of an English social institution (1981). 3 Larry Patriquin, Agrarian capitalism and poor relief in England, 1500–1860: rethinking the origins of the welfare state (Basingstoke, 2007), p. 127. 4 Karl Polanyi, The great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time (1944; Boston, 2001), pp. 81–107. For critiques, see Patriquin, Agrarian capitalism, pp. 119–35; Gareth Dale, Karl Polanyi: the limits of the market (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 56–7, 85–6. 5 Patriquin, Agrarian capitalism, p. 119; Karel Williams, From pauperism to poverty (1981), p. 151. 6 See Nicholas Edsall, The anti-Poor Law movement, 1834–44 (1971); K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the labouring poor: social change and agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge, 1984); John Knott, Popular opposition to the 1834 Poor Law (1986); Lynn Hollen Lees, The solidarities of strangers: the English poor laws and the people, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 153–76; Peter Jones, ‘Swing, Speenhamland and rural social relations: the “moral economy” of the English crowd in the nineteenth century’, Social History, 32:3 (2007), 271–90; ‘“I cannot keep my place without being deascent”: pauper letters, parish clothing and pragmatism in the south of England, 1750–1830’, Rural History, 20:1 (2009), 31–49. 7 Jan de Vries, The industrious revolution: consumer behavior and the household economy, 1650 to the present (Cambridge, 2008); Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in global perspective (Cambridge, 2009); ‘The high wage economy and the Industrial Revolution: a restatement’, University of Oxford Discussion Papers in Economic and Social History, 115 (Oxford, 2013). For a critical perspective on the increasing emphasis among economic historians on high

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9 10

11

12

13

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15 16

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wages and plebeian demand, see Joel Mokyr, ‘Is there still life in the pessimist case? Consumption during the Industrial Revolution, 1790–1850’, The Journal of Economic History, 48:1 (1988), 69–92; Sara Horrell, ‘Home demand and British industrialization’, Journal of Economic History, 56:3 (1996), 561–604; Jane Humphries, Childhood and child labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 2010). Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb, The birth of a consumer society: the commercialization of eighteenth-century England (1982); Gertrude Himmelfarb, The idea of poverty: England in the early Industrial Age (1984); Paul Slack, ‘Material progress and the challenge of affluence in seventeenth-century England’, Economic History Review, 62:3 (2009), 576–603. W. R. Greg, Not over-production, but deficient consumption, the source of our sufferings (1842), pp. 23–4. Peter King, ‘Pauper inventories and the material lives of the poor in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries’, in Tim Hitchcock, Peter King and Pamela Sharpe (eds), Chronicling poverty: the voices and strategies of the English poor, 1640–1840 (Basingstoke, 1997); John Styles, The dress of the people: everyday fashion in eighteenth-century England (New Haven, CT, 2007). See Thomas Laqueur, ‘Bodies, details, and the humanitarian narrative’, in Lynn Hunt (ed.), The new cultural history (Berkeley, 1989); James Vernon, Hunger: a modern history (Cambridge, MA, 2007). Ursula Henriques, Before the welfare state: social administration in early industrial Britain (1979), p. 26; Knott, Popular opposition to the 1834 Poor Law, p. 52; Anthony Brundage, The English poor laws, 1700–1930 (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 62–3. Marion Bowley, Nassau Senior and classical economics (1937), p. 287. As Bowley noted: ‘The passing of the final Act in a form so closely similar to the original draft was largely due to Senior’s passionate interest in the matter.’ J. R. McCulloch, The principles of political economy (1849), p. 465. Note also Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Poor Law history, part II: the last hundred years (1929; 1963), vol. I, pp. 82–90. See Henriques, Before the welfare state, pp. 27–9. Report from His Majesty’s Commissioners for inquiring into the administration and practical operation of the poor laws (1834), p. 49 [hereafter Poor Law Commissioners’ Report]. See John and Barbara Hammond’s comments in The village labourer (1911; 1978), p. 166: ‘All through the Report we read complaints of the “insolent, discontented, surly pauper”, who talks of “right” and “income.”’ Note also Himmelfarb, The idea of poverty, pp. 161–2. Poor Law Commissioners’ Report, p. 35.

98 18 19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30

31

32

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‘The Andover Cannibalism’ Ibid., p. 29. Ibid. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid.; see also Millman’s evidence. See Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: the temperance question in England, 1815–1872 (1971; Keele, 1994), pp. 76–8. For an expert dissection of what Harrison calls the ‘debauchery theory’ of the Beer Act, to which the Poor Law Report lent early support, see pp. 79–84. Poor Law Commissioners’ Report, p. 75. See Mary Poovey, Making a social body: British cultural formation 1830–1864 (1995), pp. 106–8. Poor Law Commissioners’ Report, p. 203. Ibid., p. 129. See also Williams, From pauperism to poverty, p. 58. Poor Law Commissioners’ Report, p. 137. See also Chadwick’s remarks on the condition of labourers in Cookham. Ibid., p. 174. Nassau Senior, Remarks on opposition to the Poor Law Amendment Bill, by a Guardian (1841), p. 43. For a detailed treatment, see Anthony Brundage, The making of the New Poor Law: the politics of inquiry, enactment, and implementation, 1832–1839 (1978). From Jonathan Pereira, A treatise on food and diet: with observations on the dietetical regimen suited for disordered states of the digestive organs, and an account of the dietaries of some of the principal metropolitan and other establishments for paupers, lunatics, criminals, children, the sick, &c (1843), p. 240. Henriques, Before the welfare state, pp. 39–43; Brundage, The English poor laws, pp. 69–71; Valerie Johnston, Diets in workhouses and prisons (1985); Poor Law Commission, second annual report (1836), appendix A. From a large literature, see Snell, Annals of the labouring poor, pp. 104–37; Peter Mandler, ‘The making of the New Poor Law redivivus’, Past and Present, 117 (1987), 131–57; Aristocratic government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830–1852 (Oxford, 1990); Anthony Brundage, David Eastwood and Peter Mandler, ‘Debate: The making of the New Poor Law redivivus’, Past and Present, 127 (1990), 183–201; Philip Harling, ‘The power of persuasion, central authority, local bureaucracy and the New Poor Law’, English Historical Review, 107 (1992), 30–53; David Eastwood, Government and community in the English provinces, 1700–1870 (Oxford, 1997). The classic account remains S. E. Finer, The life and times of Sir Edwin Chadwick (1952). See also Anthony Brundage, England’s ‘Prussian minister’: Edwin Chadwick and the politics of government growth, 1832–1854 (1988).

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34 George Cornewall Lewis repeated this story in Remarks on the third report of the Irish Poor Inquiry Commissioners; drawn up by the desire of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, for the purpose of being submitted to His Majesty’s government (1837), p. 10. It was also noted by the editor of The Times during the Andover scandal, who commented that for the experiment to be of any value, ‘it would have been necessary to have ascertained how long the reverend gentlemen and his clerk would have lived on their own fat’; 29 September 1845, p. 5. 35 Ipswich Journal, 26 December 1835, p. 4; A. F. J. Brown, Chartism in Essex and Suffolk (Chelmsford, 1982), pp. 28–9. Note also King’s acute observations in ‘Pauper inventories’. 36 Lewis, Remarks on the third report of the Irish Poor Inquiry Commissioners, p. 35; cited in E. P. Thompson, The making of the English working class (1963), p. 268. 37 Hugh Fearn, ‘Chartism in Suffolk’, in Asa Briggs (ed.), Chartist studies (1959), pp. 154–5. One of the Guardians who protested against the new regulations banning extras was the radical James White, who mobilised Chartists against the regime. 38 Note also Edsall, The anti-Poor Law movement; Knott, Popular opposition to the 1834 Poor Law; Digby, Pauper palaces, pp. 215–28; Felix Driver, Power and pauperism: the workhouse system, 1834– 1884 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 112–30; Robert G. Hall, ‘Hearts and minds: the politics of everyday life and Chartism, 1832–1840’, Labour History Review, 74:1 (2009), 31–4. 39 Anna Clark, ‘Wild workhouse girls and the liberal imperial state in mid-nineteenth century Ireland’, Journal of Social History, 39:2 (2005), 389–410; David Green, ‘Pauper protests: power and resistance in early nineteenth-century London workhouses’, Social History, 31:2 (2006), 137–59; Pauper capital: London and the Poor Law, 1790– 1870 (Farnham, 2010). 40 Champion and Weekly Herald, 12 February 1837, pp. 172, 174. 41 Ipswich Journal, 29 April 1837, p. 3; Brown, Chartism in Essex and Suffolk, pp. 42–3. 42 Champion and Weekly Herald, 30 April 1837, p. 264; The Times, 29 April 1837, p. 6. 43 John E. Archer, By a flash and a scare: incendiarism, animal maiming, and poaching in East Anglia, 1815–1870 (Oxford, 1990), p. 55. 44 There is only one slighting reference to Bowen and the Bridgwater case in Edsall, The anti-Poor Law movement, p. 137, n. 1. See, however, the excellent article by C. A. Buchanan, ‘John Bowen and the Bridgwater scandal’, Somerset Archaeology and Natural History, 131 (1987), 181–201.

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45 Northern Star, 17 February 1838, p. 3. Dietary number 3 was adopted. 46 Ibid., 24 February 1838, p. 3; The Times, 31 January 1838, p. 5. 47 Northern Star, 3 March 1838, p. 3. 48 These were: A letter to the King, in refutation of some of the charges preferred against the poor: with copious statistical illustrations demonstrative of the injustice with which that body has been assailed (1835); New Poor Law: the Bridgwater case – is killing in an Union Workhouse criminal, if sanctioned by the Poor Law Commissioners? etc. (1839); The Union Work-House and Board of Guardians system, as worked under the control of Poor Law Commissioners; exemplified by official documents and plan. With an address to Sir Robert Peel (1842); The Russell predictions on the working class, the national debt, and the New Poor Law, dissected, etc. (1850). 49 Northern Star, 7 April 1838, p. 4. 50 Ibid., 3 March 1838, p. 6. 51 Buchanan, ‘John Bowen and the Bridgwater scandal’, 193. 52 Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords appointed to examine into the several cases alluded to in certain papers respecting the operation of the Poor Law Amendment Act; and to report thereon (1837–8), pp. 549–55, 642, 985–6, 1007. 53 Ibid., p. 803. 54 Ibid., p. 807. 55 Ibid., p. 876. In his sympathetic discussion of rural crime in Norfolk and Suffolk, Archer observes that ‘If there was a criminal class in East Anglia it was the entire labouring community.’ By a flash and a scare, p. 14. 56 Buchanan, ‘John Bowen and the Bridgwater scandal’, 195; Report from the Select Committee of the House of Lords, p. xii; Hansard, vol. 46, cols 796–7 (House of Lords, 18 March 1839). 57 See Peter Dunkley, ‘The “Hungry Forties” and the New Poor Law: a case study’, Historical Journal, 17:2 (1979), 329–46. 58 Brighton Patriot and Lewes Free Press, 3 January 1837; Henriques, Before the welfare state, p. 50. 59 Hull Packet, 24 April 1840, p. 3. 60 See Mark Connelly, Christmas: a social history (1999); Kenneth D. Brown, The British toy business: a history since 1700 (1996); Neil Armstrong, Christmas in nineteenth-century England (Manchester, 2010). 61 Morning Chronicle, 25 December 1841. For other examples, see ibid., 25 December 1845; Daily News, 26 December 1851, p. 5. Nadja Durbach argues that treating within workhouses suggests the persistence of a ‘moral economy’ in ‘Roast beef, the New Poor Law, and

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63 64 65

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69 70 71

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the British nation, 1834–63’, Journal of British Studies, 52:4 (2013), 963–89. Northern Star, 20 December 1845, p. 3. See also Odd Fellow, 24 April 1841, p. 66. The free trade radical Douglas Jerrold also condemned the policy: ‘There had been talk … to regale certain workhouse people with a gill or so of ale, and a slice of pudding … that Christmas might be to their senses something more than a name … But no! The Poor Law – at least in the opinion of Lord Howick – was expressly passed to repeal the New Testament, and there should be no chance of the paupers running riot on the strength of illegally applied Christianity.’ See Punch, 4 (1843), 46–7. London and Westminster Review, December 1838, pp. 230–1. ‘Just starve us’, words by W. H. Freeman, music by Daniel Auber, adapted by T. C. Lewis from Auber’s opera Gustave (1843; 1854). There are journalistic accounts by Ian Anstruther, The scandal of the Andover Workhouse (1973) and Norman Longmate, The workhouse (1974). Thomas Mackay, A history of the English Poor Laws (1900; 1967), vol. III, p. 323. Sidney and Beatrice Webb rehearsed this view in English Poor Law history, p. 181. Finer discussed the Andover case in detail in The life and times of Sir Edwin Chadwick, pp. 257–73, though his approach was top-down, focusing mainly on the impact of the scandal on the Commission and its secretary. See also Peter Wood, Poverty and the workhouse in Victorian Britain (1991), p. 100. The Times, 6 August 1845, p. 2. Ibid., 13 August 1845, p. 6; Report from the Select Committee on Andover Union; together with the minutes of evidence, appendix and index (1846), p. 14. See Anstruther, The scandal of the Andover Workhouse, p. 125. The Times, 26 August 1845, p. 6. Ibid., 27 August 1845, p. 6; Northern Star, 30 August 1845, p. 5; Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 31 August 1845, p. 5; Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 1 November 1845; Report from the Select Committee on Andover Union, p. 220. The Times, 29 August 1845, p. 7; 4 September 1845, p. 7. Ibid., 28 August 1845, p. 7; 1 September 1845, p. 6. Report from the Select Committee on Andover Union, p. 313. Ibid., p. 326; E. P. Thompson, ‘Rough music’, in Customs in common (1991). The Times, 1 September 1845, p. 7. Report from the Select Committee on Andover Union, pp. v, 642– 4, 1680–1; Crowther, The workhouse system, p. 211. As William Robinson, the constable for Andover noted, he had been back and

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81 82 83

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‘The Andover Cannibalism’ forth between gaol and workhouse ‘continually’ with ‘about forty’ inmates committed by McDougal for short spells. This would make the total number of committals comparable to those in the large innercity London workhouses. See Green, ‘Pauper protests’, 142. The Times, 9 September 1845, p. 7. The press highlighted salacious details, no doubt partly for readers’ titillation. See particularly The Times, 8 September 1845, p. 7; Northern Star, 20 September 1845, p. 7. The Times, 26 August 1845, p. 6; 5 September 1845, p. 8; 1 September 1845, p. 6. Ibid., 9 September 1845, p. 7; Anstruther, The scandal of the Andover Workhouse, p. 130; Thompson, ‘On the sale of wives’, in Customs in common. The Times, 27 August 1845, p. 6; 12 September 1845, p. 8; 13 September 1845, p. 4; Examiner, 20 September 1845. See Finer, The life and times of Sir Edwin Chadwick, pp. 257–9. The Times, 23 September 1845, p. 8; 25 September 1845, p. 5. The Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 1 November 1845, reported unrest among both local ratepayers and inmates who had ‘wantonly broken’ windows in the workhouse, which had gone unpunished. See Hansard, vol. 84, cols 625–76 (House of Commons, 5 March 1846); The Times, 6 March 1846, p. 2; Examiner, 7 March 1846, p. 146. The Times’s correspondent had unearthed more stories of purported cannibalism to lend weight to calls for a public inquiry. See 8 October 1845, p. 6; 13 October 1845, p. 8. See Luise White, Speaking with vampires: rumor and history in colonial Africa (Berkeley, 2000); S. A. Smith, ‘Talking toads and chinless ghosts: the politics of “superstitious” rumours in the People’s Republic of China, 1961–1965’, American Historical Review, 111:2 (2006), 405–27. John Ashton, Modern street ballads (1888), pp. 351–2; Ruth Richardson, Death, dissection and the destitute (1988), pp. 220–2, 359, n. 13. Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 43 (April 1838), 491; Crowther, The workhouse system, p. 31. The Times, 1 September 1845, p. 8; 16 September 1845, p. 7; 6 March 1846, p. 2. Ibid., 13 September 1845, p. 7. Ibid., 14 August 1845, p. 4; 8 September 1845, p. 5. Ibid., 23 September 1845, p. 6. Ibid., 20 August 1845, p. 5, emphasis in original; A. W. Brian Simpson, Cannibalism and the Common Law (Chicago, 1984), pp. 110–45.

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Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 24 August 1845, p. 5. Ibid., 31 August 1845, p. 8. The Times, 6 March 1846, p. 4. Ibid., 3 July 1846, p. 3. For Wakley’s opposition to the Act, see S. Squire Sprigge, The life and times of Thomas Wakley (1897), pp. 478–86. Unfortunately, Fielden’s role on the Andover Committee is not discussed in Stewart Weaver’s excellent study, John Fielden and the politics of popular radicalism 1832–1847 (Oxford, 1997). Dodson asserted the unreliability of the female inmates who had spoken against McDougal and claimed that Rout had been a common prostitute. See Report from the Select Committee on Andover Union, p. 194. One wonders if Dodson would have been so brave if she had been present. The Times, 21 May 1846, p. 4; 27 May 1846, p. 5; 1 June 1846, p. 4. Report from the Select Committee on Andover Union, p. vi. Ibid., pp. 219, 392. Gates got some cheese for a short while after. Ibid., pp. 237, 348, 355. Ibid., pp. 365, 374. Ibid., pp. 442, 445–6. Ibid., pp. 922–3. Ibid., p. 926. See also The Times, 31 July 1846, p. 4. Report from the Select Committee on Andover Union, pp. 927–8. Chadwick’s performance is presented as a tour de force by Finer in The life and times of Sir Edwin Chadwick, pp. 266–7. The Times, 17 August 1845, p. 4; 18 August 1845, p. 4; 22 September 1845, p. 5. Mott was rewarded with an Assistant Commissionership but was forced to resign in 1842. Ibid., 1 August 1846, p. 4; 5 August 1846, p. 4. Ibid., 22 August 1846, p. 4; 24 August 1846, p. 6. Henriques, Before the welfare state, p. 56. See also Brundage, The English poor laws, pp. 87–9. Lewis to Grote, 26 January 1847, in Sir Gilbert Frankland Lewis (ed.), Letters of the Right Hon. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Bart. (1870), pp. 150–1; Webb and Webb, English Poor Law history, pp. 185–8. See Morning Chronicle, 19 February 1851, p. 7; Ipswich Journal, 22 February 1851; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 23 February 1851, p. 13; Leader, 22 February 1851, p. 177; Northern Star, 15 February 1851, pp. 1, 4; Archer, By a flash and a scare, p. 55. Lees, The solidarities of strangers, pp. 300–5. Ian Miller convincingly demonstrates how workhouse dietaries frequently contravened commissioners’ official recommendations in

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‘Feeding in the workhouse: the institutional and ideological functions of food in Britain, ca. 1834–70’, Journal of British Studies, 52:4 (2013), 940–62. 116 Northern Star, 16 August 1845, p. 4. 117 The Times, 21 August 1846, p. 4. On the growth of middle-class humanitarianism, see, inter alia, Brian Harrison, Peaceable kingdom: stability and change in modern Britain (Oxford, 1982); Alex Tyrrell, Joseph Sturge and the moral radical party in early Victorian Britain (1987); Clare Midgley, Feminism and empire: women activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865 (Abingdon, 2007); Gary J. Bass, Freedom’s battle: the origins of humanitarian intervention (New York, 2008).

4

‘Yours in the cause of Democracy’: democratic discourse and the Chartist challenge At Sheffield in late June 1842, a crowd of perhaps 50,000 mourners attended the public funeral of the twenty-seven-year-old Chartist militant Samuel Holberry, who had died of tuberculosis in a squalid cell at York Castle after serving two years of a four-year sentence for his alleged involvement in an armed uprising. The immense crowd wept as George Julian Harney delivered a moving graveside oration. Harney praised the moral and intellectual qualities of this ‘heroic patriot’, sacrificed for ‘the cause of freedom’ after being betrayed for ‘filthy lucre’ by ‘rotten-hearted villains’, tools of ‘base employers – the oppressors that have pursued him to his grave’. ‘Tyrants’, Harney went on, were making determined attempts to ‘crush liberty; and by torture, chains, and death, to prevent the assertion of the rights of man … and arrest the progress of democracy’, but these ‘puny Canutes’ were bound to be swept aside by ‘the ocean of intellect’. Harney reassured listeners that although Holberry’s life had been snuffed out by a corrupt state, his faith lived on and the glories of an Alexander or a Napoleon would eventually pale into insignificance alongside ‘the honest, virtuous fame of this son of toil’. Samuel Parkes also spoke and recommended that they should not rest until ‘by every legal and constitutional means you have made the Charter the law of the land, and thereby proclaimed the physical, moral and political freedom of the universal family of man!’ The crowd pressed forward as the ‘splendid oak coffin’ provided by Holberry’s supporters was lowered into the grave. Many must have caught sight of the brass breastplate that bore the inscription, ‘Died a martyr to the cause of Democracy.’1 This vignette captures an important theme that has been marginalised in recent work on the Chartist movement: the appeal of democratic discourse. It is worth recalling for a moment that

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‘democracy’ was a generally reviled concept among social and political elites in Britain throughout the first half of the nineteenth century and well beyond. It was savagely attacked by Tories during the reform debates in the early 1830s, while, in an effort to enlist popular support, Whig politicians such as T. B. Macaulay and Lord Brougham carefully distinguished between calls for ‘a democracy’ – meaning a completely transformed political system that represented a complete break with the past and which they reviled as much as any Tory – and necessary appeals to ‘the democracy’, or the rising social and economic middle, whose interests deserved to be urgently represented.2 The odium clung, however, and the eminently respectable radical George Jacob Holyoake could observe in the mid-1860s that ‘in the eyes of the governing class’, the idea of democracy was still considered ‘a Frankenstein kind of product’.3 Yet Chartists enthusiastically embraced this keyword from the late 1830s and wore it as a badge of honour until the movement’s gradual decline a decade or so later; thus ‘democracy’ (as well as those ‘democrats’ who propounded it) constituted a site of intense ideological struggle as different groups sought to define this multivalent, essentially contestable concept in various ways.4 For sure, others had talked about democracy before the Chartists but it was they who brought it down from the speculative realm to the level of the street, the workshop and the store. What gave the democratic idiom real force was that it was now backed by a mass movement of ‘the people’ – or even the ‘working class’ during the most heated phases of the Chartist agitation – that was insistently demanding the franchise not only as an abstract right but as a vital necessity in order to reconstruct social and economic relationships. Chartists wanted self-government so that they could halt the degradation of the social norm of consumption that the New Poor Law attempted to effect, as the last chapter emphasised. They wanted it so that they could contest the dominance of an abstract market that lorded over them and often, perversely, caused them to go hungry in a land of increasing plenty, as we shall see in the chapter that follows. It was little wonder that their appropriation of democracy cast a long shadow; after Chartism most upper- and middle-class leaders worried that it might never again be possible to elevate the concept so that it could be ‘sterilized to innocuousness’, to borrow Frances Gillespie’s felicitous phrase.5 The emphasis in the recent historiography on the essentially ‘constitutional’ nature

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of Chartism has served to conceal this vital aspect and has led to serious misunderstanding of the Chartist challenge. As we shall see, in many respects Chartism was admittedly at its most threatening when democratic and constitutional discourses were fused together by the heat of social and political conflict, and the speeches at Holberry’s graveside illustrate this intertwining. Nevertheless, for many Chartists it was not an imagined constitution but democracy that represented the cause. That is why so many of them signed letters to the radical press, ‘Yours in the cause of Democracy.’ It is in this context that we need to situate Chartist democratic discourse. The historical models that were deployed to buttress their claims are discussed in the following section, which argues that the shared identity of ‘democrat’ helped to conceal differences and unify the movement. The chapter then explores the way in which democratic ideas were imbricated in Chartist culture, informing its solidaristic rituals as much as the practice of self-government. Moreover, during the early 1840s in particular Chartism and democracy were increasingly regarded as synonymous, quintessentially ‘working-class’ causes; this was especially true after the failure of the Complete Suffrage Union to build an alliance between middleand working-class radicals. The chapter then briefly discusses the discursive shift inspired by democratic and revolutionary movements on mainland Europe during the second half of the 1840s, when leaders such as Harney attempted to reinvigorate Chartism following a period of defeat and state repression by adopting a continental language of ‘social democracy’. This chapter also considers the linguistic and institutional splitting that gathered pace after the climacteric of 1848. Firmly rejecting Chartist definitions of democracy and eager to forge an identity between the diffusion of consumer goods and the spread of democratic rights, free trade radicals in particular began to renew attempts to reach out to the better-off stratum of the working class; Trevelyan’s apposite remark about John Bright grasping the internal connection between a good coat and the franchise may be recalled. After the Anti-Corn Law League was formally disbanded, free traders continued to campaign for a kind of pocketbook democracy, which involved ditching the language of ‘pure’ democracy in favour of the much narrower demand for household suffrage. Not that they imagined consumers as supine or passive, far from it. As we shall see in more detail in Chapter 7, the League imagined consumers as highly creative; indeed, they

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were the fulcrum on which commercial success hinged, prototype for the modern citizen-consumer. However, free traders vehemently rejected the idea that markets should be subject to popular control as an article of faith, and the League itself was anti-democratic to the core. A democratic imaginary Chartists did not elaborate a well-worked-out, coherent theory of democracy, nor did they write treatises on the subject. What democracy meant to them has therefore to be inferred from the historical models, figurative tropes and ethical meanings that they attached to the concept in their speeches, writings and practice. But whatever the interpretive difficulties, we can say that Chartists valorised the notion of democracy and wore it with pride, as a badge of honour. Importantly, it enabled them to contest Tory and Whig historical narratives and construct alternative versions of the past as well as the present and future. Some Chartists drew on natural rights arguments as well as the history of the American and French revolutions to support their cause. The contribution of James Bronterre O’Brien, the so-called ‘schoolmaster of Chartism’, was vital here. O’Brien had little time for earlier examples of democratic practice, pointing out in the Poor Man’s Guardian, for example, that classical Greece provided no straightforward model, not least because of the institution of slavery. The government of Athens, O’Brien admitted, had been ‘a pure democracy’ in which citizens were ‘direct makers of the laws’, but this was impracticable in the more complex conditions of the present. Thus, he could argue that ‘the government we look for in England is not a democracy, but a representative republic based on universal delegation’.6 More recent experience provided a better guide, according to O’Brien, who introduced English plebeian radicals to the history of the French Revolution in the wake of the agitation over the Great Reform Act. His understanding was informed by the writings of Philippe Buonarroti, the Italian émigré supporter of Babeuf’s conspiracy for equality. According to this interpretation, the constitution of ‘the famous Democracy of 1793’ represented the apogee of democratic form in modern times because, in theory at least, it gave power to the toiling millions by abolishing the property qualification and the two degrees of election that had been established by the ‘middle class’ constitution of

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1791.7 For O’Brien, Robespierre and the radical Jacobins had heroically sought to transfer real control from executive government to primary assemblies that elected representatives on an annual basis. O’Brien infused early Chartism with these ideas, maintaining, for instance, that the three million victims of the ‘anti-Jacobin’ war with France had been murdered to protect ‘the upper, and middle classes of England’ from ‘the Democracy of 1793’ that had given ‘the working classes of France … a voice in the enactment of their own laws’.8 Democracy appealed to Chartists like O’Brien because it symbolised the necessity for a clean break with the past, the complete rejection of tradition and authority. Such radical Enlightenment ideology struck a chord with many workers, especially those local Chartist branches that styled themselves Democratic Associations, the best known of which was the London Democratic Association (LDA) that identified closely with the legacy of Paine and Robespierre, though there were many others.9 The LDA was the power base of that other revolutionary dramaturge, Harney. It is worth pointing out, however, that the American and French revolutions were not the only sources for Chartist democratic thought. The more eclectic approach to history adopted by Thomas Cooper, the Leicester Chartist, was probably more representative of the movement’s historical consciousness. An ardent student of classical history as well as much else, at his trial following the strike wave of 1842 Cooper informed Justice Denman (who was not impressed) that he ‘had imbibed the ennobling principles of democracy when only fourteen years old, by reading the glorious history of Greece’.10 Soon after his release from gaol in 1845, Cooper addressed a ‘Democratic Supper’ organised by the LDA keen to build internationalist connections, and spoke at length on the meaning of ‘democrat’. It was, Cooper said, a word of grand associations, for it came from noble old Greece – the immortal land of Thermistocles (sic), and Aristides, and Miltiades: it breathed of the glorious struggles of Marathon and Salamis; it raised up the thrilling image of Leonidas and his fearless 300, who fell, a forlorn hope, at Thermopylae; and it told of the proud Persian humbled, and of kings and their arrogance laid low – but of a whole people exalted to freedom – and that people the noblest that ever lived beneath the sun for eloquence and poetry, and philosophy, and the arts, as well as for bravery. (Great applause.) The word

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‘democrat’ was, then, like the name ‘Chartist’, one that ought to be dearly cherished for its associations. As Democrats, they possessed a name under which they could embrace as brothers, the shades of the patriotic dead of all countries, and the patriotic living of every land: as Chartists, they love a name dearer than life to many, for it had been sanctified by suffering.11

For Cooper, to be a Chartist was necessarily to be a democrat, and others commonly conflated these terms, including Feargus O’Connor, who described himself as ‘a Democrat – a Chartist’ at his own trial in May 1840.12 Cooper went on to give regular lectures to working-class audiences at the City Chartist Hall in London in which he sang the praises of republicanism and popularised ‘the magnificent themes of the Athenian democracy’, and he was not the only Chartist speaker to address this subject either.13 During the winter of 1848 Cooper discoursed on the transition from ‘legendary’ to ‘historical’ Greece at the Hall of Science in City Road. His talks demonstrated a familiarity with not only the writings of Tacitus and Plutarch but also the most recent scholarly work by George Grote, whose multi-volume History of Greece began to appear in 1846. Although Cooper clearly respected Grote’s research, he did not hesitate to criticise him on various points nor develop his own distinctive perspective – one that privileged the position of ‘the “masses” as they are so mechanically called’.14 Whatever the preferred historical sources and models, the democratic idiom depended as much on mythologised versions of the past as the constitutional idiom. Both looked back to lost freedoms, heroic struggles and ideal societies; both could be projected forwards to help imagine a new kind of society. Again, it is the interpenetration of these idioms that strikes the historian. ‘Democracy’ was clearly a capacious term and Chartists filled it with a wide range of examples. For instance, like many other Chartists, Cooper found evidence of democratic practice much nearer to home, and also lectured on the experience of ‘Anglo Saxon democracy’, when it was supposed that the people had enjoyed real power over their leaders.15 Indeed, although he typically claimed that familiarity with classical history had initially turned him into a ‘democrat’ before the jury at the Special Commission at Stafford, he went on to stress that reading ‘the legal enactments of our glorious Alfred, and our other Saxon monarchs’, as well as the Magna Charta and

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the Bill of Rights, had convinced him that national liberties had been constructed on ‘broad and enlightened principles of freedom’ and that the People’s Charter was therefore no less than ‘the embodiment of the principles contained in the theory of the British Constitution’.16 Not surprisingly perhaps, Cooper sometimes enlisted the Bible in the cause of freedom, another common ploy. The Bradford Methodist preacher, William Arran, stated at the great Chartist demonstration on Hartshead Moor that ‘the founder of Christianity was the greatest and purest democrat that ever lived’; while William Parker defended Joseph Rayner Stephens for having ‘proclaimed to the people that God’s own book laid down a pure system of Democracy’.17 The malleability of Chartist uses of democracy was a source of strength but also weakness: it could help unify different conceptions of the past and different tendencies within the movement, but it could be divisive. Occasionally, differences emerged into the open. Although even a moderate Chartist such as Henry Vincent was keen to declare how from ‘boyhood he had been a democrat’ and had devoured the writings of Paine and Volney, not surprisingly the Enlightenment legacy was defended most vigorously by the Democratic Associations.18 As a result, friction was generated within the movement. During the first General Convention in 1839, Thomas Ireland of the LDA, for example, rejected the idea that reforming bodies in London should drop separate titles, or the ‘idle distinction of names’, and merge into a single Metropolitan Charter Association. Ireland stressed that ‘names or words are so far expressive as to become nearly equivalent to things’, and considered the proposal an attack on ‘government of and by the people’, on democracy itself. Smelling the whiff of class conciliation and betrayal, Ireland urged metropolitan Chartists to abandon the ‘so-called’ London Working Men’s Association and rally round the unfurled ‘banner of Democracy’.19 Soon after, William Lovett and Matthew Fletcher accused the LDA of trying to pack the Convention with ‘Jacobin’ delegates imbued with the spirit of the French Revolution. O’Connor forcefully refuted these claims, though expressed regret that ‘any member of the Convention should dread any infusion of democracy whether from a Jacobin club or from a Democratic Association’.20 A similar though far less acrimonious conflict broke out among Barnsley Chartists the following year, and there were probably others.21

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Despite the renowned autodidacticism of leaders such as Cooper, most of the working-class men, women and children that made up the majority movement would have had neither the time nor the opportunity to study either classical or revolutionary history. For them, affiliating with the concept of democracy was often more visceral, bound up as much with questions of individual and collective identity than with any well-worked-out and coherent historical sensibility, though one should not suppose it any less important because of that. Democracy connoted particular readings of the European past but, as we have already noted, whatever its intellectual sources it also functioned as an emblem or badge that signified membership of the movement and helped to create a sense of belonging. Thus, the self-identification of democrat was pregnant with both ontological and ethical meaning. To be a democrat was to claim the moral high ground from the many ‘traitors’ that surrounded the Chartists, erstwhile allies and political enemies who sought to tyrannise over them and against whom they contrasted their own methods and ideas: ‘base Whigs’ who had deserted the popular cause after 1832; ‘sham patriots’ such as Daniel O’Connell, the Irish leader of the Catholic Association; and middle-class Sturgites and ‘extension of commerce’ men who peddled the false notion that free trade would solve the problem of working-class scarcity.22 O’Connell, we might note, was one of the very few middle-class radicals who was not afraid to speak the language of democracy, invoking ‘the great spirit of democracy’ during the parliamentary debate on reform in 1830, for example. As late as 1840, at a public meeting in Dublin he claimed that there was not ‘one individual amongst the Chartists of England more firmly attached to democracy than I am’.23 But O’Connell invariably linked political liberty with commercial freedom as two sides of the same coin, equally necessary to ensure progress, and this damned him in the eyes of working-class radicals. Chartist democrats claimed that these repeated attempts to flatter and beguile the common people had been successfully countered by a direct and truthful radical discourse that got to the heart of the matter. It was a question of trust. William Atkinson supported Harney’s election as Newcastle delegate to the Convention because he had proved himself ‘a thorough democrat, a man who had sworn never to bow to tyranny in any shape’.24 This contest on the linguistic level can be traced back at least to the unstamped press, if not

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before. Brougham’s tone had incensed radicals as much as anything during the parliamentary debate on reform, for example, especially the way in which he twisted language to suit his own agenda. Thus, the Poor Man’s Guardian reminded readers that it had long considered Brougham their ‘greatest and most deceitful enemy’, especially as ‘he deals powerfully in most fluent sophistry; we will not call it “eloquence”, because it lacks virtue and honesty, and common sense and truth – without but one of which “true eloquence can’t be”’.25 For Henry Hetherington, the paper’s publisher, authentic democratic discourse was marked by moral directness rather than by politeness, and many other radicals shared his opinion.26 Democrats thus spoke the language of ‘truth’ and cast themselves as bearers of an irresistible universalism, an almost natural as well as historical force. The editor of the Northern Star, William Hill, personified the concept of democracy as a beneficent superman – ‘the giant form of virtuous Democracy’ – that was striding across the world bringing liberty and peace, an image that superficially resembled O’Connell’s, though Hill, as we have seen, vehemently rejected the Irish nationalist’s emphasis on free trade as an inevitable corollary of political democracy.27 The Liverpool Chartist, William Jones, warned middle-class magistrates who dealt harshly with Chartist prisoners after the ‘insurrection’ of 1842 that ‘They never could prevent the onward progress of democracy, unless they could chain down the human mind, and to do that they might as well attempt to pull down the dazzling orb of day, in the full blaze of meridian splendour, to command the ocean to recede, or the heavenly bodies to stand-still.’28 Chartist leaders sometimes explicitly portrayed their own role as merely giving voice to this inexorable, world-historical power. Thomas Cooper, for example, referred to himself as ‘the people’s mouthpiece’; while Feargus O’Connor playfully embraced the abusive epithet frequently hurled at him by his enemies: ‘I am a demagogue; if the fools understood Greek, they would have known it was a term of honour, rather than reproach. (Laughter, and cheers.)’29 Finally, the identity of democrat also implied that one was prepared to suffer, fight and even die for one’s beliefs, if necessary; the term allowed Chartists to self-dramatise their excluded status in a highly melodramatic manner and this surely represented no small part of its appeal. This helps explain why Chartists were so keen to construct a kind of martyrology. State persecution was real enough

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from 1839 but just as interesting was the way in which Chartists handled their mistreatment. By 1842, the pantheon included John Frost, Zephaniah Williams, George Shell, William Jones, John Clayton and Holberry, of course, as well as many others. Countless meetings were organised to raise funds for the dependants of these men; numerous dinners were held to memorialise their sacrifice and keep up pressure for their release. At one of these, David Ross, a Leeds Chartist, remarked that the ‘persecution of these virtuous men had first converted him to democracy’.30 As with so much else, O’Connor intuited the popular mood perfectly and self-consciously embraced the identity of martyr. At his trial he proclaimed: ‘No revolution had been effected without many martyrs, and he supposed he was destined to be one.’ And he continued the role in a letter written during his imprisonment in York Castle: ‘I hail the martyrdom. Martyrdom did I say, ’tis glory. My treatment will do more for the holy cause of democracy than if I had been at large, and preaching for double the time.’31 Others were similarly explicit. At his trial, Cooper asserted, ‘on behalf of the great democratic body of this country’, that his spirit would not be crushed, whatever the outcome: ‘If he was sentenced to a dungeon, the first breath of heaven which he drew on his release, should be exclaimed in proclaiming liberty and the Charter.’32 Imbued with the imagery and rhetoric of romanticism as well as Christianity, Chartist discourse dramatised individual and collective suffering as a necessary part of the struggle for freedom.33 Culture and class Discourses of democracy were deeply embedded in the culture of the Chartist movement, in its ritual and symbolism, about which recent scholarship has taught us much. Local Chartist branches held regular tea parties, soirées and festivals to commemorate certain events, such as the release of a prisoner, or else simply to develop mutualistic ties between members.34 Such forms were deliberately open and inclusive in order to maximise participation. Women, for example, regularly attended meetings and they did not mainly wait on tables like their sisters in the Anti-Corn Law League. Alcohol was often banned from events to make them more family oriented. At a festival held at Highbury to raise funds for the erection of a trades’ hall for London journeymen, a speaker named Balls stressed

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how important it was for the movement to own its own meeting places, so that they did not have to depend on others or meet in pubs. He hoped, therefore, that the project ‘was one in which the advocates of democracy and sobriety could mutually combine’. The moral revolutionist William Lovett argued for a similar linkage, at a mostly teetotal dinner to mark Henry Vincent’s release from gaol, for example, where Lovett stated that he hoped the event would demonstrate to the wider world that ‘their great cause was best served by sober, temperate, and prudent conduct – (cheers) – and so prove that democracy was as beneficial in practice as it was in theory’.35 Little wonder that so many working-class women took such an active part in the movement, sometimes following the common custom by signing letters to the press as ‘Sisters, in the cause of democracy’, like the female Chartists of Manchester.36 Democratic and constitutional idioms were often thoroughly intertwined at these cultural events. An impressive demonstration of the trades organised by Chartists in Aberdeen to honour the radical MP Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, ‘the people’s own’ who presented the National Petition in 1842, was headed by numerous banners and a Chartist artwork: A beautiful device emblematical of the triumph of democracy, supported by four splendid columns, after the Grecian-Doric order in the recesses, between which were portraits of ‘The Exile of Erin’, Cobbett, H. Hunt, O’Connor – all hung in rich trappings of red silk, exquisitely wrought, surmounted by the Cap of Liberty, in red crimson, supported from the top of the columns by Grand Arches, tastefully arranged.37

Apart from the Exile of Erin (Feargus O’Connor’s uncle, Arthur O’Connor, the United Irishman banished from Britain during the French wars, who later served as a general in Napoleon’s army), the portraits underlined the movement’s constitutionalism while the Phrygian cap counterpoised a different tradition. Speaking at the tea party at Leeds referred to above, William Jones succinctly fused these alternative strands in a series of questions: Why was the working man excluded from a participation in national affairs? Why was he excluded from the pale of the Constitution? Why was he robbed of his natural rights, and deprived of his social privileges, converted into a mere drawer of water, a mere hewer of wood, a mere toiling machine, producing an enormous amount of

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wealth, which, after its production, he was obliged to hand over to others to enjoy?

In the midst of this period of acute social crisis, when it seemed to many as if the monarchy itself was threatened, William Hill argued that the only way to head off a republic was ‘by infusing the true spirit of rational democracy into our constitution, and giving to every Briton his rights as a human being, and his privileges as a freeman’.38 Chartism was deeply infused with republicanism and leaders such as Hill and O’Connor had to work hard to keep republican sentiments in check. For tactical reasons as much as anything, they insisted that monarchy and ‘pure democracy’ were not incompatible with one another, though it seems unlikely that the majority of Chartists agreed with them; royal scandals and extravagance were staple themes of the Chartist press, for instance.39 Chartism appeared most threatening in the early 1840s, not only because a dire economic situation mobilised the masses against the state, but also because local and national leaders were able to interweave different idioms to press for reform. For sure, they drew on a version of the English past and the critique of the lost rights of the ‘freeborn Englishman’, but they also frequently employed natural rights arguments for democratic reform and conjured up more disruptive historical models. To separate these strands, as recent scholarship has attempted, is unhelpful and makes it harder to grasp the way in which Chartism was poised on the knife-edge present, to use C. Wright Mills’ vivid phrase. Democracy was not merely a matter of texts or tradition for Chartists but was quintessentially a question of practice, as Lovett emphasised. As we have seen, they drew on an eclectic range of sources to buttress their beliefs and sustain their spirits. However, what they meant by democracy becomes more apparent when we also consider what they did, how they practised democracy. The Leeds Working Men’s Association put it bluntly: ‘Self-government we must have. We will obtain it peaceably if we are suffered to do so; BUT WE WILL HAVE IT.’ ‘Take your affairs into your own hand’, advised the Manchester Political Union; ‘We have no rich men leading or driving us but, in the true democratic spirit manage our own affairs.’40 The movement’s participatory forms and practices reflected this passionate desire. While the idea of convention linked back to the American and French revolutions, the organisation of

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local branches owed much to the old parish system with its quarterly vestry meetings.41 Members exerted control at branch level through the regular election of officers, but Chartists were keen to ensure individuals put forward to conventions or backed in parliamentary and municipal elections should be fully accountable. In short, they believed in the idea of delegation rather than representation, and this was a major distinguishing feature between them and many of their middle-class sympathisers from the start.42 A central institution of Chartist democracy, the radical press, helped build support and nurture an intimate relationship between leaders and the majority. Recent historians have demonstrated just how important a dialogic press was for the movement and have emphasised the often fluid boundary between radical readers and writers.43 The Northern Star especially was often represented as a beacon spreading the light of democracy and Enlightenment or else as a champion in the battle for freedom. Reverend Jackson, for instance, observed that since the paper ‘began to shine in our political firmament, its rays had penetrated and established the principles of democracy in every part of this country’. Indeed, Jackson hoped that one day ‘its refulgent rays should light the world to freedom’. ‘Democracy presented a darksome and gloomy hemisphere’, until the Star had disseminated ‘the light of truth’, according to William Hill, who welcomed the co-operation of other radical journals in ‘the battle of Democracy’.44 A brief contrast with the Anti-Corn Law League would be instructive here. Leaders of the League not only reviled the concept of democracy; their organisation was also deeply undemocratic. For sure, both male and female middle-class consumers were encouraged to take active part in the campaign for free trade, especially through petitioning and organising bazaars, and Chapter 7 will return to the culture of the League, which made a vital contribution to the success of its principles in the broadest sense.45 But the ‘machinery of the League’ that Norman McCord celebrated in his early scholarly account represented nothing less than the antithesis of Chartist democracy. The League was ruled by a Council consisting of about 500 men in 1845, who had purchased membership by subscribing £50 or more to the campaign. The vast majority of these took no part in its day-to-day operation, which was run with business-like efficiency from headquarters in Newall Street, Manchester, where daily meetings of the Council were held. These

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were attended by between twelve and twenty members, more often than not far fewer. Not only was power concentrated in a small number of hands, but also Richard Cobden often acted without consulting any of the other officers. The League published its own propaganda to spread the message, though it also sought to exert influence more covertly, sponsoring new periodicals such as The Economist, for instance, and paying subaltern writers such as Alexander Somerville (who published League propaganda anonymously as ‘The Whistler at the Plough’) to push the cause to workers in their own language.46 Differences between the democratic practice of the League and the Chartists are further underlined by their differing use of the mass platform, which had been a key institution of the reform movement for decades. Its first historian usefully distinguished between the Chartist platform, which he thought figured primarily as an ‘“expression” of the public voice’, and the way the platform was employed by the Anti-Corn Law League, where it appeared mostly ‘in its didactic aspect’. In other words, the latter sought to inculcate ideas of free trade from above by means of this form, while Chartists used the mass platform in order to allow the people’s voice to be heard.47 Long before Holberry was martyred in 1842, the attitudes of liberal friends of political reform had considerably hardened, as much because of the practical as the theoretical challenge Chartism posed. Not surprisingly, the militantly pro-free trade Leeds Mercury, for example, damned Chartism from the outset: ‘The design is nothing short of this, to convert the Government of England into a perfect and simple Democracy of the wildest possible kind, swamping the Crown, the Peerage, and all the property and intelligence of the country.’48 At the conference of Dissenting ministers held at Manchester in 1841, carefully stage-managed to buttress the free trade cause, the Baptist F. A. Cox underlined the precariousness of the political situation, pointing to the dangers represented by aristocratic monopolists on the one hand and ‘the faction and fury of mob-democracy on the other’.49 John Stuart Mill chose to remain largely silent on the subject of democracy after reviewing Tocqueville’s influential work, most likely because of the threat from below.50 Even the radical MP John Roebuck, who had put the Chartist case and sung a hymn to democracy in the Commons during the reform agitation, finally fell out with the movement over the question of class and O’Connor’s leadership in 1842, describing the

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Figure 8. George Cruikshank, ‘The Charter – a Commons scene’, Comic Almanack, 1843.

second National Petition as the work of ‘a cowardly and malignant demagogue’.51 Other middle-class ‘friends of the people’ also publicly recoiled, understandably given the tense state of the country. As we shall see in Chapter 6, Charles Dickens came out strongly against Chartism and so too did his close friend and collaborator, George Cruikshank. As depicted in Figure 8, Cruikshank imagined what a Chartist House of Commons would look like when the commons had really assumed control. In it we see male representatives of the people engaged in drinking, smoking, gambling and fighting, egged on from the galleries by their womenfolk. Racial as well as class prejudice informs Cruikshank’s anti-democratic nightmare: Irish-looking thugs force their own measures onto the statute books, while in the bottom right-hand corner a black man, an old Jew and an Arab puffing on a hookah sit plotting together. Above the chair of the Speaker – who vainly attempts to impose order on the unruly rabble – there hangs the Phrygian cap, symbol of liberty and revolution. The alienation of liberal middle-class opinion heightened as democracy became tied more securely to a developing ‘working-class’

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identity. We can see this clearly if we consider the way in which usage of the term shifted from a more diffuse, inclusive sense to a more particularistic meaning during the most intense period of Chartist activity. The Leeds Working Men’s Association issued an address at the beginning of 1838, for instance, that portrayed history as a ceaseless struggle between ‘the spirit of Aristocracy, and the spirit of Democracy’. Constitutional methods – ‘begging, and praying and petitioning’ – might be exhausted, the authors claimed, and to illustrate their reading they pointed to the American and French revolutions, as well as the recent coercion of Canada, a country that would nevertheless soon witness ‘the triumphant establishment of Democracy on the ruins of Aristocracy’. In similar fashion, later that year at a meeting at Manchester to commemorate Peterloo, Vincent declared that the country was now polarised into two camps: ‘those who are for the Democracy and those who are for the Aristocracy’.52 Here, democracy was employed in a rather vague, all-encompassing way, allowing the possibility of cross-class collaboration to defeat a backward-looking ancien régime. O’Connor himself often turned this opposition to his own advantage, amusing and flattering audiences with the remark that he had ‘been promoted from the ranks of the aristocracy to a commission in the democracy’. Accused by detractors such as Lovett and Hetherington of coming from middleclass stock, O’Connor delighted in reminding them that he had in fact been an aristocrat in his own country, but had worked his way into ‘the democracy’ through ‘honest service’.53 When O’Connor appeared in public dressed in a suit of fustian – ‘the emblem of your order’, as he remarked to the crowd outside York Castle – he was communicating his social and moral transformation symbolically.54 As the economic and political crisis intensified in the early 1840s, the democratic idiom began to be inflected more directly by class. An editorial in the Northern Star that denounced ‘our besotted aristocracy’ in 1840, for example, also rounded on ‘their still more besotted apes, the middle classes’. Hill quoted extensively from one of Vincent’s prison letters that expressed belief in the inexorable march of democratic progress, aided by the spread of popular education: ‘To think is to be a democrat – THINKING is DEMOCRACY.’ Disillusionment with middle-class reformers such as Thomas Atwood of the Birmingham Political Union sharpened definitional contests. Standing as a Chartist candidate in that city the following summer, George White urged his

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supporters to slough off middle-class Whig-Liberal ‘factions’ and ‘erect the standard of pure democracy’.55 Middle-class radicals’ vigorous support for the religion of free trade fuelled class antagonism considerably. In an attempt to buttress their democratic credentials, some Anti-Corn Law League speakers pointed approvingly to the example of Switzerland, including Jellinger Symonds at a meeting of the Leeds Reform Association, who described the country as ‘a perfect democracy’ characterised by ‘the most cordial union between masters and men’. Though Chartists also sometimes lauded the land of ‘the heroic Tell’, they were not taken in by this tactic, recognising that the League was also keen to identify with the country because of its adoption of free trade.56 In the radical press, victories over the League were routinely celebrated as victories for the cause of both democratic principles and the socio-political group that most cherished those principles. The Northern Star reported the ‘Triumph of the Democracy over the Corn-Law Repealers’ at a public meeting in Southampton in January 1842, for instance, while at Stalybridge a year later O’Connor proclaimed his faith that Chartists would not be led astray by the League’s blandishments because they understood that repeal of the Corn Laws without political power would represent a profound defeat: ‘this was the reason why the working classes would not join the League for their repeal. It was a fortunate thing for this country and the world that the people were determined to stand by the principles of true democracy.’ Thus, in the febrile atmosphere of the early 1840s, ‘pure’ or ‘true democracy’ came increasingly to be regarded as the cause of ‘the people’, and ‘the people’ was now often used synonymously with ‘the working class’ or ‘classes’.57 This explicit class inflection was generalised by the massive strike wave of 1842. In a speech at Lancaster in July, a month before the strikes started, O’Connor observed with characteristic humour that although ‘the working classes’ now faced combined hostility from ‘the three ocracies – the aristocracy, the smokeocracy, and the shopocracy’, he would continue to ‘back his own ocracy, democracy, against the other three – (laughter and cheers.)’. Thomas Cooper similarly believed that what he called ‘real democracy’ was now a class question and elided it with the Charter: ‘Let the middle men come if they like; but do not court them. The People’s Charter is intended to be pre-eminently the working man’s boon; and let

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us be resolved to make it so.’58 As overt class conflict spread and enemies were seen to press more determinedly, so this identification became more frequent. The Anti-Corn Law League was exposed as a cynically manipulative middle-class body that hoped to use the Chartists for their own ends in an editorial in the Northern Star, which cited private League correspondence that recommended activists denounce the aristocracy and ‘class legislation’, or ‘give the reins in favour of democracy’, because ‘the masses will not restrict their efforts to Corn Law Repeal’.59 At the height of the struggle, the South Lancashire Chartist delegate conference issued an address that condemned the ‘monstrous power of Capital in the hands of the middle classes’, who were ‘rioting in luxuries as the swine wallows in mire’. Though this group was backed by a government that endeavoured ‘to stifle free discussion and put down Democracy’, delegates affirmed that ‘nothing short of political power to protect our wages will satisfy the working classes of this country’.60 The treatment of Chartist prisoners by the state in the autumn of 1842 served to strengthen this embattled sensibility. Lord Abinger, who presided at the Chester Special Commission, had no doubt that democracy meant Chartism in 1842 and that both ought to be unremittingly suppressed.61 A final vital factor in this definitional process was the debate over the so-called ‘new move’ between Chartists and the Complete Suffrage Union (CSU), pet of the Dissenting businessman Joseph Sturge, which preached the gospel of class conciliation and aimed to enfranchise householders. Sturge launched his movement at the most inauspicious time, towards the end of 1841, and its main significance, as far as Chartists were concerned, was that it helped to bond them more closely together. It did receive some initial support from moderate Chartists, however, including Lovett’s friend J. H. Parry, who used the term democracy to underscore the cross-class, inclusive nature of the project at a public meeting at Holborn during the general strike. ‘The man who was continually denouncing the middle class was a traitor to the cause of democracy’, Parry exclaimed, then went on to warn: ‘God forbid that he should attempt to divide the two classes; it was only by a union of them that a bloodless revolution could be effected.’ Henry Vincent, who also spoke at the meeting, added a rather different emphasis, which did not bode well for future relations as it revealed Vincent’s primary commitment and linked this to their supposedly shared

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objective: ‘In his heart’s deepest core he venerated the name of the People’s Charter; he had not a drop of blood in his veins which did not boil with ardour in the cause of democracy (tremendous cheering.).’ Leaders of the ‘new move’ continued to claim the language of democracy and attempted to open it up to other constituencies; an address from the Council of the CSU, for example, spoke of ‘unitedly raising up the intelligence and virtues of democracy on the basis of free institutions’.62 The movement generated a torrent of criticism in the Chartist press, Harney predictably denouncing it as the work of ‘the “real” foes of democracy’, but what buried the organisation were the actions of the CSU itself. Signing himself ‘Your brother Democrat’, the secretary of the Chartist Executive, John Campbell, launched a scathing attack in a letter to the Northern Star in October 1842, accusing the organisation of class exclusivity, apparent in the selection of delegates to their meetings: ‘Can any working man – can any real Democrat come to any but the following – namely, that this party are not sincere’, Campbell wrote.63 The final break came two months later, at a conference in Birmingham, when even Lovett refused to abandon the symbol of the Charter and joined forces with O’Connor to defend it. Although some historians have been rather puzzled by this ‘unlikely alliance’, it becomes more understandable when we recognise that for all their differences both Lovett and O’Connor shared a belief in ‘pure’ or ‘extreme democracy’.64 For both men, democracy and the Charter could not be separated. Thus, Chartists came to regard themselves as the true defenders of democracy against the depredations of aristocratic politicians, middle-class employers and free traders, corrupt judges and false friends. Just as the boundary lines marking which groups were included within or excluded from the concept of ‘the people’ were redrawn in 1842, so too ‘democracy’, as we have seen, was redefined by popular radicals and their antagonists, who both came to regard it as synonymous with Chartism, the political project of an enlightened ‘working-class’.65 By this time O’Connell was regularly puffing the Anti-Corn Law League and denouncing ‘the tyrannous democracy of the Chartists’.66 However, although this shift was important, it should not be supposed that the door was ever entirely shut on middle-class reformers. Even during this period of acute social tension, the combative Harney was still prepared to allow ‘the middle class’ to join the cause of ‘the people’, just so

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long as they accepted the political demands of ‘the working class’ and realised that the fight was for the ‘rights of man’ and not just ‘the interests of a class’.67 The relationship between class and democracy was therefore always shifting and contingent. Democracy helped unify the Chartist movement, certainly, though it continued to divide. Soon after middle-class moderates like Sturge were purged, the movement adopted a new constitution that, according to Malcolm Chase, marked a ‘fundamental departure’ for the National Charter Association.68 Not only did this constitution prioritise the Land Plan; it also placed more power in the hands of a salaried executive, which was in theory responsible to the annual convention but which in reality could exercise far more independent control. Member participation was seriously compromised by a change that was vigorously contested by Lovett, who regarded it as further proof of the dictatorial influence of O’Connor – ‘the blight of Democracy from the first moment he opened his mouth as its professed advocate’ – and his organ the Northern Star, which had sought to undermine ‘every thing good in Democracy, or to place Toryism once more in the ascendant’.69 Cooper also launched an attack, outlining an alternative organisational structure that would enable ordinary members to hold the executive more to account: ‘The government of the Association by such a body would, also, be essentially a government by representative democracy, while the government by a directory of five may, in its very nature, be termed an oligarchy.’70 Cooper’s initiative failed to check a shift towards the centralisation of power, which only served to widen the gulf between the rhetoric and reality of Chartist democracy. Social democracy The strike wave of 1842 and the state repression that followed at the local and national level marked a profound caesura in the Chartist movement, as we saw in Chapter 2. Lacking a mass base, a belief that the cause of democracy could be imminently achieved was no longer sustainable. Defeat served to strengthen the centralising drift sketched above, but ironically it may also have heightened the rhetorical appeal of democracy; faith in the inevitability of its coming surely provided some comfort for beleaguered radicals after the general strike. In this phase, Harney invested the concept with an agency of its own, repeatedly articulating a sense of the

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inevitability of democracy, regardless of any setbacks, in editorials he wrote for the Northern Star. America was still pointed to as evidence of this progressive tendency, though its limitations had increasingly to be admitted. Harney worked hard to purge the concept of impurities, asserting: ‘Democracy comprises all; the negro as well as the white man; the African as well as the American.’ He explained slavery as merely an aristocratic vestige from the past: ‘The cart whip ruffians of Carolina are as truly aristocrats as ever were the Norman brigands that followed in the train of the bastard WILLIAM.’71 Contemporary realities posed as many problems for him as they had for O’Brien a decade earlier, and middle-class radicals were not slow to pounce on how the American experience demonstrated the perversion of democratic ideals, which had often been used to cloak the worst kinds of oppression. The Anti-Corn Law League orator George Thompson, for example, denounced America as a ‘false democracy which obstructed the progress of freedom’, precisely because it was built on the foundations of slavery, at the second annual meeting of the Metropolitan Complete Suffrage Association that was attended by the black abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass.72 Unswerving belief in the eventual triumph of democracy no doubt allowed Harney to put a brave face on during this most difficult phase. He continued to argue that the movement of history was on the side of popular sovereignty, and sanguine editorials on ‘The Influence of Democracy’ and ‘The March of Democracy’ mapped the progressive signs of the times. The growth of co-operative initiatives among the working classes was seen as most hopeful, not only the Land Plan, which Harney thought would pave the way ‘for democracy to enter the legislature of the day’, but also trade unions.73 The need for more ambitious and less exclusive organisations such as the National Association of United Trades for the Protection of Labour (NAUT) was widely acknowledged, not least by O’Connor, who hoped to substitute a ‘democracy of the Trades’ for the existing ‘aristocracy of the Trades’. Harney similarly opined that trade unions had ‘struggled hopelessly as an aristocracy of their order’, and that they now had to ‘link themselves inseparably with the democracy of that order’.74 Producer and consumer cooperatives were also singled out as progressive forms, as sources of democratic renewal and advance that would allow working people to better regulate production and consumption. The leadership,

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however, remained divided here and it is worth noting also that early co-operative societies, which will be discussed in detail in the next chapter, studiously avoided the language of democracy; though the rules of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, founded in 1844, promised vaguely to eventually ‘arrange the powers of production, distribution, education, and government’, they also contained a strong commitment to political neutrality.75 It has been widely recognised how at the leadership level Chartism became more internationalist in orientation from the mid-1840s. Harney and other metropolitan leaders were most excited by continental developments; the spread of democratic and revolutionary movements and the abortive uprising in Ireland understandably fed their romantic imaginations more effectively than the efforts of the Rochdale Pioneers. The language of democracy was profoundly shaped by these factors. It began to take on explicit revolutionary meanings for some, becoming therefore more sharply separated from constitutionalist discourse. Political exiles rubbed shoulders with Chartists in London and brought new influences; the establishment of the Fraternal Democrats in 1845 evidenced this crossfertilisation. Many ‘Democratic Suppers’ were held in the capital, ritualistic celebrations at which democratic-revolutionary past, present and futures interpenetrated. The first French republic provided a common reference point. At one of these events held at the City Chartist Hall in the autumn of 1845, the trade union activist John Skelton welcomed the German communist Wilhelm Weitling and recommended making Chartism an explicitly social as well as political project. Skelton looked forward to a time when ‘the people’ of all lands, ‘having the power to make the laws, and form the institutions, will become really sovereign; and Democracy prepare the way for that social equality and general happiness which I have a fervent faith will yet prevail. (Cheers.)’ Chartists did not lose sight of the nation at these meetings, however; William Sankey’s version of ‘Rule Britannia’, which celebrated England’s global role as harbinger of popular liberty, was regularly sung.76 Although often portrayed as a rather more insular thinker, O’Connor’s position was complex and in many respects he was as keen on international links as anyone. At a meeting in the Sun and Thirteen Cantons Tavern off Leicester Square, for instance, O’Connor warmly welcomed foreign democrats, including the German Karl Schapper, who asserted that ‘democracy would shortly

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be triumphant, and that every man would be his own landlord and his own employer. (Cheers.)’ O’Connor charted a singular course, arguing that those who fought ‘under the banner of Democracy’ in England faced a more powerful aristocracy than existed anywhere else. He went on to emphasise that while foreigners desired a republic, ‘we contend for our Charter, which is an improved principle of Republicanism. (Loud cheers.)’77 A feeling that the principle of democratic freedom was spreading throughout Europe was conveyed by numerous gatherings in support of Italy, Poland, Hungary and Germany. Again, O’Connor identified strongly with this historical trend, embracing the general atmosphere of flux and transition. Eighteen months later, he congratulated democrats in Prussia, where ‘irresponsible despotism’ had been forced to seek support from France against ‘the marching conqueror – DEMOCRACY!’ O’Connor added a typical patriotic gloss to the effect that ‘the watchword’ for change had emanated ‘from England and CHARTISM’, and was careful to stress that success was bound up with practical moves such as ‘the Land and Trades’ question, each of which are important branches of Chartism, while the success of one or both would materially advance the cause of Democracy’.78 Harney was especially keen to engage with continental émigrés, opened the Star to their activities and covered an increasing amount of foreign news, falling out with O’Connor in consequence.79 Events such as the Polish uprising against the Austrian Empire confirmed his belief in the interconnected nature of political and social reform. Harney hailed the Cracow Manifesto, issued by the Polish National Government early in 1846, because he reckoned it combined a demand for ‘equal political rights and social justice’, and was therefore symbolic of the inexorable progress of ‘Fraternal Democracy, in which labour and reward would be equally apportioned, and happiness be the reward of each and all’.80 The events in France two years later strengthened this view. For a while he was elated, and no wonder: after all, he had eaten breakfast off Louis Philippe’s crockery in the deposed king’s palace when he had visited Paris in March 1848.81 Harney enthusiastically adopted the term ‘social democracy’ and the démoc-soc ideology that was utilised by French socialists and moderate republicans such as Ledru Rollin at the time, as a way of marking out a new direction for the Chartist movement. The term it seems was first employed in an editorial that discussed the violent suppression of revolution on the streets

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of Paris in June 1848. For Harney, this was simultaneously a bloody physical act and a sustained ideological assault. He noted how, in an effort to undermine revolutionary principles, General Cavaignac had established an ‘Academy of Moral and Political Sciences’, which had appointed a committee to produce ‘a moral defence of “social order”’. Cheap tracts had been distributed among the masses to this end and the first of these by Victor Cousin was bitterly satirised by Harney for attempting to ‘throw dust in the eyes of the people’. Cousin sought to shore up social inequality with charitable activity, a futile exercise according to Harney: ‘General Cavaignac would do well to understand that though his precious band of “philosophers” should publish millions of such tracts as “Justice and Charity”, they will fail to raise a dyke against the ever-rising waters of Social Democracy.’82 John Saville has demonstrated the very real threat that confronted the British state in the year of revolutions, though the pressure was successfully resisted.83 Harney’s discourse failed to resonate with the majority of English workers. He became almost a revolutionary caricature, styled himself on the martyred Marat, signed articles ‘L’Ami du Peuple’ and increasingly peppered his editorials with alien-sounding terms like ‘proletarian’ and ‘bourgeoisie’. Such language was both symptom and cause of Harney’s increasing alienation from the wider working class.84 It seems likely that the attempt made by Harney and others to align democracy explicitly with socialism in 1848 only served to exacerbate fractures within the movement. In the early 1840s, the language of Chartist democracy was fluid enough to encompass alternative though often overlapping models derived from different conceptions of past, present and future. As we have seen, Cooper’s idealisation of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as England before the ‘Norman Yoke’, coexisted alongside O’Brien’s critical appropriation of the American and French revolutions; these democratic narratives did not preclude but intertwined with the ‘constitutional idiom’. Moreover, and regardless of such complexities, the argument that political change was necessary in order to regulate markets and humanise relations of production and consumption enjoyed widespread support within the movement. The identity of the ‘Chartist/ Democrat’ communicated a shared ambition. This helps to explain why Chartism elicited such fervent loyalty from so many workingclass women, despite the fact that demands for their formal political empowerment were ruled out as utopian by the movement’s male

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leadership. Chartist women demanded the six points in order to check the operations of ‘iniquitous capitalists’ and rescue workers’ families from the ‘horrors’ of the New Poor Law, the factory, the mine, truck and the tommy shop.85 Harney’s explicit insistence that Chartism stood for the integration of politics and social reconstruction had the advantage of clarity, certainly, but also served to isolate those who adopted a less confrontational approach, preferring not to attack the institution of private property directly. Harney and his supporters enjoyed no monopoly over the language of democracy after 1848. Other individuals and groups with quite dissimilar aims were also swept up by continental revolution and engaged in the debate on democratic ideas. As modern scholarship has emphasised, many middle-class radicals were very enthusiastic indeed about nationalist movements in Germany, Italy and Hungary. The Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi, for instance, enjoyed an almost cult status for a while in mid-Victorian England; thousands of genteel admirers flocked to see the heroic liberator when he was feted at the Crystal Palace in 1864. However, middle-class radicals had no truck with the démoc-soc notions that circulated in the year of revolutions and stressed the necessity, contra Harney, of the separation of the political from the economic domain. Not surprisingly, they rejected Louis Blanc’s attempts at socialist reconstruction outright, and linked democratic moves abroad with the douceur of capitalist commerce – the spread of free trade.86 Their views eventually received a sympathetic response among Chartists such as Holyoake who tried to look both ways for a time after 1848. Holyoake introduced Blanc’s ideas on the ‘Organisation of Labour’ to English readers through the pages of short-lived periodicals such as the Spirit of the Age and elsewhere, though only a few years later he espoused Mazzinist ideals, an airy, spiritualised nationalism popular among middle-class radicals.87 ‘We are not democracy; we are an army bound to clear the way for democracy’, proclaimed the joint republican manifesto issued by Kossuth, Ledru Rollin and Mazzini that Holyoake published in 1855, and their romantic, ‘manly’ but suitably vague rhetoric retained its appeal for Holyoake throughout his long life.88 Like the discourse on the nation, the democratic idiom had the potential to unite as well as divide classes from one another, though, as the next section shows, the chance of finding common discursive ground remained extremely slim.

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Although it was metropolitan radicals like Harney who embraced the democratic and social ideal most fervently, the clamour of democratic talk was heard in other parts of the country. The Leeds Mercury, for example, reported how speakers such as Joseph Barker and Mrs Theobald toured the West Riding during 1848, addressing large meetings that attracted many women on ‘the need for a thorough Democracy’. Edward Baines’s paper first attacked the 1848 French Revolution as a form of ‘pure democracy’, then later gloated over the failure of ‘ultra-democracy’.89 Other middle-class radicals took a more cautious approach and endeavoured to sketch an alternative path. The Bradford Observer published an address signed by more than 500 of the local electorate that included many prominent Liberals such as Titus Salt, W. E. Forster and William Byles, the paper’s owner and editor, which deprecated class hostility and expressed support for the principle of no taxation without representation.90 No mention was made of democracy. At a public meeting of ‘the Middle Classes, Special Constables, and others’ held at the Corn Exchange, Manchester, on the same day as the Kennington Common rally, a petition was drawn up in support of the Charter, which was later presented to Parliament by John Bright. Soon after, forty-nine middle-class radicals, led by the parliamentary reformer Joseph Hume and including prominent free traders such as Cobden, Bright and Sir Joshua Walmsley, backed the relaunch of a ‘New Movement’ in support of household suffrage, triennial parliaments, vote by ballot, no property qualification and equal electoral districts. Bright especially urged working-class radicals to drop the Charter – in effect to stop talking about democracy – and instead ally themselves with middle-class sympathisers and embrace household suffrage. Some of them responded to this call, including the Manchester Chartist R. J. Richardson, whose desire for class conciliation and compromise was fuelled by his antagonism towards ‘democratic tyrants’ like O’Connor.91 What made such a rapprochement difficult was the fact that the past was not easily forgotten and that words were still worth fighting for. Peter McDouall was expressing a common position when he spoke of ‘my Chartism meaning the purest democracy’. Although even Harney sometimes spoke about democracy transcending class society, a constructive salve rather than a destructive force – ‘Democracy endeavours to

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heal the wounds class-legislation has inflicted’ was how he once put it – often, as we have seen, democracy was identified closely with class.92 Harney called Bright a ‘choice specimen of the bourgeoisie’ and attacked the Commons as ‘essentially a middle-class house’ and therefore an obstacle to democratic progress. Ernest Jones similarly denounced the English middle-class as it ‘has cast down aristocracy on the left, and democracy on the right, and lives on the ruins of both’.93 Middle-class usage of the language of democracy did not aid cooperation. Many preferred to shy away from it altogether, including Cobden, who generally only used it in private; he can therefore only be described as ‘one of the leading architects of modern parliamentary democracy’ in a highly qualified sense.94 Writing to Sturge during the crisis of 1842, Cobden despaired of the Chartists for failing to grasp the basic principles of modern civilisation. He had recently attended a meeting at Coventry where workers had been ‘carried away by fellows whose fiendish spirit would have suited the time of Robespierre!’ Most worrying, these people simply did not understand the movement of history and thus ‘direct all their attacks against capital, machinery, manufacturers, and trade, which are the only materials of democracy’.95 In other words, for Cobden as for other free trade radicals the development of capitalism and the spread of democracy were intimately connected parts of a single process, the progressive tendency of modernity. However, democracy here is not construed as an abstract, universal and romantic concept that might liberate the majority whatever their material condition, but is rather seen as a positive side effect of accumulations of property. Such capitalist utopianism was publicly articulated in the pages of the Leeds Mercury, which struck a similar note in an editorial that read symbolic meaning into Queen Victoria’s opening of the New Royal Exchange. Blind to the possible charge of blasphemous hubris, Baines enthused about England’s global mission of free trade that was inscribed over the entrance: ‘The Earth is the Lords, and the fullness thereof.’ Like Cobden, Baines believed that capitalist growth had made democracy possible: ‘it is her manufacturing and commercial industry that has formed her great and intelligent democracy’.96 Interestingly, in private Cobden used the term more instrumentally or negatively, as in a letter sent to James Mellor as the climax of the campaign against the Corn Laws approached, in which he opined that it might be necessary

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for free traders to ‘shake the rod of democracy’ in their opponents’ faces before they finally conceded.97 With the language of democracy used in these ways, it was little wonder that Chartists in the main remained sceptical. There were more sympathetic middle-class figures who tried to keep channels of communication open, however, including William Byles at the Bradford Observer. Byles published a remarkable editorial in the same issue in which the conciliatory address referred to above appeared on ‘The Secret of the Chartist Movement in England’. Here he argued that while the People’s Charter was despised by the respectable classes, it remained ‘the idol of the people. They love it in their heart of hearts. It is the symbol and summary of their political faith.’ For Byles, the Charter was not simply a set of political demands but also expressed the ‘social wants’ and ‘sorrows’ of ‘the people’, their ‘hopes of social amelioration, of better wages, of comfortable cottages, of plenty of the necessaries of life’. Though he fully appreciated how urgent material improvement was for the working classes, Chartism was clearly more than a ‘knife and fork’ question according to Byles; it was a plea for inclusion and respect and he therefore supported the view, articulated by thinkers as dissimilar as Tocqueville and Carlyle, that ‘democracy is coming, as steadily as time’. Rather than dismiss Chartism as The Times had done as ‘a little fact’, it was far better to learn lessons from the recent past and embrace the movement of history: ‘The landed aristocracy greatly miscalculated in resisting the inevitable advent of free trade; for the protracted struggle which they waged with the League all but annihilated the prestige of their order. It will be well if the middle classes take warning from this example, and fraternise with, rather than resist, the legions of democracy.’98 As we have seen, some of Byles’s friends and colleagues shared these anxieties, though it is significant that they chose to ditch the language of democracy, tainted as it was by Chartism, in favour of the pragmatic language of incremental change, most importantly household suffrage. Middle-class harmonists renewed their efforts to build alliances with more moderate working-class radicals after 1848. The ‘New Movement’ rediscovered that year linked extension of the suffrage to property ownership. The highest stratum of workingclass male householders it was thought had earned the vote, which was regarded as a trust, a symbol of moral character. Thus, the right to the franchise was carefully decoupled from the language of

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democracy. Cobden and Bright were especially keen on the freehold land movement that emerged at this time, which sought to enfranchise members who contributed to a fund to purchase property and eventually qualify to vote as forty-shilling freeholders, precisely because they saw it as a way of reinforcing an identity between suffrage and property.99 In a revealing speech in support of Joseph Hume’s motion for household suffrage and other political reforms in the Commons in June 1849, Bright lauded this initiative as a way of meeting the demand of ‘the industrious, peaceable, and intelligent portions of the working classes’ for inclusion ‘within the pale of the constitution’. Careful to stress that he did ‘not insist at all on the plea of natural right’, Bright skirted round democratic discourse, claiming to represent ‘a popular, and, if you choose, a democratic, element … the common people of England … the cause of a population among whom I live’.100 In this manner, Bright crafted his persona as the ‘people’s tribune’, an identity that he was to trade on consistently during the course of his political career.101 He went on to express sympathy with working-class political demands, but quickly denounced ‘the frightful thing which men call Chartism’, frightful not because of the six points but because it had stirred up ‘passions’ and inculcated ‘false principles’; presumably arguments for political equality based on natural right.102 He closed with an image of masses of thrifty, respectable working men eager to join freehold land societies in the localities (1,500 alone had enrolled in Birmingham) and work out ‘their own political enfranchisement’. This move appealed strongly to Bright and other middle-class backers because it reduced the vote to both a commodity or thing and a reward for good behaviour: ‘I believe that every man who saves his money to get a vote, is socially and morally improving himself in so doing, and that his admission within the pale of the constitution will be a blessing to the country.’103 Some Chartists themselves tried to tag on to the freehold land movement, albeit for somewhat different reasons, including Holyoake and Henry Hetherington, but the majority took a hostile line.104 Not surprisingly, Harney was a most scathing critic. He condemned it as Cobden’s brainchild, and for being restricted to the labour aristocracy. In an editorial in the Northern Star, he rightly accused Cobden of having ‘no fancy for universal suffrage’, keen only to extend the right to the franchise just enough ‘to place power in the hands of the “Manchester School”; but not so numerous as to

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risk the attainment of power by the advocates of reform democratique et sociale’.105 However, even figures like Cooper held fast to an expansive conception of Chartism long after the debacle of 1848. Giving the freehold land movement short shrift, Cooper pressed independent liberals like Dudley Coutts Stuart to support manhood rather than household suffrage as a matter of principle: ‘I know that some Parliamentary Reformers are accustomed to speak slightingly of all natural right to the franchise; but this is a doctrine so firmly fixed in the convictions of intelligent workingmen in this country, that they would as soon think of denying their own existence as of denying its truth.’106 Conclusion To the majority Chartist movement, narrowing the meaning of democracy to the vote for male householders, even if this was combined with one of the six points such as the secret ballot, was a travesty, an almost sacrilegious action. As Harney explained in an editorial entitled ‘What is Democracy?’ that took issue with The Times for defining the concept as being based on the idea of letting people ‘take care of themselves’, Chartists wanted the franchise not simply for reasons of individual self-interest, to help improve the condition of themselves and their families, but to enable them to better look after each other in communities, as a people. This necessarily entailed the rational control of markets so that working people could be protected as consumers as well as producers from the ‘extension of commerce’ or the juggernaut of capitalist development. Real democracy therefore implied ‘equal political privileges’ for sure, but it also depended on ‘equal guarantees for the enjoyment of social happiness’.107 If it had been passed, the ‘People’s Charter’ would have necessarily involved a complete restructuring of the political domain, with MPs reduced to the role of delegates rather than representatives and Parliament subject to real scrutiny and control by the people, now empowered to regulate the social and economic life of the nation.108 Attending to the democratic idiom enables the historian to better gauge Chartism’s radical challenge to the British state, then, and also forces us to reconsider how the movement relates to the broader transformation of British politics and society in the mid nineteenth century. Most obviously, it allows us to question seriously the notion

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that there was an easy transition from Chartism to liberalism. By the late 1840s, this sense of connectedness was captured within the movement by the increasingly common phrase ‘the Charter and something more’.109 However, from Chartism’s emergence a decade before, a wide range of activists had commonly employed the argument that politics needed to be remodelled in order to enable working people to check the spread of market capitalism and regulate the spheres of consumption as well as production. Thus, the demand for democracy invariably spilled over into social and economic domains: Chartism was quintessentially the desire for self-government writ large. The six points of the Charter were the means but they were not the end, as Engels, Carlyle, Macaulay, Mrs Gaskell and the majority of the British ruling elite understood very well. The liberalism of Cobden and Bright, which insisted on the rigid separation of the political from the economic and social domain and substituted the demand for household suffrage for the language of democracy, was incompatible with majority Chartist ambition, notwithstanding the drift of much recent historiography. That is surely why Chartism was so wilfully misrepresented by elites and why it faced such implacable hostility, not just at the time but also by subsequent generations.110 Notes 1 Northern Star, 2 July 1842, p. 5. On the theatre of radical funerals, see Thomas Lacquer, ‘Bodies, death, and pauper funerals’, Representations, 1:1 (1983), 109–31; Malcolm Chase, Chartism: a new history (Manchester, 2007), pp. 152–7. 2 See Hansard, vol. 22, cols 891–2 (House of Commons, 23 February 1830); vol. 3, cols 65–8 (House of Commons, 4 March 1831); vol. 3, cols 894–8 (House of Commons, 24 March 1831); vol. 5, col. 570 (House of Commons, 2 August 1831); vol. 7, cols 298–301 (House of Commons, 20 September 1831); vol. 8, cols 250–2, 263–4, 272–3 (House of Lords, 7 October 1831); vol. 9, cols 387–9 (House of Commons, 16 December 1831); vol. 12, col. 39 (House of Lords, 9 April 1832); vol. 12, col. 253 (House of Lords, 11 April 1832); vol. 12, cols 1252–3 (House of Lords, 22 May 1832). 3 G. J. Holyoake, The liberal situation: necessity for a qualified franchise – a letter to Joseph Cowen (1865), p. 11. 4 See Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘The essential contestability of some social concepts’, Ethics, 84:1 (1973), 1–9; J. G. A. Pocock, Politics, language

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‘Yours in the cause of Democracy’ and time: essays on political thought and history (New York, 1973); Raymond Williams, Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (1983), pp. 93–8. Frances E. Gillespie, Labor and politics in England, 1850–1867 (Chicago, 1927), p. 5. Poor Man’s Guardian, 7 June 1834, p. 139; James Bronterre O’Brien, The rise, progress, and phases of human slavery: how it came into the world and how it shall be made to go out (1885). Victorian readings of classical civilisation have been explored by a number of scholars. See especially Richard Jenkyns, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Cambridge, MA, 1980); Frank M. Turner, The Greek heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT, 1984); Norman Vance, The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford, 1997). Poor Man’s Guardian, 24 November 1832, pp. 617–18; James Bronterre O’Brien, Buonarroti’s history of Babeuf’s conspiracy for equality (1836), p. xix. Operative, 23 December 1838, p. 1; Alfred Plummer, Bronterre: a political biography of Bronterre O’Brien 1804–1864 (1971), pp. 59–72. For O’Brien’s appropriation of the American experience, see Michael J. Turner, ‘Chartism, Bronterre O’Brien and the “luminous political example of America”’, History 97 (2012), 43–69. See the appendix in Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: popular politics in the Industrial Revolution (Aldershot, 1984), pp. 341–68, which lists thirty-eight Democratic Associations, probably an underestimate. These associations were merged after the reorganisation of the movement in 1840 into local branches of the National Charter Association. For the LDA and revolutionary tradition, see Jennifer Bennett, ‘The London Democratic Association 1837–41: a study in London radicalism’, in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (eds), The Chartist experience: studies in working-class radicalism and culture, 1830– 1860 (1982), p. 112. Northern Star, 13 May 1843, p. 6. Ibid., 16 August 1845, p. 8. Harney refused to start the meeting with a toast to the Queen, observing, ‘for Democrats, who had nothing to do with royalty but the questionable pleasure of helping to pay for it, it would be much more appropriate to drink “the People,” and shout “God save the rights of man.” (Cheers.)’ See also Stephen Roberts, The Chartist prisoners: the radical lives of Thomas Cooper (1805–1892) and Arthur O’Neill (1819–1896) (Oxford, 2008), p. 108. Northern Star, 16 May 1840, p. 1. Ibid., 23 August 1845, p. 8; 20 November 1847, p. 8. Note also John Collins’s defence of the Roman and Greek republics at a meeting of the Leeds Reform Association, which was trying to promote the demand

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for household suffrage in preference to the Charter. Ibid., 23 January 1841, p. 8. Cooper’s 1845 lecture series is briefly discussed by Robert G. Hall, ‘Creating a people’s history: political identity and history in Chartism, 1832–1848’, in Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson and Stephen Roberts (eds), The Chartist legacy (Woodbridge, 1999), pp. 237–8. Reasoner, 137, pp. 22–7; 140, pp. 72–6; 141, pp. 88–91. See the notice of Cooper’s lecture programme in Northern Star, 19 July 1845, p. 4. The lecture on Saxon England covered ‘Alfred and his glorious philanthropy; our ancient democratic institutions, etc.’ Others discussed the impact of ‘William the Bastard’ and the American and French revolutions. The classic study of the ‘Norman Yoke’ theme is Christopher Hill’s essay in John Saville (ed.), Democracy and the Labour movement: essays in honour of Dona Torr (1954). Northern Star, 22 October 1842, p. 6. York Herald, and General Advertiser, 25 May 1839, p. 4; Northern Star, 6 April 1839, p. 7. See also Chartist Circular, 28 September 1839, p. 1. Stephens later strongly rejected democracy in his pamphlet, The altar, the throne and the cottage (Stalybridge, 1868), p. 8. Northern Star, 6 March 1841, p. 8. Operative, 14 April 1839, p. 6. Northern Star, 27 April 1839, p. 1; Bennett, ‘The London Democratic Association’, p. 98. Northern Star, 5 September 1840, p. 1; 12 September 1840, p. 3. On the later employment of this trope in labour movement discourse, see Jacqueline Dickenson, Renegades and rats: betrayal and the remaking of radical organisations in Britain and Australia (Carlton, Vic., 2006). Hansard, vol. 22, cols 719–20 (House of Commons, 18 February 1830); Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, 20 March 1840, p. 3. Northern Star, 29 December 1838, p. 6. Poor Man’s Guardian, 15 October 1831, pp. 125–6, O’Brien’s emphasis; Dror Wahrman, Imagining the middle class: the political representation of class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 322. The relationship between languages of democracy and politeness deserves to be explored. For a start, see E. P. Thompson, The making of the English working class (1963; 1968), pp. 90, 94–5; Olivia Smith, The politics of language, 1791–1819 (Oxford, 1984); Owen Ashton, ‘Orators and oratory in the Chartist movement, 1840–1848’, in Ashton et al. (eds), The Chartist legacy. In his graveside oration at Hetherington’s funeral, Holyoake remarked that although he was ‘a personification of good-humoured Democracy’, the publisher’s

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‘Yours in the cause of Democracy’ blunt, class-conscious discursive style was becoming outdated. See Thomas Cooper and G. J. Holyoake, The life and character of Henry Hetherington (1849). Northern Star, 6 October 1838, p. 4; 2 January 1841, p. 3. Ibid., 24 December 1842, p. 6. R. G. Gammage, History of the Chartist movement, 1837–1854 (1854; 1976), p. 408; Northern Star, 6 July 1839, p. 6; James Epstein, The lion of freedom: Feargus O’Connor and the Chartist movement, 1832–1842 (1982), pp. 90–3; Robert G. Hall, Voices of the people: democracy and Chartist political identity, 1830–1870 (2007), p. 91. Northern Star, 22 November 1845, p. 6. Ibid., 16 May 1840, p. 1; 11 July 1840, p. 7. Ibid., 13 May 1843, p. 6. See Eileen Yeo, ‘Christianity and Chartist struggle’, Past and Present, 91 (1981), 109–39; Anne Janowitz, ‘Class and literature: the case of Romantic Chartism’, in W. C. Dimock and M. T. Gilmore (eds), Rethinking class: literary studies and social formations (New York, 1994); Anne Janowitz, Lyric and labour in the Romantic tradition (Cambridge, 1998); Eileen Groth Lyon, Politicians in the pulpit: Christian radicalism in Britain from the fall of the Bastille to the disintegration of Chartism (Aldershot, 1999); Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the romance of politics, 1819–1869 (Oxford, 2003). See Eileen Yeo, ‘Culture and constraint in working-class movements, 1830–1855’, in Eileen and Stephen Yeo (eds), Popular culture and class conflict, 1590–1914: explorations in the history of labour and leisure (1981); James Epstein, ‘Some organisational and cultural aspects of the Chartist movement in Nottingham’, in Epstein and Thompson (eds), The Chartist experience; Kate Bowan and Paul Pickering, ‘“Songs for the millions”: Chartist music and popular aural tradition’, Labour History Review, 74:1 (2009), 44–63; Mike Sanders, ‘“God is our guide! our cause is just!”: the National Chartist Hymn Book and Victorian hymnody’, Victorian Studies, 54:4 (2012), 679–705. Northern Star, 30 July 1842, p. 7; 6 March 1841, p. 8. Ibid., 31 July 1841, p. 8. See also 19 October 1839, p. 6; Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist movement (1991). Northern Star, 4 November 1843, p. 1. See also ibid., 8 January 1842, p. 1. There is a discussion of the symbolic meaning of the Phrygian cap for Chartists in James Epstein, ‘Understanding the cap of liberty: symbolic practice and social conflict in early nineteenth-century England’, Past and Present, 122 (1989), 115–16. Northern Star, 24 December 1842, p. 6; 2 January 1841, p. 3.

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39 See Antony Taylor, ‘Down with the Crown’: British anti-monarchism and debates about royalty since 1790 (1999), pp. 55–8, 126–8. 40 Northern Star, 6 January 1838, p. 6; 22 December 1838, p. 8. For a discussion of this theme, see Eileen Yeo, ‘Some practices and problems of Chartist democracy’, in Epstein and Thompson (eds), The Chartist experience . 41 T. M. Parsinnen, ‘Association, convention and anti-parliament in British radical politics, 1771–1845’, English Historical Review, 88 (1973), 504–33; Yeo, ‘Some practices and problems’, pp. 353–4. Many middle-class Tories were also steeped in traditions of self-government at the parish level and this helps explain cross-class hostility towards the New Poor Law after 1834. Some useful leads can be found in David Eastwood, Government and community in the English provinces, 1700–1870 (Basingstoke, 1997), pp. 131–4, 164–6. 42 Miles Taylor, ‘The six points: Chartism and the reform of Parliament’, in Ashton et al. (eds), The Chartist legacy; Hall, Voices of the people, pp. 52–3. 43 See James Epstein, ‘Feargus O’Connor and the Northern Star’, International Review of Social History, 21:1 (1976), 51–97; Joan Allen, ‘“A small drop of ink”: Tyneside Chartism and the Northern Liberator’, in Ashton et al. (eds), The Chartist legacy; Joan Allen and Owen Ashton (eds), Papers for the people: a study of the Chartist press (2005). 44 Northern Star, 22 April 1843, p. 1; 17 November 1838, p. 4. 45 On petitioning, see Henry Miller, ‘Popular petitioning and the Corn Laws, 1833–46’, English Historical Review, 127 (2012), 882–919. 46 Norman McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League 1838–1846 (1958; 1968), pp. 163–4, 170–3, 182–5. 47 Henry Jephson, The Platform: its rise and progress (1892; 1968), vol. II, p. 304; Hall, Voices of the people, pp. 58–60. For the post-war mass platform, see John Belchem, ‘Orator’ Hunt: Henry Hunt and English working-class radicalism (Oxford, 1985). 48 Leeds Mercury, 11 August 1838, p. 4. 49 Report of the Conference of Ministers of all denominations on the Corn Laws (Manchester, 1841), p. 110. 50 See J. S. Mill, ‘De la democratie en Amérique’, Edinburgh Review, 145 (October 1840), 13–14. Mill later developed his ideas on the machinery of democracy in Considerations on representative government (1861). See also Jens A. Christophersen, The meaning of ‘democracy’ as used in European ideologies from the French to the Russian Revolution (Oslo, 1966), pp. 158–69. 51 Northern Star, 4 June 1842, p. 4; Chase, Chartism, p. 56. 52 Northern Star, 6 January 1838, p. 6; 18 August 1838, p. 8.

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53 Ibid., 6 July 1839, p. 6; 8 May 1841, p. 7. Note O’Connor’s remarks about Ernest Jones cited by Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism, and the romance of politics 1819–1869 (Oxford, 2003), p. 22. See also John Belchem and James Epstein, ‘The nineteenth-century gentleman leader revisited’, Social History, 22:2 (1997), 174–93; Paul A. Pickering, Feargus O’Connor: a political life (2008), pp. 148–9. 54 Paul A. Pickering, ‘Class without words: symbolic communication in the Chartist movement’, Past and Present, 112 (1986), 157–62. 55 Northern Star, 22 August 1840, p. 4; 26 June 1841, p. 3. 56 Ibid., 23 January 1841, p. 8; 23 October 1841, p. 8; 4 January 1845, p. 2; 17 May 1845, p. 4. 57 Ibid., 29 January 1842, p. 4; 4 February 1843, p. 8. 58 Ibid., 9 July 1842, pp. 5, 7. 59 Ibid., 27 July 1842, p. 4. The letter was from J. Whittern to the Chairman of the Anti-Corn Law conference in London. 60 Ibid., 17 September 1842, p. 1. 61 Ibid., 15 October 1842, p. 1. 62 Ibid., 3 September 1842, p. 4; 17 September 1842, p. 4. 63 Ibid., 10 September 1842, p. 7; 1 October 1842, p. 1. 64 Alex Tyrrell, Joseph Sturge and the moral radical party in early Victorian Britain (1987), pp. 129–30; John Belchem, Popular radicalism in nineteenth-century Britain (Basingstoke, 1996), p. 84; Northern Star, 7 January 1843, p. 6; 29 July 1843, p. 8. 65 Dorothy Thompson, ‘Who were “the People” in 1842?’, in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (eds), Living and learning: essays in honour of J. F. C. Harrison (Aldershot, 1996). 66 The Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 28 January 1843, p. 7. 67 Northern Star, 5 March 1842, p. 4. See also Harney’s editorial on ‘The working and middle classes’ that similarly countenanced middleclass admittance into the ranks of ‘the Democracy’. Ibid., 4 September 1847, p. 4. 68 Chase, Chartism, p. 248. 69 William Lovett, Letter from Mr. Lovett to Messrs. Donaldson and Mason, containing his reasons for refusing to be nominated secretary of the National Charter Association (1843), pp. 2–3. 70 Northern Star, 10 December 1842, p. 7. For later contests on the left over democratic form, see Logie Barrow and Ian Bullock, Democratic ideas and the British labour movement, 1880–1914 (Cambridge, 1996). 71 Northern Star, 27 April 1844, p. 4. 72 Daily News, 21 May 1846, p. 5. See also D. P. Crook, American democracy in English politics, 1815–1850 (Oxford, 1965); Simon J. Morgan, ‘The Anti-Corn Law League and British anti-slavery in transatlantic perspective, 1838–1846’, Historical Journal, 52:1 (2009), 87–107.

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73 Northern Star, 30 January 1847, p. 4; 14 December 1844, p. 7. 74 Ibid., 8 February 1845, p. 4; 25 April 1846, p. 4. See also David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–1848 (Cambridge, 1982). 75 A point often underlined by outside observers, including Daniel Stone in The Rochdale Co-operative societies: a study for working men (Manchester, 1861), p. 5: ‘Their transactions bear no sign of political bias, no religious test, or passport of secret favour.’ 76 Northern Star, 27 September 1845, p. 5; Y. V. Kovalev, An anthology of Chartist literature (Moscow, 1956), p. 78. See also Henry Weisser, British working-class movements and Europe, 1815–1848 (1975); Iorwerth Prothero, ‘Chartists and political refugees’, in Sabine Freitag (ed.), Exiles from European revolutions: refugees in mid-Victorian England (Oxford, 2003); Christine Lattek, Revolutionary refugees: German socialism in Britain, 1840–1860 (2006). 77 Northern Star, 15 November 1845, p. 7. 78 Ibid., 27 March 1847, p. 1. 79 Pickering, Feargus O’Connor, p. 123. 80 Northern Star, 27 February 1847, p. 7; Salvo Mastellone, Mazzini and Marx: thoughts upon democracy in Europe (Westport, CT, 2003), pp. 71–80. 81 A. R. Schoyen, The Chartist challenge: a portrait of George Julian Harney (1958), p. 159. 82 Northern Star, 14 October 1848, p. 5. 83 John Saville, 1848: the British state and the Chartist movement (Cambridge, 1987). 84 Northern Star, 25 November 1848, p. 7; 23 June 1849, p. 5. For more on the adoption of démoc-soc ideals by Harney and other Chartists, see Margot Finn, After Chartism: class and nation in English radical politics, 1848–74 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 113–15. 85 Northern Star, 2 February 1839, p. 3; 9 February 1839, p. 6. For contrasting views of women’s participation in Chartism, see Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: socialism and feminism in the nineteenth century (1983), pp. 265–75; Thompson, The Chartists, pp. 120–51; Anna Clark, The struggle for the breeches: gender and the making of the British working class (1995); Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist movement. 86 Finn, After Chartism, passim; Belchem, Popular radicalism, pp. 95–6; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 17 April 1864, p. 1; Daily News, 18 April 1864, p. 5. 87 Lee E. Grugel, George Jacob Holyoake: a study in the evolution of a Victorian radical (Philadelphia, 1976), pp. 52–3, 84–5; Gregory Claeys, ‘Mazzini, Kossuth, and British radicalism, 1848–1854’, Journal of British Studies, 28:3 (1989), 225–61; Christopher Bayly and Eugenio

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99 100

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‘Yours in the cause of Democracy’ Biagini (eds), Giuseppe Mazzini and the globalisation of democratic nationalism 1830–1920 (Oxford, 2008). Manifesto of the Republican Party (1855), p. 10; G. J. Holyoake, Sixty years of an agitator’s life (1906), pp. 532–3; Peter Gurney, ‘George Jacob Holyoake: socialism, association and co-operation in nineteenth-century England’, in Stephen Yeo (ed.), New views of cooperation (1988), p. 54. Leeds Mercury, 11 March 1848, p. 4; 29 July 1848, p. 1; 14 October 1848, p. 1; 18 November 1848, p. 10; 30 December 1848, p. 4. Bradford Observer, 13 April 1848, p. 1. Saville reveals Forster’s cynical motives in 1848, pp. 146–7. John Bright, New movement: household suffrage, triennial parliament, vote by ballot, no property qualification, and equal electoral districts (Manchester, 1848), pp. 5, 10. Northern Star, 17 February 1844, p. 1; 13 November 1847, p. 4. Ibid., 1 January 1848, p. 4; 15 January 1848, p. 9. Roland Quinault, ‘Cobden and democracy’, in Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan (eds), Rethinking nineteenth-century liberalism: Richard Cobden bicentenary essays (Aldershot, 2006), p. 67. Anthony Howe (ed.), The letters of Richard Cobden, vol. i: 1815– 1847 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 280–1. Cobden recommended a forceful stand and later in the letter referred to artillery, Congreve rockets and ‘other diabolical contrivances of wholesale slaughter’, which would soon put Chartists to flight ‘like sheep’. Leeds Mercury, 2 November 1844, p. 4. Howe (ed.), The letters of Richard Cobden, p. 417. Bradford Observer, 13 April 1848, p. 4; Saville, 1848, p. 146; Theodore Koditschek, Class formation and urban industrial society: Bradford, 1750–1850 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 520–1, passim. Malcolm Chase, ‘Out of radicalism: the mid-Victorian freehold land movement’, English Historical Review, 106 (1991), 319–345. Hansard, vol. 105, cols 1197–8 (House of Commons, 5 June 1849). Note that Holyoake later admitted in Sixty years, p. 275, that the ‘idea of democracy’ was absent from Bright’s mind. Discussed by Patrick Joyce in Democratic subjects: the self and the social in nineteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 85–146. Hansard, vol. 105, col. 1206 (House of Commons, 5 June 1849). Ibid., col. 1208. Cobden sometimes had even higher expectations of the freehold societies. See F. M. L. Thompson, ‘Cobden, free trade in land, and the road to the Abbey National’, in Howe and Morgan (eds), Rethinking nineteenth-century liberalism, pp. 73–9. Chase, ‘Out of radicalism’, 332–3.

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105 Northern Star, 29 December 1849, p. 5. Harney closed by expressing hope in ‘that great, incontrovertible fact … the universally acknowledged march of the principles of Social Democracy’. 106 Cooper’s Journal, 17 January 1850, p. 35. 107 Northern Star, 27 April 1844, p. 4. 108 Taylor, ‘The six points’, pp. 7–13; Hall, Voices of the people, pp. 41–54. 109 The expression went back much further. See Northern Star, 8 May 1841, p. 3; 19 June 1841, p. 5; Thomas Frost, Forty years recollections, literary and political (1880), pp. 38, 341. 110 Robert Saunders, ‘Chartism from above: British elites and the interpretation of Chartism’, Historical Research, 81 (2008), 463–84.

5

‘Consumers of their own productions’: popular radicalism and consumer organising Not all middle-class observers were implacably hostile to Chartism, though democratic talk was generally ignored. Elizabeth Gaskell, for example, offered a sympathetic if ultimately reductive representation of the effects of hunger on the labouring poor in Mary Barton (1848), her great ‘Condition of England’ novel that dramatised the Chartist ‘insurrection’ of 1842. His wits broken by ‘clemming’, John Barton, one of the book’s chief protagonists, is inexorably driven, along with the wider class, to violence and despair: Then came a long period of bodily privation; of daily hunger after food; and though he tried to persuade himself he could bear want himself with stoical indifference, and did care about it as little as most men, yet the body took its revenge for its uneasy feelings. The mind became sour and morose … it ceased to hope. And it is hard to live on when one can no longer hope.1

From one angle, Gaskell’s reading seems to lend support to a crude ‘knife and fork’ interpretation of Chartism, in which workers are seen to rally to the cause simply because their bellies are empty. But the novel also alerts us to the centrality of the politics of provision and consumption more generally within the movement. Barton’s own mother, we are informed, had starved to death and while his own son is sinking Barton peers longingly through ‘one of the shop windows where all edible luxuries are displayed; haunches of venison, Stilton cheeses, moulds of jelly – all appetising sights to the common passer by’.2 On the whole, however, Gaskell carefully avoided any sustained analysis of Chartist ideology, famously noting in the preface to the novel that she knew ‘nothing of Political Economy, or the theories of trade’.3 Thus, Gaskell sidestepped both the demand for working-class self-government or ‘pure democracy’

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as the solution for economic ills and the panacea of free trade that had emerged victorious only two years before the novel was published. It was no wonder that she chose to elevate contemporary political conflicts onto a supposedly higher moral or spiritual plane and avoid taking sides openly – many of her and her husband’s dissenting friends were keen free traders after all – and Gaskell’s representation of plebeian culture is all the more remarkable given the constraints she worked within. Nevertheless, her perspective was seriously limited and even a cursory consideration of the movement’s press would have revealed a sophisticated intellectual as well as intensely human critique of the new order that was coming into being. Some Chartists no doubt travelled a similar road to Gaskell’s doomed anti-hero. Many others, however, vented their anger more positively against the immediate enemy – the shopkeeping middle class – and endeavoured to use their consumer power to both increase pressure for democratic reform and regulate the market. This chapter argues for an intimate connection between popular radicalism and forms of consumer organising in the first half of the nineteenth century; the practice of ‘exclusive dealing’ in particular and the establishment of Chartist joint-stock provision stores that developed from it were attempts to exert some form of popular democratic control over the market during a period of rapid change and uncertainty. We know a great deal about how working people responded as producers to the development of industrial capitalism in the early nineteenth century. They were vitally concerned about and contested the introduction of machinery, which was regarded as a cause of deskilling and unemployment. They attempted to improve conditions by means of trade unions that fed into and profoundly shaped the Chartist movement. The trades played a key role in metropolitan Chartism as well as elsewhere, especially during the ‘plug plot’ disturbances of 1842, and the major producers’ tactic advocated by Chartists – the ‘sacred month’ or general strike – depended for its success on trade union support.4 However, working-class families and communities who suffered hunger and scarcity also responded as consumers to their changing world. The hypothesis that Chartism was a movement of consumers as well as producers is explored by examining the place of exclusive dealing within the movement. Many historians have noted that the practice of trading only with shopkeepers who were sympathetic to the democratic cause, boycotting or even intimidating

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others, was widely adopted, particularly by female Chartists in the early phase. The way in which exclusive dealing led rapidly to the formation of consumer co-operatives in some localities has also frequently been observed.5 Nevertheless, there has been little detailed consideration of the significance of consumer organising for the movement, despite its widespread appeal. For sure, the Chartists were not the first to politicise shopping. American colonists had famously boycotted English tea and other commodities in the 1760s and 1770s, and the powerful slogan ‘no taxation without representation’ resonated on both sides of the Atlantic.6 Moreover, middle-class anti-slavery campaigners had also organised boycotts of goods and dealers.7 As we shall see, what was novel about the Chartist politics of consumption was that specific tactics such as the boycott and the co-operative store soon became part of a much more generalised and radical, if at times still somewhat inchoate, criticism of the deleterious effects of competition on the poor consumer. The term ‘exclusive’ carried important connotations within the radical lexicon. For Chartists, ‘exclusive power’ had resulted in ‘exclusive law’, used by ‘tyrants’ to maintain them in ‘slavery’ or political, social and economic ‘bondage’. Before 1832 the aristocracy was invariably singled out as monopolisers of power, but by the end of the 1830s, particularly after middle-class delegates quit the National Convention when it moved from London to Birmingham in the spring of 1839, capitalists and ‘profitmongers’ of all kinds were added to the list of oppressors of the people. Addresses from Working Men’s Associations in Leeds and Nottingham, for example, contrasted ‘the Aristocratic principle of hereditary perfectibility’ with ‘the Democratic and common-sense practice of capability determined and elected’. Whigs and Tories were condemned equally as ‘monsters in human form’, who used the terrors of New Poor Law ‘Bastille’ to force the ‘industrious classes to live upon coarser food’. The root cause was ‘exclusive laws enacted by exclusive power’ and the only real solution to present distress was no less than ‘the total subversion of all power that is exclusive and irresponsible, and the establishment of a self-governing authority based on the broad principle of Equal Rights’.8 After the flight of Thomas Attwood of the Birmingham Political Union and other middle-class radicals, the net widened. Debating with the Anti-Corn Law League lecturer John Finnigan in the autumn of 1840, the Manchester Chartist James

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Leach agreed that the aristocratical Corn Laws were ‘disgraceful’ but also laid the blame for the economic grievances of the labouring poor squarely on the shoulders of groups enfranchised less than a decade before, who according to Leach were the real holders of power: ‘Political power is wielded by the profitmongers – the working man is the party over whom it is wielded.’ Aristocratic landowners were part of the problem, certainly, but employers had more clout and wanted repeal in order to reduce wages still further: ‘so long as the masters had the exclusive power, they would make use of it for that purpose, without rendering any improvement in the condition of the working classes’.9 Thus, Chartists argued that the political monopoly of anti-democratic elites had to be broken and that just as the dominant classes dealt exclusively in the realm of politics, so workers should exercise their power as consumers, practise exclusive dealing and trade only with themselves in order to both accumulate their own capital and increase pressure for democratic change. Indeed, Chartist boycotts and early consumer organisations were simultaneously vital schools of democratic practice as well as making it possible for some to imagine a society in which working people would become ‘consumers of their own productions’, rather than merely exploited shoppers or overworked labourers; as we shall see, Chartists such as Thomas Devyr and Robert Lowery had the most utopian ambitions for exclusive dealing and joint-stock provision stores. This chapter first traces the origins of the tactic of exclusive dealing back to the late 1820s and early 1830s. Employed initially by the Catholic Association in Ireland, it was used by both Tories and Whigs during the heated agitation that preceded the Great Reform Act of 1832. However, radicals soon appropriated exclusive dealing in order to attack the ‘shopocracy’, which it was argued had betrayed the popular cause and gone over to the enemy. The chapter then moves on to consider exclusive dealing and early co-operative stores as Chartist responses to the specific experiences of working people as hard-pressed consumers. Finally, it is suggested that as political and economic domains became increasingly fractured, at least formally, especially after the failure of the general strike in 1842, co-operative practice was diverted into ‘nonpolitical’ channels, while exclusive dealing came eventually to be seen as something of an embarrassment by many of the leaders of late Chartism.

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The Chartists did not invent exclusive dealing. Indeed, there is some anecdotal evidence that the tactic was initially employed by Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association in Ireland in the late 1820s. An article in the Dublin Morning Messenger, for example, pointed out that absentee Protestant landowners were vulnerable because they were not the major employers in the country and strongly backed the new direction marked out by the Association: ‘if “exclusive dealing” be determined upon, it will be found very practicable’. As Catholic consumers had most spending power, the paper concluded that ‘there is no power in Brunswickism to make a re-action even perceptible on the great bulk of the people, composed as it is of Catholics and liberal Protestants’.10 Predictably, the tactic provoked outrage on the Protestant side. The Belfast News-Letter soon condemned the ‘hell born’, ‘un-Christian’ policy of the Catholic Association, which it was thought was likely to have ‘ruinous consequences’. The paper also reported that Protestant retail traders in College Green now transacted much more business with strangers who stated that they refused to spend money at Catholic shops because of the Association’s policy.11 It is difficult to tell whether the tactic had much effect in Ireland but it soon became an important feature of English political life. Exclusive dealing was widely practised across the political spectrum during the General Election of 1832. It was advocated vociferously, for instance, by radical Political Unions, especially in places such as Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Rochdale and Sabden in the industrial north. There is evidence to suggest that the tactic met with a good deal of success in Oldham especially, where a handbill supporting the radical candidates John Fielden and William Cobbett was distributed that reported: ‘The enemies of reform are everywhere alarmed at the non-electors adopting exclusive dealing.’12 The radicals eventually won a landslide victory, made possible in no small degree by support from local shopkeepers.13 The Times condemned the move of ‘the Union rabble of Rochdale’ and made slighting reference to the origins of the tactic: ‘Did ever a demagogue-ridden Irish faction surpass this precious example of despotism in the affairs of life?’ As the Poor Man’s Guardian pointed out, this was all rather hypocritical, especially as exclusive dealing had earlier

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been recommended by Conservatives in Blackwood’s Magazine as well as in the pages of The Times itself.14 The paper emphasised that radicals had therefore deployed the tactic in self-defence, considered ‘exclusive dealing a CRIME in them and a VIRTUE in you’, and reproduced resolutions from Sabden that declared against dealing with any ‘butcher, druggist, draper, ironmonger, shoemaker, tailor, clogger, glazier, coal-vender, or any other tradesman’ known to oppose reform. The Poor Man’s Guardian also noted approvingly that the radical adoption of exclusive dealing had received support from the Westminster Review, organ of the Philosophic Radicals.15 Some liberal commentators, however, completely rejected the tactic. Joseph Livesey, for example, fulminated against Bronterre O’Brien, describing the tactic as ‘monstrous oppression’, though this was hardly surprising given the fact that Livesey was a cheese vendor himself.16 The Bristol Mercury, a liberal periodical, similarly attacked the way radicals pushed the idea in some localities. The paper pinned blame on the Tories, specifically the Duke of Newcastle and his followers, for first introducing this dangerous schism into English society. It applauded the stance taken by the Bolton Chronicle, which condemned the ‘stupid, unconstitutional plan of threatening voters that their shops will be marked, and that they will not be dealt with unless they vote for a particular candidate’, which had been canvassed by the Political Union in that town.17 The paper also strongly recommended the secret ballot as a remedy against exclusive dealing and the question was frequently bound up with the ballot for radicals as well. O’Brien commented on Thomas Wakley’s proposal for the ballot in the Poor Man’s Guardian and argued that in the present context the ballot would work against the popular cause, as it ‘would convert all England into one huge rotten borough, and render a complete reform in the representation next to impossible, save through the medium of a bloody revolution’. O’Brien and others feared that the ballot would mean that the common people would be unable to bring pressure to bear on the ‘enfranchised middleman’ and the country would be completely dominated, as it already was in France, by a ‘jealous constituency of shopocrats and middlemen slave-drivers’. Now at least in places such as Blackburn, Bolton, Sabden and Stockport artisans could ‘gather round the hustings to thunder into the ears of the shopocrat’.18

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O’Brien regularly poured scorn on the ‘shopocracy’ in the pages of the Poor Man’s Guardian; indeed, the paper probably first introduced the term into the language.19 Shopkeepers drew radical opprobrium as they represented the fraction of the middle classes met by workers most regularly on a face-to-face basis, and many were only just above them socially and economically. The concept of the ‘shopocracy’ encompassed these small shopkeepers, though it was also used flexibly as a synonym for those property owners enfranchised in 1832: the post-Reform Parliament was often referred to as a ‘shopocrat’ Parliament. Radicals continued to debate and refine the tactic of exclusive dealing as a way of undermining the economic and political power of ‘shopocrats’ in the pages of the Poor Man’s Guardian in the aftermath of the Reform Act. The Spencean and Owenite Allen Davenport was a key figure here. However, unlike O’Brien, Davenport was rather more sanguine about the possibility of an alliance with sections of the shopkeeping middle classes and believed that exclusive dealing could help forge an identity of interest between workers and the ‘lower class of shopkeepers or middlemen’. Davenport emphasised that such people were in a very vulnerable position as they were engaged in ‘a constant war … with each other, like the war among the fishes, for their very existence’. He hoped to draw small shopkeepers and eventually even ‘the great and proud shopocracy’ into political unions, a utopian prospect as O’Brien gently reminded him.20 Undaunted, Davenport published the following poem: The various changes that are past, Have all been unavailing, We therefore have resolved at last, To try Exclusive Dealing. The little shops must fall in spite Of puffing and appealing, Unless their owners shall unite, And share Exclusive Dealing. And where the higher shopocrats, Shall find their houses failing, They’ll scamper off like other rats, And cry ‘Exclusive Dealing!’

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Then we, like Cousins, may resist The governmental stealing, And those who make a stand assist By our Exclusive Dealing. Then kings, and priests, and lords must work, And show a kinder feeling; No more shall they our labour BurkeOur shield’s Exclusive Dealing.21 Davenport obviously had the highest aspirations for exclusive dealing, even if he was not much of a poet. For him it meant nothing less than Owenism in action and he asked readers, ‘what are the Owenites aiming at but Exclusive Dealing, that is, to deal with one another within their own friendly circle?’ If generalised the practice would enable the working classes to accumulate their own capital and bring about ‘a moral revolution that shall expel from society all who are able but not willing to create the means of their own subsistence’.22 Despite frequent vituperative attacks on the ‘shopocracy’, some shopkeepers in the metropolis shared Davenport’s optimism regarding the possibility of an alliance with workers based on shared interests. The Poor Man’s Guardian, for example, published a memorial from the ‘Shopkeepers, Dealers, and inhabitants of Sumers Town’ in St Pancras to trade unionists, condemning the actions of master builders who were attempting to introduce general contracting, thereby undermining working conditions, in the summer of 1834. The authors expressed sympathy with the builders’ union and stressed that defeat of the union would ‘seal the fate of the union system for years to come’ and drive down wages, which in turn would impact badly on the retail trade. A meeting organised by the shopkeepers took up a subscription in support of the union in order to demonstrate ‘clearly and forcibly that their interests were bound up with those of the operatives’. Most unusually, in this case the shopkeepers themselves urged unionists to employ exclusive dealing and trade only with sympathetic shopkeepers: ‘This would show to the shopkeepers in general that they must come forward to support their best and largest consumers.’ The memorialists were keen to build alliances between consumers, unionists and small shopkeepers, against unprincipled masters. In the ongoing struggle, ‘the scourge of exclusive dealing’ was a vital weapon.23

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However, radicals had still not completely monopolised the tactic. During the municipal elections in November 1836, the Tories in Bristol even contemplated forming a Conservative Tradesmen’s Association to put exclusive dealing on a better-organised footing. The move was roundly condemned as an ‘atrocious’ step by the local liberal press, which reported in detail how exclusive dealing was already being put into effect in the city. Poll-books had been specially published along with details of individual voters’ trades and occupations. ‘Ladies’, the Bristol Mercury observed, ‘go shopping with these books in their hands.’ The Mercury advised liberals to take defensive action and mobilise non-electors, who constituted ‘the great mass of consumers’ and who were anti-Tory almost by definition. As before, however, the editor was reluctant to lend full support to a tactic that could result in ‘a civil war of the worst kind’ if widely adopted. Once again, the secret ballot was seen as an appropriate remedy.24 Other liberal commentators were also loath to recommend exclusive dealing, regarding it as an extremist measure that could have dangerous consequences and even lead to ‘monstrous calamities’.25 Consumer exploitation Working people were exploited as consumers as well as producers, in the marketplace as well as in the workplace. The most common abuses briefly noted in Chapter 2, which were experienced on a regular basis, included short measure, adulteration of foodstuffs, truck and company stores or tommy shops. Food was by far the largest item of expenditure for working-class people. However, when they had money, the food that they could afford was frequently of very poor quality, if not positively injurious to health. Friedrich Engels presented a memorable and damning account of the working-class diet during the ‘Hungry Forties’ in his Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. Engels observed that urban workers came to market late as they were generally paid on Saturdays, after the best produce had been sold. What remained was often almost inedible: ‘The potatoes which the workers buy are usually poor, the vegetables wilted, the cheese old and of poor quality, the bacon rancid, the meat lean, tough, taken from old, often diseased, cattle, or such as have died a natural death, and not fresh even then, often half decayed.’ Moreover, dealers and manufacturers

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commonly adulterated goods ‘without the slightest regard to the health of the consumers’.26 Engels quoted numerous prosecutions reported in local newspapers to support his claims, though they were hardly controversial. Adulteration was a major topic in the national press, generating heated debate across the political spectrum, throughout the 1840s and well beyond.27 Unsurprisingly, the Northern Star frequently drew attention to particular abuses, such as the addition of gypsum to flour, potato starch to sugar, dandelion root to coffee, creosote to whiskey and so on.28 The paper’s editor, William Hill, regarded adulteration as a systemic effect of competition and free trade, which would inevitably spread if the Anti-Corn Law League got its way: They will neither let their workman nor their customer be protected from them and their doings. They are for free trade … What article of commerce or trade is there now in England, at all capable of adulteration, that is not adulterated? What article of manufacture have we, that is not inferior to what it used to be, before the ‘no protection’ principles were so much in vogue?29

Truck and tommy shops were other common sources of complaint. The Midland Mining Commission, which investigated conditions in the South Staffordshire coalfield after the unrest of 1842, revealed that the Truck Acts were largely ineffective in regulating these practices, which were rife in the area.30 Payment of wages in tokens that could only be exchanged in certain stores undermined working-class independence and encouraged families to fall into debt, as goods in these stores were not only of poor quality as a rule but also often hugely overpriced. The Midland Mining Commission highlighted two themes in particular in its report. First, truck and tommy were seen as destabilising the domestic sphere. Women not only had to pay much more for goods but the shops themselves were sometimes miles from the miners’ homes, which meant they had to leave very early in the morning in order to be able to prepare dinner for their menfolk: ‘All weathers you have to stand out, enough to catch your death of cold. I have been obliged to stand out in the open air with a young baby at my breast’, one woman told the Commission. A pikeman’s wife recalled a desperate crush outside one shop in which a young boy was partially smothered. ‘Ah, it’s cruel work is the tommy shop’, she concluded. ‘Banks’s shop has got much worse of late since young Mr Charles Banks came to the

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shop; he swears at the women when the women are trying to crush in with children crying in their arms. He is a shocking little dog.’31 Second, the report maintained that truck demoralised the market and drew attention to the fact that some employers and magistrates were also strongly against the system. It was practised particularly by masters whose capital was limited and who had therefore to resort to unfair methods in order to turn a profit. In short, truck was a feature of primitive capitalist development that now threatened the whole social order, causing ‘oppression to the workmen, which is responded to on their part by discontent and alienation; hence also overproduction, forcing sales, underselling the fair dealer, and ruinous mercantile convulsions, affecting not merely the gamblers who have caused the evil, but thousands of families of all classes and of all professions throughout the country’.32 Besides these specific flashpoints, there was also the perception that working people were unfairly taxed by a corrupt, parasitic state. This had been a ubiquitous strand in radical thought for decades and can be traced back at least to Thomas Paine, who criticised state dependence on indirect, regressive taxation in 1792 in the second part of the Rights of Man.33 After the end of the Napoleonic Wars, William Cobbett continued to denounce the fiscal underpinnings of ‘Old Corruption’ and the critique was developed further in the unstamped press.34 O’Brien, for example, emphasised government dependence on indirect taxation in the Poor Man’s Guardian, which potentially conferred great power on consumers – he calculated that if tea drinkers alone organised a boycott they could reduce government revenue by approximately £8 million a year. Adding the revenue together for articles of general consumption such as coffee, sugar, candles, soap and so on, he concluded: ‘they could, if they pleased, with the great and sharp axe which they hold in their hand, lop branch after branch’, and thus undermine the state. Gin and rum were first on the list of goods that ought to be boycotted as a ‘dram-drinking, superstitious-loving, ignorant people will always have a government to correspond with it’.35 Chartists consistently underlined the state’s reliance on an iniquitous fiscal system, a charge that was bound to resonate with working-class consumers at a time when government received a third of its total revenue from taxes on liquor alone.36 Such facts led William Hill to go so far as to argue that ‘the working classes are much more valuable to their oppressors as consumers, than even to their

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employers as producers’.37 There was, moreover, a gender dimension to this critique. T. B. Smith, for instance, urged Chartist men to relinquish the ‘destructive selfishness’ that continued to impoverish working-class families and homes for the sake of ‘the well-filled tobacco pouch, and the flowing pint’.38 The Chartist Circular similarly emphasised that it was imperative to boycott excisable articles immediately: ‘Every cup of ale diminished – every glass of spirits retrenched – every cup of tea untasted – every particle of snuff and tobacco permitted to remain unused in the premises of the manufacturer, which has hitherto been consumed, would be productive of immense advantage. A drunken Radical is a disgrace. Reform should begin at home.’ The boycott thus linked up individual, private transformation with collective, public change. The writer also stressed how such a boycott would undermine both an oppressive state and ‘those middle men – the shopocracy and spirit-dealers – men who are the most inveterate enemies of the people … recently elevated in general from the ranks which they so heartily despise … Up themselves, they are anxious to keep all down.’39 As historians of the movement have frequently observed, the link between Chartism and the temperance cause was very strong indeed in some localities; this was particularly the case in Scotland, as the evidence from the Chartist Circular indicates.40 Teetotal Chartism appealed to many radicals precisely because it sought to fuse working-class moral improvement and political liberation.41 To compound these particular abuses and grievances, there was a heightened sense that things were getting worse for the poor consumer in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, that the split between those who produced and those who consumed was widening at an ever-faster pace. Evidence for increasing middle-class consumerism abounded in urban centres. The new shopping arcades, bazaars and early department stores testified to an intense, albeit sometimes guilt-ridden, middle-class love affair with the world of goods and we will return to this important theme in Chapter 7, which explores the culture of the Anti-Corn Law League in more depth. It was little wonder that fears about the enervating effects of the new consumerism and middle-class showiness were magnified in the context of the ‘Hungry Forties’. The discourse on taste channelled some of these anxieties. Elizabeth Stone, the Manchester middlebrow novelist, for example, lambasted bourgeois taste in her best-selling novel published in 1842: ‘The drawing-room in which

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Mrs Langshawe received her visitors was as splendid as money could make it. The furniture and the decorations were, however, all good – the best of their kind; but there was an elaboration in the style, and a profuseness in the ornaments, that savoured more of a heavy purse than a cultivated taste.’42 In February 1842 the VicePresident of the Board of Trade, William Gladstone, deplored the fact that ‘while there is at this moment a decrease in the consuming powers of the people, an increase in the pressure of privations and distress, there is at the same time a constant accumulation of wealth in the upper classes, an increase in the luxuriousness of their habits, and of their means of enjoyment’.43 When economic depression hit hard from the late 1830s the immiseration of working-class producers stood out in stark relief against this background of hedonistic middle-class consumerism. That the interests of producers and consumers were increasingly pitched against one another had been a common strand in radical discourse and argument for some time. O’Brien attacked free trade in 1834, for instance, because it ‘leaves the unproductive classes “free” to lavish their revenues on foreign artisans – and leaves the home producers “free” to starve’. He went on to advocate ‘a system which would regard the interests of unproductive consumers as always of secondary importance to the interests of those, by whose toil the whole of society is upheld’.44 A woodcut published in Henry Hetherington’s Odd Fellow early in 1841 (Figure 9) graphically represented the perceived split between producers and consumers. As we saw in Chapter 2, melodramatic and gothic tropes of hunger were omnipresent in the culture during the early 1840s. Sardonically entitled ‘Christmas Cheer’, the image counterpoised a gluttonous middle-class consumer (most likely an Anglican clergyman) with an emaciated, potentially violent working-class producer, who might have provided a model for Gaskell’s John Barton. While the obese parasite gorges on rich food and wine, hardly able to fit his carcass in the substantial armchair, a starving worker dressed in rags broods over a bare board, knife in hand. Note how the meaning of consumer is negatively freighted here, while the producer is positively charged, a contrast that was commonly made in Owenite as well as Chartist discourse; scholarship has shown how Owenites reckoned the New Moral World of the future would be characterised by private asceticism and public opulence.45

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Figure 9. ‘Christmas cheer – the producer and consumer’, Odd Fellow, 2 January 1841.

Exclusive dealing and joint-stock provision stores, discussed below, were attempts to overcome contradictions between production and consumption, as indeed was the Land Plan, which played such a central role in the later phases of Chartist activity. A Chartist weaver from Braintree succinctly expressed the popular desire to reconstruct economic as well as political relations when he criticised middle-class consumers for being ‘only useful as purveyors of the produce of others and not as the producers of wealth’ and pointed to ‘the communities and co-operative societies, which were now on foot in various parts of the country’ that ‘would enable the producers in great measure to dispense with their services’.46

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Figure 10. C. J. Grant, ‘The great captain’s opinion of the present distress among the labouring classes of England’, Penny Satirist, 16 October 1841.

Neither sympathy for the sufferings of the poor nor criticism of the stark disparity between the experience of scarcity and excess was the monopoly of ultra-radicals.47 The Penny Satirist, for instance, which appealed to a more moderate, lower-middle-class readership – it strongly opposed the imposition of income tax – published a striking woodcut (see Figure 10) during the depths of depression in October 1841. It was executed by C. J. Grant, one of the most well-known popular caricaturists of the day. The text that accompanied this image pointed up the indifference of the rich to working-class distress. Outside the window, the starving ‘rabble’ clamour for bread while their governors – including Sir Robert Peel (‘The Tamworth Doctor’) and the Duke of Wellington (‘Old Slaughter’) – dine lavishly within. Peel standing in the centre of the image tells the unctuous butler to fob off the ‘swinish multitude’ with a parliamentary commission, while Wellington, pictured skewering a beefsteak (far right), refuses to accept that the complaints of the labouring poor have any validity: ‘Don’t tell me they are in want – Nobody is in distress from want of Food, there is plenty at everybody’s Table, and plenty of ways to get it.’48

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Chartist strategy In this context, Chartists found exclusive dealing especially appealing because it promised to reconstruct relations between producers and consumers by connecting political demands to economic grievances. Feargus O’Connor grasped the centrality of the tactic early on, declaring before the London Working Men’s Association in April 1838 that ‘if exclusive rights were wholesome, exclusive dealing was equally so’.49 Others drew attention to the way in which the middle classes had employed this tactic to gain the vote for themselves at the start of the decade. James Ayr advised an audience at Newcastle to do likewise and stated, ‘whoever would not deal with them in politics they would not deal with them in goods’.50 O’Brien thought it time to put pressure on shopkeepers, reluctantly admitting that ‘exclusive dealing is also a potent lever in its way’.51 His hesitation was due to the fact that, as noted at the start of the chapter, the term ‘exclusive’ carried negative connotations for radicals who typically championed the principle of inclusion in politics and culture. Many of them referred explicitly to this difference, including George Julian Harney who declared: ‘By EXCLUSIVE DEALING the people may righteously compel the abolition of Exclusiveism … The principle of EXCLUSIVE DEALING which has heretofore been employed against the people, must be now turned against the enemies of the people, by the people themselves.’52 As many historians have observed, women were often the most enthusiastic converts to exclusive dealing in Chartism’s early years. Months before the National Convention met, the radical women of Nottingham, for example, issued an address that contrasted the ‘sycophancy’ and supposed effeminacy of the despised ‘shopocracy’ with the masculinity of their own menfolk, the ‘rough and hardy diamonds’ with whom they lived and worked. They also argued that although exclusive dealing had long been ‘the motto of our political opponents, necessity and self-defence compel us reluctantly to recommend its adoption’.53 Female Chartists organised meetings pledging their support and urging women to use their particular influence and power within neighbourhoods and families. Radical females in Barnsley, for instance, where local drapers had treated Chartist requests for support ‘with contempt’, promised to take up ‘and endeavour to persuade our neighbours to adopt the system of exclusive dealing’.54 The ‘Patriotic Women of Sunderland’ listened

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appreciatively to George Binns, a local Chartist leader, who advised them to practise exclusive dealing ‘both in trading and in loving’.55 One of the first things the Newcastle Female Political Union did after its formation in January 1839 was organise a system of exclusive dealing.56 Apart from these places, we know for sure that women in Ashton-under-Lyne, Bradford, Carlisle, Hulme, Leeds, Manchester, Mansfield, Nottingham, Rochdale, Salford and Stalybridge did likewise.57 The practice not infrequently involved threatening local shopkeepers directly, as in Carlisle in July 1839, when large numbers of special constables had to be sworn in by magistrates to protect traders against angry boycotters.58 The tactic was probably most effective in small towns or working-class districts of major urban centres, where shopkeepers were most dependent on working-class custom. An analysis of a list of shopkeepers who contributed to the Defence Fund in Bradford, which appeared in the Leeds Mercury, plausibly suggested that ‘respectable tradesmen’ – that is, those who served middle-class customers – ‘have resolutely withstood the intimidation of the Chartist beggars’.59 With exclusive dealing already being practised on the ground in many localities in the north of England, the Chartist Convention considered what was to be done if constitutional methods failed and the National Petition was rejected. This problem greatly exercised delegates; the ulterior measures recommended in the manifesto issued by the Convention from Birmingham in May 1839 represented a creative solution to it. The more confrontational measures, particularly general arming and the ‘sacred month’ or general strike, caused a great deal of dissention and debate but the boycott of excisable articles and exclusive dealing gained widespread support across the movement. As delegates toured the country, canvassing support for ulterior measures, the political atmosphere grew more and more heated. Speeches were increasingly saturated with class hostility, especially targeted at shopkeepers but also aimed at the middle class more generally.60 At the mass demonstration at Glasgow Green in late June, for example, Dr John Taylor pledged support for exclusive dealing as ‘one of the best plans to bring their enemies to their feet … He did not blame the middle classes that they trampled their poorer brethren to the dust; he blamed the Radicals for allowing them to do it.’61 William Hill recommended ulterior measures, especially exclusive dealing, as the best way of undermining the power of ‘a middle class of money-mongers and capitalists’.62

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Clearly, this tactic was not regarded as simply a peaceful, moral alternative to physical force or direct confrontation. Henry Hetherington certainly underlined its morality but he also considered it a ‘tremendous field-piece … Perkins’s steam-gun is a child’s toy to it’.63 Exclusive dealing was seen as extremely threatening in itself, then, and was often inextricably linked to the ‘sacred month’, seen as functionally necessary if the strike was to be successful. Chartists such as O’Connor, Harney and Lovett may have been divided on many issues but they were agreed on this.64 O’Brien’s growing scepticism towards exclusive dealing was somewhat exceptional. ‘He did not care for a run on the Savings Banks, for exclusive dealing, for abstaining from excised luxuries. He did not wish to deprive the people of any one of their necessaries, besides he knew it could produce no good result’, O’Brien opined at a meeting in Nottingham at the beginning of July. Intoxicated by the times perhaps, he urged instead the immediate necessity of a general cessation of labour, recommending workers ‘borrow’ food if necessary to tide them over the crisis.65 Most Chartist leaders, however, continued to stress how the ‘sacred month’ would be largely ineffective if workers did not first secure their own sources of supply. On his return from Glasgow in early July, Taylor reported back to the Convention and recommended that ulterior measures be practised immediately, all except the ‘sacred month’. As is well known, delegates were still deeply divided on this issue. O’Connor also advised caution but others backed the strike call, including Peter McDouall, who observed that the people of Ashton were practising exclusive dealing and arming. ‘July was a celebrated month for revolution’, he wryly observed.66 Taylor managed to postpone the decision on the ‘sacred month’ for a fortnight.67 William Hill despaired when the Convention eventually fixed the date for 12 August because he believed that the strike was bound to fail until the people were armed and exclusive dealing was more widely employed. Hill had great expectations for the latter; when ‘a general system of exclusive dealing’ was put into operation, ‘no power on earth can hinder them from carrying anything they please, without the aid of any other engine than that alone’.68 For its part, the government kept a watchful eye on these developments and took action against exclusive dealing behind the scenes. The Home Secretary, Lord John Russell, wisely determined not to inflame the volatile situation unnecessarily and therefore did

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not come out publicly against the practice.69 He was well aware of its growing influence, however. In early June, Lord Hawick sent him letters from Bedlington that described Chartist intimidation of local shopkeepers and tradesmen.70 A month later police in Leeds arrested two local Chartists, White and Wilson, caught demanding a contribution from a local hatter. According to books found in their possession, the men were authorised collectors for the Leeds Northern Union, tasked with building support among shopkeepers for a ‘system of government whereby the labour of the poor may be protected, in the same manner, as the wealth of the rich’. These books contained the names, addresses and occupations of traders who had given money, as well as the amounts contributed. The Leeds Mercury strongly condemned the way in which local Chartists threatened shopkeepers ‘with ultimate violence’ and applauded the action of the magistrates, who faced down a crowd made up of ‘a very low description of persons’ in court and refused the men bail.71 In August the Anti-Corn Law Circular reported that Russell had instructed magistrates to put down exclusive dealing and take a hard line with offenders. The results were mixed, with Chartists in some localities successfully intimidating traders with the ‘Black Book’. When magistrates hauled up William Tillman of the Manchester Political Union for his activities that month, for instance, not a single shopkeeper could be found to appear against him.72 Chartists soon moved on from boycotting unsympathetic shopkeepers to organising their own stores and dealing with each other on a co-operative basis. The earliest example of Chartist retail cooperation can be traced back to the store established at Hull in April 1839, though the practice of co-operative storekeeping more generally of course had been deeply embedded within Owenism for over a decade, despite Robert Owen’s rejection of these forms. Unlike the ‘Social Father’, many Owenites regarded shopkeeping as not merely a diversion but as a way of building the ‘Community idea’ in working-class neighbourhoods, and it is not surprising therefore that Chartist and Owenite initiatives overlapped in some localities; the Huddersfield Co-operative Society helped organise and finance the monster reform demonstration at Peep Green in October 1838.73 What was different about Chartist co-operation was that it politicised consumption practices explicitly; mutual trading was now intimately bound up not with the construction of some far-off future

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utopia, but with the radical transformation of an existing, corrupt state – the ‘Patriot’s Store’ in Stockport, for instance, devoted half of its profits to relieve Chartist prisoners. Although it is difficult to tell exactly how many were formed, co-operatives became particularly attractive after the collapse of the Convention and the rejection of the National Petition. Reports of many Chartist joint-stock provision stores appeared in the movement press, mainly but not only established in manufacturing towns in the north of England, including Dewsbury, Hull, Leeds, London, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield, South Shields, Stockport, Stockton, Sunderland, Trowbridge and Winlaton, as well as Merthyr Tydfil and Newport in South Wales and Dalkeith and Edinburgh in Scotland. They sold unadulterated, basic necessities – mostly flour, tea, coffee, sugar, butter, cheese, bacon – at market prices, usually on a cash-only basis, which meant that the poorest were frequently shut out, a weakness that Chartists agonised about but could not satisfactorily resolve.74 At a meeting at Huddersfield in August, which passed a resolution in favour of ulterior measures, Mr Barker argued that to fully carry out the recommendations of the Convention, ‘they must act upon co-operative principles’. Barker advised them ‘to put their 5s and their 10s together and buy articles at wholesale prices’, which would enable them to keep the ‘sacred month’ because ‘they could produce three times as much as they could consume, as they were the industrious people who produced all the wealth of the country’.75 An editorial in the Charter stressed how organising and running joint-stock cooperative stores would simultaneously improve workers’ material situation and undermine the ‘middle class of society … personally and collectively your enemies’.76 One of the most indefatigable advocates of exclusive dealing and co-operative practice at this time was the Newcastle Chartist Robert Lowery. More than anyone else, Lowery theorised this important shift in Chartist strategy; he was to exclusive dealing and Chartist co-operation what William Benbow had been to the ‘sacred month’. Lowery toured the north-east and Scotland in 1839, converting large audiences with his passionate, eloquent addresses on the subject. After he delivered a two-hour speech at Bedlington in June, it was reported that ‘nothing is heard … but the determined voice of exclusive dealing’. A local journalist who had witnessed developments first hand observed approvingly: ‘The universal opinion is, that the shopkeeper, publican, or butcher that does not join the

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people here will shut up shop, before three months passes over.’77 As we noted above, local authorities expressed concern to the Home Secretary over the impact of exclusive dealing and Lowery’s visit must only have added to their fears. Lowery was the product of a dynamic radical local culture in which mutualistic forms of trade were found deeply appealing. In late summer 1839 the council of the Northern Political Union established the North East of England Joint Stock Provision Stores, which was the powerhouse for co-operative endeavour during this period; Rochdale’s later memorialisation in an important sense involved the deliberate forgetting of this more strident, openly political phase. The company was committed to supplying good-quality necessities at the lowest price and it limited share ownership (valued at 10s each) to fifty per member, with each member allowed ‘one vote and no more’. When it eventually opened in the centre of Newcastle in November 1839, the ‘People’s Provision Store’ consisted of three departments that sold a wide range of groceries, dairy produce and meat.78 At a meeting held to elect directors, Mr Morgan playfully suggested that co-operative trading had one drawback: ‘They would have to support the middle classes as paupers, when they were reduced to their natural level. (Laughter, and cries of “We’ll feed them on their own favourite skilly.”)’ Similarly, John Mason prophesied that combining working-class purchasing power would ‘level tyranny to the earth; reduce the middle classes to live according to Scripture; and eat their bread by the sweat of their brow’. Stressing the usefulness of co-operatives as schools of democracy, Thomas Devyr, a staff reporter on the Northern Liberator, stressed how an organisation guided by individuals ‘elected by Universal Suffrage, Vote by Ballot, and no Property Qualification … could accomplish almost anything’. Devyr looked forward to a time when Chartists would be able to purchase coalfields, shipyards and land in order to ‘employ those men who were persecuted by their present tyrants … it [co-operation] would at once sweep social misery and political tyranny from the face of the land, and make idle schemers do honest work for their living’.79 Back in his hometown the following month, Lowery reminded listeners that their ‘earnings reared the palaces in Grey-street, and stocked the splendid shops and mansions in this town’. He went on to narrate the rapid progress of the joint-stock experiment in Newcastle, which had already issued 2,000 shares – he was a shareholder himself. He closed, typically,

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by forging connections between moral and physical-force methods: ‘The man that will not go the length of the street to spend his money in the shop of a friend or a store, the profits of which he may share, will never walk ten miles with the musket on his shoulder to fight for freedom.’80 Lowery published an influential pamphlet in late 1839 that soon became a manifesto for joint-stock co-operation. The Northern Star carried advertisements for the work from November 1839 to May 1841 and many local Chartist branches bought and discussed the pamphlet.81 In a discourse saturated with Christianity, Lowery portrayed the mass of poor consumers as no more than slaves in a land of increasing plenty.82 The benefits of enlarged production had been swallowed up by higher taxation and the growing army of ‘idlers, tax-gatherers, bankers, lawyers, placemen, pensioners, priests, and princes’.83 For Lowery, the growing immiseration of the working class contrasted vividly with the conspicuous opulence of the rich: ‘All those splendid shops we see in every town have been furnished by us; all those fine houses in which those gentry dwell, with their snug parlours, fine drawing rooms, and costly furniture, have been furnished by the profits of our labour; and if we have done so much for others, may we not do as much for ourselves?’84 Exclusive dealing was seen as a way of remedying this imbalance as it could potentially unite the interests of ‘the people’ in their roles as producers as well as consumers and therefore did not narrowly appeal to working-class sectional interests: ‘The mass of the people are of our principles; they are the consumers.’85 Despite this inclusiveness, however, Lowery also emphasised how the tactic would take the ground from under jumped-up, middle-class shopkeepers, the most immediate class enemy.86 Towards the end of the pamphlet, Lowery pointed to the historical example of the American colonists to underline the potential power of ordinary consumers. According to him, ‘the glorious patriots of America harassed the tyrants of England’ by successfully harnessing their consumer power.87 Lowery went on to elaborate a radical politics of consumption in which joint-stock provision stores would simultaneously feed the majority, undermine middleclass ‘shopocrats’ and secure working-class political liberation. Fully developed, the system promised no less than revolution and would completely

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change the face of society: we may become builders, cultivators, merchants, and producers for ourselves, and sit under our own vine and fig-tree, none making us afraid. We shall no longer be under the galling bondage we are under at present, with want continually before us, while we toil for profit-mongers who value neither men’s bodies nor souls, except as materials to barter for gain; who hold us in political bondage, and arrogantly claim dominion over our minds, denying to us the right to think for ourselves, and to express our opinion.88

For Lowery, Devyr and many other Chartists, politics and economics were interpenetrating realms. The problem of hunger was inextricably bound up with economic and political dependence and would only be eradicated when this ‘galling bondage’ was finally removed. And, typically, success depended on female participation: ‘Remember that no woman is worthy of the name of a workingman’s wife, who will lay out his hard-earned wages in the shops of those who insult him and deny him his political rights.’89 Reconfiguring politics and economics Joint-stock co-operation provided a focus for Chartist activity after the abortive Newport Rising in November 1839 and the mass arrests that followed. Indeed, in some areas it went from strength to strength. By February 1840, for example, there were four cooperative societies in Sunderland alone, though relations between them were not always harmonious. Friction arose over questions of accountability and control. One of the societies, formed initially by Owenites in 1838 but dependent on Chartist support, gave profits to shareholders who held a £50 share regardless of ‘whether they be consumers or not’. This structure meant that investors motivated more by greed than by co-operation or Chartism could direct and even take over the society, which eventually in fact occurred. After an unsuccessful attempt to change the rules, the Sunderland Chartist James Williams helped set up an alternative, the Durham County Social Institute, which gave half the profits ‘arising from their own consumption’ to customers, who could, if they wished, leave it to accumulate in order to enable them to eventually buy shares.90 Williams stated that ‘Co-operation is the most practical form of exclusive dealing’, which promised to be ‘the speediest means of working out our political regeneration’. He recommended

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fellow Chartists supply grocery and provision, drapery, hardware, books and newspapers so that ‘we can battle with the wholesale merchants, the great commercial gods’.91 At a meeting at Sunderland in September 1839 he baldly declared, ‘consumption was the source from which profit was derived, and capital was unproductive without it; that therefore the consumer was entitled (as a consumer) to a return of one-half of the profits derived on his purchase’.92 Whatever the differences of opinion they provoked, joint-stock trading companies remained important sites of cultural construction during very difficult times. At a festival organised at Sunderland in October to mark the commencement of trading activity, to which Williams and Binns sent their apologies (they were by now both under arrest), a packed gathering of shareholders sat down to a generous meal, ‘which the big-bellied exclusives would fain keep all to themselves’. Anti-Whig and anti-Tory banners hung from the walls of two large rooms where the celebration was staged, while the Winlaton band entertained with political airs. No doubt in an effort to reassure Owenite purists who, like Robert Owen, had doubts about the usefulness of shopkeeping in bringing about the New Moral World, speakers repeatedly denounced capitalist ‘profit-mongering’, contrasting this with their own project, which was nothing less than ‘the regeneration and happiness of the human race’. Others questioned the Christian bases of an economic system that ‘made a few riot in sinful luxuries, whilst the many famished for a morsel of bread’. The most impressive address was delivered by Devyr, who again recommended political shopkeeping as a way of building an alternative hegemony, this time employing a striking metaphor to reinforce his point: Instead of risking all upon an open headlong assault against the citadel of corruption, the people had wisely determined to sit down before it, and commence a regular siege. They had established, or were establishing, Joint Stock Companies all over the land, this was approaching the fortress of corruption by what engineers called the ‘sap’, – it was a certain and safe way of approaching it – and when they had sapped the middle class foundation, the whole fabric of rottenness would tumble into one undistinguished ruin.93

Like many of these early ventures, the Social Institute continued to be riven by conflict between directors and members and was relatively short-lived. A similar fate eventually overtook the flagship

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‘People’s Store’ in Newcastle, which was brought down by fraud two years after it was launched.94 Despite the many setbacks, such forms continued to be strongly supported. This was because Chartist co-operatives proved vital training grounds in the messy business of democratic practice as well as supplying material needs; members elected officials to operate and manage the stores by means of regular meetings. They made it possible for working people to assume greater control over their lives as consumers on the ground and demonstrated that the principle of self-government could be applied across the economy as well as the polity. The legal as well as the economic context exerted powerful constraints, especially in this early phase. Until and even beyond the passage of the Industrial and Provident Societies Act of 1852 – which gave co-operative members certain legal protections but which also limited their activities in important ways – such forms were very fragile indeed. Not only could wealthier members take them over but also officials often absconded with cash, causing ruin. Jubilee histories of local retail co-operative societies published from the end of the nineteenth century are replete with stories of how loyal co-operators overcame such setbacks in the ‘heroic’ early days.95 Nevertheless, as Chartist leaders such as William Hill recognised, provision stores represented a solution to the key problem that confronted the working class: how to simultaneously practise democracy as well as accumulate capital. ‘Unite, organise – and put the profits now realised by the retail dealer – the wretch who sells the interest of his best customers at the bidding of the tyrant – into your own pockets’, Hill wrote. ‘Thus will you create capital for yourselves, as you are now doing it for your oppressors.’96 Although O’Connor continued to advocate exclusive dealing as a way of getting more Chartists elected to Parliament, he couched his words very carefully after the general strike and the Chartist show trial at Lancaster in March 1843. He reminded readers in the Northern Star, for example, that Judge Baron Rolfe had declared exclusive dealing legal in his summing up at Lancaster, so long as no intimidation was employed. O’Connor considered that Rolfe’s words provided ‘a very striking instance of the power with which legal combination arms the working classes; and here also is an instance of passing the limits of the law which such transgression rather injures than serves’.97 In the account of the trial issued by the radical publisher Abel Heywood, Rolfe did indeed distinguish

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between legitimate combinations and illegal conspiracies and was quoted as having stated: ‘Any of you may chose not to deal with John Smith, the baker, but if all of you combine together not to deal with him, but as far as you can prevent others from dealing with him, that would not be an illegal act, but, no doubt, it would be a conspiracy.’98 However, middle-class newspapers offered a different account and interpretation of Rolfe’s summing up. The Times, for instance, reported that the judge had simply conflated combination with conspiracy and ruled all exclusive dealing to be outside the law.99 While the legal position on exclusive dealing remained unclear, the formal drift within Chartism after the profound defeat of 1842 was to accept or at least learn to adapt to the increasing separation of political from economic forms of social transformation.100 This shift was registered in various ways. The objects of the flagship cooperative society founded by Owenites and Chartists at Rochdale in 1844, for example, were codified in rules that were eventually held up as a model by a developing movement after mid-century. These included the complete remodelling, ‘as soon as practicable’, of ‘the powers of production, distribution, education and government … to establish a self-supporting colony of united interests’. The Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, however, also voiced a strong commitment to political neutrality, as noted in the previous chapter, and it was this that represented a more important turning point than their decision to award dividend on purchases to members; other societies had distributed profits for over a decade, after all.101 The decision to formally reject politics and the problem of state power may have been a realistic assessment of the changed situation but it does indicate an important move away from the more explicit forms of political shopkeeping that emerged out of exclusive dealing.102 Thus, the Rochdale Society can be regarded as ‘the most prodigious child of the Chartist movement’ only in a limited sense.103 Some Chartists later attacked consumer co-operation for depoliticising the struggle – Ernest Jones, for example, who debated the subject in Halifax over two evenings in January 1852 with Lloyd Jones, the old Owenite convert to Christian Socialism. Deriding those ‘Penny Christian Socialists’ who supported co-operation, Jones mocked the idea that the practice had really furthered the liberation of the people: ‘What carried Catholic Emancipation? Was it a cake of soap? No! it was political power. What carried

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the Reform Bill? Was it a pat of butter? No! it was political power. What is it that is driving on the middle class tyrants and the aristocracy to a semblance of reform? Is it your co-operation that they fear? – no, it is ours.’104 Further evidence of the Chartist response to the uncoupling of politics and economics can be seen in relation to the ‘Chartist Co-operative Land Company’, as it was initially called when launched in the spring of 1845. In an important sense, the Land Plan in fact represented an attempt to address the imbalance between production and consumption, as we have already noted. Writing in the Northern Star, ‘Philodemos’ singled this out as a major reason why readers should lend their support, observing that ‘laws have been made, and rules for social guidance, laid down – wherein the producer and the consumer have been divided – and it has been assumed that the one must be benefited at the expense of the other’.105 Simultaneously, the Land Plan pointed towards the possibility of a new kind of purified politics. In his manifesto on the scheme, O’Connor stated that it would ‘remove the dead weight of monopoly from the shoulders of the people’ and thus, ultimately, secure nothing less than ‘the redemption of the working classes from their thraldom’; he also ridiculed contemporary political practice, especially the figure of ‘the mere politician, who is in general, an upholder or denouncer of abuses … a mere trafficker in human susceptibility, capable of being moulded into any shape best suiting the requirements of the political mechanic – a thing bought and sold, like stock upon ’change, and alike transferable’.106 O’Connor went on to explain how the plan came to him as a kind of individual moral revelation, which depended on the rejection of unproductive consumption; his earlier life, first as a barrister, then as a journalist and MP, had been characterised by frivolity and dissipation, a round of fox-hunting, balls and gambling. Thus, the Land Plan was a means of redressing the imbalance between consumption and production, which O’Connor believed marked classical political economy: ‘I felt that if we were all consumers and no producers, the world’s existence would speedily terminate, and I rejected the illiberal philosophy.’ Consequently, he gave up his earlier dissolute life for the plan, replaced the polished boots and red coat with fustian and brogues, in order to become a producer rather than ‘a thoughtless consumer’.107 The scheme proved very popular indeed, serving to hold the movement together in an extremely

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difficult period – about 70,000 individuals subscribed funds to purchase farms.108 Ideas of working-class independence and the necessity for market control were staple themes of radical discourse by the mid1840s. At the national trade union conference held in London in March 1845, many delegates emphasised the limitations of unions in effecting a thoroughgoing transformation of society. Existing injustices in the distribution of wealth, it was thought, would only be put right by a combination of methods; both the Land Plan and co-operative stores were considered vital. The problem that many wrestled with was the same as had occupied Devyr over five years before: how best to warren or undermine the system from within? Blackhurst, a delegate from Sheffield, was not alone in regarding cooperatives and the Land Plan as making it possible ‘for the working classes to become consumers of their own productions, and thus support themselves, instead of supporting other classes’. This meeting, at which was founded a co-ordinating body – the National Association of United Trades for the Protection of Industry – unanimously passed a resolution recommending that the trades ‘establish manufactories and stores to supply themselves with provisions, the profits arising therefrom to be devoted to the purchase of land on which to employ surplus labour’.109 In similar fashion, Nottingham Chartists agreed soon after that they ‘should support any plan to employ the people upon the land, and to induce them to become members in co-operative stores’.110 According to the editor of the Northern Star, repeal of the Corn Laws and the victory of free trade in 1846 also served to emphasise the fact that politics and economics were increasingly becoming separate domains. But repeal also reinforced both the continued vulnerability of working-class consumers and the necessity for them to organise and act politically. An editorial on the coming ‘battle’ pointed out that protectionists and free traders both exploited labour, ‘the only source of wealth’. The former had attempted to ‘retain power by making them valuable as expensive consumers’, while the latter aimed to ‘increase wealth by making them cheap producers’. Although the defeat of protectionism had been claimed as a victory for the people, the ‘grand national jubilee’ that had been anticipated to commemorate repeal had simply not materialised, suggesting that labour was well able ‘to distinguish between its own, and its oppressors interest’. The writer (Joshua Hobson or,

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more likely, Harney) went on to argue that the people must practise exclusive dealing according to the following plan: ‘Every constituency should have its election roll, the consumers should arrange themselves into CUSTOM CLASSES, and, according to the principles of political economy, exchange their commodities in the most beneficial market, exchanging the produce of their labour for the vote that is to protect their industry.’111 Exclusive dealing was used in a number of constituencies during the 1847 General Election. O’Connor urged Chartists in Leeds and Halifax in particular to employ the tactic and opined, somewhat optimistically, that Ernest Jones and Joseph Sturge could be elected to Parliament if they did.112 At a meeting at Halifax in August, the local Chartist George Webber declared to an audience of over 7,000 non-electors that their motto should be ‘No vote, no custom’. The same evening at least 2,000 women met in the Odd Fellows’ Hall to discuss how best to employ exclusive dealing in the forthcoming election.113 In the end, Jones failed to defeat the Whig candidate, Sir Charles Wood. Campaigning alongside the editor of the Nonconformist, Edward Miall, with whom he shared the radical ticket if not much else, Jones did manage, however, to break liberal unity in the town.114 Exclusive dealing certainly played an important role in the election, according to many contemporaries including Ben Wilson, who observed that the practice ‘made the fortunes of several Halifax tradesmen and publicans for years to come’.115 While exclusive dealing continued to feature in particular localities, the Northern Star was now ambivalent about the tactic and merely stressed its usefulness as a ‘protective weapon’.116 If not definitively rejected, exclusive dealing was completely marginalised at the Chartist Convention in 1848. When the subject was raised the chairman, Philip McGrath, immediately ruled it out of court, maintaining that ‘their policy ought not to be aggressive, but conciliatory’. Both Ernest Jones and William Cuffay spoke in its defence, though Jones was careful to stress that he wanted to see exclusive dealing employed not against all traders but only those who enrolled as special constables ‘to make a slaughter on the people assembled in defence of their rights’.117 However, as a correspondent for the Morning Chronicle gleefully noted, McGrath was adamant and Jones’s motion, which urged Chartists to deploy exclusive dealing against the specials, was promptly dropped. McGrath was duly congratulated by this organ of metropolitan ‘freebootery’

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for the ‘great propriety’ and ‘good taste’ he had demonstrated in this matter. Jones had more success outside the Convention, though, and had attended a meeting at Lambeth at which he had moved a successful resolution recommending exclusive dealing against members of the ‘shopocracy’ who had signed up as specials.118 Some Chartists outside London also backed this initiative, including female Chartists in Leicester, for instance.119 The shift away from explicit forms of political shopping was marked, nevertheless. At a meeting at Tower Hamlets four years later in 1852, the engineers’ leader, William Newton, delivered an election address in which he stressed that Chartists should ‘strike out into a new and broader path’, build cross-class alliances and appeal to as many people as possible. For Newton, this new direction meant the complete eschewal of all intimidation, including exclusive dealing: ‘He held by the principle that all coercion was both impolitic and unjust.’120 Exclusive dealing and retail co-operatives had appealed to Chartists so much because such practices bridged demands for radical economic and political change. They exposed fundamental differences between Chartists and free traders, for the former insisted that a community of organised consumers ought to exert more control over the market. James Leach, for instance, argued that a reconfiguration of politics and economics was necessary in order to protect the poor consumer. At a lecture delivered at the Birmingham Mechanics’ Institute in early 1842, Leach quoted Adam Smith’s dictum from the Wealth of Nations about consumption being ‘the sole end and purpose of all production’ and posed a rhetorical question: ‘Now if production ought to be suited to the means of consumption, why were so many hundreds turned to starve whilst their places were occupied by inanimate matter?’ Leach maintained that scarcity was caused not simply by the Corn Laws but by ‘infamous systems of government’ that left consumers unprotected. The first Opium War in China demonstrated that free trade manufacturers would use force to further their creed across the globe and that such men were even prepared to shoot those who refused ‘to be poisoned for the benefit of commerce’. Leach closed by contrasting this ‘immoral’ system of free trade with ‘real trade, one which would enable the producer to be a consumer’, and emphasised that the politics of consumption ‘was mixed up with every action of their lives, with every article they eat or wore, and was consequently of the first importance. He compared it to so many wires all meeting

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at one common centre, that centre being the people’s pockets.’121 For sure, many Chartists found exclusive dealing attractive because it offered a practical solution to the most basic problem that faced them in their everyday lives. But it also represented the beginning of a strategic attempt by working people to exert control over the sphere of consumption, to cut as well as expose the ‘many wires’ that regularly pilfered the ‘people’s pockets’. Conclusion This chapter has shown how Chartists took up the weapons of political shopping and shopkeeping because they were exploited as consumers as well as producers. None understood the politics of provision better, perhaps, than the London Chartist, John James Bezer. He recalled in his autobiography how prolonged unemployment in the late 1830s meant that another mouth to feed was experienced as a catastrophe, which inverted and deformed what ought to be the normal joys of family life: ‘That was a horrible day – the birthday of my first boy! Wife, it was thought would die; and I knew why die – from sheer staring want. No joy was in our nearly empty room, but all was desolate, and the very blackness of despair.’ Bezer tried to earn money singing hymns in the streets of Brixton before approaching the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity, prompted by the promise of work. He was eventually offered bread and cheese, as much to shut him up as anything else, which he was ordered to consume on the spot. Bezer refused and declared to the officer of the society: ‘I don’t care about your rules, I want to share it with those I love, who are as hungry as I am, and if you are a Devil with no natural feelings, I am not.’ That night he accompanied his landlord to a Chartist meeting where the scales fell from his eyes: ‘how I sucked in all they said! “Why should one man be a slave to another? Why should the many starve, while the few roll in luxuries? Who’ll join us, and be free?” “I will,” cried I, jumping up in the midst.’122 Unlike Elizabeth Gaskell’s anti-hero John Barton, Bezer’s wits were not broken by hunger but sharpened. He playfully dedicated the final section of his autobiography to Lord John Russell and read the Whig leader a lesson to close his narrative: And so, Lord John, I became a rebel; – that is to say: – Hungry in a land of plenty, I began seriously for the first time in my life to enquire why, why – a dangerous question, Lord John, isn’t it, for a poor man to ask? lending to anarchy and confusion … Politics, my Lord, was

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for me just then, a bread-and-cheese-question. Let me not, however, be mistaken; – I ever loved freedom, and its inevitable consequences, – and not only for what it will fetch, but the holy principle, – a democrat in my Sunday School, everywhere.123

For Bezer, as for Chartists more generally, questions of provision and consumption were inseparable from questions of democratic participation and control. Exclusive dealing and joint-stock provision stores thus fanned Chartist hopes that market relations could be fully democratised and humanised. Notes 1 Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: a tale of Manchester life (1848; 1970), p. 218. 2 Ibid., pp. 60–1. It was a mark of Gaskell’s achievement that she considered other readings of hunger in this text. See also pp. 238–9. 3 Ibid., p. 38. 4 See, inter alia, Raymond Challinor and Brian Ripley, The Miners’ Association: a trade union in the age of the Chartists (1968); Iorwerth Prothero, ‘William Benbow and the concept of the “General Strike”’, Past and Present, 63 (1974), 132–71; Artisans and politics in early nineteenth-century London: John Gast and his times (1979); Mick Jenkins, The General Strike of 1842 (1980); David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–1848 (Cambridge, 1982); Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: popular politics in the Industrial Revolution (1984). 5 See, for example, James Epstein, ‘Some organisational and cultural aspects of the Chartist movement in Nottingham’, and Eileen Yeo, ‘Some practices and problems of Chartist democracy’, in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (eds), The Chartist experience: studies in working-class radicalism and culture, 1830–60 (1982), pp. 242, 348, 375; Malcolm Chase, Chartism: a new history (Manchester, 2007), pp. 62–3, 146–7. 6 See T. H. Breen, The marketplace of revolution: how consumer politics shaped American independence (Oxford, 2005). 7 For important earlier examples, see Clare Midgley, ‘Slave sugar boycotts, female activism and the domestic base of British anti-slavery culture’, Slavery and Abolition, 17:3 (1996), 137–62; Charlotte Sussman, Consuming anxieties: consumer protest, gender, and British slavery, 1713–1833 (Palo Alto, CA, 2000). 8 Northern Star, 6 January 1838, p. 6; 27 January 1839, p. 4. 9 Ibid., 3 October 1840, p. 1. 10 The article from the Dublin Morning Register was reproduced in the Morning Chronicle, 19 November 1828, p. 3, which watched developments closely.

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11 The Belfast News-Letter, 21 November 1828, p. 6. See also Thomas Wyse, Historical sketch of the late Catholic Association (1829), pp. 423–35. 12 John Foster, Class struggle and the Industrial Revolution (1974), pp. 53–4. 13 Competing interpretations of the role of exclusive dealing in this election can be found in D. S. Gadian, ‘Class consciousness in Oldham and other north-west industrial towns 1830–1850’, Historical Journal, 21:1 (1978), 162; R. A. Sykes, ‘Some aspects of working-class consciousness in Oldham, 1830–1842’, Historical Journal, 23:1 (1980), 173–6. 14 The Times, 8 October 1832, p. 2. 15 Poor Man’s Guardian, 13 October 1832, p. 562. Note also Julius West, A history of the Chartist movement (1920), p. 67. 16 Moral reformer, and protestor against the vices, abuses, and corruptions of the age, November 1832, p. 338. 17 Bristol Mercury, 13 October 1832, p. 4. 18 Poor Man’s Guardian, 5 January 1833, p. 1. See also Alfred Plummer, Bronterre: A political biography of Bronterre O’Brien 1804–1864 (1971), pp. 52–3. James Vernon stresses the anti-democratic implications of the Ballot Act of 1872 in Politics and the people: a study in English political culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 157–8. 19 The Oxford English Dictionary records that ‘shopocracy’ occurs in the Poor Man’s Guardian in June 1832 and that the same paper referred to a ‘shopocrat Parliament’ in December that year. 20 Poor Man’s Guardian, 7 September 1833, pp. 291–2. Davenport’s sympathetic stance towards shopkeepers is noted by Gareth Stedman Jones in ‘The language of Chartism’, in Epstein and Thompson (eds), The Chartist experience, p. 25. 21 Poor Man’s Guardian, 28 September 1833, p. 315. Cousins refers to the radical publisher B. D. Cousins, who led the resistance against Pitt’s window tax in the metropolis. See also R. C. N. Thornes, ‘The early development of the Co-operative Movement in West Yorkshire, 1827–1863’ (University of Sussex DPhil thesis, 1984), p. 94. 22 Poor Man’s Guardian, 26 October 1833, p. 346. See also Malcolm Chase (ed.), The life and literary pursuits of Allen Davenport (Aldershot, 1994). 23 Poor Man’s Guardian, 9 August 1834, p. 212; R. W. Postgate, The builders’ history (1923); Richard Price, Masters, unions and men: work control in building and the rise of labour 1830–1914 (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 34–6. 24 Bristol Mercury, 19 November 1836, p. 3; 28 October 1837, p. 3. Tories in Bristol were still employing the tactic nearly a decade later. See ibid., 23 November 1844, p. 8; 11 January 1845, p. 8.

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25 Manchester Times, 4 November 1837, p. 3. 26 Friedrich Engels, The condition of the working class in England: from personal observations and authentic sources (1845; 1969), p. 101. See also Roger Scola, Feeding the Victorian city: the food supply of Manchester, 1770–1870 (Manchester, 1992). 27 John Burnett, Plenty and want: a social history of diet in England from 1815 to the present day (1966); Michael French and Jim Phillips, Cheated not poisoned? Food regulation in the UK, 1875–1938 (Manchester, 2000); Lozah Kassim, ‘The Co-operative movement and food adulteration in the nineteenth century’, Manchester Region History Review, 15 (2001), 9–18. 28 Northern Star, 11 September 1841, p. 3; 5 February 1842, p. 5; 12 February 1842, p. 3; 2 April 1842, p. 3; 20 April 1844, p. 3; 20 July 1844, p. 5. 29 Ibid., 12 March 1842, p. 4. 30 On legislative changes, see G. W. Hilton, The truck system, including a history of the British Truck Acts, 1465–1960 (Cambridge, 1960). For the persistence of truck in Staffordshire, see Roger Swift, ‘The English urban magistracy and the administration of justice during the early nineteenth century: Wolverhampton 1815–1860’, Midland History, 17 (1992), 79–80, 87–8. 31 Midland Mining Commission, First Report, South Staffordshire (1843), pp. xc, xci, xciii. The influence of this report can be found in Benjamin Disraeli’s ‘Condition of England’ novel, which first appeared in 1845: Sybil; or, the two nations (1985), pp. 179–82, 195–201. 32 Midland Mining Commission, pp. c, 13. For a balanced discussion of the Commission’s report, see David Philips, ‘Riots and public order in the Black Country, 1835–1860’, in Roland Quinault and John Stevenson (eds), Popular protest and public order: six studies in British history, 1790–1920 (1974), pp. 154–6. 33 Thomas Paine, Rights of man: part the second combining principle and practice (1937), p. 202. 34 See Patricia Hollis, The pauper press: a study in working-class radicalism in the 1830s (Oxford, 1970), p. 256; Philip Harling and Peter Mandler, ‘From “fiscal military” to “laissez faire” state, 1760–1850’, Journal of British Studies, 32:1 (1993), 44–70; Philip Harling, The waning of ‘old corruption’: the politics of economical reform in Britain, 1779–1846 (Oxford, 1996). 35 Poor Man’s Guardian, 14 February 1835, pp. 428–9. 36 Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: the temperance question in England, 1815–1872 (1971; Keele, 1994), p. 2. 37 Northern Star, 17 March 1838, p. 4.

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38 English Chartist Circular, 1 (1841), 160, cited in Wally Seccombe, Weathering the storm: working-class families from the Industrial Revolution to the fertility decline (1993), p. 249. 39 Chartist Circular, 7 March 1840, p. 97, emphasis in original. 40 See W. Hamish Fraser, Chartism in Scotland (Woodbridge, 2010). 41 Brian Harrison, ‘Teetotal Chartism’, History, 58 (1973), 193–217. 42 Elizabeth Stone, William Langshawe, the Cotton Lord (1842), vol. I, p. 37. Stone’s work is discussed by Robert Gray, The factory question and industrial England, 1830–1860 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 152–3. 43 Cited by Karl Marx, Capital: a critique of political economy (1863; Middlesex, 1976), vol. I, p. 805. 44 Poor Man’s Guardian, 29 November 1834, p. 338. 45 Noel Thompson, ‘Social opulence, private asceticism: the idea of consumption in early socialist thought’, in Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (eds), The politics of consumption: material culture and citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford, 2001). 46 Cited in A. F. J. Brown, Chartism in Essex and Suffolk (Chelmsford, 1982), p. 89. 47 See Charlotte Boyce, ‘Representing the “Hungry Forties” in image and verse: the politics of hunger in early-Victorian illustrated periodicals’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 40:2 (2012), 421–49. 48 For useful discussions of visual sources in this period, see Celia Fox, Graphic journalism in England during the 1830s and 1840s (New York, 1988); Brian Maidment, Reading popular prints, 1790–1870 (Manchester, 1996); Comedy, caricature and the social order, 1820–50 (Manchester, 2013). 49 Northern Star, 28 April 1838, p. 4. See also 5 October 1839, p. 4. 50 Champion and Weekly Herald, 8 July 1838, p. 4. 51 Northern Star, 14 July 1838, p. 4. 52 Ibid., 24 July 1847, p. 4. 53 Ibid., 8 December 1838, p. 6. 54 Ibid., 13 April 1839, p. 6; 27 April 1839, p. 4. 55 Ibid., 8 June 1839, p. 7. 56 Robert Colls, The pitmen of the northern coalfield: work, culture, and protest, 1790–1850 (Manchester, 1987), pp. 277–8. 57 Northern Star, 8 December 1838, p. 6; 22 December 1838, p. 8; 1 June 1839, p. 5; 6 July 1839, p. 8; 27 July 1839, p. 5; 5 October 1839, p. 4; Manchester and Salford Advertiser, 29 July 1839. On female activism, see also Dorothy Thompson (ed.), The early Chartists (1971), pp. 194–5; Michael Thomis and Jennifer Grimmet, Women in protest, 1800–1850 (1982), p. 131; Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women and the Chartist movement (1991); Anna Clark, The struggle for the breeches: gender and the making of the British working class (Berkeley, 1995).

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Northern Star, 3 August 1839, p. 4. Leeds Mercury, 10 August 1839, p. 8. Discussed by Stedman Jones, ‘The language of Chartism’, pp. 26–30. Northern Star, 22 June 1839, p. 7. Ibid., 25 January 1840, p. 4. Odd Fellow, 3 August 1839, p. 122. Mark Hovell, The Chartist movement (Manchester, 1966), pp. 148–9; Morning Chronicle, 5 July 1839, p. 4. Northern Liberator, 6 July 1839, p. 2. Northern Star, 6 July 1839, p. 1. Taylor was still arguing for exclusive dealing as an alternative to a general strike in August; Northern Liberator, 31 August 1839, p. 6. Northern Star, 3 August 1839, p. 4. See John Prest, Lord John Russell (1972), pp. 144–6, 148–50. National Archives, HO 40/42/30, dated 11 June 1839. See especially the letter from Robert Dawson to James Wakinshaw, Bedlington Ironworks, 5 June 1839, reporting Chartist activity and threats to boycott shopkeepers who refused to sign the Charter; letter from Mr C. Martin to Michael Longridge, Bedlington Ironworks, 6 June 1839, reporting Chartist intimidation of shopkeepers and the Postmaster; letter from James Wakinshaw to Michael Longridge, Bedlington Ironworks, 6 June 1839, reporting Chartist intimidation of shopkeepers and tradesmen. Leeds Mercury, 27 July 1839, p. 7. Anti-Corn Law Circular, 20 August 1839; Paul Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (Basingstoke, 1995), p. 39. See J. F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: the quest for the new moral world (1969); Martin Purvis, ‘Co-operative retailing in England, 1835–50: developments beyond Rochdale’, Northern History, 22 (1986), 198–215; Robin Thornes, ‘Change and continuity in the development of co-operation, 1827–44’, in Stephen Yeo (ed.), New views of co-operation (1988), pp. 27–51; Thornes, ‘The early development of the Co-operative movement’, pp. 151–3; W. H. Fraser, Alexander Campbell and the search for socialism (Manchester, 1996), pp. 149–51. A report on co-operation in Salford in late 1842 noted that the two Chartist stores in the area boasted lower prices than private shops, had sold nineteen sacks of flour the week before and that the system therefore was ‘fast bringing the shopocrats to their senses’. Northern Star, 19 November 1842, p. 1. See also Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists, pp. 106–8; Chase, Chartism, pp. 146–7. Northern Star, 17 August 1839, p. 7.

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‘Consumers of their own productions’ Charter, 8 September 1839, p. 517. Operative, 16 June 1839, p. 2. Northern Liberator, 26 October 1839, p. 1. Ibid., 21 September 1839, p. 3; Thornes, ‘Change and continuity’, p. 46. Northern Star, 5 October 1839, p. 1. See also ibid., 7 December 1839, p. 7. Advertisements were headed: ‘Read and be wise, rich, and free.’ Eileen Yeo, ‘Christianity and Chartist struggle’, Past and Present, 91 (1981), 109–39; Eileen Groth Lyon, Politicians in the pulpit: Christian radicalism in Britain from the fall of the Bastille to the disintegration of Chartism (Aldershot, 1999). Robert Lowery, Address to the fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, of the working classes, on the system of exclusive dealing, and the formation of joint stock provision companies, shewing how the people may free themselves from oppression (Newcastle-upon-Tyne, 1839), reprinted in Brian Harrison and Patricia Hollis (eds), Robert Lowery, radical and chartist (1979), p. 198. Ibid., p. 200. Ibid., p. 202. Ibid., p. 199. Ibid., p. 204. Ibid., p. 202. Ibid., p. 204; Brian Harrison and Patricia Hollis, ‘Chartism, liberalism and the life of Robert Lowery’, English Historical Review, 82 (1967), 503–35. Northern Star, 1 February 1840, p. 8. Northern Liberator, 7 September 1839, p. 5; Thornes, ‘Change and continuity’, p. 45. Charter, 29 September 1839, p. 571; Thornes, ‘The early development of the Co-operative movement’, pp. 160–1. Northern Liberator, 26 October 1839, p. 6. See ibid., 26 September 1840, p. 8; 10 October 1840, p. 6; 21 October 1840, p. 5; Northern Star, 12 February 1842, p. 8; Raymond Challinor, ‘Chartism and co-operation in the north east’, North East Labour History, 16 (1982), 34–40. See my monograph, Co-operative culture and the politics of consumption in England, 1870–1930 (Manchester, 1996), pp. 16–17; 135–6. Northern Star, 11 September 1841, p. 4. Ibid., 23 September 1843, p. 1. The trial of Feargus O’Connor and fifty-eight others on a charge of sedition, conspiracy, tumult and riot (1843; New York, 1970), p. 358.

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99 The Times, 11 March 1843, p. 5. See also Manchester Times and Gazette, 11 March 1843, p. 5. 100 See Stedman Jones, ‘The language of Chartism’, p. 52; Miles Taylor, ‘Rethinking the Chartists: searching for synthesis in the historiography of Chartism’, Historical Journal, 39:2 (1996), 493–4. 101 See Sidney Pollard, ‘Nineteenth-century co-operation: from community building to shopkeeping’, in Asa Briggs and John Saville (eds), Essays in labour history (1960), pp. 74–112. 102 See G. J. Holyoake, Self-help by the people: a history of co-operation in Rochdale (1858); Catherine Webb (ed.), Industrial Co-operation: the story of a peaceful revolution (Manchester, 1904), pp. 68–9. 103 West, A history of the Chartist movement, p. 200. 104 Notes to the People, 7 February 1852; Thornes, ‘The early development of the Co-operative movement’, p. 255; Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism and the romance of politics 1819–1869 (Oxford, 2003), p. 148. See also Harney’s comments in Star of Freedom, 14 August 1852. The Christian Socialists did much to secure legal protection for consumer co-operation, especially E. V. Neale and J. M. Ludlow; the latter drafted the Industrial and Provident Societies Act of 1852, often referred to by co-operators as their ‘Magna Charta’. See N. C. Masterman, J. M. Ludlow: the builder of Christian Socialism (Cambridge, 1963); Philip Backstrom, Christian socialism and cooperation in Victorian England: Edward Vansittart Neale and the Co-operative movement (1974). 105 Northern Star, 25 September 1847, p. 7. 106 The Labourer; A Monthly Magazine of Politics, Literature, Poetry etc, 1 (1847), 146. Relevant studies include Joy MacAskill, ‘The Chartist Land Plan’, in Asa Briggs (ed.), Chartist studies (1959), pp. 304–41; A. M. Hadfield, The Chartist land company (1970); Malcolm Chase, ‘“We wish only to work for ourselves”: the Chartist Land Plan’, in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (eds), Living and learning: essays in honour of J. F. C. Harrison (1996), pp. 133–48; Jamie L. Bronstein, Land reform and working-class experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Palo Alto, CA, 1999); Malcolm Chase, ‘“Wholesome object lessons”: the Chartist Land Plan in retrospect’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003), 59–85. 107 The Labourer, 1 (1847), 147. Just before his imprisonment seven years earlier, O’Connor had looked forward to a time when ‘each being his own producer and consumer; every man having the key of his larder and his storehouse’. Northern Star, 25 April 1840, p. 4. 108 Legal difficulties imposed by the state, which bedevilled the Land Plan, are discussed in Yeo, ‘Some practices and problems’, pp. 367–73.

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109 Northern Star, 29 March 1845, p. 8. A total of 110 delegates attended this conference. Predictably, Sidney and Beatrice Webb portrayed the NAUT as merely a stepping-stone to later, superior forms of organisation in The history of trade unionism (1896; 1902), pp. 168, 173–7. For a more sympathetic account, see Malcolm Chase, Early trade unionism: fraternity, skill and the politics of labour (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 207–15. 110 Northern Star, 19 April 1845, p. 7. 111 Ibid., 29 August 1846, p. 4. 112 Ibid., 17 July 1847, p. 1. 113 Ibid., 14 August 1847, p. 7. 114 See Kate Tiller, ‘Late Chartism: Halifax, 1847–58’, in Epstein and Thompson (eds), The Chartist experience, pp. 314–15; Taylor, Ernest Jones, pp. 102–4. 115 Ben Wilson, Struggles of an old Chartist (1887), reprinted in David Vincent (ed.), Testaments of radicalism: memoirs of working-class politicians, 1790–1885 (1977), p. 205; Chase, Chartism, p. 282. 116 Northern Star, 7 August 1847, p. 4; Chase, Chartism, p. 285. 117 Northern Star, 15 April 1848, p. 7; Chase, Chartism, p. 308. 118 Morning Chronicle, 13 April 1848, p. 3. 119 Northern Star, 3 June 1848, p. 5. 120 The Star and National Trades Journal, 10 April 1852, p. 7; Chase, Chartism, pp. 346–7. For continued use of the tactic, see Norman Gash, Politics in the age of Peel: a study in the technique of parliamentary representation 1830–1850 (1953), p. 176. 121 Northern Star, 12 February 1842, p. 3; Shijie Guan, ‘Chartism and the First Opium War’, History Workshop Journal, 24 (1987), 27–9; David Todd, ‘John Bowring and the global dissemination of free trade’, Historical Journal, 51:2 (2008), 390–6. 122 John James Bezer, ‘Autobiography of one of the Chartist rebels of 1848’, in Vincent (ed.), Testaments of radicalism, pp. 178, 186. On this organisation see M. J. D. Roberts, ‘Reshaping the gift relationship: the London Mendicity Society and the suppression of begging in England, 1818–1869’, International Review of Social History, 36:2 (1991), 201–31. 123 Bezer, ‘Autobiography’, p. 187. See also Alf Louvre, ‘Reading Bezer: pun, parody and radical intervention in 19th century working class autobiography’, Literature and History, 14:1 (1988), 23–36; Kelly J. Mays, ‘Subjectivity, community, and the nature of truth-telling in two Chartist autobiographies’, in Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson and Stephen Roberts (eds), The Chartist legacy (Woodbridge, 1999).

6

‘Please, sir, I want some more’: Dickens on working-class scarcity and middle-class excess Chartists such as John James Bezer firmly rejected Christian charity as the real solution to the difficulties they faced as poor consumers. They understood that the bread and cheese grudgingly stuffed in their mouths by bodies such as the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity was intended to silence them and ensure their political subordination, and this was too high a price to pay. However, the importance of charitable giving by the better off continued to be urged, and not just by Tory paternalist critics of the New Poor Law that were discussed in Chapter 3. Charles Dickens was one of the most well-known liberal advocates of a better deal for the poor. His life and work embodied the contradictions that are the subject of this book. The early writings that brought immediate fame prioritised hunger and scarcity, and here Dickens could draw on the hardships he had experienced during his own dislocated childhood. Conversely, though he experienced the multifarious goods on display at the Great Exhibition of 1851 as a kind of drowning – ‘So many things bewildered me’, he wrote to a friend, ‘I have a natural horror of sights, and the fusion of so many sights in one has not decreased it’ – Dickens also revelled in the excesses of middle-class consumerism.1 Dressed ‘in high satin stock and double breast pin, in glossy frock coat and velvet collar, in cut velvet waistcoat and glittering chain’, as a young man he presented himself as a dandy on the streets of London. On his first visit to America in 1842, one newspaper complained that Dickens’s ‘whole appearance is foppish … and partakes of the flash order’.2 Like many bourgeois paterfamilias, he did not have to be cajoled into accompanying his wife Catherine on shopping trips either and derived real, some would say even obsessive, pleasure from beautifying domestic space. Dickens redecorated Tavistock House in lavish fashion after moving there

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towards the end of 1851, provoking George Eliot’s caustic question: ‘How can we sufficiently pity the needy unless we know fully the blessings of plenty?’3 One of the most significant aspects of Dickens’s vision, then, was that it was produced by a writer who had one foot in the world of the metropolitan poor, especially early on in his career, and the other in a burgeoning commodity culture with all its exciting allurements. In an incisive study, George Orwell noted how Dickens approached metropolitan society as ‘a city of consumers’ and that he observed the social world primarily ‘from the consumer-angle’: ‘the kind of things he notices are inn-signs, brass door-knockers, painted jugs, the interiors of shops and private houses, clothes, faces and, above all, food’.4 Moreover, Dickens’s writing was itself literally imbricated within and was part of the new consumerism. Many firms, including producers of branded goods such as Colman’s mustard and Pears’ soap, advertised in the inserts that were bound in with the serial parts of his novels; after he died tea dealers and others promoted their goods by giving away free copies of his works.5 From the mid-1840s, Dickens embraced the free trade utopia as a solution to working-class scarcity, initially with a passion of which John Bright would have approved. However, Dickens was no zealot and the enthusiasm soon wore off. Even before the decade was over, he was producing work that profoundly questioned whether it was at all possible to moralise capitalism in any meaningful sense. Repeal of the Corn Laws and the spread of global capitalism may have brought material improvement to many but this did not mean that people were necessarily more content, and this included wealthy consumers who enjoyed more than their fair share. Though Dickens clearly understood the new consumerism from the inside, his mature work developed a powerful critique of excess and configured society as one huge, immoral marketplace.6 This chapter explores the shift from the politics of necessity to the politics of affluence in Dickens’s early work. The first section considers Dickens’s intervention in the debate on hunger in the late 1830s, when Chadwick and others argued over whether it was still possible to starve to death in England. Oliver Twist revealed deep sympathy with and understanding of the plight of the poor but eschewed radical political solutions to the problem of scarcity and lamely put its faith instead in individual paternalistic gestures from above, in charitable acts motivated by a non-sectarian, New

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Testament-inspired Christianity. The chapter then goes on to discuss Dickens’s testing and eventual rejection of paternalism after the crisis of the early 1840s and his conversion to the panacea of free trade soon after. For a short while in the Christmas Books, he almost became a propagandist for this cause, especially in The Chimes, though the role soon wore thin. Before the ‘Hungry Forties’ was over Dickens perceived that the most urgent task facing Victorian society was the moralisation of free trade capitalism and he hoped that it might still be possible to shape the emerging economy and culture according to a flexible Christian ethic. The last substantive section discusses how these themes played out in Dombey and Son, which pushed against the buffers. Dickens wrestled with this impossible task in his great novel of the 1840s until, like Dombey, it eventually defeated him. Hunger and paternalism: Oliver Twist The serialisation of Oliver Twist in Bentley’s Miscellany from early 1837 and the publication of the novel in three volumes the year after consolidated Dickens’s reputation as one of the most popular authors of his generation. With its mix of biting satire and lurid melodrama, the story of a parish boy helped keep the issue of widespread hunger and the politics of the poor at the centre of public debate. Oliver’s pathetic plea for more workhouse gruel in chapter 2 of the book immediately touched a raw nerve and was seared into the popular imagination by George Cruikshank’s memorable illustration that accompanied the text (Figure 11). The image and the question continue to resonate today. In December 2008, for example, the British Medical Journal published an article entitled ‘Please, sir, I want some more’, which took Oliver’s request as a cue for a reassessment of the workhouse dietary in the nineteenth century.7 The authors of the piece argued, mainly on the basis of published dietaries, that workhouse fare was relatively nutritious and that Dickens’s representation of workhouse conditions was therefore misleading, that he bent the stick too far in an understandable desire to protect the weak and vulnerable in society.8 The article was fundamentally flawed in any number of ways, most obviously for interpreting written guidelines as a reflection of actual practice. However, it also wilfully ignored Dickens’s understanding of the cultural and political meanings of

Figure 11. George Cruikshank, ‘Oliver asking for more’, in Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist; or the parish boy’s progress (1838).

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food, which, as Sally Ledger has demonstrated, drew on the radical campaign against the New Poor Law.9 Oliver Twist not only attacked the new system of poor relief; it also condemned abuses that were common under the Old Poor Law. Although deeply influenced by Thomas Carlyle, Dickens resolutely rejected any nostalgic vision of the contented poor, fully recognising that many features of the New Poor Law were found in the old; only the principle of centralisation represented an entirely new departure. Early on in the novel, for instance, Oliver is put out to a baby-farm run by Mrs Mann, who received so much per child and kept the infants on meagre rations in order to maximise profits.10 Although such practices pre-dated 1834, it is also wrong to assume – as Harriet Martineau did – that Dickens merely confused the old with the new, as his target was the continuing inadequacy of poor relief.11 In Oliver Twist, Dickens stressed how the New Poor Law turned the screw even more, systematising the already inhumane treatment of the poor. It had been designed by zealous ideologists such as Chadwick and Nassau Senior, sarcastically referred to as ‘philosophers’ in the text, who were keen to impose their will on the poor and drive down the cost of relief. Dickens followed popular radicals who argued that ‘slow starvation’ and a mainly gruel diet lay at the core of the new regime. Oliver is brought before the local Board of Guardians composed of ‘very sage, deep, philosophical men’, who had swallowed the official dogma, believing that the poor had come to regard the workhouse as ‘a regular place of public entertainment … a tavern where there was nothing to pay; a public breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper, all the year round; a brick-and-mortar elysium, where it was all play and no work’. The principle of less-eligibility was designed to deal with such degenerate behaviour, with the poor now given the choice ‘of being starved by a gradual process in the house, or by a quick one out of it’. They faced the prospect of seeing their families broken up and having to subsist on a diet of water, ‘three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll on Sundays … The relief was inseparable from the workhouse and the gruel; and that frightened people.’12 Like the anti-Poor Law propagandists discussed in Chapter 3, Dickens believed that gruel symbolised the harsh treatment of the poor: the workhouse diet deliberately stripped the poor of their humanity and civilised status. The regime quickly takes effect in the

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novel. After only a few weeks of being gruelled, paupers’ clothes ‘fluttered loosely on their wasted, shrunken forms’. After three months suffering ‘the tortures of slow starvation’, Oliver and his companions were ‘so voracious and wild with hunger’ that they even contemplated cannibalism: one boy: who was tall for his age, and hadn’t been used to that sort of thing, (for his father had kept a small cook’s shop): hinted darkly to his companions, that unless he had another basin of gruel per diem, he was afraid he might some night happen to eat the boy who slept next him, who happened to be a weakly youth of tender age. He had a wild, hungry, eye; and they implicitly believed him.13

The fear of anthropophagy lay behind Oliver’s famous request and Dickens employed the cannibalism trope again – which was central to anti-Poor Law and Chartist but also Anti-Corn Law League propaganda, as we have seen – when describing how the local board had tried to apprentice Oliver to a chimney sweep to get him off their hands. Beaten and locked up after asking for more, Oliver is released, ordered to wear a clean shirt and given a basin of gruel plus a holiday allowance of bread by Mr Bumble, the overfed parochial beadle who enforced the policy of ‘slow starvation’ for the ‘philosophers’ on the ground. Overcome by such generosity, ‘Oliver began to cry very piteously: thinking, not unnaturally, that the board must have determined to kill him for some useful purpose, or they never would have begun to fatten him up in that way.’14 For Dickens, food was not simply fuel that was necessary to power the human motor. He had a keen anthropological sensibility, stressing, in this novel and elsewhere, how the preparation and sharing of food made possible fundamental bonds between people and carried deep emotional and psychological meaning. The gruel diet dehumanised the poor and signified their definition and rejection as criminal ‘others’ by better-off sections of the community. When Oliver arrives at Mr Sowerberry’s, the parochial undertaker to whom he is eventually apprenticed, he is in such a reduced condition that he devours the ‘dainty viands that the dog had neglected’ without any hesitation. The narrator remarks that he wished ‘some well-fed philosopher’ could witness ‘the horrible avidity with which Oliver tore the bits asunder with all the ferocity of famine’, or, better still, experience it himself.15 After Oliver finally rebels and strikes out at Noah Claypole, the bullying charity boy, Bumble tells Mrs

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Sowerberry that meat not madness is the cause: ‘You’ve overfed him, ma’am. You’ve raised a artificial soul and spirit in him, ma’am, unbecoming a person of his condition: as the board, Mrs Sowerberry, who are practical philosophers, will tell you … If you had kept the boy on gruel, ma’am, this would never have happened.’16 When he eventually escapes from servitude Oliver is picked up by the Artful Dodger, who takes him to Fagin’s hideout where he is inducted into the criminal underworld with a shared meal of hot sausages. Taken in by Mr Brownlow later on, Oliver delights in a basin of broth, ‘strong enough to furnish an ample dinner, when reduced to the regulation strength: for three hundred and fifty paupers, at the very lowest computation’.17 Soon after Dickens’s novel appeared, a well-known intellectual spat broke out over whether it was possible to starve to death in early Victorian England. The controversy between Chadwick and William Farr, statistician in the office of the Registrar General of Births, Deaths and Marriages, turned on the question of whether environmental factors, including diet, housing and working conditions, should be taken into account when recording causes of death. Farr had recently attributed over sixty deaths to starvation and, provoked by Chadwick who vehemently rejected this claim, maintained that the workhouse diet provided only about threequarters of the minimum required for healthy life. Farr held to an older, physiological conception of disease in which undernourishment and other predisposing social factors played a vital role, while Chadwick articulated an emergent ontological conception that sought to assign singular causes to physical maladies.18 Their disagreement was part of a much wider debate on the minimum requirement for existence, and in Oliver Twist Dickens takes a similar line to Farr. In the first scene of gothic melodrama in the novel, Oliver accompanies Sowerberry to a slum dwelling in the poorest part of town where he witnesses the full horror of scarcity when he helps collect a pauper’s corpse. Distraught with grief, the husband clings to his wife’s body: ‘Ah!’ said the man: bursting into tears, and sinking on his knees at the feet of the dead woman; ‘kneel down, kneel down – kneel round her every one of you, and mark my words! I say she was starved to death. I never knew how bad she was, till the fever came upon her; and then her bones were starting through the skin. There was neither fire nor candle; she died in the dark – in the dark. She couldn’t

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even see her children’s faces, though we heard her gasping out their names. I begged for her in the streets; and they sent me to prison. When I came back, she was dying; and all the blood in my heart has dried up, for they starved her to death. I swear it before God that saw it! They starved her!’ He twined his hands in his hair; and, with a loud scream, rolled grovelling upon the floor: his eyes fixed: and the foam gushing from his lips.19

The bereaved man’s speech is powerful and moving but it is limited: who are ‘they’, one wonders? Supporters of the Anti-Poor Law and Chartist movements had answers to this question and developed their own collective answers; as we saw in the previous chapter, Bezer was reduced to begging but did not despair. Dickens’s preferred solution, however, is resolutely paternalistic.20 Dickens underlined how the objectifying, statistical gaze of the Poor Law authorities conflicted with the sense of entitlement shared by the poor. He well understood how relief was intimately bound up with issues of pride and self-respect, sometimes even to the point of death. Visiting the workhouse where Oliver was born, for example, Bumble moans about the recalcitrant poor to the matron, Mrs Corney, a kindred spirit. The novel’s narrator prefaces Bumble’s speech with a pithy reminder: ‘Many hunger-worn outcasts close their eyes in our bare streets, at such times, who, let their crimes have been what they may, can hardly open them in a more bitter world.’ Complaining about the amount of outdoor relief that has been granted owing to the recent bad weather, Bumble notes that one man with a wife and large family, who had received a quartern loaf and a full pound of cheese, was still not grateful and had had the gall to ask for coal besides.21 Another was more brazen still: A man, with hardly a rag upon his back (here Mrs Corney looked at the floor), goes to our overseer’s door when he has got company coming to dinner; and says, he must be relieved, Mrs Corney. As he wouldn’t go away, and shocked the company very much, our overseer sent him out a pound of potatoes and half a pint of oatmeal. ‘My heart!’ says the ungrateful villain, ‘what’s the use of this to me? You might as well give me a pair of iron spectacles!’ ‘Very good,’ says our overseer, taking ’em away again, ‘you won’t get anything else here.’ ‘Then I’ll die in the streets!’ says the vagrant. ‘Oh no, you won’t,’ says our overseer. ‘Well ma’am,’ rejoined the beadle, ‘he went away, and he did die in the streets. There’s a obstinate pauper for you!’22

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Dickens suggests in the novel that the erosion of entitlement represented an assault on earlier religious as well as secular norms. In a typical, sharply observed detail, the buttons on Bumble’s coat that draw Sowerberry’s admiration are made to illustrate the overturning of Christian virtues: ‘The die is the same as the parochial seal – the Good Samaritan healing the sick and bruised man … I put it on, I remember, for the first time, to attend the inquest on that reduced tradesman, who died in a doorway at midnight.’23 When Sowerberry recalls a recent case in which the jury criticised the relieving officer and brought in the special verdict, ‘Died from exposure to the cold, and want of the common necessaries of life’, Bumble quickly interrupts, brushing aside ‘the nonsense that ignorant jurymen talk … ineddicated, vulgar, grovelling wretches’ who know nothing of ‘philosophy’ or ‘political economy’.24 As scholars have argued, Oliver Twist is one of Dickens’s most explicitly Christian novels, which demonstrated the breakdown of charity, in terms of not only giving alms to the poor but also ‘the more general motive of Christian love, expressed as a love of God and one’s neighbour’.25 Because of the failure of public charity, Oliver has to choose between Fagin and a life of crime and Brownlow’s paternalism, and he plumps for the latter. Dickens memorably portrayed the predicament of the poor in a society where poverty has been criminalised and notions of ‘moral economy’ overturned, but his views resonated more with the campaign waged by humanitarian middleclass opponents of the new regime than with those of working-class radicals; little wonder that a section of the notorious second chapter was published in The Times to aid owner John Walter’s campaign.26 Significantly, most of the working-class press ignored the novel, although it was criticised by a London paper, the Operative, which underlined the high price of the work when it appeared in volume form. The reviewer in this periodical went on to say that it might have been worthwhile to protest about this if the novel ‘were of any real value’, but ‘it is as well to make the rich pay as dear for their amusements as possible’.27 From paternalism to free trade: the Christmas Books A Christmas Carol, the first of Dickens’s Christmas Books, which appeared in December 1843, also offered a paternalistic solution to the problem of poverty and sought to remind readers of their

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Christian duties. George Orwell remarked that Dickens was essentially a ‘change of heart man’ and this text concerns the education of a rich miser’s heart.28 In a story that immediately struck a chord with readers across classes, the businessman Ebenezer Scrooge experiences a profound transformation when spirits conjure up images of past, present and future. The key theme is announced by Scrooge’s nephew at the beginning when he defends the tradition of giving at Christmas: ‘the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys’.29 Dickens’s text argues for the regeneration of the seasonal spirit of charitable sociability. Scrooge is visited early on by gentlemen collecting for charity who remind him of the plight of the poor: ‘Many thousands are in want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands are in want of common comforts, sir.’ These philanthropists remind Scrooge that relief is particularly urgent when the experience of scarcity and excess is so vividly juxtaposed: ‘it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices’. The Malthusian Scrooge flatly refuses and recommends the treadmill and the workhouse; better by far for the poor to die and thereby decrease the ‘surplus population’.30 The reality of scarcity is repeatedly contrasted in the story with representations of seasonal plenitude and social cohesion. It is almost as if commercial market transactions are temporarily suspended. ‘Poulterers’ and grocers’ trades’, we are told, ‘became a splendid joke: a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do.’ Both high and low participated in this carnivalesque inversion, from the Lord Mayor to the poor tailor, ‘whom he had fined five shillings on the previous Monday for being drunk and blood-thirsty in the streets’.31 It is a shared, national celebration, marked by forgiveness, in which the normal rules of commerce seem to be subordinated to a different ethic and Dickens thus suggests that not everything can be reduced to exchange value or market relations. Food, of course, is at the centre. When the ghost of Scrooge’s dead partner, Jacob Marley, first appears, Scrooge tries to dismiss him as merely a phantom produced by bad digestion: ‘You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato.’32 Here Dickens was

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poking fun at the mechanistic view peddled by early nutritionists such as Jonathan Pereira and the architects of the New Poor Law, who, as we saw in Chapter 3, regarded food as merely fuel for the human machine. Typically, Dickens insists that food is inescapably psychological and cultural in A Christmas Carol. The Ghost of Christmas Past shows Scrooge pictures from his unhappy childhood but also reveals images of the festive ball thrown by his old paternalistic employer, Mr Fezziwig, at which a bounty of food and drink is enjoyed by all.33 A cornucopian figure, the Ghost of Christmas Present, sits on a ‘kind of throne’ of Christmas fare, which Dickens ticks off like a shopping list: ‘turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn, great joints of meat, suckling-pigs, long wreaths of sausages, mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts, cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears, immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch’.34 This Ghost shows Scrooge scenes of plenty on the streets of London, shops bursting with groceries, fruit and poultry, tempting passersby with their mouth-watering delights. Even the Spanish onions are personified as fat, lascivious friars, ‘winking from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went by, and glancing demurely at the hung-up mistletoe’.35 Despite his slender means, given this wellstocked market, even Scrooge’s downtrodden clerk Bob Cratchit and his family can manage to rustle up a decent Christmas dinner. Scrooge’s conversion to a simple New Testament Christianity that considered a charitable heart more important than churchgoing is made complete after the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come takes him to the poorest part of the city, a district that ‘reeked with crime, with filth, and misery’.36 Scrooge is made to witness servants selling his goods after he has died to old Joe, the owner of a foul rag-and-bone shop. This hybrid site of exchange – a kind of cross between a pawnshop and a charnel house where organic and inorganic matter intermingle – is a truly nightmarish space that signifies the fungibility of all things. Far in this den of infamous resort, there was a low-browed, beetling shop, below a pent-house roof, where iron, old rags, bottles, bones, and greasy offal, were brought. Upon the floor within, were piled up heaps of rusty keys, nails, chains, hinges, files, scales, weights, and refuse iron of all kinds. Secrets that few would like to scrutinise were bred and hidden in mountains of unseemly rags, masses of corrupted fat, and sepulchres of bones.37

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Picked clean by his servants, Scrooge is reduced to a motley collection of mean objects as each unravels their bundle. One asks, ‘Who’s the worse for the loss of a few things like these? Not a dead man, I suppose.’ The bundles contain a few seals, a pencil case, a pair of sleeve buttons, a brooch ‘of no great value’, sheets and towels, some clothes, two silver teaspoons, a pair of sugar-tongs, a few boots, bed curtains, blankets and the best shirt Scrooge’s corpse had initially been laid out in but which had been removed for sale.38 Watching himself thus commodified and consumed by this cannibalistic triad, Scrooge recoils in horror: ‘he viewed them with a detestation and disgust, which could hardly have been greater, though they had been obscene demons, marketing the corpse itself’.39 The beneficence that follows is no less than Scrooge’s affirmation of life and fellowship over death and the commodity form. Published the following year, The Chimes, the second of the Christmas Books, marked a break with paternalistic solutions to the problem of working-class scarcity that had marked Dickens’s early work. Comparing it with A Christmas Carol, the Edinburgh Review observed: ‘What was there the individual lapse, is here the social wrong.’40 The Chimes attacked Malthusian cant and the abstractions of political economy head-on and offered no simple way out. In the story, Toby Veck, nicknamed Trotty, a typically poor but decent ticket-porter, who waits for work in a church porch with only the bells for company, is first admonished about the ‘workingclass question’ by representatives of the new philosophy, the liberal Alderman Cute and the utilitarian Filer. The latter warns Trotty’s daughter Meg and her sweetheart Richard of the dangers of early marriage, while Cute sides with Chadwick in the contemporary debate on starvation: ‘there’s a great deal of nonsense talked about Want – “hard up”, you know: that’s the phrase isn’t it? ha! ha! ha! – and I intend to Put it Down. There’s a certain amount of cant in vogue about Starvation, and I mean to Put it Down.’41 Cute despatches Trotty to the house of ‘the Poor Man’s Friend’, Sir Joseph Bowley MP, with a letter asking for the arrest of Will Fern, an independently minded agricultural labourer. On his return, Trotty runs into Fern and his niece. Fern has rejected Bowley’s paternalism outright and speaks the language of class war: ‘when work won’t maintain me like a human creetur; when my living is so bad, that I am Hungry, out of doors and in; when I see a whole working life begin that way, go on that way, and end that way, without a chance

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or change; then I say to the gentlefolks “Keep away from me!”’42 Sympathising with Fern’s plight, Trotty offers them food and shelter. Greatly disturbed by these impressions, however, Trotty is visited by the Goblin of the Great Bell, who shows him a series of grim snapshots from the future: Richard has drunk himself to death, Lillian has become a prostitute while Meg, worn-out by needlework, commits suicide clutching Richard’s baby in her arms. Trotty thankfully wakes at the end to find it was all a dream, and Richard and Meg are married on New Year’s Day after all. The chimes in the story’s title ring out a clear warning and portend what might be unless things change soon. Consumption is a central theme in the narrative, which begins with a symbolic meal. Sheltering outside the church door reading an old newspaper, Trotty muses on the notion that working-class unrest can be explained as a knife-and-fork question and reflects thus: ‘There’s nothing’, said Toby, ‘more regular in its coming round than dinner-time, and nothing less regular in its coming round than dinner. That’s the great difference between ’em. It’s took me a long time to find it out. I wonder whether it would be worth any gentleman’s while, now, to buy that obserwation for the Papers; or that Parliament!’43 Dickens highlights the split between those who take it for granted where the next meal is coming from and those who live from hand to mouth. He insists at the outset that the poor are not without culture and should not be reduced to unreasoning appetites. Trotty thinks as well as hungers, intuits that scarcity is a political issue in the broadest sense, though he cannot find the underlying cause of things. Nevertheless, the common-sense ideas that are distilled into proverbs enable Trotty to articulate the notion that England is divided into two nations. His train of thought is interrupted when his daughter brings him a treat of tripe and potatoes in order to celebrate her betrothal to ironworker Richard. The long-drawn-out scene that follows reveals that Dickens understood working people’s relationship with food very well indeed. The dish is covered and it is hot, a real delight on this cold day. Meg makes her father guess the contents of the dish by its smell and Trotty duly reels off the food of the poor: polonies, pigs’ trotters, liver, cocks’ heads, sausages, chitterlings. We are shown how food is a form of communication as well as a source of bodily sustenance, and constitutes a central way in which people express their love for one another and their common humanity. Meg wants to prolong the suspense in

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order to maximise her father’s pleasure: ‘Meg was in a perfect fright lest he should guess right too soon.’44 To re-emphasise the point that workers were not mere brutes, Trotty is almost put off his treat by a fleeting vision of Meg’s future life that flashes before him.45 This anthropological approach to the eating habits of the poor contrasts with the condescending views adopted by those above. Emerging onto his doorstep, Alderman Cute examines Trotty and his dinner as quaint specimens, and then eats the remaining morsel of tripe that Trotty was keeping as ‘a last delicious tit-bit’.46 In this way, Cute literally takes food from the mouth of the poor. Filer, meanwhile, discourses on Trotty’s dinner as if it were the food of a savage tribe, then delivers a lecture on the wastefulness of tripe consumption: Tripe is more expensive, properly understood, than the hot-house pineapple. Taking into account the number of animals slaughtered yearly within the bills of mortality alone; and forming a low estimate of the quantity of tripe which the carcasses of those animals, reasonably well butchered, would yield; I find that the waste on that amount of tripe, if boiled, would victual a garrison of five hundred men for five months of thirty-one days each, and a February over. The Waste, the Waste.47

Dickens’s target here obviously is Chadwick and the crass truth claims made by devotees of the statistical method. The food issue graphically demonstrates the great gulf in understanding between classes during the ‘Hungry Forties’. As a good utilitarian, Filer regards workers as mere flesh-and-blood machines, which needed so many calories to labour effectively; whether food is tasty or comforting is therefore completely irrelevant to him. From a different though just as condescending angle, the paternalist landlord Bowley lectures Trotty later on about how vital it is for working men to raise their ambitions and substitute their gross appetites for higher things: ‘Now, the design of your creation is: not that you should swill, and guzzle, and associate your enjoyments, brutally, with food’ – Toby thought remorsefully of the tripe – ‘but that you should feel the Dignity of Labour; go forth erect into the cheerful morning air, and – stop there. Live hard and temperately, be respectful, exercise your self-denial, bring up your family on next-to-nothing, pay your rent as regularly as the clock strikes, be punctual in your dealing’.48

As we have noted, Dickens repeatedly emphasises that for the poor food is inescapably linked to questions of humanity and belonging.

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When Trotty takes Will Fern and Lillian back to his humble lodgings he gives them tea and bacon and goes without himself, just for the satisfaction he gets from helping them.49 In other words, the poor communicate their care for each other through food. As briefly noted in Chapter 2, other ‘Condition of England’ novelists at this time also stressed that the great lesson of the poor was their solidarity and willingness to help those less fortunate.50 The Chimes offered no simple, paternalistic solution to the problem of working-class scarcity and popular unrest; the bells ring out ambivalent meanings and could be heralding death or rebirth. But one thing is certain – there can be no going back. Dickens believed that nostalgia for earlier, supposedly better days was no more than a cul-de-sac and parodies the mock feudalism espoused by Disraeli’s Young England faction when Bowley entertains and plays skittles with his tenants. A red-faced Tory gentleman also lectures Trotty along with Cute and Filer early on, blathering about an imagined past: ‘Look at him! What an object! The good old times, the grand old times, the great old times! Those were the times for a bold peasantry, and all that sort of thing.’51 For Dickens, the key problem was that at the moment the poor were largely shut out from the good things that commercial and industrial progress had brought in abundance. Running an errand, Trotty rushes past many shops ‘decked out gaily … There were books and toys for the New Year, glittering trinkets for the New Year, dresses for the New Year, schemes of fortune for the New Year; new inventions to beguile it.’52 An image of plenitude is provided by the shop owned by the stout, rosy-cheeked Mrs Chickenstalker, on whose credit Trotty depends. A little shop, quite crammed and choked with the abundance of its stock; a perfectly voracious little shop, with a maw as accommodating and full as any shark’s. Cheese, butter, firewood, soap, pickles, matches, bacon, table-beer, peg-tops, sweetmeats, boys’ kites, birdseed, cold ham, birch brooms, hearth-stones, salt, vinegar, blacking, red-herrings, stationery, lard, mushroom-ketchup, staylaces, loaves of bread, shuttle-cocks, eggs, and slate-pencil; everything was fish that came to the net of this greedy little shop, and all these articles were in its net. How many other kinds of petty merchandise were there, it would be difficult to say; but balls of packthread, ropes of onions, pounds of candles, cabbage-nets, and brushes, hung in bunches from the ceiling, like extra-ordinary fruit; while various odd canisters emitting aromatic smells, established the veracity of the

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inscription over the outer door, which informed the public that the keeper of this little shop was a licensed dealer in tea, coffee, tobacco, pepper, and snuff.53

Mrs Chickenstalker’s shop is a symbol of hope for the future, embodies the idea of progress, which according to the Goblin of the Great Bell is the great law of Time.54 In this way, the text construes progress as a law of nature, presently thwarted by an economic and political order that fails to make it possible for the common people to live in hope despite massive accumulations of wealth. Although Dickens did not explicitly blame protectionist legislation for causing the problems of the poor in The Chimes, there can be little doubt that this was his chief target. Will Fern, after all, is an impoverished agricultural labourer driven to the city in search of work and bread; the complacent paternalist Sir Joseph Bowley is a greedy landlord. The Chimes was intended as a blow for the free trade cause and was the closest Dickens ever came to writing a work of political propaganda. Although Patrick Brantlinger noted this aspect some years ago, most literary critics have overlooked Dickens’s attachment to free trade, though it is impossible to understand his ideological development without it.55 Dickens was deeply troubled about capitalist modernity; although he regarded the growth of modern industry as the best guarantor of improvement for the majority in the long run, he hated the New Poor Law passionately and sympathised deeply with the immediate plight of the poor. The religion of free trade made it possible for him to develop structural rather than individual solutions to social and economic problems. He was careful, however, not to declare his support for free trade openly, though he did contribute an anonymous article to the Morning Chronicle nine months before The Chimes appeared. In this piece, Dickens took a satirical swipe at Peel’s administration, arguing that the whole nation, rich and poor, now conspired against a ‘sacred’ agricultural interest. The cry for the repeal of the Corn Laws, according to Dickens, went far beyond the Anti-Corn Law League: It may be heard moaning at night, through the straw-littered wards of Refuges for the Destitute; it may be read in the gaunt and terrible faces which make our streets terrible; it is muttered in the thankful grace pronounced by haggard wretches over the felon fare in gaols; it is inscribed in dreadful characters upon the walls of Fever Hospitals; and may be plainly traced in every record of mortality.56

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Free trade thus lay at the root of the ‘Condition of England’ question for Dickens from the mid-1840s; aristocratic protectionists that stood in its way were fighting a losing battle against the movement of history, which was on the side of the railway and modern industry: ‘The world is too much with us in this manufacturing interest, early and late; that is the great complaint and the great truth.’ From this perspective, Chartism was a similarly misguided and backward-looking movement. Not surprisingly perhaps, many readers of The Chimes missed its veiled message. Although an enthusiastic reviewer in The Economist was quick to recognise a ‘brother’ and praised the story as ‘a real light in our now darkened paths’, others were far more reticent; The Chimes was hardly comparable, after all, to propagandist works like Harriet Martineau’s Dawn Island, which unproblematically puffed the free trade utopia and which will be discussed in the following chapter. The Morning Chronicle condemned Dickens for ‘ranging party against party and class against class’, while The Times admitted the work might do good but deplored the fact that ‘there are some among the working classes who may find in it nourishment for discontent, and hatred of the more fortunate members of society’.57 On the other hand, the text’s ambiguities meant that it was more likely to find favour among working-class radicals. Based on the first two Christmas Books, the Northern Star labelled Dickens ‘the poet of the poor’. Contesting negative reviews, the paper was most impressed by Will Fern’s speech, which it asserted had secured Dickens’s public role ‘as the champion of the people!’58 It is unlikely that Dickens would have appreciated this attempt to enlist him in the class struggle, especially given his decidedly hostile view of the Chartist movement.59 However, he was keen to increase his popularity among working-class readers, who often found the writings of G. W. M. Reynolds more appealing, and this is probably the reason why Dickens left his political message conveniently vague.60 Progress and pride: Dombey and Son As we have seen, Dickens embraced the progressive, global mission of free trade passionately from the mid-1840s. To further the cause he established a periodical, the Daily News, early in the year the Corn Laws were finally repealed. The first issue carried a brief prospectus by Dickens in which he laid out the paper’s non-party,

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cross-class orientation. The Daily News was to stand for ‘Progress and Improvement’, meaning the bodily and intellectual elevation of ‘the People’, which was not ‘a class-question’ but involved recognising the ‘mutual dependence’ of employers and workers. Dickens appointed W. J. Fox, the Anti-Corn Law League orator, as leader writer and many other members of staff were free trade radicals, including John Forster and Douglas Jerrold; the paper’s financial backers included Sir Joshua Walmsley, the leader of the League in Liverpool. The first of Fox’s editorials, which were read and approved by Dickens, represented the League as the vanguard of the ‘most significant movement of our times’. Cobden, Bright and others were ‘the missionaries of a national policy, essential to the prosperity of the country, the peace of the world, and the progress of humanity’.61 Dickens resigned as editor in February 1846 to pursue his career as a novelist but he did contribute some poetry to the paper, including ‘The Hymn of the Wiltshire Labourers’, which employed the threatening tone characteristic of so much League propaganda and ended with a plea to the rich to remember their Christian responsibilities towards the poor: ‘Oh God remind them! In the bread/They break upon the knee/These sacred words may yet be read/“In memory of me”!/Oh God remind them! Of His sweet/ Compassion for the poor/And how He gave them Bread to eat/And went from door to door!’62 The novel Dickens published two years after this short-lived public conversion explored the private, moral contradictions of the gospel of free trade. The full title of the work made this clear: Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: Wholesale, Retail and for Exportation. In it, Dickens revealed how globalised capitalism had encouraged not only Cobden’s internationalism but also Dombey’s hubris. The protagonist is the archetypal ‘economic man’, the head of a big City firm grown fat on free trade, who believes that every aspect of life revolves around commerce and exchange value. Dombey’s family is his ‘Home Department’, just another branch of the firm. The economic system has enabled him to accumulate great wealth but at the expense of his human sympathies, which have atrophied. The novel traces Dombey’s fall and eventual redemption, its central problematic being whether it is possible to moralise free trade at an individual level. Dombey and Son is deeply ambivalent about capitalist progress in its various manifestations, and Dickens

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represented the global project of free trade as domination of nature at the outset in this memorable, frequently quoted passage: Those three words conveyed the one idea of Mr Dombey’s life. The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system in which they were the centre. Common abbreviations took new meanings in his eyes, and had sole reference to them. A. D. had no concern with anno Domini, but stood for anno Dombei – and Son.63

Dombey’s ‘master-vice’ is his blasphemous hubris and the destructive nature of his pride is frequently underlined in the text.64 Great wealth has given him an overweening sense of his own power and he has subordinated human relations entirely to accumulation: Dombey’s loving daughter Florence is rejected out of hand, while the sickly Paul is desired as an heir and Edith is bought on the marriage market after Paul’s mother dies in childbirth. Moreover, and despite Dombey’s haughtiness, he finds it impossible to hermetically seal his ‘Home Department’, which is dependent on the lower classes. This is especially so after the death of Mrs Dombey when Polly Toodle, the wife of a labourer on the railways, is employed as Paul’s wet-nurse. Dombey tries to reduce the relationship to the cash-nexus and even renames Polly for fear of class contamination: ‘I desire to make it a question of wages, altogether.’65 The novel demonstrates the futility and immorality of such exclusionary tactics and presents Dombey as all too human in the end, stupefied by Paul’s naive but penetrating question about the commodity of commodities: ‘Papa! What’s money?’66 If money is as powerful as his father believes, Paul wonders, why can it not bring his mother back or make him strong? Not that the spread of free trade capitalism has not conferred many positive material benefits; Dickens’s dialectical imagination allowed him to appreciate real achievements here and that is one reason why Marx admired him so much.67 The railway is the most powerful symbol of the irresistible force of capitalist modernity in the novel and it appears as both a creative and a destructive force. Staggs’s Gardens in Camden Town where the Toodles live, for example, is destroyed and rebuilt because of railway development

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during the course of the novel. We see how the ‘miserable waste ground, where the refuse-matter had been heaped of yore’ is replaced by ‘tiers of warehouses, crammed with rich goods and costly merchandise’. The new world that mushrooms offers the prospect of advance for many. Initially resistant to change, inhabitants of the neighbourhood now embrace it because of the many commercial opportunities that have opened up. There were railway patterns in its drapers’ shops, and railway journals in the windows of its newsmen. There were railway hotels, office-houses, lodging-houses, boarding-houses; railway plans, maps, views, wrappers, bottles, sandwich-boxes, and time-tables; railway hackney-coach and cab-stands; railway omnibuses, railway streets and buildings, railway hangers-on and parasites and flatterers out of all calculation. There was even railway time observed in clocks, as if the sun itself had given in … To and from the heart of this great change, all day and night, throbbing currents rushed and returned incessantly like its life’s blood. Crowds of people and mountains of goods, departing and arriving scores upon scores of times in every four-and-twenty hours, produced a fermentation in the place that was always in action.68

Railways are the iron veins and arteries that make possible the rapid circulation of both people and commodities. Some can consequently improve their lives; Mr Toodle, for example, advances from railway labourer to fireman then engine driver, and his family enjoy the material comforts that follow his rise. It is worth recalling here that when the achievements of capitalism were questioned from various quarters at mid-century, Dickens readily sprang to its defence, pointing, along with other free traders, to the many visible improvements that could be discerned among the urban working class.69 Reynolds’s Newspaper, however, was unconvinced, and ‘Gracchus’ reminded Dickens that ‘shops filled with jewellery and merchandize, opera houses crowded with gay visitors, or parks filled with horses’ are no proof of ‘national greatness’ in a society where ‘the skilled artisan and handicraftsman are pining in poverty’. Much to the paper’s disgruntlement – which unfairly labelled him ‘that lickspittle hanger-on to the skirts of Aristocracy’s robe’ – Dickens thought Chartism and protectionism two sides of the same coin, reactionary causes that had no place in the progressive future opened up by free trade finance.70

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As in Dickens’s other mature fiction, the target of criticism in Dombey and Son was not industry per se but rather commercial and financial capital. That his attitude towards industry softened after visiting paternalistic enterprises at Lowell, Massachusetts in 1842 is widely recognised by critics. Brantlinger has observed how Dickens finally rejected factory reform on his return from America, thereafter adopting ‘notions of class conflict to be found among free traders and political economists, according to which factory owners and workers – the “productive classes” – share interests against the upper class’.71 The figure of the bad factory owner Bounderby in Hard Times (1854) was an exception to his general approach. Positive images of industrial capitalists are much more commonly found in Dickens’s work and one could point to the favourable portrait of the ironmaster Rouncewell in Bleak House (1853) or the paternalistic Daniel Doyce in Little Dorrit (1857). Dickens’s views here were in line with those of the Anti-Corn Law League, as was his dismissive attitude towards factory reform. Dickens’s stance on the latter, however, changed over time and in the mid-1850s he came out in favour of legislative intervention, arguing the case against Martineau.72 Moreover, critics have often overlooked the fact that Dickens also returned from America with a heightened loathing for the immoral features of its economic system, particularly ‘the love of “smart-dealing”: which … enables many a knave to hold his head up with the best, who well deserves a halter’.73 This critical sensibility can certainly be read in Dombey and Son. Surrounded by the accumulation of dead labour, Dombey himself has become cold and atrophied. He is described ‘turning round in his easy chair, as one piece, and not as a man with limbs and joints’.74 Dickens here conveys the process of reification, in which people take on thing-like qualities while things become personified and endowed with life. Dombey is not a miser but takes great pride in the things money can buy. Nevertheless, his house and the objects in it are repulsive because they lack human warmth: The books precisely matched as to size, and drawn up in line, like soldiers, looked in their cold, hard, slippery uniforms, as if they had but one idea among them, and that was a freezer. The bookcase, glazed and locked, repudiated all familiarities. Mr Pitt, in bronze, on the top, with no trace of his celestial origin about him, guarded the unattainable treasure like an enchanted Moor. A dusty urn at each high corner, dug up from an ancient tomb, preached desolation

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and decay, as from two pulpits; and the chimney-glass, reflecting Mr Dombey and his portrait at one blow, seemed fraught with melancholy meditations.75

Ironically enough, it is the mirror above the fireplace that simultaneously captures the dual image of the real Dombey and the painting he has commissioned for display, which has grasped the psychological dynamics of the ‘Home Department’. Repeatedly, things seem to understand more than do people. When the guests return from Paul’s christening they share a dismal meal along with Pitt, who is shown ‘turning up his nose at a cold collation, set forth in a cold pomp of glass and silver, and looking more like a dead dinner lying in state than a social refreshment’.76 Dombey’s marriage to Edith Granger fails to bring a thaw, for he has bought her just like any other commodity. Following the usual Victorian practice, Dombey has the house decorated before the wedding and Edith indifferently inspects the work when it is completed. Rather than causing pleasure, the commodities on show pierce Edith’s body and mind: Slowly and thoughtfully did Edith wander alone through the mansion of which she was soon to be the lady: and little heed took she of all the elegance and splendour it began to display … The mimic roses on the walls and floors were set round with sharp thorns, that tore her breast; in every scrap of gold so dazzling to the eye, she saw some hateful atom of her purchase-money; the broad high mirrors showed her, at full length, a woman with a noble quality yet dwelling in her nature, who was too false to her better self, and too debased and lost, to save herself.77

Display and spectacle are vital aspects of this consumer culture. Edith is merely another object in Dombey’s collection, bought for purposes of conspicuous consumption, just like the fashionable carpets, wallpaper and gilt mirrors. Edith understands the nature of the social relations that underpin this exhibition and therefore glittering gold does not impress but only serves to remind her of her transformation into exchange value. She befriends Florence, precisely in order to protect her from a similar fate, from commodification. The idea that things are personified in Dombey’s world is systematically developed in chapter 36, sardonically entitled ‘Housewarming’, which describes a dinner party arranged to show off Dombey’s renovated home and new wife. Chief among the numerous guests are a wealthy banker and a director of the East

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India Company, the latter underlining the global nature of British capitalism. Dickens portrays the banker as a morally repugnant fraud, false in manner and attire, who affects an ascetic simplicity while all the time ‘reputed to be able to buy up anything – human Nature generally, if he should take it in his head to influence the money market in that direction’.78 Despite the dazzling and costly display that Dombey puts on, the occasion is a chilling, deathly affair for the guests are completely alienated from each other, none more so than Mr and Mrs Dombey, whose gross parody of romantic love is mocked by ornamental Cupids: Now, the spacious dining-room, with the company sitting round the glittering table, busy with their glittering spoons, and knives and forks, and plates, might have been taken for a grown-up exposition of Tom Tiddler’s ground, where children pick up gold and silver. Mr Dombey, as Tiddler, looked his character to admiration; and the long plateau of precious metal frosted, separated him from Mrs Dombey, whereon frosted Cupids offered scentless flowers to each of them, was allegorical to see.79

Dickens had a keen sense of the cultural significance of eating, as we have seen, and he was renowned for the lavish parties thrown to celebrate the completion of his novels.80 Dombey’s housewarming represents the antithesis of eating and drinking understood as an essentially human activity, for it entirely lacks sociability. There is no sense that the guests enjoy their meal, which proceeds mechanically as if it had a life of its own: ‘Through the various stages of rich meats and wines, continual gold and silver, dainties of earth, air, fire, and water, heaped-up fruits, and that unnecessary article in Mr Dombey’s banquets – ice – the dinner slowly made its way.’81 We should not conclude, however, that commodities always mocked their owners and reminded them of their alienated condition in this manner. Dickens was not arguing for a proto-Marxist concept of commodity fetishism. He believed that capitalist commodities were often harbingers of a better life for all classes, a belief commonly articulated by journalists who supported free trade such as Douglas Jerrold, whose views are discussed in more depth in the following chapter. Context and usage played a crucial role here. Compare, for instance, the Dombeys’ domestic material world with the description of the Toodles’ living room (Figure 12). This interior is partly observed through the eyes of Miss Tox, a middle-class visitor of the poor, a stock figure in ‘Condition

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of England’ novels of the period that documented the emergence of the female charity worker.82 Taking Dombey’s children on an illicit visit, Susan Nipper, we are told, ‘took sharp note of the furniture, the Dutch clock, the cupboard, the castle on the mantelpiece with red and green windows in it, susceptible of illumination by a candle-end within; and the pair of small black velvet kittens, each with a lady’s reticule in its mouth; regarded by the Staggs’s Gardeners as prodigies of imitative art’.83 Florence’s brittle but essentially good-hearted nurse takes ‘sharp note’ of the objects in the house in order to weigh up the moral nature of its inhabitants. The furniture, and especially the affordable Dutch clock produced in great numbers for a growing mass market, testified to their respectability; the railways standardised time notation across national economic space and as an eager employee, punctuality would be vitally important to Mr Toodle.84 There are, significantly, also some homely touches, brought to life in Hablot Browne’s illustration for the novel. The illuminated castle connects this humble parlour with the middle-class obsession for all things gothic or chivalric and emphasises that the domestic is an imaginative, emotional space. So too do the simultaneously decorative and useful kittens, made from a fashionable fabric and containing Mrs Toodle’s workbags.85 The fact that the latter, we are told, are seen by neighbours as ‘prodigies of imitative art’ should not be read as betraying the same kind of condescension that usually marked accounts of working-class interiors produced by middle-class observers. Dickens is entirely approving: commodities help make this place human. Dombey’s bankruptcy or fall is a direct result of his blasphemous hubris. The chapter that describes this process is fittingly entitled ‘Retribution’, for bankruptcy is represented in the novel as a simultaneously religious as well as economic judgement. Dombey’s firm goes bust and therefore the ‘Home Department’ comes crashing down. The servants refuse to believe the catastrophe has occurred until they read about it in the official Gazette, which published lists of bankruptcies. Dickens develops the theme of public humiliation at length when the contents of the house are finally auctioned off. Strangers invade the house, turning it upside down, measuring and valuing everything in sight: The men in the carpet caps go on tumbling the furniture about; and the gentlemen with the pens and ink make out inventories of it, and sit upon pieces of furniture never made to be sat upon, and eat bread

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Figure 12. Hablot Browne, ‘Miss Tox pays a visit to the Toodle family’, in Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (1848). and cheese from the public-house on other pieces of furniture never made to be eaten on, and seem to have a delight in appropriating precious articles to strange uses. Chaotic combinations of furniture also take place. Mattresses and bedding appear in the dining-room; the glass and china get into the conservatory; the great dinner service

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is set out in heaps on the long divan in the large drawing-room; and the stair-wires, made into fasces, decorate the marble chimneypieces. Finally, a rug, with a printed bill upon it, is hung out from the balcony; and a similar appendage graces either side of the hall door.86

The valuation is construed as a direct assault on the bourgeois home, a desecration of what should be a sacred, private space. The injunction to keep things in their proper place runs through much didactic Victorian writing and suggests just how important the maintenance of order was to the creation of the bourgeois household.87 Moreover, Dickens’s own obsession with domestic order has often been remarked upon by critics and he undoubtedly drew on his own fears and anxieties in this remarkable chapter.88 Rough men wearing ‘carpet caps’ thoughtlessly deconstruct that which has been so carefully assembled, turn the outside inside by eating bread and cheese from a public house on inappropriate items of furniture. This is the bourgeois world turned upside down, but a nightmare not a carnival. The costly dinner service, which not so long before had declared Dombey’s wealth and status, is now laid out for sale, while a ticketed rug, perhaps even the rug from the symbolic hearth, announces his disgrace to the world outside. Dombey’s goods are put on view, occasioning a kind of cannibalistic feast described minutely in the text. The house is over-run by buyers for a booming second-hand furniture trade, ‘herds of shabby vampires, Jew and Christian’, who finger and poke the plate-glass mirrors, grand piano, pictures, dinner knives, chairs and sofas, feather beds, drawers, silver spoons and forks, drapery and linen, all the while ‘disparaging everything’. Commodities are promiscuously handled and even punched by ‘dirty fists’ in what amounts to a brutal, sexualised violation that is witnessed by the whole neighbourhood. Finally, the sale: Then there is a palisade of tables made in the best drawing-room; and on the capital, french-polished, extending, telescopic range of Spanish mahogany dining-tables with turned legs, the pulpit of the Auctioneer is erected; and the herds of shabby vampires, Jew and Christian, the strangers fluffy and snuffy, and the stout men with the napless hats, congregate about it and sit upon everything within reach, mantel-pieces included, and begin to bid. Hot, humming, and dusty are the rooms all day; and – high above the heat, hum, and dust – the head and shoulders, voice and hammer, of the Auctioneer, are ever at work. The men in the carpet caps get flustered and vicious

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with tumbling the Lots about, and still the Lots are going, going, gone; still coming on. This lasts all day and three days following. The Capital Modern Household Furniture &c., is on sale.89

Dickens represents this quintessential bourgeois nightmare in almost sadistic detail. In a typically ironic inversion, a salesman not a preacher stands in the pulpit, and the sacred sphere of the home has been turned into a common marketplace. Keen to make amends for the racist portrayal of Fagin in Oliver Twist, Dickens emphasised that greed is not the monopoly of any single religion – a multi-faith group of vultures pick over the contents of the house until nothing is left: ‘The house is a ruin, and the rats fly from it.’ The moral stigma attaching to bankruptcy was very real, so it was little wonder that it loomed large in the imagination of Dickens and other Victorian novelists. Moreover, the fear of bankruptcy was grounded in reality; industrialisation increased the risks involved in economic activity and although accurate figures are difficult to come by, it seems that the number of bankruptcies rose from about 200 per annum in the 1730s to 1,000–1,500 per annum in the first half of the nineteenth century. The railway mania, which reached its climax as Dombey and Son was being published in instalments, was not financed out of accumulated wealth but depended on pyramid loans that necessarily encouraged speculation. The inevitable crash in 1847 shook the entire economy, with more than twenty long-established firms failing in a single month. Some commentators, including J. S. Mill, recommended harsh legal treatment of bankrupts, though the drift of legislation was to be increasingly more lenient. From 1849, bankrupts were classified according to how much personal blame was judged to have been involved in each individual case, which resulted in a complex system of moral grading that lacked uniformity and generated much complaint. One problem was that the boundaries between moral and immoral business activity were blurred; as Lord Brougham remarked, in a commercial country like England it was difficult to tell ‘where enterprise ends and reckless trading begins’.90 Clearly, Dickens was writing against the legislative trend in Dombey and Son, though it seems likely that his criticisms were quite widely shared; the novel sold very well indeed, averaging around 35,000 copies a month, which helped solve Dickens’s financial problems after a period of

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much uncertainty.91 Many readers no doubt delighted in Dombey’s ultimate and touching redemption through the love of his daughter Florence. However, it was his physical and mental breakdown – just punishment for Dombey’s lack of Christian feeling – that was more acutely drawn.92 Paul’s question, which haunted Dombey during the crisis, reverberated beyond the text: ‘He would repeat that childish question, “What is money?” and ponder on it, and think about it, and reason with himself, more or less connectedly, for a good answer.’93 Conclusion Dickens’s genius was not universally acknowledged in his own lifetime. Middle-class reviewers often criticised him for supposedly caricaturing the rich, while Reynolds’s Newspaper branded him a hypocrite nearly a decade after Dombey and Son appeared, reckoning that he ‘struck “twelve o’clock all at once”’ with his early success.94 Critics have often discussed such issues too simplistically and have either portrayed Dickens as an essentially ‘middle-class’ writer or else have sought to align him with the literature of popular radicalism.95 A cursory consideration of Dickens’s relationship to his disparate, heterogeneous market gives some sense of the complexities here. He was very keen, for instance, on the production of cheap editions of his works, though he was careful to dedicate the new series not to his working-class readers but to ‘the English people’, hoping in a preliminary advertisement that it might become ‘easily accessible as a possession by all classes of society’ – an archetypal civilising and humane commodity.96 However, even after his death in 1870 the Graphic could remark with justification that Dickens’s popularity was largely ‘confined to the middle and upper classes’, that he had ‘yet to become … the favourite of the poorer classes’, and pressed for a really cheap edition to reach this largely untapped market.97 The highly lucrative public-speaking tours from the late 1850s, moreover, were almost exclusively directed at more affluent audiences in both Britain and America. Dickens tailored his readings to suit their tastes, self-censoring radical passages from The Chimes, for instance. Ironically enough, at the same time that his writing was becoming more subversively critical of capitalism, he was making a fortune from performances sanitised so as not to offend the taste of middle-class audiences.98

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Such contradictions were quickly resolved after Dickens died. He became an unproblematic man of ‘the people’ almost overnight and was soon transformed into a ‘national institution’.99 Reynolds’s Newspaper conveniently forgot that it had previously labelled Dickens a hanger-on of the aristocracy and carried a long obituary on its front page that portrayed him as a paragon of British virtue and compassion. According to the paper, he was nothing other than a ‘high priest’ or ‘true prophet’, who ‘foretold the day when the British name would be humbled in the dust by the worship of Mammon’. Dickens was, in short, no less than the voice of the people: ‘He wrote for the people, because he could only be understood by the people, and because he was of the people.’ This populist appropriation of the author was clinched by his burial in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. Dickens himself had left clear instructions that he wanted to be laid to rest in ‘an inexpensive, unostentatious and strictly private manner’ near Gad’s Hill in Kent, but his wishes were ignored. Reynolds’s Newspaper staunchly defended this decision: ‘Charles Dickens was a pride of the nation, and the nation willed that he should sleep among its most glorious worthies.’100 As Orwell remarked in his typically flippant but spot-on manner, Dickens’s burial was in fact ‘a species of theft’.101 With the collusion of his family, Dickens’s body was stolen by the liberal state and his work mythologised as emblematic of a socially cohesive and economically progressive nation. The grave was left open for two days and many of those who paid their respects left flowers, according to Dickens’s son Henry, who later remembered ‘several small rough bouquets … tied up with pieces of rag’.102 James Fraser, recently appointed by Gladstone as Bishop of Manchester, delivered a sermon on Dickens as an ‘apostle of the people’, a man who preached a ‘cheery, joyous, gladsome message … the gospel of kindliness, of brotherly love, of sympathy in the widest sense of the word, of humanity’.103 The ecumenical Dean Stanley emphasised that Dickens spoke alike to those who experienced excess and scarcity: ‘Through his genius the rich man who fares sumptuously every day was brought to see Lazarus at his gate … If he has brought rich and poor together and made Englishmen feel more one family, he will not have lived in vain, nor will his bones have been laid in vain in this mausoleum of the English nation.’104 Dickens’s mature work, which we will return to in the epilogue, demonstrated the impossibility of effectively moralising free trade

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capitalism and healing the gulf between economics and ethics. The commodity culture that it had produced undoubtedly brought benefits for some, though it had also made it more difficult for individuals to treat each other as people rather than as things. However, his trenchant critique, more telling for being voiced by one who had embraced the free trade utopia and understood the allure of material goods only too well, was pushed to one side after his death in favour of an image of Dickens as a spokesman for a nascent liberal humanitarianism. It has proved very difficult to unpick this powerful mythology, not least because it was encouraged by Dickens in his own lifetime, as we have seen, and because it contained more than a grain of truth. He enjoyed reducing middle-class audiences to tears with stories of suffering, ever since his pre-publication readings of The Chimes for close friends. One of his listeners at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, in the early 1860s recalled that the ‘power that Dickens had over the hearts of the people at this time, was little short of marvellous’.105 It was not such a difficult task when Dickens was no longer around to appropriate him for a humanitarianism keen to shake off its negative connotations: Martineau was not being complimentary when she described Dickens as a ‘humanity monger’.106 And this is precisely what Dickens became – not a radical critic of consumer capitalism but instead a writer who did ‘more to draw English people together than any other influence at the time’.107 It seems unlikely that many of Dickens’s adoring middle-class fans fully appreciated his ‘sentimental radicalism’ – which for all its absences profoundly questioned the facile certainties of political economy – or had even much more than a superficial understanding of his deep misgivings about the morality of free trade capitalism.108 For a better insight into how free trade ideas were appropriated by the mass of middle-class consumers, we need to look beyond his complex, contradictory vision and turn our attention instead to the culture of the Anti-Corn Law League. Notes 1 Letter to Mrs Richard Watson, 11 July 1851, in Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson and Nina Burgis (eds), The letters of Charles Dickens 1850–1852 (Oxford, 1988), vol. IV, p. 428. For his views on

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the Great Exhibition, see the essay Dickens wrote with R. H. Horne, ‘The Great Exhibition and the little one’, Household Words, 5 July 1851, pp. 356–60; Patrick Brantlinger, The spirit of reform: British literature and politics, 1832–1867 (Cambridge, MA, 1977), p. 197. Extracts from William Watkins, Memoir of Charles Dickens, with anecdotes and recollections of his life (1870), reproduced in Reynolds’s Newspaper, 19 June 1870, p. 1; Peter Ackroyd, Dickens (1990), p. 349. Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 648. George Orwell, ‘Charles Dickens’ (1939), in Decline of the English murder and other essays (1965), pp. 115, 118. Bernard Darwin, The Dickens Advertiser: a collection of the advertisements in the original parts of novels (1930), pp. 197–208; Robert L. Patten, Dickens and his publishers (Oxford, 1978), pp. 218–20, 330; Juliet John, Dickens and mass culture (Oxford, 2010); Andy Williams, ‘Advertising and fiction in The Pickwick Papers’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 38:2 (2010), 319–35. James M. Brown, Dickens: novelist in the market-place (1982), p. 23; K. Theodore Hoppen, The mid-Victorian generation, 1846–1884 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 390–1. Leonard Smith, Sue J. Thornton, Jonathan Reinarz and Andrew N. Williams, ‘Please, sir, I want some more’, British Medical Journal, 337 (2008), a2722. The authors were mainly dieticians and paediatricians. See also Anne Digby, The Poor Law in nineteenth-century England and Wales (1982), pp. 16–17. For a thorough refutation of the optimistic view of workhouse dietaries, see Ian Miller, ‘Feeding in the workhouse: the institutional and ideological functions of food in Britain, ca. 1834– 70’, Journal of British Studies, 52:4 (2013), 940–62. Namely Jonathan Pereira’s Treatise on food and diet with observations on the dietetical regimen (New York, 1843), an early work of ‘scientific’ dietetics, which figured the human body as a machine. Pereira merely reproduced the six official dietaries issued by the Poor Law Commissioners; see pp. 236–42. Note also Anson Rabinbach, The human motor: energy, fatigue, and the origins of modernity (Berkeley, 1992), pp. 128–33. Sally Ledger, Dickens and the popular radical imagination (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 65–105. Charles Dickens, The adventures of Oliver Twist; or, the parish boy’s progress (1838; Oxford, 1999), p. 4. Dennis Walder, Dickens and religion (1981), pp. 52–3. Dickens, The adventures of Oliver Twist, pp. 10–11. Ibid., pp. 11–12.

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14 Ibid., p. 19. Dickens’s use of the cannibalism trope has been widely discussed. James E. Marlow, for example, has argued that the influence of Douglas Jerrold rather than Carlyle was decisive here. In his essay ‘Debtor and creditor’ (1841), Jerrold exclaimed, ‘How innocent, how guileless, is the man who never dreams that there are cannibals in London! Why, society is beset by anthropophagi.’ Cited in ‘English cannibalism: Dickens after 1859’, Studies in English Literature, 1500– 1900, 23:4 (1983), 650. For an exhaustive treatment of this theme, see Harry Stone, The night side of Dickens: cannibalism, passion, necessity (Columbus, 1994). 15 Dickens, The adventures of Oliver Twist, p. 31. 16 Ibid., p. 51. 17 Ibid., pp. 63, 86. Critics such as Gail Turley Houston have made too much of Dickens’s own experience of hunger when apprenticed to Warren’s blacking factory. See Consuming fictions: gender, class, and hunger in Dickens’s novels (Carbondale, 1994), p. 7. Ackroyd’s assessment in Dickens, pp. 79–80, is far more measured. 18 Christopher Hamlin, ‘Could you starve to death in England in 1839? The Chadwick-Farr controversy and the loss of the “social” in public health’, American Journal of Public Health, 85:6 (1995), 856–66. 19 Dickens, The adventures of Oliver Twist, p. 39. 20 Holly Ferneaux overplays Dickens’s radicalism in ‘“Worrying to death”: reinterpreting Dickens’s critique of the New Poor Law in Oliver Twist and contemporary adaptations’, The Dickensian, 101 (2005), 213–24. 21 Dickens, The adventures of Oliver Twist, pp. 177–8. 22 Ibid., p. 179. 23 Ibid., p. 27. 24 Ibid., p. 28. 25 Walder, Dickens and religion, p. 45. 26 The Times, 31 January 1837, p. 3. 27 Operative, 18 November 1838, p. 43. The writer reminded readers that Dickens was keen to safeguard his copyrights and prophesied that his works would be ignored by future readers as they were only of the moment. 28 Orwell, ‘Charles Dickens’, p. 97. 29 Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol in prose (1843) in A Christmas Carol and other Christmas writings (2003), p. 36. 30 Ibid., pp. 38–9. 31 Ibid., pp. 39–40. 32 Ibid., p. 45. 33 Ibid., p. 63. 34 Ibid., p. 72.

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35 Ibid., p. 75; Audrey Jaffe, ‘Spectacular sympathy: visuality and ideology in Dickens’s A Christmas Carol’, PMLA, 109:2 (1994), 254–65. 36 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, p. 98; Ledger, Dickens and the popular radical imagination, pp. 122–3; Walder, Dickens and religion, pp. 113–14. For Dickens’s criticism of evangelicalism, see also Norris Pope, Dickens and charity (1978), pp. 13–41. 37 Dickens, A Christmas Carol, pp. 98–9. 38 Ibid., pp. 100–1. 39 Ibid., p. 102. 40 Edinburgh Review, 163 (January 1845), 181; Ledger, Dickens and the popular radical imagination, p. 107. 41 Charles Dickens, The Chimes: a goblin story of some bells that rang an old year out and a new year in (Leipzig, 1845), p. 23. Alderman Cute was modelled on the Middlesex magistrate Sir Peter Laurie, whom Jerrold had ridiculed in the pages of Punch. 42 Dickens, The Chimes, p. 39. 43 Ibid., p. 11. 44 Ibid., pp. 13–14. 45 Ibid., p. 15. 46 Ibid., p. 19. 47 Ibid., pp. 20–1. 48 Ibid., p. 32. The Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, a determined supporter of the Corn Laws who had been attacked by Carlyle in Past and Present and who was regularly denounced in Anti-Corn Law League propaganda, provided Dickens with the model for Bowley. See Michael Shelden, ‘Dickens, The Chimes, and the Anti-Corn Law League’, Victorian Studies, 25:3 (1982), 339–41. 49 Dickens, The Chimes, pp. 42–3. 50 See Chapter 2, n. 77. 51 Dickens, The Chimes, p. 21. 52 Ibid., p. 29. 53 Ibid., p. 71. 54 Ibid., pp. 52–3. 55 Brantlinger, The spirit of reform, pp. 90–1, 105, 112–17. See also Shelden, ‘Dickens, The Chimes, and the Anti-Corn Law League’, pp. 329–53. 56 Morning Chronicle, 9 March 1844, p. 5. 57 The Economist, 18 January 1845, p. 54; Morning Chronicle, 17 December 1844, p. 3; The Times, 25 December 1844, p. 6. Mark Lemon and Gilbert A’Beckett’s stage adaptation of The Chimes, which opened at the Adelphi Theatre as soon as the work was published, was also blasted in the Morning Chronicle, 19 December 1844, p. 5. On

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62 63

64 65 66 67

68 69

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‘Please, sir, I want some more’ reception, see also Ledger, Dickens and the popular radical imagination, pp. 118–20. Northern Star, 21 December 1844, p. 3; 28 December 1844, p. 3. The paper later claimed that ‘Charles Dickens and others like him have effected a revolution in novel writing. It is the many, not the few, who now form the materials from which are quarried the heros and heroines of fiction.’ See ibid., 11 January 1845, p. 3. See Noel Peyrouton, ‘Dickens and the Chartists’, The Dickensian, 60 (1964), 78–88, 152–61. George H. Ford, Dickens and his readers: aspects of novel-criticism since 1836 (1955; New York, 1965), pp. 78–9. Daily News, 21 January 1846, p. 4; Gerald G. Grubb, ‘Dickens and the Daily News: the early issues’, Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 6:4 (1952), 234–46; David Roberts, ‘Charles Dickens and the Daily News: editorials and editorial writers’, Victorian Periodicals Review, 22:2 (1989), 51–63. Daily News, 14 February 1846, p. 5. Charles Dickens, Dealings with the Firm of Dombey and Son: wholesale, retail and for exportation (1848; 1982), p. 50. See also Jeff Nunokowa, The afterlife of property: domestic security and the Victorian novel (Princeton, 1994), p. 40; Paul Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition: the Victorian new world order (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 1. Dickens, Dombey and Son, p. 737. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 152. See S. S. Prawer, Karl Marx and world literature (Oxford, 1976). Differences between Dickens and Marx are highlighted in Andrew Sanders, Dickens and the spirit of the age (Oxford, 1999), pp. 137–9. Dickens, Dombey and Son, pp. 289–90. The railways are also a symbol of death in the novel; see especially pp. 354–5. See Dickens’s article in his Household narrative of current events, May 1850, p. 1, which attacked Ledru Rollin’s The decline of England (1850), a work by a radical émigré that generated considerable controversy. Note also the satirical article by W. H. Wills, Dickens’s righthand man on Household Words: ‘Christopher Shrimble on the Decline of England’, 6 July 1850, pp. 358–60. Reynolds’s Newspaper, 16 June 1850, p. 3; 8 June 1851, p. 7. The paper also claimed that Dickens enrolled himself as a special constable on 10 April 1848 and that he had gone ‘swaggering about the vicinity of the Regent’s park with the staff in his hand, while he knew perfectly well that the Chartists were over at Kennington – five miles distant!’ In his biography, Ackroyd notes that Dickens’s associate John Leech

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served as a special and concludes: ‘His friends were on the side of the government, and there is no reason to believe that Charles Dickens saw the matter any differently.’ Dickens, p. 544. Brantlinger, The spirit of reform, p. 91. See Ledger, Dickens and the popular radical imagination, p. 189. Charles Dickens, American notes for general circulation (1842), vol. II, p. 291. Dickens, Dombey and Son, p. 67. Ibid., p. 109. Ibid., p. 115. Ibid., p. 503. Edith understands the workings of the marriage market only too well. See p. 473. Ibid., p. 594. Ibid., p. 596. See Houston, Consuming fictions, p. 5; Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 223. A recent study of bourgeois dining is Rachel Rich, Bourgeois consumption: food, space and identity in London and Paris, 1850–1914 (Manchester, 2011). Dickens, Dombey and Son, p. 598. See Eileen Yeo, The contest for social science: relations and representations of gender and class (1996). Dickens, Dombey and Son, p. 125. E. P. Thompson, ‘Time, work discipline and industrial capitalism’, Past and Present, 38 (1967), 56–97; David Harvey, The condition of postmodernity: an enquiry into the origins of cultural change (1989). See Mark Girouard, The return to Camelot: chivalry and the English gentleman (New Haven, CT, 1981); for the continuing craze for black velvet, see Thomas Richards, The commodity culture of Victorian England: advertising and spectacle, 1851–1914 (1990), pp. 96–9. Dickens, Dombey and Son, p. 928. For a strong statement of this obsession, see Isabella Mary Beeton, Everyday cookery and housekeeping book (1861; 1872 edn), pp. i–lxiv. Andrew H. Miller, Novels behind glass: commodity culture and Victorian narrative (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 119–20; Ackroyd, Dickens, pp. 222–3. Dickens, Dombey and Son, p. 929. On the second-hand furniture trade, see Pat Kirkham, The London furniture trade, 1700–1870 (1988); Clive Edwards and Margaret Ponsonby, ‘Desirable commodity or practical necessity? The sale and consumption of second-hand furniture, 1750–1900’, in David Hussey and Margaret Ponsonby (eds), Buying for the home: shopping for the domestic from the seventeenth century to the present (Aldershot, 2008).

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90 Barbara Weiss, The hell of the English: bankruptcy and the Victorian Novel (Lewisburg, PA, 1986), pp. 25–6, 37–8, 43–4. See also Mary Poovey, Making a social body: British cultural formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1995), pp. 156–65; V. Markham Lester, Victorian insolvency: bankruptcy, imprisonment for debt, and company winding up in nineteenth century England (Oxford, 1995); Timothy L. Alborn, Conceiving companies: joint-stock politics in Victorian England (1998); James Taylor, Creating capitalism: joint-stock enterprise in British politics and culture, 1800–1870 (Woodbridge, 2006). 91 Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 528. 92 Walder, Dickens and religion, pp. 125–32; Weiss, The hell of the English, pp. 114–18. 93 Dickens, Dombey and Son, p. 957. 94 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 14 June 1857, p. 3. 95 Ian Haywood, The revolution in popular literature: print, politics, and the people, 1790–1860 (Cambridge, 2004), p. 163; Ledger, Dickens and the popular radical imagination, p. 150. 96 See Patten, Charles Dickens and his publishers, pp. 198, 299, 327–8; Walter Dexter, ‘The “Library”, the “Peoples” and “Charles Dickens” editions’, The Dickensian, 40 (1944), 186–7; Ackroyd, Dickens, p. 528. 97 Cited by Patten, Charles Dickens and his publishers, p. 327. 98 Dickens’s most popular reading was A Christmas Carol and he made a total of £45,000 from these tours, about half of his final estate. In Charles Dickens: the public readings (Oxford, 1975), p. lxvi, Philip Collins observes that Dickens ‘evidently judged that public readings were not the occasion for social criticism’. See also Susan L. Ferguson, ‘Dickens’s public readings and the Victorian author’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 41:4 (2001), 729–49; John, Dickens and mass culture, pp. 131–56. 99 Orwell, ‘Charles Dickens’, p. 81. 100 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 19 June 1870, p. 1. 101 Ackroyd, Dickens, p. xiii; Orwell, ‘Charles Dickens’, p. 80. 102 Henry Dickens, The recollections of Sir Henry Dickens, K.C. (1934), pp. 87–8. 103 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 19 June 1870, p. 3. 104 Daily Telegraph, 20 June 1870, reproduced as an appendix in G. A. Sala, Charles Dickens (1870; Farnborough, 1970), pp. 140–1, one of a slew of texts that helped construct the idea of a ‘people’s Dickens’. 105 Ledger, Dickens and the popular radical imagination, p. 124; Richard Robert Madden, The literary life and correspondence of the Countess of Blessington (1855), vol. II, pp. 400–1; Joyce Emmerson Muddock, Pages from an adventurous life (1907), p. 54.

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106 Brantlinger, The spirit of reform, p. 117. 107 John and Barbara Hammond, The age of the Chartists, 1832–1854: a study of discontent (1930; Hamden, CT, 1962), p. 257. See also ‘The Labour Party and the books that helped to make it’, Review of Reviews, June 1906, pp. 568–82. 108 Walter Bagehot labelled Dickens’s politics ‘sentimental radicalism’ in the late 1850s in contrast to the ‘philosophical radicalism’ of Benthamites and political economists. See Norris Pope, ‘The Old Curiosity Shop and the new: Dickens and the age of machinery’, Dickens Quarterly, 13:1 (1996), 13–14.

7

‘The Sublime of the Bazaar’: the religion of free trade and the making of modern consumerism Early in 1844, Richard Cobden, accompanied by Robert Moore and Peronnet Thompson, visited Harriet Martineau on her sick bed at Tynemouth. Cobden’s intention was to persuade Martineau to use her considerable propagandist powers to further the cause of the Anti-Corn Law League. He proved persuasive and the first result was Dawn Island, a short novella published in a special edition and sold at the great National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar held at the Covent Garden Theatre in London early in 1845.1 In typically moralistic fashion, the story described how free trade had civilised a race of South Pacific savages who, before their contact with European traders, had scraped out a bare existence on a seemingly paradisiacal island that was in fact blighted by superstition, scarcity and war. Drawing on an emerging corpus of ethnographic research on colonised peoples of colour in early Victorian England that was shot through with Eurocentric assumptions, Martineau catalogued the backward traditions and social forms that were thought to characterise ‘inferior’ races.2 Chief among these were human sacrifice and cannibalism, which the islanders regularly practised in order to propitiate their gods and tame the unruly forces of nature. Women were represented as an oppressed caste, while polygamy and infanticide were rife. Significantly, domestic life was almost non-existent: ‘There was nothing in the abodes of any of the inhabitants of the island to tempt them to stay within, – no coolness, nor cleanliness, nor comfort.’ All this is transformed with the arrival of the white man and the commodity form. After a course of basic instruction from the captain of the trading vessel in the importance of private property, free commercial exchange and the law of comparative advantage, ‘puerile man’ begins to realise that free trade will bring peace, plenty and, above all, hope for the future.3 Before departing,

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the captain urges the natives to substitute trade for human sacrifice and cannibalism, to offer up goods rather than bodies to the gods. As his ship sets sail, the captain smugly remarks that it ‘warmed my heart and filled my head to see how these children of nature were clearly destined to be carried on some way towards becoming men and Christians by my bringing Commerce to their shores’.4 Instead of the religion of the heart advocated by Dickens and others, the Anti-Corn Law League promoted the religion of free trade with all the proselytising fervour of converts who had seen the true light. Its reach was truly global, as Dawn Island made clear.5 Activists devised highly inventive ways of spreading the gospel, and the most spectacular of these was the Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar. Martineau was certainly not disappointed by it. In her laissez-faire reading of early-nineteenth-century history published five years later, she wrote: the porcelain and cutlery exhibitions, the mirrors and grindstones, the dolls and wheat-sacks, shoes and statuettes, antiquities and the last fashion of colored muslins, flannels and plated goods, and anatomical preparations, laces and books, made a curious and wonderful display, which was thought to produce more effect on some Parliamentary minds than all the eloquence yet uttered in the House of Commons.6

It was the promiscuous intermingling of politics and commerce most especially that was such a characteristic feature of the bazaar, which made Martineau anxious as well as excited. Mixed feelings only intensified after the Corn Laws were repealed; buying and selling at the Great Exhibition in 1851, for example, had turned it into the ‘Sublime of the Bazaar’, implying that the event in Hyde Park not only was a beautiful apotheosis but also simultaneously inspired awe and even terror.7 The Great Exhibition has attracted much attention from historians, especially in recent years, and we shall have more to say about it later. The main focus in this chapter, however, is provided instead by the National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar of 1845, a key moment in the making of modern consumerism. Whereas the commercial aspects of the Great Exhibition were deliberately downplayed – price tags were conspicuously absent, for instance – consumption of the profuse forms of Victorian commodity culture was openly paraded at the Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar.8 Archibald Prentice,

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the League’s official historian, underlined the formative influence of the bazaar.9 And more than half a century later, in his monumental biography of John Bright, G. M. Trevelyan similarly noted that the event ‘astonished that simple era with its magnificence and variety, and paved the way for the great Exhibition of 1851’.10 The bazaar should still command our attention, for it simultaneously celebrated and mobilised the changing consumption practices of an increasingly self-confident metropolitan middle class.11 Rather than search for putative origins of consumer culture, this chapter chiefly considers a vital and largely overlooked moment in a long evolution, a specific iteration of modern consumerism.12 Both the novelty and distinctive contribution made by the Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar to what was a complex and protracted transformation deserves consideration, not least because many of the issues and tensions that marked the development of capitalist consumerism in subsequent decades were explicitly revealed and openly discussed in the spring of 1845. Most importantly, we still need to link the culture with the politics of free trade finance, and a case study of the bazaar enables us to do this. This chapter attempts to bridge this historiographical divide by reconnecting the culture and politics of the Anti-Corn Law League and the wider project of free trade. First, the ways in which the bazaar pulled together commerce and politics is explored. The League was not only concerned with the abolition of excise duty on staple goods (especially ‘the people’s corn’) but was also keen to address the commodity world of Victorian capitalism more generally, and a focus on the bazaar helps unravel the significance of this preoccupation. The bazaar was labelled ‘a great school for propagating an idea’, and that idea encompassed far more than repeal of the Corn Laws. The chapter then goes on to consider the central role played by middle-class women in this area and suggests why their participation was thought vital. Next, contradictory attitudes towards consumption and continuing fears provoked by the commercialisation of politics are discussed in more detail. Finally, the chapter suggests, more speculatively and in the longer term, that the culture of the League – embodied in the bazaar of 1845 – helped prepare the ground for the emergence, or rather invention, of the modern consumer in Victorian England. This process was taken further in that quintessential space of liberal consumerism – the Crystal Palace – both in its initial embodiment at the Great Exhibition and

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in its more permanent manifestation after the structure was moved to Sydenham Hill three years later. The Bazaar idea As noted in Chapter 5, buying and selling goods in aid of a political cause had been done before the Anti-Corn Law League refined the art, most notably by abolitionists during the campaign to end the slave trade. The charity bazaar, which harnessed the enthusiasm and organisational abilities of middle-class women, went back a long way too, at least to the 1790s as Frank Prochaska has demonstrated.13 The form was also indebted to the exhibitions of manufactured goods popularised by Mechanics’ Institutes from the 1830s, which were intended to educate English artisans in design principles.14 Drawing on these antecedents, the Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar collapsed consumption and politics together and captured perfectly, both materially and symbolically, the ultimate ambition of the League: to turn the whole world into a giant bazaar.15 That was why the idea was taken up so enthusiastically early on. The initial impetus came, unsurprisingly, from the north. Wives and daughters of League activists in Lancashire first proposed holding a bazaar in Manchester to raise funds for propaganda purposes in autumn 1841, an idea that immediately received backing from the League’s chairman, George Wilson, among others. The final organising committee comprised 360 women from all over the country, with Catherine Cobden, wife of Richard Cobden, acting as president. Expressly designed ‘to carry the agitation of the corn laws home to the firesides of the community’, the event was staged over five days at the Theatre Royal from late January 1842 and attempted to be national in scope, featuring stalls from Bristol, Coventry, Leicester and Nottingham besides Lancashire and Yorkshire.16 John Bright paid for his own factory workers to attend the bazaar during the depths of economic depression. Bright’s sister Priscilla memorably described the carnival atmosphere when the party left Rochdale: The factory people all went yesterday to the Free Trade Bazaar, my brother paying for a cheap train to conduct them to Manchester. There were 700 of them, and George Wilson let them go in free. They assembled on the moor just below these gates; the women and girls

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went first in twos and threes, then followed a band of music, and the men and boys brought up the rear. It was really a beautiful sight. They were all so well-dressed and in such high spirits.17

The goods piled up in the Theatre Royal were supposed to demonstrate the rightness of the League’s principles to working-class as well as to middle-class spectators. However, it was hardly the most propitious moment to spread the free trade utopia among the less fortunate, and one wonders whether any of the workers who were treated to a free trip to the Manchester bazaar were among the crowd that besieged Bright’s residence seven months later demanding bread. The pro-free trade Manchester Times declared it all a resounding success, especially in terms of women’s participation, which underscored the specifically moral purposes of the bazaar: ‘The WOMEN OF BRITAIN have emphatically yet silently pleaded the cause of starving millions.’18 Conversely, The Times’s correspondent was decidedly unimpressed: ‘The bazaar on this occasion had nothing of novelty about it. The stalls were occupied by females, who distributed their fancy articles at a very high rate.’19 Despite the fact that many workers and Tories remained unmoved, the bazaar was a great success in both financial and propaganda terms, raising about £10,000 for the League.20 The venue chosen for the great bazaar held in the metropolis three years later exactly suited the deliberately theatrical nature of the event. The public entered Covent Garden Theatre as if attending a dramatic performance, through the entrance in Bow Street, then up the grand staircase to the ‘Shakespeare saloon’ that had been ‘fitted up with tapestry, carpets, shawls, etc. so as greatly to resemble the show room of a mercer’, as the Morning Herald revealingly observed. Passing a gigantic mirror priced at 200 guineas, spectators surveyed the main body of the theatre from above, the deliberate intention being to create a coup d’oeil, which ‘bursts at once upon the sight’.21 The pit and stage were boarded over and the whole theatre transformed into a ‘Gothic Hall’, with imitation panelled walls decorated with the mottoes of the League.22 From the roof hung rows of illuminated lamps, which bathed the objects on show in a subdued light. Shoppers’ nerves were soothed by light classical music played by a hired band. Thus, a great deal of attention was paid to the ambience of this proto-shopping mall, in order to recast shopping as an enjoyable, total experience. No expense

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was spared on the interior, which had been designed by Thomas Grieve, the most famous theatrical scene painter of his generation. The transparent roof and immense stained glass window helped to create a particularly luminous and romantic space: ‘The wondrous view had all the effect of enchantment; it seemed as if Aladdin’s palace had been called into existence by the spell of the magician … long vistas of pillars extending to a distance which imagination more than doubled.’23 Other observers employed orientalist tropes in order to convey associations of exoticism and luxury. As the report in the Morning Herald noted: ‘for a moment we could fancy ourselves transported to the east, and about to deal with Turks and Mussulmans’.24 The Bazaar featured stalls of goods of all descriptions from fortysix provincial towns and twelve districts of London, and it opened on Thursday 8 May, when visitors could admire but not purchase the exhibits after paying an entrance fee of 10s 6d.25 Buying and selling proper began the week after and proved so popular that the pavements outside the theatre were soon ‘crowded with well dressed people anxious to obtain admission’, and the normal charge was raised from a shilling to half-a-crown. In just seventeen days it attracted approximately 170,000 people and raised over £25,000 for the League.26 According to the news-sheet that appeared daily to publicise the event, the Bazaar demonstrated that ‘no protection is necessary to British industry and ingenuity, and that our artisans, if allowed to contest with foreigners on equal terms, would have no reason to dread competition’.27 Memorabilia was a prominent feature and included engraved portraits of Cobden and Bright, silk Free Trade waistcoats decorated with wheat sheaves (the League’s ubiquitous logo), Free Trade pocket handkerchiefs, sofa cushions and so on.28 Sympathetic press reports remarked approvingly on the way politics and material culture interpenetrated. Describing the ornamental ironworks on display at the Coalbrookdale stall, the Morning Herald drew attention to the vases, fountains, bronzes, ornamental grates, rocking chairs, garden seats and fire-screens – ‘on which were painted striking portraits of Messrs Cobden, Bright, and Villiers’ – that attracted knots of admiring spectators, ‘who were loud in their eulogisms’.29 Though fancy work remained important, the bazaar form was considerably developed and the undoubted impact and real novelty of the event can be attributed to the fact that the latest consumer

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goods now took pride of place on many stalls. Fashionable dresses for women and children as well as chintzes and fabrics of all kinds and for all purposes could be purchased, as one report observed: ‘Mr Hertz (a prominent Manchester manufacturer) has sent several dresses of printed lace, a new style of dress, of such light and gossamer texture that it seems as if it had been woven by fairy hands.’30 The latest furniture and, most importantly, inventions that promised to revolutionise the bourgeois home, including water filters, stoves and even washing machines, made an early public appearance. Sounding suspiciously like advertising copy, the Bazaar Gazette sang the praises of the latter and testified to the fact that ‘numerous respectable families who have long held them in constant use … kindly allowed themselves to be referred to as to their efficiency … These machines will wash the most delicate, as well as every other description of linen … The machine may also be worked by a very young or inexperienced person.’31 The frenzied nature of the buying and selling perturbed taste reformers writing in the Art Union magazine, who, like Martineau and others, sometimes found it all rather vulgar. They made a determined effort to separate those aspects perceived to be educational from those thought purely commercial: It was unfortunate for Art that this exposition was connected with a Bazaar – not merely because the ideas associated with a Bazaar are those of the luxurious products of laborious idleness – fancy work, screens, cushions, workbags, purses, and similar nicknackeries, – but because many articles most illustrative of manufactures were sold as fast as they were displayed, and disappeared from the stalls before they could be examined by the artist.

The flux of things disturbed the senses and made the aesthetic appreciation of objects difficult if not impossible. Even the most decorative and finely wrought goods – John Ridgeway’s porcelain, for example – ‘came like the gorgeous hues of summer’s evening clouds, and were even more transitory, for they were purchased as fast as they could be set out’.32 Many contemporary observers employed a similarly romantic idiom as they struggled to convey the excitement and meaning of what Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine accurately called ‘a sort of huge collection, not of one, but of all classes of social objects’.33 Tropes of profusion and plenitude marked the discourse elicited by the event, including the poem

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by William Gardner, which also represented the Bazaar as the place of all things: ‘If any person be in want/Of any single earthly article/ In wholesale hemp, or retail scant/In hugeous bulk, or viewless particle/Let him but thither bend his way/And, never asking – “Have you this/Or that?” – at once politely say/“Guide me to where what I want is”.’34 What these objects had in common of course was that they were all for sale; everything could be bought at the Bazaar; even the culture and politics of the movement itself were thoroughly commodified. Its educational function was repeatedly emphasised by supportive organs of the press including the Morning Chronicle, which referred to ‘this extraordinary museum’ and noted that, ‘as a spectacle, it is unsurpassed in beauty, attractiveness, and interest by any that our metropolis affords. It is a great social and political fact.’35 The Illustrated London News carried elaborate representations of this shopping festival (Figure 13) and drew particular attention to the inclusive, democratic nature of the event. Technological advances like the galvanic process had brought the good things in life to a wider circle than ever before: ‘This new system of gold-printing is intended to supersede the more expensive mode of embroidering fabrics with gold and silver for windowcurtains, and other descriptions of furniture. It is peculiarly adapted for long drawing-room draperies; the brilliancy of the gold is rather heightened than impaired by washing; and the fabric is as economical as it is elegant.’36 On side by now, The Times described the Bazaar as simultaneously ‘a museum of British manufactures’ and a ‘cathedral’ of modern commerce, and also emphasised the wide variety of goods on offer: ‘But of all that is to be purchased here, how can we speak? From a lady’s dress to a doll’s cap – from the priedieu of most elaborate manufacture to the smallest articles of the toilette – ay, even to soap and lavender-water – are all to be found here, and in the greatest profusion.’37 Despite their criticism, the Art Union enthused about the way in which scientific advances in production techniques meant that aesthetically pleasing goods were now affordable by more and more people, praising modern damask chair covers, for instance, that managed to successfully combine cheapness with good design, thereby ‘bringing taste within the daily range of observation, and exhibiting the arts of decorative design in articles of constant use’.38 And even this highbrow critic borrowed from the developing discourse of advertising in order to talk about

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Figure 13. Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar, Illustrated London News, 10 May 1845.

goods, as in the case of the latest carpet contributed by the AntiMonopoly Association of Glasgow: ‘no engraving can do justice to its gorgeous colouring, its close texture, and its luxurious softness. The sensation it gave to the tread was like that of elastic mountainmoss, in which the foot sinks to the instep and yet leaves no print behind.’39 In a novel move, activists combined fashion with virtue to create what we could call a new morality of style.40 In this eminently practical manner, middle-class consumption power was thus harnessed as a political force and channelled in appropriate ways so that individual desire and the collective progress of ‘the people’ could be harmonised. The following advertisement nicely captures the point: We have to announce the receipt of twenty packets of Reynold’s AntiCorn Plasters, which the proprietor says will commend themselves to all classes, whether Whig, Tory, or Radical, being free from all party

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bias, while they act upon the well-known political principle of yielding to pressure from without; and while they will speedily deprive the poor of ‘corns’, they will better enable him to get ‘bread’.41

Gigantism was symptomatic of the ambition and hubris of a metropolitan middle class enjoying its golden hour.42 One of the chief objects of attraction in the refreshment room – a giant plum cake that measured five feet in diameter, weighed 280 lbs and was iced with ‘nearly all the maxims which embody the religion of the League … so sweet and richly ornamented as to almost induce the visitor to swallow them’, according to the Morning Herald – was divided up and ritualistically consumed on the closing day of the exhibition.43 For its promoters, then, the Covent Garden Bazaar not only hastened the repeal of the Corn Laws the following year; it also portended a new way of life, allowing visitors to glimpse fragments of a cornucopian future or eat it in the form of a giant plum cake. The notion that the goods on sale at the Bazaar were pregnant with meaning and could even come to life was sometimes explicitly stated. One of the best examples can be found in Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, where commodities speak the message of free trade. It is worth quoting in full: The workman was represented by his handicraft; the toiling city was shadowed forth by rich stuffs, or glancing metals; and the fabrics, gorgeous from the loom, or dazzling from the forge, cried aloud, although they spoke not: – ‘Let us accomplish our mission; let us go forth over the earth, civilizing, aiding, comforting man; and bringing, in return, plenty to the board, and peace to the hearth, of the toilworn men and women who have fashioned us!’ A ‘Bazaar’ – ’tis a trite word for a commonplace thing – often an idle mart for children’s trumpery – for foolish goods brought forth of laborious idleness. But an idea can ennoble anything. Nobility, in its true sense, is an idea; and how grand is the idea which ennobles our Bazaar – which, even apart from its claims as an industrial exposition, makes it a great and holy thing. ‘Free Trade’. These words form a spell by which the world will yet be governed. They are the spirit of a dawning creed – a creed which already has found altars and temples worthy of its truth. The Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar has raised thoughts in the national mind which will not soon die. As a spectacle, it was magnificent in the extreme; but not more grand materially than it was morally. The crowd who saw it, thought as well as gazed. It was not a mere huge shop for selling wares; but a great school for propagating an idea.44

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Modern scholarship has rightly emphasised that goods carry complex symbolic meanings that require careful reading and contextualisation.45 Prescient observers in mid-Victorian England from across the ideological spectrum, including Karl Marx but also Charles Dickens as we saw in the previous chapter, as well as George Cruikshank as we shall see in a moment, noted at the time how commodities were increasingly taking on a life of their own or becoming ‘personified’ in this period.46 Clearly, what Marx famously called commodity fetishism was not merely the product of critical reason but was integral to the world view of a precocious bourgeoisie. The anonymous taste reformer writing in the Art Union sought to distance themselves from the event’s organisers, claiming political neutrality and an interest motivated purely by the agenda of aesthetic reform.47 In the end, however, the commodities on sale got the better of the author, and forced them to come off the fence. The Orkney and Shetland stall made it impossible not to take sides, for here spectators witnessed a stark contrast to the profusion that surrounded them elsewhere. All that was on display here was some knitted hosiery; protectionist legislation made it impossible for islanders to export cured fish and to develop their industry to its best advantage. Beneath a woodcut that represented their predicament was the motto ‘Starvation of the many for the luxury of the few.’48 Other ‘semi-civilized or savage races’ inhabited the margins of this account, including Tahitians. Like Martineau, the writer believed the best remedy for barbarism was the douceur of commerce, which, when combined with ‘the soothing influences of Art’, would eventually secure nothing less than Britain’s ‘supremacy in intelligence more glorious than the sway of the proudest empire that ever existed’.49 Women and the bazaar The consumer culture of the League depended upon the ‘co-operation of the ladies’, in Cobden’s phrase.50 The connection between women and consumption stretched back to the eighteenth century and before, though the link had often been portrayed in negative ways. More specifically, middle-class women had practical experience of consumer politics; they had been in the forefront of boycotts of goods produced by slave labour and had from the start

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been the main organisers of charity bazaars. As many scholars have remarked, the emerging social domain provided these women with an important field of action, particularly within philanthropy.51 The bazaar built on this tradition but developed and extended it within a new context; the Covent Garden Bazaar needs to be situated within a changing field of economic and social practices. Shopping was reinvented after the end of the Napoleonic Wars as urban middleclass elites eagerly spent their newly acquired or augmented wealth; ‘going a shopping’, as it was often termed, became a leisure pursuit for more and more people. Forms that many scholars have come to regard as fundamental to the development of modern consumer culture, particularly arcades and bazaars, made their first appearance. The great Manchester Bazaar, for example, which developed into Kendal Milne, an early department store, was established by John Watts in 1831.52 Another sign of a growing propensity to consume was the diffusion of goods like the piano, which rapidly replaced dining tables as the most expensive objects in middle-class homes in Glasgow and Edinburgh, as detailed research has shown, though they also proved popular among bourgeois consumers more generally. From the early 1860s it was possible to buy such status goods on the ‘three-year system’.53 Theodore Hoppen observes: The characteristic mid-Victorian liking for clutter required increasing expenditure on tables, chairs, sideboards, chiffoniers, escritoires, pianos, dumb waiters, (all covered with tasseled velvet cloths and runners), upon Staffordshire figurines, Doulton china, brass candlesticks, coal-scuttles, papier-mâché models, vases, stuffed birds, wax fruit, and framed photographs. Rapid fashion changes in something as fundamental as carpets regularly forced the ‘up-to-date’ into making new acquisitions as the flat-woven body carpets of the 1840s gave way in the 1850s to fitted pile or tapestry carpet.54

Such consumption practices drew an increasing amount of comment around mid-century. The ‘sport of shopping’ was satirised by Punch in 1844, for instance, which defined it as ‘the amusement of spending money at shops’. According to the writer, new spaces of consumption necessitated different techniques: ‘In street-shopping walk leisurely along, keeping a sharp look-out on the windows. In bazaar-shopping, beat each stall separately. Many patterns, colours, novelties, conveniences, and other articles will thus strike your

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eye, which you would otherwise have never wanted or dreamt of.’ Street-shopping related mainly to hosiery, drapery and ‘jewellery of the richer sort’, whereas bazaars and arcades, ‘though excellent sport’, tended to specialise in more frivolous goods – ‘toys and superfluities’.55 More straight-faced observers like the Board of Trade official and ardent free trader, George Porter, approvingly noted the visible effects of all this activity. According to Porter, writing in 1836 in the first edition of his best-selling work, The Progress of the Nation, prosperous London shopkeepers at the end of the previous century were generally without even sitting room carpets. The contrast with the present was striking: we now see, not carpets merely, but many articles of furniture which were formerly in use only among the nobility and gentry: the walls are covered by paintings and engravings, and the apartments contain evidences that some among the inmates cultivate one or more of those elegant accomplishments which tend so delightfully to refine the minds of individuals, and to sweeten the intercourse of families.56

The Anti-Corn Law League Bazaars were organised by the wives and daughters of the national and local leaders of the League, but the hundreds who took part were not simply goaded into action by George Wilson. The League’s chairman was certainly encouraging but their own efforts were of paramount importance.57 The bazaar proved attractive to them because it furnished a bridge between women’s knowledge and power within the private field of consumption and the public world of politics. The supposed distractions and shallow temptations of the world of goods could thus be checked or regulated by purposeful action in an emergent social domain.58 According to some male observers – including an anonymous versifier who penned doggerel to his imaginary bucolic relative – the bazaar nevertheless retained a certain licentiousness: ‘And Cousin of Suffolk, you’ll look with surprise/On the lady stall-keepers there/ They’ll dazzle you quite, with the light of their eyes/And tempt you to purchase their ware.’ But in case the cousin was misled, the writer continued, reassuringly: ‘They are not painted ladies, just come from the South/Or in hothouse or greenhouse unfurl’d/ But England’s own flowers, and rear’d in her bowers/Beloved and admir’d all over the world.’59 More typical were representations of the bazaar that emphasised its family nature, such as the image in

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Figure 14. Shopping at the League Bazaar, Illustrated London News, 17 May 1845.

the Illustrated London News shown in Figure 14; women served on the stalls but were also shown contemplating and enjoying goods with their husbands and children. In this way a large and influential cross-section of the metropolitan middle class were taught crucial lessons in the micro as well as the macro politics of consumption by this proto-department store. Middle-class consumers were deliberately encouraged to shop as families, and this was probably a relatively new phenomenon.60 On a more elevated level, other organs of the press emphasised how women’s participation would help humanise or moralise the

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capitalist market. Free trade proposed its own distinctive form of ‘moral economy’, as The Economist underlined at the time, and women it was thought had a vital role to play here: We see stalls bearing the inscription of nearly every important town and neighbourhood in the kingdom, containing the richest specimens of all that art and ingenuity and taste can display, presided over by the votaries of a great principle, and by those who have been moved to a compassionate sympathy for the sufferings of the great masses of our fellow countrymen in the recent years of scarcity and distress; – who, now that those clouds are passed, and a more happy and prosperous period accompanies a time of plenty, are still willing to make any personal effort or sacrifice to save their neighbours and their country from a recurrence of such scenes as have stricken with grief and sorrow the hearts of the stoutest during the late years of suffering.61

The League spoke to plenty but was also keen to explain scarcity and mobilise the forces it unleashed. As we saw in Chapter 2, only a few years earlier during the general strike of 1842 the leadership inflamed the volatile food issue to further the case for repeal. Moreover, despite The Economist’s optimism and all the hyperbole, the shadow of hunger and even cannibalism hung over the Bazaar, for working people still faced hard times, not least in Ireland where the full force of the potato famine was just about to break. Before leaving Covent Garden Theatre, visitors had to pass a large painting representing Count Ugolino starving to death with his sons. Inscribed beneath was the slogan: ‘The clergy and aristocracy of England would shudder at inflicting such a cruelty. Let them consider whether taxes on bread, however indirectly raised, may not produce the same suffering.’62 It was in the context of free trade utopianism but also continuing anxieties about the effects of abject suffering and degeneration that women’s moral influence was singled out. As literary scholars have demonstrated, middle-class women’s role in moralising the capitalist market was a key theme for mid-Victorian novelists like Elizabeth Gaskell; one thinks, most obviously, of the character of Margaret Hale in North and South (1855) who is the antithesis of the hedonistic female consumer.63 The ‘votaries of a great principle’, it was believed, would not only help introduce more middle-class families to an expansive world of consumption but could also teach forbearance and provide hope for those who were, for the time being at any rate, shut out from this exciting new order.

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Handling contradiction The League managed to bring together constituencies of gender but also attempted to overcome differences of locality, age, class (with not much success after 1842, it must be said) and religion. The new consumption practices sketched above generated deep unease among various groups. A plebeian supporter of the League, Joseph Livesey, struck an apocalyptic note in an article on the ‘evils of shopping’ in the Struggle, for example, and singled out workingclass women who adopted the consumption practices of their social superiors for particular censure: ‘On the part of the consumers, this system is a source of loss, extravagance, disputes, litigation, and immorality.’ For Livesey, shopping and buying were quite distinct activities, the former dependent on the growing availability of easy credit and unchecked desire: ‘the thorough-going shopping woman, is she who has a husband at regular work, getting his 20s or more a week, and perhaps one or two girls at the steam-looms … Drinking and idleness are too often the accompaniments of shopping.’64 The pull between moral restraint and unlicensed desire was certainly not new and can be found in very different contexts across time.65 What was novel, however, were the ways in which the League handled such contradictions. John Bright himself literally embodied these contradictions. The plain-speaking ‘Father Bright’, as Marx liked to call him, also prided himself on plain-living. He was notoriously thrifty, kept an ‘almost accusing tally’ of personal expenditure in his diary and even skimped, unforgivably, on his fishing tackle.66 Bright quite self-consciously rejected the fashionable attire and home furnishings of the successful public man, adopting instead the already long outmoded Quaker dress early in his career and living in simple if not quite spartan style. Trevelyan underlined this aspect, observing that at One Ash, Bright’s Rochdale home, there was ‘no aping the wealthier classes, even when in later years he became well off … There was no following the fashions, but adherence rather to the old Quaker standards … On a tour abroad, he writes that he is “abstaining from buying things, as our house is full of things.” Many people would have thought it bare.’67 Bright was, unsurprisingly, an early and enthusiastic convert to the temperance cause, though many of his peers in the League were far more profligate in their spending habits.68

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Such tensions were clearly exposed during the musical soirée or ‘final promenade’ organised for the last night of the Bazaar. The committee of women who had organised the Manchester Bazaar in 1842 had wanted to organise something similar but, as a correspondent remarked in The Times, ‘the gentleman saints of the League, considering that a ball is a “Vanity Fair,” and both wicked and immoral, have refused to countenance it, [and] much to the chagrin of the ladies’.69 Three years later the women were not to be thwarted, and the editor noted that many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, attended this invitation-only event, held to honour ‘the fair dames and damsels’ who had acted as saleswomen. Entertainments therefore were of ‘a somewhat more gay and trivial character than might suit the taste or harmonise with the prejudices of the prim sectarians who form a large proportion of the constituency of the Anti-Corn Law League’. Reconciling ethical and religious difference was a key theme in the editorial: Side by side with the Independent minister might be seen the Unitarian, and in a far corner was to be detected a Wesleyan looking awful astonishment at the profane vanities above and around him; but, worse than all seemed to those who in the tariff of sanctity stand at the highest rate of import duty when the gaieties of life are concerned – shocking to relate, there were to be seen a dozen or so of dashing young Quakers, in ‘cutaway’ coats with diminished collars, white waistcoats, and unexceptionable kid gloves; and these were really the cavaliers of the assemblage, meeting their reward in the smiles and sly gaiety of their proverbially pretty partners.70

There were serious concerns among some middle-class fractions at the prospect of hedonistic consumption propelled by heightened fashion-consciousness, as the editor underlined. The point, however, was that such differences could be buried in the ideology of free trade that enabled influential sections of the middle classes to ‘make their peace with indulgence’ at this time.71 Many leaders of the League attended the soirée, including Dr Bowring, Peronnet Thompson, Robert Moore, W. J. Fox and Dr Price. Dancing was proposed at 11 o’clock but for some this was going too far. Indeed, more strait-laced elements had left as soon as the music had commenced. Dr Price along with other puritans fought off calls for dancing until midnight, then quit the theatre. As the editor of The

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Times observed, ‘the broad shield of the League covered them all’, though only just.72 As Chapter 2 emphasised, the Anti-Corn Law League managed to successfully stitch together the interests of different constituencies. Dissenters played a major role in the organisation, as historians have often observed, and Bright and Dr Price were not the only ones to turn up their noses at the showy excesses of middle-class consumerism; Edward Niall’s Nonconformist thought the bazaar lowered the tone of the campaign, for instance.73 Sometimes prioritising and celebrating the role of consumption thus generated discord within the ranks, but it also provided the League with a common platform that enabled its leaders to fashion a universalist appeal to ‘consumers’, which transcended, in theory at least, divisions of class, religion and gender. Consumption practices and free trade ideology helped unify the middle classes as much as if not more than anything else did, certainly more than rigid ideas about separate spheres that recent historians have shown to be an often unreliable guide to lived experience.74 Inventing the ‘consumer’ The National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar of 1845 not only raised a great deal of money for the cause of free trade; it also celebrated in suitably spectacular and dramatic ways an emergent middleclass consumerism. It helped bring the consumer centre stage and develop new ways of talking about consumption and the consumer. This had profound intellectual as well as practical ramifications. Although Adam Smith had asserted in 1776 that ‘consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer’ in the Wealth of Nations, the sphere of consumption was marginalised within classical political economy.75 To be sure, Thomas Malthus and Christian economists like Thomas Chalmers adopted underconsumptionist arguments in the 1820s, arguing that capital and commodity gluts would recur as ‘middle-class avarice outpaced the natural limits of consumer demand’.76 Ricardians, however, continued to propound Say’s law, which maintained that, under favourable conditions, supply would always create its own demand, and thus tended to regard consumption as unproblematic.77 Indeed, it was not until the marginalist

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revolution during the last quarter of the nineteenth century – associated in Britain particularly with the mathematised economics of Stanley Jevons and coinciding with a crisis of faith in the ideology of free trade and increasing doubts about Britain’s position as the leading economic power in the world – that the consumer was treated at all seriously by professional economists.78 Though scholars such as Regenia Gagnier have argued that Jevons developed a ‘hedonic calculus’ that foregrounded the role of an acquisitive, individual consumer devoid of any moral sensibility, even Jevons was conflicted about consumption. He certainly embraced the free trade utopia, once describing the Great Exhibition as the ‘place of all places’, but it is simplistic to regard him as merely an optimistic spokesman for a new, distinctively modern and amoral consumerism.79 Jevons famously worried about the natural limits to capitalist growth and devised an outlandish if ingenious theory that blamed economic cycles on sunspot activity to shore up his belief in free trade. He was also keen to denounce the profligate expenditure of middle-class consumers and therefore continued like many intellectuals to regard consumption issues as inextricably bound up with questions of morality.80 Even as late as 1890, the key figure in the discipline of economics, Alfred Marshall, could justifiably complain that ‘Until recently the subject of demand or consumption has been somewhat neglected.’81 Unease about consumption at the theoretical level was echoed in less rarefied discourses and texts; again, we should not overestimate the speed of change or underplay the deep ambivalence towards the world of goods often found within the ranks of the middle classes themselves. Anxieties did not abate overnight. Mrs Beeton’s parsimony and concern for thriftiness that marked the hugely popular Book of Household Management (1861) is just one example of continuing concern; the spread of middle-class retail co-operative stores in the metropolis is another. Public controversy over the rise of Whiteley’s ‘Universal Provider’ in the 1870s similarly points up the partial, long-drawn-out nature of the transformations sketched in this chapter.82 As this book has suggested, despite this theoretical neglect and continuing contestation, from the 1840s onwards the figure of the consumer assumed greater importance in British political as well as social and economic life. The League can take a good deal of credit for this as it attempted to overturn negative conceptions of consumption that associated it primarily with destruction and waste.

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The term was not used much before the 1840s; the traditional designation was purchaser or customer, and these terms were freighted differently. As Raymond Williams observed: ‘The relative decline of customer, used from C15 to describe a buyer or purchaser, is significant here, in that customer had always implied some degree of regular and continuing relationship to a supplier, whereas consumer indicates the more abstract figure in a more abstract market … to say user rather than consumer is still to express a relevant distinction.’83 Although Chartists sought market regulation to protect poor consumers and organised to further their political as well as economic interests, it is hard to find positive uses of the new designation in the movement press; as noted in Chapter 5, the identity of consumer was usually negatively construed by them. It was the League who employed this re-evaluated term and described the benefits of placing the consumer interest centre stage in universalist terms: working-class as well as middle-class lives would be greatly improved as their consumption standards rose and tastes improved. Thus, leading free traders rejected the common charge made against them by Chartist and other adversaries, arguing that in the longer term repeal of the Corn Laws would not result in lower remuneration for industrial workers as masters reduced pay rates. Though there was no straightforward unanimity on economic doctrine, League ideologues rejected the iron law of wages and instead asserted a causal link between high wages and free trade, because the latter would eventually increase competition. During the parliamentary debate on the Corn Laws in 1842, for example, Cobden famously rebutted the suggestion that masters wanted to grind workers down by means of repeal and insisted that all classes would benefit from an increase in popular consumption: ‘I hope the manufacturers will have credit for taking a rather more enlightened view of their interest than to conclude that the impoverishment of the multitude, who are the great consumers of all that they produce, could ever tend to promote the prosperity of our manufactures.’84 In short, the League aimed in its own way to remoralise the sphere of consumption, and that is what its leaders meant when they claimed that it was nothing less than a new religion or way of life. And at the centre of this way of life was the commodity. The League effectively harnessed middle-class consumer power and its cultural project had at its core the figure of an acquisitive consumer with expansive desires. The chief business of political associations,

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according to the leadership of the League, was to protect and further the freedom of consumers. They preferred as a rule to use the language of the ‘people’ rather than the ‘consumer’ certainly, though even Bright lamented how workers were ‘prevented from continuing or becoming consumers or purchasers of manufactured goods’ during the depression of the early 1840s.85 Changes in political and social practice tended to precede changes at the linguistic level; buying and selling were profoundly transformed during the mid nineteenth century before the modern concept of the consumer had fully developed. Decisive shifts did occur around mid-century, including at the level of representation: the Victorians invented the modern consumer as a desiring agent and abstract category. As we have seen, during the 1840s ‘going a shopping’ became a leisure pursuit for more and more people and the term ‘consumer’ was gradually brought to the fore. Moreover, middle-class consumers also began slowly to organise themselves as specific interest groups and describe themselves as consumers, especially in relation to natural monopolies such as gas and water.86 Some commentators readily adopted the new idiom, especially, we might tentatively suggest, if their economic interests and professional lives were bound up less with the world of work and production, as was Bright’s, and more with trade and commerce. Joseph Livesey, for instance, made his living and improved his status as a cheese merchant. George Porter at the Board of Trade meticulously documented consumer desire and fed the Victorian ‘appetite for inventory’.87 In the second edition of The Progress of the Nation, which was published a year after the Corn Laws were repealed, Porter supported abolition of the sugar duty as ‘a measure of justice to the consumer’, and reckoned the change would quicken technological advance in the production of this staple commodity.88 Like other free traders, he believed that growing prosperity and material abundance demonstrated the rightness of his economic principles. ‘Progress’, for example, was measured in terms of the ability of the nation to satisfy the expanding needs of the majority. According to Porter, improvement was most visible among ‘those who are called, by a somewhat arbitrary distinction, “the working classes”’, but was not confined to that stratum as all classes benefited from the diffusion of ‘comforts’. Porter also stressed how consumption practices invariably raised issues of morality; standards of material ‘comfort’ and ‘respectability’ were intimately bound together as

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goods were the visible markers of social status and individual worth. Sheffield artisans were singled out for special praise by Porter, who drew attention to their domestic pride: ‘the floors are carpeted, and the tables are usually of mahogany; chests of drawers of the same material are commonly seen, and so in most cases is a clock also, the possession of which article of furniture has often been pointed out as the certain indication of prosperity and of personal respectability on the part of the working man’.89 The Great Exhibition, held at Hyde Park in the summer of 1851, undoubtedly did a great deal to further popularise both ideas of free trade as well as the concept of the consumer. Despite the justified criticism that has been levelled at his work, the cultural historian Thomas Richards has usefully suggested how the exhibition helped to elaborate new, more sophisticated modes of commodity representation that transformed the advertising industry after mid-century.90 And although far less obviously partisan than its Anti-Corn Law League prototype, the event also proclaimed the hegemony of free trade on a global stage.91 By the time it was held, the protectionist cause was completely lost, apart from the odd spasm, and what had already become the ‘tradition’ of free trade (with a pantheon of heroes and an official history) remained active and alert, more than capable of routing the enemy once again if necessary.92 According to Jeffrey Auerbach’s account, organisers of the exhibition foregrounded the themes of peace and progress and deliberately marginalised the ideology of free trade in order to placate protectionists (and working-class radicals, one might add) in the wake of the repeal of the Corn Laws.93 The Great Exhibition was certainly presented by its promoters as marking a dividing line between an earlier phase of development, characterised by industrial and commercial dynamism but also profound social conflict, and a more orderly, relatively harmonious and inclusive present. As is well known, middle-class observers sang the praises of the working-class crowds that flocked to see the exhibition on shilling days in the summer of 1851 in the most patronising, self-congratulatory manner, interpreting their good behaviour as evidence of their pacification and readiness for ‘improvement’.94 Modern scholarship has rightly stressed the multivalent meanings of the event as well as the symbolically charged architectural space in which it was staged.95 However, despite the undeniable complexity of this ‘Victorian prism’, the gospel of free trade was of central importance,

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embedded at a deep structural level in both the exhibition and the building itself.96 As the Congregationalist minister William Forster opined when the exhibition closed, the Crystal Palace was ‘essentially an embodiment of free trade and universal-peace ideas’.97 Reynolds’s Newspaper may have dismissed the event as ‘the monster Exhibition humbug’, but millions of middle-class and working-class visitors flocked to see it and the general response was far more positive.98 Crowds delighted in this elaborate inventory of Victorian things, the material analogue of Porter’s work. The Crystal Palace was designed to display a dazzling array of commodities produced by capitalist exchange, best facilitated by free trade. Contemporaries like Dickens and Martineau felt overwhelmed by the things on display and worried about commercialism. Less sensitive souls grasped the possibilities with both hands, including the department store magnate, William Whiteley, who, after visiting the exhibition as a young man, began to imagine ‘universal providers’ shops’ with plate-glass fronts.99 The sense of being on the cusp of a world that promised greater comforts for all, but which was also likely to be more disorienting and potentially dangerous, informed George Cruikshank’s hallucinogenic image shown in Figure 15.100 It appeared in the novel Henry Mayhew published to cash in on the exhibition mania. Here we see a spectral host of commodities exploding outwards from the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. Typically personified, the goods take on a life of their own: furniture, cannon, clothing of all kinds, musical instruments, clocks, toys, home furnishings, ironware, even weird figures in diving suits, leave their temporary home in search of new resting places. The steam locomotive just off centre denotes the annihilation of time and space brought about by the revolution in transport that carried goods to new markets faster than ever before, while the elephant and tigerskin rugs connote the exoticism and material possibilities of empire. Cruikshank’s caricature supports the idea that the Great Exhibition was indeed a turning point of sorts. Like Martineau, the maverick mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage, who is often credited with being the originator of the programmable computer, was critical of the Great Exhibition, not because it was too commercial but because it did not go far enough. Babbage celebrated what he called ‘the world’s great bazaar’ as a showcase for the civilising influences of free trade and unbridled competition: ‘the free and unlimited exchange

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Figure 15. George Cruikshank, ‘The dispersion of the works of all nations from the Great Exhibition of 1851’, in Henry Mayhew, 1851: or, the adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys and family (1851).

of commodities between nations, contributes to the advantage and the wealth of all’.101 Typically ahead of his time in this as in so much else, Babbage fully embraced the new idiom and situated a universal category of the consumer at the centre of his account: ‘all men are consumers, and as such their common bond of interest is to purchase every thing in the cheapest market’. It was the consumer, pursuing his or her own self-interest, that disciplined both producers and middlemen to the advantage of all. The only major complaint was that goods were not openly priced at the Great Exhibition, for this undermined its fundamental educational role, which was ‘to instruct the consumer in the art of judging of the character of the commodity’. The Royal Commission’s decision to separate display from exchange (influenced perhaps by the overt commercialism of the Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar), according to Babbage, ‘puts aside the greatest of all interests, that of the consumer, in order to favour a small and particular class – the middle-men’.102

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Over the period covered by this book, it seems likely that more individuals came to believe in the positive influence of goods and the improving effects of the desire for them. Trevelyan’s suggestive remark about John Bright grasping the fact that the connection between a good coat and the franchise was a ‘first postulate of civilised society’ may be recalled. The Chartist retort during the ‘Hungry Forties’ was that unless they gained the vote they would not get a decent meal, let alone a good coat. However, leaders of the League insisted that the new consumer culture, with its own particular freedoms and restraints, was potentially within reach of everybody, both at home and abroad, and the spread of comforts especially after mid-century seemed to strengthen their hand. Richard Cobden and other free trade ideologues were not the only ones to emphasise the global nature of this project. Henry Bellows, the New York Unitarian, expressed the ambition nicely in 1853: ‘the productive industry of the whole race will soon be required to meet the demands of the consumers’, Bellows wrote, ‘for when all the world are great consumers, all the world must be great producers’.103 The plethora of commodities produced by modern industry spoke the message of free trade and would, it was widely believed, eventually civilise the savage in metropole and colony. Martineau’s South Sea head-hunter and Porter’s Sheffield artisan thus had a good deal in common, might equally be moulded into modern consumers as well as workers, simultaneously stimulated and tamed by the world of goods.104 Dawn Island caught the mood well: this was the utopian promise of the National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar of 1845, continued in a less partisan manner at Hyde Park six years later. Conclusion Public debate about what to do with the Crystal Palace started to rage before the doors of the Great Exhibition had closed. Recognising that they were purchasing what had become in a few short months a national institution with a royal seal of approval, a group of speculators eager to turn a profit bought the structure. The designer and taste professional Owen Jones, who had conceived the original, controversial polychromatic colour scheme, was hired to work on the much-enlarged structure that was opened at Sydenham Hill, South London in 1854. Believing that art should reflect the

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spirit of its own age – which, he argued, it signally failed to do at the moment – Jones underlined the need for specifically capitalist forms of artistic expression. Whereas in earlier civilisations religious belief had dominated the artistic field, contemporary society instead worshipped moneymaking but was yet to find appropriate forms with which to express this changed reality. Jones spoke plainly about the present: ‘Mammon is the god: Industry and Commerce are the highpriests.’ Failure to acknowledge this fact and think it through had resulted in a cacophony of styles and had produced an ‘age of ugliness’. The solution lay in the education of consumer taste, which would lead to greater demand for aesthetically pleasing goods across all social classes. The plan was directly underpinned by free commercial exchange – ‘Free trade supplies food and raiment to all’, Jones optimistically opined – and the Crystal Palace furnished no less than a kind of school or object lesson for the future.105 For Jones, the building represented a qualitatively new kind of space, a material sign of a new order of things in which divisions between classes would be healed by a plenitude of tasteful commodities. Though laudable aims of rational recreation were written into the Crystal Palace Company’s deed of settlement, commercial imperatives proved irresistible from the start and this drew sharp criticism. Joseph Paxton, the architect of the original structure and a motive force behind redevelopment, was accused, for example, of wanting to turn the Crystal Palace into ‘a great trade bazaar’, charges that he fiercely rebutted.106 Liberal MP and the company’s first chairman, Samuel Laing, did nothing to quell fears when he declared at a ceremony to mark the raising of the first pillar that the Palace ‘might be rendered the largest advertising van in the world’.107 When the new Crystal Palace was finally opened the public were astonished by the heterogeneous mix of attractions on offer at Sydenham; it was in part a museum that whirled visitors on a Cook’s tour of Western civilisation and art, part playground and eating house and part middle-class department store. What they were experiencing was the world’s first shopping mall. Some observers had been excited for a while by this prospect. A preview of attractions on offer at the new Crystal Palace that appeared in Fraser’s Magazine contrasted it with the Great Exhibition where no goods had been sold, officially that is. Though undoubtedly ‘a vast bazaar’, the latter was therefore ‘struck … with commercial death’, unlike ‘the world’s fair at Sydenham’ that was explicitly intended to be ‘an active mart, in

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which all the world and his wife will be seen from the galleries simultaneously “shopping”’.108 The Illustrated London News took readers on a shopping trip around the Palace’s seven industrial courts shortly before the grand opening, tempting consumers with detailed descriptions of the many commodities on sale. Here one could chose from an encyclopaedic collection of things, ranging from meretricious gewgaws to costly big-ticket items – stationery, musical instruments, printed fabrics, textiles, furniture, iron stoves, patent mangles, carpets, curtains, cutlery, paper-hangings, china and glass, leather and papier-mâché goods, perfumery, machinery, mirrors, cigars, shirts, jewellery, shawls, chandlery, galvanised iron, garden tools, palm oil, soap, lamps, pickles – the list seemed almost endless. The writer imagined well-heeled middle-class newlyweds first whiling away time on their honeymoon in the art courts or the gardens, before furnishing their home from top to bottom. Interestingly, this was regarded as a joint conjugal pleasure, though some purchases were specifically gendered; the husband might wander to the North Wing to select agricultural implements for his ‘fancy farm’, for example, while his wife went to the South Wing to choose between ‘a brougham and an open phaëton’.109 Ingenious gadgets and helpful inventions often drew comment as evidence of the progressive and civilising influence of things. The Morning Chronicle, for instance, waxed lyrical about Goodyear’s India rubber-covered furniture as well as ‘Lilliputian alarm clocks’, which at five shillings apiece were ‘perfect marvels of cheapness’. The Times was most enthusiastic because the venture provided yet another magnificent demonstration of what private enterprise could achieve. The paper repeatedly emphasised how ‘the people’s palace’, as it was now designated, had only been made possible through the efforts of a group of ‘comfortable capitalists’ who, inspired by the profit motive as much as by philanthropy, sought to supply the expanding wants of the majority; it was the work ‘not of a prince, but of a company’. Just as Versailles represented the closed, exclusive world of the ancien régime, so the Crystal Palace represented the modern democracy of the pocketbook.110 Although shopping pleasures were mainly targeted at middleclass visitors, the majority of the tens of millions that flocked to Sydenham over subsequent decades were undoubtedly from ‘the humbler grades’.111

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Queen Victoria eventually opened the new Crystal Palace on 10 June 1854, in the presence of 40,000 guests, consisting mainly of court officials and season-ticket holders (the Queen already had her ticket). Predictably enough, it was the educational rather than the commercial side that was emphasised most during the opening ceremony. The Queen herself praised the Crystal Palace as an example of rational recreation, while the official address from the company presented to her by Laing reinforced this dimension. The talk was of ‘elevating’ pleasures and ‘civilising effects’. Nevertheless, Laing could not resist a brief mention of the ‘commercial utility’ of it all, referring to the advantages to buyers and sellers of the establishment of ‘such a world’s fair for the exhibition and inspection of goods’.112 Most metropolitan papers carried effusive reports of the proceedings, including Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper in which Douglas Jerrold could hardly contain his enthusiasm for the new Crystal Palace, which he puffed as ‘the glorifying diadem on the brow of the Giant Present’. For Jerrold, this was a thoroughly liberal space, testament to the power of free trade capitalism to deliver the goods for all, eventually at any rate. It was, therefore, ‘a magnificent assertion of English democracy’ and anathema to ‘Old Toryism’ that could not bear the thought of the ‘Swinish Multitude feeding in trough of Crystal!’113 Only the evangelical Archbishop of Canterbury, John Bird Sumner, struck a discordant note at the opening ceremony, for those who wished to hear it. Sumner’s prayer was more sombre than the one he had given to help legitimise the Great Exhibition three years before, perhaps because of the increasing commercialisation of the place. In it, he urged his listeners not to forget ‘the instability of earthly things’, a moral taught by the overview of vanished civilisations furnished by the Palace’s many courts. Sumner also warned against the dangers of hubris, which all too often accompanied material wealth: ‘Thou hast but to give the word, and the richest may become poor, and the proudest be levelled into dust. Therefore, O Lord, we entreat Thee so to regulate the thoughts of our hearts, that they may not be lifted up, that we forget the Lord our God; as if our power or the might of our hands had gotten us this wealth.’114 Sumner’s speech was duly reported in the press, though his message was ignored during the race for wealth in the late 1850s. His words may have struck some as prophetic a few years later, however, when relatively affluent workers in Lancashire were reduced to pawning

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all their hard-won possessions and begging in the streets through no fault of their own. Notes 1 See R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: a radical Victorian (New York, 1960), p. 264. 2 G. W. Stocking, Victorian anthropology (New York, 1987). 3 Harriet Martineau, Dawn Island (1845), p. 14. 4 Ibid., p. 94; Deborah A. Logan, Harriet Martineau, Victorian imperialism, and the civilising mission (Farnham, 2010), pp. 99–105. 5 See David Todd, ‘John Bowring and the global dissemination of free trade’, Historical Journal, 51:2 (2008), 373–97. 6 Harriet Martineau, The history of England during the thirty years’ peace, 1816–1846 (1850), vol. II, pp. 674–5. 7 Harriet Martineau, ‘The Crystal Palace’, Westminster Review, 62 (October 1854), 548. On the sublime, see George Landow, The aesthetic and critical theories of John Ruskin (Princeton, 1971). 8 See Asa Briggs, Victorian things (1990), p. 71. 9 Prentice observed that the opening of the bazaar ‘created an interest scarcely inferior to that which was felt at a later and happier period at the opening of the Crystal Palace, in Hyde Park’. History of the AntiCorn-Law League (1853), vol. II, p. 327. 10 G. M. Trevelyan, The life of John Bright (1913), p. 129. 11 For a now somewhat dated review of the literature on consumption and middle-class formation, see Lisa Tiersten, ‘Redefining consumer culture: recent literature on consumption and the bourgeoisie in Western Europe’, Radical History Review, 57 (1993), 116–59. 12 Peter N. Stearns, ‘Stages of consumerism: recent work on the issues of periodization’, Journal of Modern History, 69:1 (1997), 103. 13 F. K. Prochaska, ‘Charity bazaars in nineteenth century England’, Journal of British Studies, 16:2 (1977), 62–84; Women and philanthropy in nineteenth century England (Oxford, 1980). See also S. J. D. Green, ‘The death of pew rents, the rise of bazaars, and the end of the traditional political economy of voluntary religious organizations: the case of the West Riding of Yorkshire, c. 1870–1914’, Northern History, 27 (1991), 198–235; Ian Mitchell, ‘Innovation in non-food retailing in the early nineteenth century: the curious case of the bazaar’, Business History, 52:6 (2010), 875–91. 14 See Toshio Kusamitsu, ‘Great Exhibitions before 1851’, History Workshop Journal, 9 (1980), 70–89. 15 For a modern update by an academic economist, see John McMillan, Reinventing the bazaar: a natural history of markets (New York, 2002),

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who stresses that bazaars or markets are always embedded within particular political and social contexts. On this theme, see also Karl Polanyi, Conrad M. Arensberg and Harry W. Pearson (eds), Trade and market in the early empires: economies in history and theory (Glencoe, IL, 1957); Mark Bevir and Frank Trentmann (eds), Markets in historical contexts: ideas and politics in the modern world (Cambridge, 2004). Manchester Times, 29 January 1842, p. 2. Trevelyan, The life of John Bright, p. 107, wrongly dated 1843. Manchester Times, 5 February 1842, pp. 3–4. The Times, 4 February 1842, p. 5. See Norman Longmate, The breadstealers: the fight against the Corn Laws, 1838–1846 (1984), pp. 197–8; Simon Morgan, ‘Domestic economy and political agitation: women and the Anti-Corn Law League, 1839–46’, in Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (eds), Women in British politics, 1760–1860: the power of the petticoat (2000), pp. 123–5. Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 11 May 1845, p. 3. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn-Law League, vol. II, pp. 328–9. Art Union, 1 July 1845, p. 211. Tropes of space and light also marked descriptions of the Great Exhibition, as Marshall Berman notes in his influential study, All that is solid melts into air: the experience of modernity (1982), pp. 237–8. Quoted in The Economist, 10 May 1845, p. 432. For these connections, see also Gary Dyer, ‘The “Vanity Fair” of nineteenth-century England: commerce, women, and the East in the ladies’ bazaar’, Nineteenth Century Literature, 48:2 (1991), 196–221. The League Guide to London and free-traders’ hand-book of the metropolis; prepared for the use of visitors to the Great Bazaar (1845). National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar Gazette, no. 7, p. 5; no. 8, p. 1; Longmate, The breadstealers, pp. 199–207. National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar Gazette, no. 2, pp. 1–2. Ibid., p. 5; no. 7, p. 1. Quoted in The Economist, 10 May 1845, p. 433. National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar Gazette, no. 3, p. 2. Ibid., pp. 7–8. Art Union, 1 July 1845, p. 209. Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, June 1845, p. 518. William Gardner, A rythmical notice of the Anti-Corn-Law League Bazaar held at Covent Garden Theatre (1845). National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar Gazette, no. 16, p. 1; Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn-Law League, vol. II, p. 337.

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‘The Sublime of the Bazaar’ Illustrated London News, 17 May 1845, p. 309. The Times, 9 May 1845, p. 6. Art Union, 1 July 1845, p. 212; see also ibid., p. 214. Ibid., p. 218. For a much later example of an attempt to forge such a link, see Lawrence Glickman, ‘“Make Lisle the Style”: the politics of fashion in the Japanese silk boycott, 1937–1940’, Journal of Social History, 38:3 (2005), 573–608; Buying power: a history of consumer activism in America (Chicago, 2009). National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar Gazette, no. 16, p. 7. On gigantism, see Thomas Richards, The commodity culture of Victorian England: advertising and spectacle, 1851–1914 (1991), pp. 48–9. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn-Law League, vol. II, pp. 330–1. Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, June 1845, pp. 516–17. On Jerrold’s commitment to the panacea of free trade, see Michael Slater, Douglas Jerrold: a life, 1803–1857 (2001). See Arjun Appadurai, The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective (Cambridge, 1986); Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood, The world of goods: towards an anthropology of consumption (1996). Marx’s classic formulation of commodity fetishism is in Capital: a critique of political economy (1867; Middlesex, 1976), vol. I, pp. 163–77. For the important role of the Art Union in promoting taste reform, see Lara Kriegel, Grand designs: labor, empire, and the museum in Victorian culture (Durham, NC, 2007), pp. 135, 139–41. Art Union, 1 July 1845, p. 218. Ibid., p. 228. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn-Law League, vol. I, p. 386. Women’s participation in the bazaar is discussed in Alex Tyrrell, ‘“Woman’s mission” and pressure group politics (1825–1860)’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 63:1 (1980), 194– 230; Morgan, ‘Domestic economy and political agitation’, pp. 126–9. Alison Adburgham, Shops and shopping 1800–1914 (1964), pp. 18–21. Cyril Ehrlich, The piano: a history (Oxford, 1990), pp. 100–4; Stena Nenadic, ‘Middle-rank consumers and domestic culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow 1720–1840’, Past and Present, 145 (1994), 145, 153; ‘Romanticism and the urge to consume in the first half of the nineteenth century’, in Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford (eds), Consumers and luxury: consumer culture in Europe 1650–1850 (Manchester, 1999), p. 212. More generally, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine

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Hall, Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class 1780–1850 (1987), pp. 357–87; Briggs, Victorian things. K. Theodore Hoppen, The mid-Victorian generation 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998), p. 336. See also Ralph Dutton, The Victorian home: some aspects of nineteenth-century taste and manners (1954), p. 145; Thad Logan, The Victorian parlour: a cultural history (Cambridge, 2001); Deborah Cohen, Household gods: the British and their possessions (New Haven, CT, 2006). Quoted in The Times, 26 September 1844, p. 8. Note also the humorous song, Going out a shopping – Happy moments (1850). G. R. Porter, The progress of the nation, in its various social and economical relations (1836; 1851), p. 522. Note also Lucy Brown, The Board of Trade and the free trade movement, 1830–1842 (Oxford, 1958). Morgan, ‘Domestic economy and political agitation’, p. 116. For women and the social, see Denise Riley, Am I that name? Feminism and the category of ‘women’ in history (Basingstoke, 1988); Mary Poovey, Making a social body: British cultural formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1995); Eileen Yeo, The contest for social science: relations and representations of gender and class (1996). National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar Gazette, no. 15, pp. 7–8. This subject deserves fuller investigation, though there are some useful leads in Adrian Forty, Objects of desire: design and society 1750–1980 (1986), pp. 105, 118–19. Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn-Law League, vol. II, pp. 340–1. The Economist was established in 1843 by James Wilson, a keen supporter of the League, which gave the journal vital financial help in its early phase. Norman McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League, 1838–1846 (1958), p. 184; Ruth Dudley Edwards, The pursuit of reason: ‘The Economist’ 1843–1993 (1993). Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 25 May 1845, p. 8; Morning Chronicle, 17 May 1845, p. 6. This painting, no doubt modelled on the famous work produced by Sir Joshua Reynolds in the 1770s, may have been the one painted by an unknown Irish artist that was owned by League supporter Daniel O’Connell, who had put it on public display in London a few years earlier. The Northern Liberator judged this work superior to Reynolds’s original because the artist enjoyed ‘the advantage of sketching the whole from nature, during one of the periodical famines with which Ireland is afflicted’; 15 February 1840, p. 5. Gaskell’s complaints about consumer culture are discussed by Ellen Rosenman, ‘More stories about clothing and furniture: realism and bad commodities’, in Christine Krueger (ed.), The functions of Victorian culture at the present time (Athens, OH, 2002), pp. 47–54.

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64 Struggle, 91 (1843), 2. 65 In The embarrassment of riches: an interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987), Simon Schama, for example, observed how Dutch merchants in the seventeenth century attempted to reconcile Calvinist discipline with domestic material extravagance. Note also Jan de Vries, ‘Between purchasing power and the world of goods: understanding the household economy in early modern Europe’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds), Consumption and the world of goods (1993). 66 Palmerston also thought Bright a humbug, as Asa Briggs noted in Victorian people: a reassessment of persons and themes 1851–67 (1954; 1965), pp. 208, 212. Evidence of Bright’s parsimony can be found in R. A. J. Walling (ed.), The diaries of John Bright: with a foreword by Philip Bright (1930), pp. 229–30. 67 Trevelyan, The life of John Bright, pp. 173–4. 68 For Bright’s temperance connections and his changing drinking habits, see Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: the temperance question in England, 1815–1872 (1971; Keele, 1994), pp. 165, 282–3. But compare William Ashworth’s wine cellar and the extravagances of one of the Fielden brothers: Rhodes Boyson, The Ashworth cotton enterprise: the rise and fall of a family firm (Oxford, 1970); Brian Law, Fieldens of Todmorden: a nineteenth century business dynasty (Littleborough, 1995). 69 The Times, 4 February 1842, p. 5. 70 Ibid., 29 May 1845, p. 6. 71 Stearns, ‘Stages of consumerism’, 116. 72 The Times, 29 May 1845, p. 6. 73 Paul Pickering and Alex Tyrrell, The people’s bread: a history of the Anti-Corn Law League (Leicester, 2000), p. 210. On the importance of support from dissenting communities in Wales, see Ryland Wallace, ‘Wales and the Anti-Corn Law League’, Welsh History Review, 13:1 (1986), 8–9. 74 Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women’s history’, Historical Journal, 36:2 (1993), 383–414; Robert Shoemaker and Mary Vincent (eds), Gender and history in western Europe (1998); John Tosh, A man’s place: masculinity and the middle-class home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT, 1999). 75 Adam Smith, An inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations (1776; 1937), vol. II, p. 155. Smith, however, also regarded consumption as morally frivolous; see Joyce Appleby, ‘Consumption in early modern social thought’, in Brewer and Porter (eds), Consumption and the world of goods, pp. 168–9. An alternative reading is proposed

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by Neil De Marchi, ‘Adam Smith’s accommodation of “altogether endless” desires’, in Berg and Clifford (eds), Consumers and luxury, pp. 18–36. Boyd Hilton, The age of atonement: the influence of evangelicalism on social and economic thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988), p. 118; Donald Winch, Riches and poverty: an intellectual history of political economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 367–8. Marx refuted the vulgar underconsumptionist theory of crisis in Capital (1885), vol. II, ch. 20. As Mark Blaug observed, in Principles of political economy (1817) Ricardo conceived the economy ‘as descending smoothly into the stationary state without any hitch from a failure of effective demand’. Blaug, Economic theory in retrospect (1962; Cambridge, 1985), p. 129. Ibid., pp. 294–327; Philip Mirowski, ‘Macroeconomic instability and the “natural” processes in early neoclassical economics’, Journal of Economic History, 44:2 (1984), 436; Sandra Peart, The economics of W. S. Jevons (1996). In The economic theory of the leisure class (1919; 1927), p. 26, the Bolshevik intellectual, Nikolai Bukharin, linked the marginal revolution to changes in the structure of late-nineteenth-century capitalism, suggesting that ‘Consumption is the basis of the entire life of the rentiers and the “psychology of pure consumption” imparts to this life its specific style. The consuming rentier is concerned only with riding mounts, with expensive rugs, fragrant cigars, the wine of Tokay.’ W. S. Jevons, Theory of political economy (1871); David Reisman, Alfred Marshall’s mission (Basingstoke, 1990), p. 154; Regenia Gagnier, The insatiability of human wants: economics and aesthetics in market society (Chicago, 2000), p. 43; Asa Briggs, Victorian things (1988), p. 302. W. S. Jevons, The coal question (1865); ‘Report of the Committee … Appointed for the Purpose of Inquiring into and Reporting on the Present Appropriation of Wages, and Other Sources of Income, and Considering how far it is Consonant with the Economic Progress of the People of the United Kingdom’, Proceedings of the British Association (1881). Alfred Marshall, Principles of economics (1890; 1961), p. 84. See also David Reisman, The economics of Alfred Marshall (1986). Julia Hood and B. S. Yamey, ‘The middle class retail Co-operative Societies in London, 1864–1900’, Oxford Economic Papers, 9:3 (1957), 309–22; Erika Rappaport, ‘“The halls of temptation”: gender, politics and the construction of the department store in late Victorian London’, Journal of British Studies, 35:1 (1996), 58–83.

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83 Raymond Williams, Keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (1983), p. 79. 84 John Bright and J. E. Thorold Rogers (eds), Speeches on questions of public policy by Richard Cobden MP (1878), p. 43, cited by Alon Kadish, ‘Free trade and high wages: the economics of the Anti-Corn Law League’, in Andrew Marrison (ed.), Free trade and its reception 1815–1960 (1998), p. 25. 85 In a diary entry for 1843, cited in Trevelyan, The life of John Bright, p. 57. Note how Bright used both the old and new designation here, suggesting ambivalence. In a letter to his sister-in-law Margaret (p. 73), Bright also denounced the aristocracy for squeezing ‘all they can out of the mass of consumers’. 86 See, for example, R. M. Massey, A letter to the gas consumers of the City of London (1851). Middle-class consumers defended themselves against monopoly by means of bodies such as the London Gas Consumers’ Association in the 1870s and the Water Consumers’ Defence League in the 1880s. For these organisations, see Martin Daunton, ‘The material politics of natural monopoly: consuming Gas in Victorian Britain’, in Martin Daunton and Matthew Hilton (eds), The politics of consumption: material culture and citizenship in Europe and America (Oxford, 2001); Vanessa Taylor and Frank Trentmann, ‘Liquid politics: water and the politics of everyday life in the modern city’, Past and Present, 211 (2011), 199–241. 87 Derek Walcott’s felicitous phrase cited by Miriam Bailin, ‘The new Victorians’, in Krueger (ed.), The functions of Victorian culture, p. 43. 88 G. R. Porter, The progress of the nation (1847), p. xix. 89 Ibid., p. 523. 90 Richards, The commodity culture of Victorian England, pp. 17–72. Victorian advertising men regarded the Great Exhibition as a watershed of sorts, including William Smith, Advertise: How? When? Where? (1863), p. 13. 91 Wolfram Kaiser, ‘Cultural transfer of free trade at the World Exhibitions, 1851–1862’, Journal of Modern History, 77:3 (2005), 563–90. 92 Briggs, Victorian people, p. 29; Anna Gambles, Protection and politics: Conservative economic discourse, 1815–1852 (1999). The League was revived briefly during the general election campaign of 1852. 93 Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: a nation on display (New Haven, CT, 1999). 94 See Audrey Short, ‘Workers under glass in 1851’, Victorian Studies, 10:2 (1966), 193–202; Geoffrey Best, Mid-Victorian Britain 1851–75 (1971), p. 253; François Bédarida, A social history of England, 1851– 1971 (1979), p. 8. Some labour historians have stressed that relations between the classes continued to be often marked by hostility. For an

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96

97

98 99

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101

102

103 104

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overview, see Neville Kirk, Change, continuity and class: labour in British society, 1850–1920 (Manchester, 1998). W. L. Burn, The age of equipoise: a study of the mid-Victorian generation (1964); Martin Hewitt (ed.), An age of equipoise? Reassessing mid-Victorian Britain (2000). John R. Davis, The Great Exhibition (Stroud, 1999); Louise Purbrick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851: new interdisciplinary essays (Manchester, 2001); James Buzard, Joseph W. Childers and Eileen Gillooly (eds), Victorian prism: refractions of the Crystal Palace (Charlottesville, VA, 2007); Paul Young, Globalization and the Great Exhibition: the Victorian new world order (Basingstoke, 2009). William Forster, The closing of the Great Exhibition; or, England’s mission to all nations (1851?), cited in Paul Young, ‘Economy, empire, extermination: the Christmas pudding, the Crystal Palace and the narrative of capitalist progress’, Literature and History, 14:1 (2005), 27. Reynolds’s Newspaper, 19 October 1851, p. 8. Asa Briggs, ‘The Crystal Palace and the men of 1851’, in Victorian people, p. 48. Erika Rappaport suggests that this story was part of Whiteley’s self-promoted mythology in Shopping for pleasure: women in the making of London’s West End (Princeton, 2000), pp. 27–8. Henry Mayhew and George Cruikshank, 1851: or, the adventures of Mr and Mrs Sandboys and family, who came up to London to ‘enjoy themselves’ and to see the Great Exhibition (1851). Charles Babbage, The Exposition of 1851; or, views of the industry, the science, and the government of England (1851), pp. vi, 10 (emphasis in original). Note also Babbage’s remarks on pp. 42, 73. Ibid., pp. 45, 81, 129. See also Peter Hoffenberg, ‘Equipoise and its discontents: voices of dissent during the international exhibitions’, in Hewitt (ed.), An age of equipoise?, pp. 43–9. Henry Whitney Bellows, The moral significance of the Crystal Palace (New York, 1853), pp. 17–18. See Catherine Hall, Civilising subjects: metropole and colony in the English imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford, 2002). The global impact of the religion of free trade is the subject of Mike Davis’s compelling Late Victorian holocausts: El Nino famines and the making of the Third World (2001). Owen Jones, On the true and the false in the decorative arts: lectures delivered at Marlborough House, June 1852 (1863), pp. 13, 74, 106, 110. Henry Atmore, ‘Utopia Limited: the Crystal Palace and joint-stock politics, 1854–1856’, Journal of Victorian Culture, 9:2 (2004), 189–215; J. R. Piggott, Palace of the people: the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, 1854–1936 (2004), p. 31; Morning Chronicle, 17 April 1852, p. 3.

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107 Morning Post, 6 August 1852, pp. 5–6; The Times, 25 May 1854, p. 9. 108 ‘The New Crystal Palace at Sydenham’, Fraser’s Magazine, 48 (December 1853), 615. 109 Illustrated London News Supplement, 22 April 1854, p. 374; Morning Post, 19 April 1854, p. 6. 110 Morning Chronicle, 18 June 1855, p. 2; The Times, 18 April 1854, p. 7; 12 June 1854, p. 8. 111 According to the author of a pamphlet published in the mid-1870s that put the figure at 38 million: The Crystal Palace in adversity (1876), p. 18. On the working-class takeover of the venue, see my chapter, ‘An appropriated space: the Great Exhibition, the Crystal Palace and the working class’, in Purbrick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851, pp. 114–45. 112 Illustrated London News, 17 June 1854, pp. 580–4; Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, 1780–1880 (1980), pp. 156–7. 113 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 11 June 1854, p. 1. 114 The Times, 12 June 1854, p. 9. Sumner’s earlier blessing, and the response it provoked, is discussed at length in Geoffrey Cantor, Religion and the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Oxford, 2011), pp. 63–70.

8

‘The lion turned into a lamb’: the consumer politics of popular liberalism The Liberal leader William Gladstone understood both the pleasures and pains of consumerism very well. He amassed an impressive art collection during his political career, which he reluctantly sold for financial reasons when nearing retirement. More mundanely, Gladstone also participated in the ‘china craze’ that gripped the middle classes in the 1860s, and could wax lyrical about his Worcester porcelain.1 Though his record as Chancellor of the Exchequer is much better known to historians, it makes sense to regard Gladstone’s public work and private obsessions as connected. This is because Gladstone wholeheartedly embraced the free trade utopia and looked forward to a time when more and better goods would become within reach of everybody. The desire for and possession of things were signs of moral as well as material improvement for Gladstone, and we can understand his wider project better if we consider his approach to fiscal reform that was specifically designed to expand working-class consumption. He had worried about the widening gulf between rich and poor ever since he had been Vice-President of the Board of Trade the year the ‘Bombshell Budget’ was introduced, as we saw in Chapter 5. Gladstone’s fiscal policy continued Peel’s work by privileging the interests of poor consumers especially; Fraser’s Magazine, for instance, described his 1853 Budget as ‘a lineal successor of the Peel Budgets of 1842 and 1845’.2 Gladstonian economic policy was based on three broad principles: retrenchment and the rationalisation of government finance; a tax system that would not retard industrial and commercial development; and balanced budgets with surpluses to allow for fiscal reforms and the reduction of the national debt.3 Direct and indirect taxation were key levers used to help create a ‘psychological

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expectation’ of social balance and fairness, as Colin Matthew argued in an influential article.4 Welcomed by Douglas Jerrold as ‘a cupboard budget … a poor man’s budget’ and by others as ‘The People’s Budget’, Gladstone’s Budget of 1853 extended the income tax to those whose annual income exceeded £100, which roughly corresponded to the electorate at the time, but left the vast majority of the working class outside the tax. Duties were greatly reduced or abolished on well over a hundred commodities including soap, tea, butter, cheese, cocoa, eggs and so on, articles that, as Gladstone himself remarked, ‘enter largely if not into the necessaries of life, at any rate into the solace and comfort of the people’. Significantly, the advertisement duty was also repealed, which helped facilitate the remarkable expansion of the national and local press; the Liberal leader thus helped usher in what was later dubbed ‘the age of advertising’. Believing that fiscal policy raised questions ‘almost to the first principles on which men are united in civilized society’, Gladstone explicitly appealed to and sought approval from ‘the people’ in their role as consumers, hoping that such measures would benefit both the individual, or ‘particular’, and the collective, or ‘general consumer … operating to the extension and invigoration of the trade of the country, and in that way extending and widening the means of consumption of the great body of the people’.5 What was left of the radical press passed little comment, though the Budget’s significance was recognised by The Times, which noted that the artisan’s wife ‘will save several pounds a year by it’.6 Gladstone’s Budget of 1860 went further still, raising the widely reviled income tax from 7d to 10d in the pound on those whose income exceeded £150 per annum (he had intimated in 1853 that it would be ended in seven years) and rescinding more duties on ‘comforts’. Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper once again championed the measure as spreading the benefits of free trade to working people and by this time even George Reynolds was on side, declaring that it represented no less than ‘a complete revolution in the fiscal system of this country’. Although Reynolds underlined how the reduction of duties on French silk would cause some unemployment at home, he also opined that the wives, sisters and daughters of working men ‘have at least as good a right to dress comfortably, richly, and elegantly, as the human males and females of the idle, aristocratic classes, who do nothing but squander and consume the produce of the poor man’s toil’.7 In an impressive speech in the Commons,

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Gladstone successfully managed to link up his broader vision of fiscal policy – which was to knit classes closer together as consumers in a progressive free trade nation – with a grasp of the quotidian material realities of workers’ lives. Thus, he discoursed at length on the subject of the reduction in wine duties, explaining that his ambition was to thereby redefine ‘luxuries’ and bring good wine within reach of even poor consumers, to transform popular tastes that were necessarily malleable and raise them to another level.8 This ability to master fine detail and relate it to the wider picture was a characteristic mark of Gladstone’s political genius. And more than anything else, it was his taxation strategy that was to endear Gladstone to important sections of the working class as it demonstrated a real concern to improve their lives within the framework of a palpably ‘just’ capitalist economy and society.9 As in the decades before mid-century, then, the politics of consumption continued to constitute a vital arena where class relationships were defined and renegotiated, a space where links between the middle and working classes could be constructed, but the context that shaped consumer politics was itself rapidly changing. If during the 1840s consumption pulled classes apart, increasingly it now pulled them together. The split between producer and consumer as well as the relationship between poverty and plenty remained important but they were handled differently. In short, a particular politics of consumption – a liberal consumerism – underpinned popular liberalism, and this chapter explores this theme in detail by focusing on the Lancashire ‘Cotton Famine’ of the early 1860s. If according to some historians cotton textile workers had been in the vanguard of the working class politically in the 1840s, twenty years later they were in the forefront of those workers who had benefited most in material terms from economic growth and Gladstone’s fiscal policy. Their recent affluence, which for many Liberal leaders demonstrated the viability of the free trade utopia, quickly ran into the sands as unemployment rocketed and newly acquired things were sold or pawned. In a matter of months around half-amillion operatives and their families were reduced to the same level as paupers as the local economy ground to a halt. The New Poor Law buckled under the strain, as deserving, hard-working operatives fell into the ranks of demoralised paupers, and it was feared that cotton workers would inevitably be dragged down to the same level, a concern that had bedevilled the legislation from the start.

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Starvation and its accompanying diseases now threatened, not in a ‘backward’ country like Ireland but in a region that represented the epicentre of modern industrial capitalism, a rather different matter. The chapter therefore considers how middle-class charitable initiatives stepped in to meet this emergency in order to prop up the social norm of consumption of working-class consumers, and goes on to argue that the crisis was also fundamental to the development of the modern humanitarian campaign. According to the radical preacher Joseph Rayner Stephens, who emerged briefly into the limelight once more, humanitarian efforts served mainly to disempower Lancashire workers, turning the lion into a lamb, and a final substantive section looks at those impoverished working-class consumers who responded to his challenge and took up the weapons of the ‘moral economy’ in the spring of 1863 and resorted to direct action. The spread of consumerism Lancashire textile operatives were prototypes of modern workingclass consumers. They were one of the first groups to be almost, if not quite, totally dependent on the market for the supply of their everyday needs.10 They enjoyed high wages when in employment, often spent freely and enjoyed purchasing things – precisely the kind of people Gladstone hoped his budgets would benefit. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that probably the earliest example of the ‘embourgeoisement’ thesis was propounded on the basis of the experience of the Lancashire working class in the decade after the Great Exhibition. Engels no doubt had such workers in mind when he made his famous exasperated remark in 1858: ‘the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois’.11 A boom in the cotton industry between 1858 and 1860 led to a sharp rise in earnings.12 David Chadwick’s study concluded that wages of nearly all classes of cotton factory workers had increased by between 10 and 25 per cent during the 1840s and 1850s. Hours for adults had been limited to sixty a week after the Factory Act of 1847, though regulation had not retarded the tremendous increase in output. This was a remarkable achievement and one that amazed contemporaries like Chadwick, who wrote: ‘Such an Extension of one branch of Trade in fourteen years may, I think, be pronounced unparalleled in the history of any country in the world.’ He estimated that there

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were about 400,000 people employed in the Lancashire cotton trade in 1859, earning wages that amounted to a total of £10.6 million per annum. Arthur Arnold, the first historian of the ‘Cotton Famine’, put the figures at 440,000 and £11.5 million soon after. Chadwick considered the experience of other groups, including silk workers, those employed in the building and mechanical trades, coal miners and agricultural workers. All had benefited from the booming local economy and Chadwick concluded that the low prices of food and clothing, as well as increases in wages, ‘have placed within the reach of the working classes more physical comforts and the means of obtaining more social and intellectual enjoyment than at any previous period’.13 Cotton textile workers had fared better than most, especially spinners, whose wages, according to a rather over-optimistic John Watts, had risen by 50 per cent since the early 1840s.14 Material advances provoked frequent comment, both approving and critical. When employed full-time, mill workers consumed more than average amounts of meat and were, as modern consumers, susceptible to many unhealthy temptations. Observers such as Dr Edward Smith, who was despatched by Sir John Simon, Government Medical Officer, to study the effects of scarcity on workers’ health in December 1862, complained in his report of their taste for unnecessary luxuries such as tea and coffee. According to Smith, many cotton workers ate too much before the famine and ate the wrong kinds of foods, particularly sugar and fats, especially butter. Dr Buchanan, who also reported on the health of mill workers, complained about their undisciplined shopping habits: ‘In practice they are too often disposed to spend money in the fashion of prosperous times, and too often are defrauded by adulteration.’15 Others noted how well they often dressed when away from the workplace. Mill girls had as keen an eye for fashion as any middle-class consumer, as Elizabeth Gaskell observed, and they were increasingly able to indulge their passion after mid-century.16 Visitors to Lancashire during the crisis frequently remarked how young women in particular would shrink away from sight in their homes, embarrassed by their reduced attire.17 The interiors of these homes had often been quite lavishly furnished and many workers could afford to engage in intellectual pursuits. The effects of affluence were uneven and often insecure, certainly, and any simple idea of mid-Victorian prosperity will not stand up; the general improvement in cotton workers’

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wages from the late 1840s was far from continuous during the 1850s and was far more limited than was often claimed.18 Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, now ensconced at Gawthorpe Hall at Padiham near Burnley and in his paternalist phase, undoubtedly pushed the argument too far to support his own viewpoint, once portraying distress as a form of retribution for the excessive consumption of both mill owners and workers who frittered away their earnings on ‘hurtful and wasteful’ luxuries such as ‘oysters and beef-steaks’, on which they had been ‘gorging’. Unsurprisingly, Kay-Shuttleworth censured young girls in particular, who ‘spend far too much upon finery and dress, and are too bent upon imitating the latest fashion of classes above them’.19 Nevertheless, middle-class visitors who pointed proudly to the material gains made by working people did not just see what they wanted. Like many other commentators Ellen Barlee regarded Lancashire operatives as ‘a class in themselves’, and implied that their proud, ‘independent’ nature was bound up with both their high wages and consumerist behaviour. She noted that before the famine ‘pianos, pictures, books, and other incentives to mental cultivation’ could be often found in workers’ cottages and that ‘the desire to be on a footing of equality with their neighbours is perhaps unrivalled in any class; hence, in prosperous times the competition in dress, furniture, and appearance is very great among them’.20 The institution that demonstrated the gospel of material ‘improvement’ best perhaps was the consumer co-operative store. If excessive working-class consumption often drew criticism, these forcing beds for thrifty, careful, yet simultaneously desiring consumers were praised to the skies by bourgeois observers that tended to regard their spread as evidence of the ‘civilising’ power of joint-stock enterprise.21 Consumer co-operatives were dominated after mid-century by a male leadership who liked to portray themselves as adopting an entirely rational, masculine attitude towards consumption – another reason why these forms attracted so much favourable attention from outsiders.22 The erstwhile Owenite John Watts, who now fully embraced free market capitalism and served as a member of the Central Relief Committee during the ‘Cotton Famine’, framed his contemporary history of the crisis as a narrative of ‘improvement’. For Watts, the misguided utopianism of the past was buried by the system established at Rochdale that ‘retains much of the good of communism, but gives to people according to their successful exertions,

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instead of according to their necessities’. Estimating that there were well over a hundred stores in Lancashire by the end of 1863 with a combined annual turnover in excess of one million pounds a year, Watts believed that retail co-operatives enabled workers to secure the ‘profits of shopkeeping to the consumers’, which they could use to start manufacturing for themselves.23 Watts was not a lone voice; Cobden and Bright visited stores and gave their public seal of approval to this growing movement in the early 1860s. For them, co-operative stores symbolised just how much had changed since the ‘Hungry Forties’, Cobden remarking how consumer co-operatives tended to ‘bridge over or partly close up that great gulf which has hitherto separated the two classes of capitalists and labourers’. Bright lectured co-operators in his hometown and a leading member of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, Samuel Tweedale, became the manager in one of his mills.24 For Cobden and Bright, many male co-operators had proved themselves worthy of the vote by virtue of their thrifty consumption practices. Addressing the Leeds Working Men’s Parliamentary Reform Association in December 1860, for example, Bright declared that it was ‘intolerable’ that only two out of thirtytwo co-operators who served on management committees of retail societies in Rochdale (the town had three at this time) were entitled to vote, despite the fact that they controlled businesses with a combined annual turnover of around £380,000.25 Although frequently lauded for their encouragement of thrift and rational consumerism by liberal leaders, retail co-ops sometimes encouraged rather more hedonistic practices. The middle-class writer, Daniel Stone, who toured the Pioneers’ stores in Rochdale, naturally emphasised the material benefits conferred by a body that made nearly £16,000 profit and sold half-a-million pounds of meat in 1860. He typically praised co-operation for rendering trade unions unnecessary, and like Watts maintained that its success demonstrated how workers had broken with the past completely: ‘They see it is not Owenism, not the doctrine of French Equality men, and truly did Canon Richson point out, the other day, at Manchester, – “Co-operation is not communism”.’ However, Stone also dwelt on the way the society facilitated greater engagement with a more expansive range of fashionable commodities, especially at the separate drapery store where, unaccompanied and disconcerted in this feminine space, he inadvertently trod ‘on a brilliant carpet length, which the shopman

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confidently unrolled to an earnest co-operative, who contemplated its merits and suitability for her future parlour’.26 The experience of loss After the boom came the inevitable crash. The first signs of distress began to be seen in the cotton districts in the autumn of 1861, when mill workers were either laid off or put on short-time. By November, over 8,000 operatives were unemployed and many more were on half-time. Local Boards of Guardians began to feel pressure as demand for outdoor relief increased. Reluctant at first to turn to the Poor Law because of the stigma that was attached to it, many workers pawned or sold their furniture, clothing and even bedding to get them through what was initially thought to be a temporary downturn. Those worst affected saw their homes broken up as people herded together to save rent and fuel.27 They also depleted their savings, withdrawing funds from friendly and co-operative societies, which suffered serious setbacks. Watts noted that quarterly sales of fourteen large co-op stores in Lancashire fell from nearly £158,000 in June 1861 to just over £113,000 in March 1863, and that workers withdrew £288,000 in dividends and £249,000 of capital during this period. Many small societies were ruined.28 Towns such as Ashton and Stalybridge, which relied heavily on supplies of American cotton, were hardest hit; in the decade after 1861, these towns lost 8 and 15 per cent of their population, respectively. In contrast, the population of Stockport declined by only 3 per cent.29 The crisis therefore impacted differently across the region; towns such as Ashton, Blackburn, Preston and Wigan that were almost completely dominated by cotton fared much worse than those that had more diversified local economies, including Manchester, Rochdale and Bolton. However, pockets of the most abject suffering could easily be found in the latter. Various explanations for the distress were proposed. Indeed, the question of what precisely had caused this calamitous state generated continuous and ongoing debate. The term that soon came to be used as a general descriptor – ‘Cotton Famine’ – concealed as much as it revealed. Interestingly, its origins can be traced back at least to the economic crisis of the late 1840s. In his famous defence of free trade at Stockport in late 1847, for instance, Cobden had referred to the ‘famine in cotton’ as an important reason why the

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benefits of the new policy had not been fully felt. He maintained that the proper working of the free market could, in the short run at least, be checked by a natural calamity such as a failure of the cotton crop, though in the longer term things would surely come right. Sympathetic organs of the press supported Cobden against both protectionists and radicals who sought an explanation for crisis in the operation of free trade itself.30 In the Northern Star, for example, the factory reformer John Fielden argued that the looming ‘cotton famine’ (he put the term in quotation marks and used the lower case) would certainly be inevitable if mill owners managed to get their way and reintroduce a twelve-hour day in order to increase production.31 Thus, for radicals such as Fielden the term was from the outset employed by free traders in order to obfuscate the ways in which human suffering was built into the structure of unregulated markets. For his part, Cobden preferred to blame providence for the crash, rather than the anarchy or ‘immorality’ of the capitalist free market. Such oppositions recurred fifteen years later as the question of culpability was hotly contested. Critical voices were soon raised against the actions of unscrupulous factory owners and merchants who, it was claimed, had either caused or at least exacerbated the economic crisis for their own ends. The former were blamed for running their mills full pelt, which inevitably led to overproduction and glutted markets, the latter for making inflated profits when the price of American cotton eventually soared. Indeed, there was plenty of cotton in English warehouses in 1861 but export markets were completely choked. Raw material prices plummeted and so did wages and eventually employment; mills were on short-time long before the effects of the American Civil War were properly felt. The blockade of ports in the southern states inevitably drove up the price of cotton and speculators made a killing by selling off stock. Arnold documented all this in detail in his early account, and disarmingly admitted that ‘we might well think the title of this history a misnomer’.32 While Cobden maintained that rising unemployment was solely attributable to the war, the independent Liberal, William Coningham, disputed the usefulness of the term ‘Cotton Famine’ precisely because it served to deflect blame from manufacturers and traders.33 The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gladstone, made an important intervention in this debate in a speech at Newcastle town hall in

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October 1862. Before an audience that included William Armstrong, the arms manufacturer, and Joseph Cowen, the radical newspaper proprietor, Gladstone praised the conduct of operatives who were ‘as innocent as children’, and extended Lord Palmerston’s earlier criticisms. According to Gladstone, some capitalists had become ‘insensible to their duty – men so deluded as to make money the object of their worship instead of using it as an instrument of good’. He went on to refer to a mill owner whose cotton had been spirited away under cover of darkness to avoid any opprobrium to illustrate how avarice drove some individuals and recommended owners to keep factories operating for as long as possible.34 Though overlooked by recent historians, Gladstone’s condemnation of Lancashire mill owners during the ‘Cotton Famine’ – part of his attempt to project a particularly Christian, moralised version of capitalist market relations – was to play a central role in his transformation into ‘The People’s William’ at this time.35 Not surprisingly, it sparked controversy, including an anonymous pamphlet that reproved him for failing to understand political economy according to Adam Smith and linked Gladstone’s moralism with the French Jacobin of 1793 because of their vain attempt to fix prices, and even by extension to the system of ‘Communism’.36 Gladstone felt obliged to reply in writing to one of his private critics, assuring him that while he fully accepted ‘the general argument in favour of what used at one time to be prohibited under the name of forestalling or regrating’, he maintained that ‘some limits upon human action which law cannot properly place ought to be placed by the sentiments of the individual himself’.37 Disciplining the market had to come from within. It has frequently been noted how outside observers drew attention ad nauseam to the stoicism and fortitude of the Lancashire working class during the crisis, and we shall return to this theme presently. However, here it is worth pointing to another dominant trope that marked ‘famine literature’; namely, the loss of workers’ domestic things. Nearly all commentators referred to the way the cotton operative’s home had been gradually depleted of its contents until all that remained was a bare, uninviting space. One of the best accounts of inexorable loss appeared in Dickens’s All the Year Round just before Christmas 1862. By this time some middle-class readers were already experiencing what we in the West now call ‘compassion fatigue’, so bombarded had they been by images of suffering during the preceding months, yet the author urged them

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not to turn away. An almost gothic scene of domestic desolation followed: Is it possible by mere words to convey to those who have never seen any abjectly poor place, an idea of the utter bareness, and ugliness, and horror, of a room in one of the byways of Manchester – a room from which, by degrees every article has been removed except a small, dirty, rickety table of blackened deal, and a receptacle in the corner for holding one or two cracked plates or cups? A chair with the bottom out can hardly be called a piece of furniture, nor a strap nailed against the wall, with one black-handled knife and one blackhandled fork stuck into it.38

Such graphic, concrete descriptions provided a kind of inventory, a way of making the meaning of the crisis intelligible to readers. The writer opened the door to other interiors, taking special notice of how workers frequently attempted to humanise their surroundings, despite ‘the grim horror’ of the spaces they now inhabited. Two women who shared a cellar in Blackburn, for example, managed to keep it clean and had put coverings over an old chest and bandbox, giving them ‘a sort of extravagant air of ottomans’. Such touches, the writer went on, demonstrated the women’s worthy desire to ‘make the best of everything’, rather than ‘sink prostrate under the first stroke of misfortune without making a single effort’.39 And what made the situation more heart-rending was the fact that these workers had been used to so much better. Readers were reminded that cotton operatives’ ‘pride in their homes is very great’, and among the better-paid grades ‘the glories of the best parlour are really astonishing. Pictures and ornaments, looking-glasses and bits of china, are seen everywhere, and rosewood cabinets, and even pianos, are far from being unknown.’40 Images of domestic desolation that appeared in the Illustrated London News the month before may have provided inspiration for the writer in Dickens’s periodical. They opened up famine tourism to a wider audience by allowing viewers to gaze into working-class interiors from the comfort of their armchairs. Figure 16 shows the living room of workers who had previously been quite well off but who were now living in a very reduced state. On the lower righthand side of the frame, broken-up furniture is ready to be used as firewood. Two women and a youth sit separately, isolated even from one another by hunger and want. Things could be worse, however, for they have managed to hold onto a few cooking utensils, some

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Figure 16. Tickle Street, Deansgate, Manchester, Illustrated London News, 29 November 1862.

basic furniture, one or two ornaments and, most poignantly, three prints that hang above the mantelshelf. Figure 17 shows a family who were not quite as lucky. Here, the same sense of isolation is conveyed; though sitting close together round the empty grate, individuals are separated by the condition of ‘staring want’. Only a table and a single chair remain; the sick father looks on helplessly from a mattress of straw and rags. They are pathetic, resigned but most emphatically deserving. Such powerful images must have resonated deeply with middleclass readers who, as we have seen, were becoming rapidly more enamoured with a developing consumer culture; indeed, Dickens’s periodical ventures were part of that trend. The trope was omnipresent, rehearsed by numerous observers from Reynolds’s Newspaper, which emphasised cotton workers’ ‘love of a comfortable home’, to Archdeacon John Rushton of Manchester, who lamented the loss of ‘the chest of drawers, the corner cupboard and mahogany clock, the wife’s bonnet, the daughter’s shoes … the little girl’s latest frock, and the boy’s holiday hat … the chairs, the bedstead, and the bed’.41 From a middle-class perspective, a shared love of domestic

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Figure 17. Southern Street, Liverpool Road, Manchester, Illustrated London News, 29 November 1862.

possessions no doubt helped both to humanise working people and facilitate flows of sympathy, and money. Thus, the National Review underlined the ‘honest pride’ workers had for their things, ‘for which they felt an affection which those only do feel for their possessions who have earned them’.42 Moreover, those closer to operatives’ daily lives also emphasised their sentimental attachment to goods, even if they did not always draw the same moral lessons as those above. In ‘Philip Clough’s Tale’, for example, the dialect poet Joseph Ramsbottom explored in memorable verse what the loss of things may have felt like for workers: My little savins soon were done, Un then aw sowd my twothr’y things – My books and bookcases o’ are gone, My mother’s picther, too, fun wings. A bacco box wi two queer lids, Sent whoam fro Indy by Jim Bell, My fuchsin plants and pots, my brids, An cages, too, aw’m ferced to sell;

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In this moving poem, Ramsbottom communicated the idea that working people had just as complex a relationship with commodities as their social superiors. Like them, they appropriated goods and used them to weave together the fabric of their emotional and psychological selves. Even modest things had lives, serving both as markers of a culture of improvement – books, furniture, an eight days’ clock – and sustaining family and kinship connections despite the painful separations of death and emigration – ‘My mother’s picther’, ‘My fether’s rockin cheer’, ‘my gronny’s silver cup’, ‘my uncle Robin’s flute’ and the exotic ‘bacco box wi two queer lids,/Sent whoam fro Indy by Jim Bell’. As previous chapters have argued, for free trade utopianists in particular, the desire for an expanding range of consumer goods among growing numbers of the population was an important measure of the level of civilisation or culture attained by any society. The catastrophic loss experienced over just a few months during the early 1860s by Lancashire cotton workers – a group that was often seen as quintessential proof of the widening benefits of the capitalist market – therefore simultaneously represented a profound psychological trauma for middle-class Victorians as well as an all-too-real material trauma for workers themselves.44 The dynamics of relief Mass unemployment in Lancashire put enormous strains on the operation of the New Poor Law, and it broke down under the pressure. At first the Poor Law Board that ran the system from London

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was confident in its ability to cope, despite the bad press it had already received because of its handling of the problem of the London poor during the hard winter of 1860.45 Their attitude was initially complacent and little action was taken until local Boards of Guardians started to register their concerns with a new urgency, backed up by a growing campaign in the metropolitan press, to which we shall return. While slightly less harsh than the Outdoor Relief Prohibitory Order of 1844 that it replaced, the Outdoor Relief Regulation Order of 1852, which local guardians were expected to enforce, still banned outdoor relief to those in work, insisted claimants be given half relief in kind and made them perform what were perceived as degrading kinds of labour, including stone-breaking and oakum-picking. On the ground, the individuals that ran the system, understanding the difficulties and fearing the breakdown of social order, frequently demanded a more flexible approach. Some even defied the Board, including guardians at Oldham who granted relief without oakum. Following ‘a very decided stand’ taken against the labour test by claimants in Ashton, the rule was relaxed and by December 1862 over 5,000 adults were relieved by guardians outside the terms of the Order.46 However, the centre did what it could to hold a much harder line. Special Commissioner H. B. Farnall, true believer in the ‘principles of 1834’ – a figure hated by many Lancashire workers for the tough stance he had taken during the Preston strike nearly a decade before – was despatched to the cotton districts by Charles Villiers, now serving as President of the Poor Law Board, to report the situation in May 1862.47 Towards the end of the year, the second Chief Medical Officer, Sir John Simon, also sent Dr Edward Smith north to study the effects of dearth on the health of cotton workers. Smith was a child of the times who worked within the emerging field of nutritional science that imaged the human body as a machine. Specialising in ingestion and excretion, he had made his reputation weighing the faeces of London prison inmates, as well as his own, in an effort to discover the most cost-efficient nutritional regime.48 Down on their ‘luxuries’, Lancashire workers would have no doubt preferred it had Smith stuck to the study of shit. Professionals such as Farnall and Smith were in a terrible bind, as indeed was the Poor Law more generally. The measure’s ultimate sanction, as working people understood only too well, was the coercive force of hunger or ‘clemming’ for those deemed ‘undeserving’.49

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Local and national officials attempted to uphold distinctions between different categories of claimants in a context where such boundaries were becoming increasingly difficult, even impossible, to police. Farnall recommended short-term, incremental increases in local poor rates to meet the crisis and silence critics such as the Reverend Charles Kingsley, who had condemned the stinginess of Lancashire ratepayers in The Times. The government consequently made it possible for parishes within a Union to spread the burden of relief more evenly by means of the Union Relief Aid Act of August 1862.50 Even with these changes, levels of relief remained desperately low; for much of the period of distress it was probably under 1s 6d per head a week, though 2s came to be regarded as a proper norm. Farnall held the common view that a more generous scale would only serve to ‘demoralise’ unemployed workers and make them reluctant to return to wage labour when things improved. Such fears informed Edward Smith’s researches. Asked by Simon to undertake a ‘scientific’ investigation into whether the distress was serious enough to lead to outbreaks of ‘starvation diseases’ like typhus, Smith produced a sketchy overview of operatives’ diet, based on a very limited sample that excluded the ‘thriftless’ entirely. It did, nevertheless, shed some light on the eating habits of cotton workers, who Smith reckoned had become far too accustomed to ‘uneconomical’ or ‘luxury’ foods such as shop-bought bread, meat, sugar, butter, tea and coffee, as we have already seen. Building on his prison experiences, Smith also drew up model dietaries that he believed would maintain the health of the unemployed at the least possible cost.51 Clearly, the marking of boundaries was crucial to state servants such as Farnall and Smith. What made this process highly problematic was not only the recalcitrance and bad habits of working people but also the relatively high social norm of consumption that they had enjoyed before the slump. The impossible task facing Poor Law officials was how to temporarily recalibrate entitlement of the most affluent group of English operatives without ‘demoralising’ or ‘pauperising’ them for good, driving them down into the ranks of the ‘undeserving’ poor, thereby undermining their hard-won material and cultural development. As Simon stressed in his report, those most affected were not ‘a common low-typed proletariat, familiar with parish doles, and preferring pauperism to labour’, but rather a moral, intellectual and proudly independent population.52

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Demarcation lines had not been entirely imposed from above either, but were at least partially constructed from below. Though overstating the case, there was some truth in the view of another commentator who wrote that in the eyes of ‘the factory folk of Lancashire … the distinction between the pauper and the labourer is greater than that between the labourer and the peer’.53 From late 1861 private charitable initiatives started to supplement Poor Law relief. Treated coolly at the outset by many Boards of Guardians, which, in Arnold’s rather jaundiced view, were largely composed of an inferior sort of men who lacked ‘gentle manners and good education’, it seems likely that the Poor Law would have entirely collapsed without this prop.54 Charitable giving received a major impetus after April 1862, when a series of letters appeared in The Times from ‘A Lancashire Lad’, John Whittaker, a middle-class writer from Wigan. Reprinted in many other London papers, these personal appeals tugged effectively at middle-class hearts and purse strings, and donations of money and clothing poured in. Hundreds of soup kitchens were established in factories, churches and other places to feed the hungry. Well over a hundred local committees sprang up to administer relief; their activities were co-ordinated from the summer of 1862 by a Central Executive Relief Committee, consisting of twentysix members with Lord Derby as chairman. The Lancashire and Cheshire Operatives Relief Fund, headed by the Mayor of London, was also established in May 1862; the so-called Mansion House Fund operated outside the control of the Central Committee and there was considerable friction between these bodies.55 The main influence on the policy of the latter was Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, who as vice-chairman laboured tirelessly to ensure that charity did not ‘demoralise’ recipients nor undermine the disciplinary functions of the Poor Law. Under Kay-Shuttleworth’s direction, the Central Committee was guided by two key principles: relief was provided that maintained health but did not nearly approach wage rates (between 2s and 2s 6d per head was aimed at, which coincided with Edward Smith’s recommendations); and a significant amount of relief had to be given in kind. Claimants were also expected to perform work. Kay-Shuttleworth therefore championed ‘educational’ provision, such as schools for unemployed men and sewingclasses for female mill workers, which thousands were forced to attend.56 Despite the predictable rhetoric, the main purpose of these

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initiatives, as scholarship has shown, was to secure public order and ‘the right moral guidance’; in other words, to keep workers under surveillance and instil approved ideas about class and gender identity.57 Sewing classes, for example, were often singled out for praise by middle-class observers who disparaged the presumed effects of factory work on married women.58 In short, fears of ‘demoralisation’ underpinned charitable endeavour as much as Poor Law relief. The bourgeois metropolitan press kept up the momentum of the relief campaign with numerous reports from special correspondents. Distressed operatives were portrayed within these reports quintessentially as objects of pity. It also became almost fashionable for concerned individuals, mainly from charitable and religious backgrounds, to visit factory districts and publish their impressions: the crisis generated a kind of famine tourism as well as a literature of its own. The dominant representational trope was the patient, even noble suffering of Lancashire working people. Most important, it was the assumed passivity of the unemployed that especially qualified them as deserving of help. Take, for example, the image shown in Figure 18 that appeared in the Illustrated London News in November 1862. Here we see mainly women and children exchanging relief tickets for provisions, mostly bread. There is no undue clamour or haste about the scene, no jostling for advantage. Instead, the needy patiently wait their turn, serious hardship and want written on their haggard, shrunken faces. One of the few men queuing for relief stares vacantly ahead from centre-right of the frame, as does the woman by his side, as if in a state of shock or disbelief. Below them, a pathetic little girl confronts the viewer directly with an imploring gaze. Visual representations of suffering yet deserving workers such as this, as well as the flood of literary accounts, proved successful; the unprecedented sum of about £2 million was eventually subscribed to the Central Committee, the Mansion House Fund, local relief committees and other charitable bodies.59 No previous economic crisis had generated so much attention or support. Working-class consumers, middle-class humanitarians It would be worthwhile considering in more depth precisely why unemployed Lancashire operatives generated so much middle-class

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Figure 18. Relief in the Lancashire ‘Cotton Famine’, Illustrated London News, 29 November 1862.

sympathy in the early 1860s. For sure, donations came from working-class groups and individuals as well, but the vast majority of the relief that poured in was given by the better off, for obvious reasons. Public celebrities backed the campaign, including Charles Dickens, who donated money raised from public readings in Paris.60 Moreover, the campaign was truly international, eliciting contributions from unlikely places such as Argentina, Brazil and Egypt, as well as from countries more directly tied to English cotton districts by the history of emigration, namely America and Australia.61 In fact, the ‘Cotton Famine’ witnessed the first successful emergency humanitarian effort in world history. Admittedly, the Anti-Slavery Society had pricked middle-class consciences earlier in the nineteenth century and had also used consumer power to further its cause. The Great Famine in Ireland also generated a charitable response throughout Britain and indeed the wider world, though aid from England was quite paltry compared to that given to Lancashire workers a decade-and-a-half later. Starving Catholic peasants were frequently stigmatised – ‘soupers’ remained a term of abuse for generations – and despite appeals from Queen Victoria in 1847 only approximately £200,000 was raised, about a tenth

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of the money donated to help relieve English cotton operatives and their families.62 Therefore, the humanitarian response to the ‘Cotton Famine’ was of a different order to that which had gone before. This was a self-contained crisis that necessitated the mobilisation of ‘public opinion’ and funds in a very short space of time, just like the modern emergency appeals that we have become so familiar with over recent decades, and, most importantly, it was successful. Linguistic changes are significant here. When people called Dickens a ‘humanity monger’ they were not being kind, but a gradual shift to the positive term ‘humanitarian’ can be discerned from the 1860s. ‘Humanitarianism’, a concept that initially carried pejorative, often gendered meanings – Tait’s Magazine, for instance, condemned British policy in India as the ‘puerile whimperings of an effeminate humanitarianism’ in 1850 – also came to be bathed in a much more approving light.63 From the beginning of the charitable relief campaign, fears of working-class degeneration were frequently expressed by the concerned middle classes. The presumed deleterious effects of the loss of hard-won domestic things have been discussed but the impact of distress on operatives’ diet had deep cultural resonances for outside observers also. Many rejected Dr Edward Smith’s mechanistic view of workers’ bodies and doubted that some of the changes had been for the better. In his second letter to The Times, for example, John Whittaker referred to ‘families that have been so reduced, that the only food they have had has been a porridge made of Indian meal. They could not afford oatmeal, and even of their Indian meal porridge they could only afford to have two meals a day.’ Food carried complex meanings: if in the early 1840s potatoes represented an important boundary line of civilisation, twenty years later the marker was now Indian meal. Whittaker emphasised how operatives themselves regarded the consumption of this foodstuff as a terrible stigma, invoking the anti-Poor Law language of earlier decades: ‘They have been so ashamed of their coarser food that they have done all that was possible to hide their desperate state from those about them. It has only been by accident that it has been found out, and then they have been caught hurriedly putting away the dishes which contained their loathsome food.’64 As in the ‘Hungry Forties’, there were depths below depths. ‘Londoner’, who toured Lancashire in the summer of 1862 and published an exposé of suffering soon after, referred to an apocryphal story that had

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appeared in the Blackburn Times about a young, famished girl who was seen fighting with a dog for a bone in the streets.65 Writers continually drew readers’ attention to how fortunate they were to enjoy the many pleasures of consumption when so many deserving workers were deprived of the basic necessities of life. Whittaker, for instance, placed the plaintive, apologetic plea of a mill girl at the emotional centre of his first letter – ‘Con yo help us a bit?’ – and compared the ennui frequently experienced by fashionable ladies with the hardships of those who wore cotton gowns and wooden clogs. ‘Londoner’ reminded readers: ‘One pleasure trip of a few hours set aside, might keep a Lancashire family for a week.’66 John Whittaker was not alone in disparaging Indian meal, despite the fact that nutritionists like Smith were keen to sing its praises. Once again, we see how food was bound up with ethnic and racial as well as class identities. For in the minds of the swelling ranks of middle-class humanitarians in the early 1860s were shadows of real famine, such as that which decimated the Eastern Rajputana region of India in 1860–1, in which perhaps two million died, discussed in some detail in the British press.67 Though a few commentators did refer to the Indian experience explicitly, the Irish Famine of the 1840s played a much greater role in debates on the meaning of distress in Lancashire in the early 1860s. The legacy of famine in Ireland was variously understood. Differences between the distress in Lancashire and earlier events in Ireland were underlined by Arnold, for example, who recognised that the suffering of the Irish was on an altogether different scale: ‘Thankfully it may be affirmed, that throughout this Famine none were forced to starve; none died like the unhappy peasants of Ireland, seeking, but unable to find relief.’68 Other observers pushed a more remarkable line of argument: that the hardships endured by Lancashire operatives were, in some sense, even more serious. Thus, while the Methodist London Quarterly Review fully accepted Arnold’s point about the abject misery endured by the Irish peasantry, it also went on to stress that the effects of scarcity were more keenly felt by Lancashire workers precisely because of the relatively high standard of comfort they had previously enjoyed: ‘Had they been accustomed to the fare of Irish labourers, they would not have felt the distress so deeply: but where men have long been used to the comforts which a family income of two guineas a week can bring, they naturally associate the parochial allowance of half a guinea with the idea of starvation.’69 The

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Reverend John Baillie of Caius College, Cambridge, went even further, asserting that the Irish Famine lacked ‘that element of painful sensitiveness which so affectingly aggravates the present calamity’.70 The racist overtones of this discourse are manifest and some writers, not surprisingly perhaps, even contrasted the plucky endurance of the Lancashire unemployed with the dissolute Irish race that, when faced with adversity, simply lay down and died.71 Not only did Lancashire workers need help from those better off, then, but they had also earned it. Behind some of this sympathy lay fear, certainly. Arnold noted that many worried that the widespread social disorder of the Chartist period might reappear along with mass hunger: ‘It could not but be expected that this should have demoralized many, and together with this reflection came recollections of outrage and violence, of which the experience of former times ominously suggested the recurrence.’72 However, it should not be doubted that a large proportion of middle-class individuals who participated in the relief campaign in one way or another were driven by higher motives; Mrs Gaskell broke her heart over the suffering poor in the last years of her life and she was not alone.73 Changes in religious belief played a significant role here. Developing Boyd Hilton’s seminal work on the influence of Christian ideas in mid nineteenth century England, Deborah Cohen has suggested that the shift from the ‘age of atonement’, where suffering was viewed as just punishment for sinfulness, to a much more forgiving ‘incarnationalism’ that perceived Christ in everyone was bound up with an increasingly relaxed attitude towards consumerism among the middle classes.74 As we have already argued, a growing middle-class humanitarianism was partly galvanised into action by stories and images of relatively prosperous workers being stripped of their possessions, and it was also undergirded by an incarnational religious outlook that portrayed all men as brothers. Thus, the campaign was frequently represented as a triumph of human and Christian solidarity over the claims of class. Baillie took the opportunity to bring the message of Jesus’ love and the gospel of mercy to the cotton districts, while other propagandists reminded readers ‘that there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of His people, our kindred in Christ, in deepest distress’.75 This transformed Christianity, highly sensitive to relations between common things and the common people, was frequently turned against those niggardly capitalists who put profit above all else. As a prize-winning poem warned: ‘We rear a hideous

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idol for ourselves/And bow us down before the demon, Gold/Hear this and learn that still some love remains/Some care for penury, some tears for woe/Some likeness of the mind of Christ in men.’ Gladstone’s stance was informed by this sensibility, of course, but by this time it had even touched Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, who may have regarded the crisis as retribution for profligate consumption, particularly by the rich, but who also preached publicly about a loving God before which ‘we are all equal’.76 Humanitarian efforts were marked by profound tensions from the start. Treating the Lancashire unemployed as brothers and sisters conflicted with the bureaucratic rationale that informed both statutory and charitable relief. Australian donors complained bitterly about the way in which funds were channelled off by KayShuttleworth for purposes of educational or moral reform rather than for food and clothing.77 Different religious organisations sometimes vied with one another for control of relief initiatives, an important contributory factor in the Stalybridge riots, as we shall see. Working-class thrift was also penalised; Lord Derby, for example, instructed local committees to refuse relief to claimants who still held shares in co-operative societies, despite the fact that these were now almost worthless.78 Clearly, the response from above was at odds with efforts from below, and workers’ own attempts to help themselves were often blocked.79 In general, workers were configured by the humanitarian campaign as passive recipients of relief, suffering hardship bravely and immensely grateful for help from their social superiors. This key contradiction tended to be buried by the famine literature. One text, however, took a rather different tack: Edwin Waugh’s Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk during the Cotton Famine (1867). First serialised in the Manchester Examiner and Times during 1862, Waugh’s sharply drawn vignettes certainly humanised the unemployed, evoking sympathy for families whose homes were disintegrating before their eyes. But it achieved much more than that. Unlike other observers, Waugh had first-hand experience of poverty – he worked for years as a journeyman printer throughout the country before returning to his native Rochdale – and had only recently managed to escape the drudgery of a life of labour by means of dialect poetry. Waugh thus represented distress from a position of liminality; he was removed from working people through the effort of self-improvement and the middle-class patronage relationships on which he increasingly

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depended, but was nevertheless still close to and greatly respected Lancashire factory folk.80 In the notebooks in which Waugh recorded his visits he wondered why the crisis had not generated popular revolt, as it had in the fairly recent past. The answer, Waugh concluded, lay in the spread of education among the workers and the general desire for ‘order’.81 The latter manifested itself in the cleanliness of their homes, which were mostly kept neat and clean even in the teeth of distress. The love of things was repeatedly highlighted in the published work; indeed, goods were intimately connected with the quest for pattern and control. Maintaining a clean home in which ‘the household gods’ were proudly displayed was central to Lancashire workers’ culture and Waugh showed how some managed to cling on heroically, for a time at least, to hard-won possessions, including clothes, furniture, pianos and even oil paintings.82 Understandably, those better placed held onto their things for longer, like the throstleoverseer whom Waugh observed fly-tying, no doubt in preparation of a poaching expedition: The bits of cottage furniture, though cheap, and well worn, were all there; and the simple household gods, in the shape of pictures and ornaments, were in their places still. A hardy-looking, brown-faced man, with close-cropped black hair, and a mild countenance, sat on a table by the window, making artificial flies, for fishing. In the corner over his head, a cheap, dingy picture of the trial of Queen Catherine, hung against the wall.83

Waugh rehearsed the clichés about dignified suffering readily enough but he also portrayed the ‘Cotton Famine’ as an assault on working-class culture, which met an active response from those affected despite the absence of serious social unrest. His method, as well as his origins, allowed him better insight into the meaning of distress than any other writer. Like Henry Mayhew in the late 1840s, Waugh listened to operatives’ stories and allowed them to speak in their own words much of the time. He therefore took repeated swipes at the statistical gaze in the text, preferring instead to communicate working-class experience in the cadences of their own dialect.84 Consequently, workers come across not as cowed, docile sufferers but as spirited, creative individuals who could even laugh at their dire situation sometimes. Narrating a send-off at Blackburn railway station to

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unemployed operatives that had been found agricultural work in Lincolnshire, Waugh observed how one of the men called to his wife, ‘There’s a good time coming’, and asked her to run home and fetch a pair of wet-weather trousers: ‘One of his companions replied, “Thae knows hoo connot get ’em Jack. Th’ pop-shops are noan oppen yet”.’85 Consumers in revolt The image of cotton operatives as brave but passive sufferers of an act of God bore some resemblance to reality but it was very partial, shaped for a particular market. Waugh, for instance, recorded numerous grumblings against Boards of Guardians and the operation of the various relief schemes.86 More organised protest was not uncommon either and occurred well before the full impact of the ‘Cotton Famine’ was felt. Based now at his chapel at Stalybridge, the old radical preacher J. R. Stephens played an important role here, regularly denouncing capitalist mill owners from the start of the decade. Conflict between masters and textile unions broke out in south-east Lancashire and north-east Cheshire at the first sign of trade stagnation that resulted in wage cuts; at Bolton 12,000 operatives turned out in the spring of 1861. Some union leaders, most especially the charismatic Jonathan Bintcliffe, spoke a strident language of class, invoking memories of early Chartism.87 As unemployment and distress spread, criticism of the organisation and management of relief became more common. In the summer of 1862 large meetings were held at Stevenson Square, Manchester, at which speakers explained the ‘Cotton Famine’ as a crisis of overproduction and also condemned the hated labour test and the parsimony of some guardians who ‘almost count the grains of meal on which a man could live’.88 Other forms of protest were more covert. Prosecutions for poaching in Lancashire and Cheshire rose to exceptional levels during this period and there is evidence to suggest that many workers regarded poaching as a social crime, entirely legitimate in the circumstances. For example, Blackburn fell into the hands of a ‘lawless mob’ in early November 1862, after eight local men had been found guilty of netting rabbits on the Pleasington estate. The Riot Act was read and the tumult eventually quelled with the arrival of the military and police reinforcements from Burnley and Darwen.89

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In mid-March 1863 Dr John Bridges, a convert to the positivist ‘religion of humanity’ and physician at Bradford Infirmary, wrote to The Times contesting complacent perceptions of the crisis. Bridges sympathised with the ‘very deep and widespread irritation’ felt by cotton operatives, caused in part by unsympathetic relief committees and harsh Boards of Guardians, and warned of the likelihood of social unrest.90 His fears had no doubt been fuelled by recent outbreaks of disorder. At Glossop on 2 March, the unemployed had intervened in the sale of American flour sent as aid, believing that it should be given away as donors had intended. The patience of the 5,000-strong crowd snapped as local shopkeepers started bidding, barrels were seized and broken open until everything looked as if there had been ‘a heavy snow storm’. Eight days later Manchester workers refused to play their assigned role in a carefully stage-managed spectacle of giving. The distribution of food brought over by US relief ship the George Griswold had been timed to coincide with the wedding of the Prince of Wales. The unemployed were requested to assemble in Stevenson Square, Manchester, and then form a procession to Kersal Moor where it was promised 15,000 loaves would be handed out. As Arnold observed in his history, operatives found the idea of following carts laden with bread to what had been one of the great Chartist meeting places ‘something derogatory … like donkeys after a bunch of carrots’. A riot duly broke out as bread was appropriated and distributed by the people themselves.91 These relatively minor incidents were important precursors of far more serious outbreaks that occurred just over a week later at Stalybridge, Ashton, Hyde and Dukinfield. These particular cotton towns had been among those hardest hit by distress. In Ashton, for example, full-time employment fell by almost 90 per cent between early 1861 and 1863. Apart from grievances concerning the operation of relief committees and Boards of Guardians, discontent was fomented by the miserly attitude of local mill owners, only a third of which contributed to the relief fund in Ashton, though better relations between workers and employers pertained elsewhere.92 Pressure from below grew as scales of relief were ratcheted down in places like Stalybridge, the epicentre of revolt. Trouble had been brewing here for months, exacerbated by the fact that the relief operation was divided along religious lines. Dominated by nonconformists, the major official body followed the Central Committee line, while another under Anglican control

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relied on the Mansion House Fund. Early in 1863 the official relief committee had decided to reduce the grant paid to the unemployed who attended schools from 3s 4d to 3s a week, hold back a day’s pay on the condition of good behaviour and give relief in the form of tickets rather than cash, taking the view that too much money was being spent in beer houses. A storm of protest followed, led by J. R. Stephens, who, according to Dr Bridges, had ‘recovered all the energy of his youth’.93 On Sunday 25 January, Stephens delivered a sermon to a packed meeting at King Street Chapel that explained the ‘Cotton Famine’ as a crisis of overproduction and denounced as undemocratic the actions of an unelected relief committee made up of ‘shabby beggars, rogues, and fools’. The Mayor, Robert Hopwood, who was a member of the committee, had refused to sanction a public meeting to discuss matters and on 2 February, before an audience of at least 1,500 factory operatives at the town hall, Stephens narrated his interview with Hopwood, who had flatly refused to accept criticism of his ‘unconstitutional’ behaviour.94 Concluding that legitimate channels of dissent were blocked, Stephens kept up pressure for change with speeches whose rhetoric recalled his Chartist heyday. Such activities certainly worried Hopwood, who, along with other members of the relief committee, blamed this ‘old and practiced demagogue’ for the tense situation in the town.95 Stephens detailed, with great ingenuity and humour, how operatives were being degraded as consumers not only by the operation of his old target the Poor Law but also by new charitable initiatives. Stephens read the marks of condescension here, despite grandiloquent claims about human brotherhood made by supporters of the relief campaign. His method of exposure was most graphic. At one meeting he told the story of a woman who had been given a pair of stockings by the committee – ‘so thin that he had no doubt that when they were washed they would run up so that they would not fit a pea stick’ – on which were stamped the letters SERF, rather than SBRF (Stalybridge Relief Fund), because the ink had not taken properly. Stephens made much of this, claiming that he had explained to the woman that the clothes had been donated by the Czar of Russia, where serfdom had recently been abolished: ‘and a most appropriate present it would have been to those who permitted their wives and daughters to wear articles which were stamped like sheep, and petticoats so thin that anyone could read a

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newspaper through them’.96 Stephens’s critique of the ‘slop’ dished out by the soup kitchens echoed his anti-Poor Law days: the soup they got only swelled the belly without lining the ribs – (loud laughter) … He wanted them to get really good dishes, in which the spoon would stand upright, not skilligalee, not that everlasting soup. (Cheers.) He had tasted their soup, both at Ashton and Stalybridge, stirred it well up, got to the bottom, but he had never been able to discover a hair of Lord Faversham’s ox. (Loud Laughter.)

Like Waugh, Stephens understood and adroitly deployed the dry humour of the Lancashire working class; the final reference was to an ox that had been donated to the unemployed but which was rumoured to have been shared out among the relief committee and secretly consumed at a public house belonging to one of its members. Stephens’s argument about reduced consumer standards was shot through with a patriarchal view of gender relations. He stirred male audiences by portraying relief as an attack on working-class masculinity; women and children were excluded from the town hall meeting of 2 February and the placards that called the meeting at Lees were headed ‘Be Men’. Women, he maintained, were often ‘pitched, and tossed, and bandied, and pushed about from one end of the town to the other’ to get help, while men could only look on shamefully.97 The overall thrust of Stephens’s analysis was that the social norm of consumption recently and deservedly enjoyed by textile workers was being consciously ratcheted down to pay for a crisis not of their own making. Soup kitchens symbolised for him the strategy of the powerful and their philanthropic hangers-on, designed as they were ‘to bring the people of England down to a lower standard of life than heretofore’. At Lees he linked the inferior Indian cotton that provided operatives with what little employment there was with this general process of degradation: ‘They were living on Surat oatmeal. (Loud cheers and laughter.) Surat coats, shirts, shoes, and other garments branded with the initials of the Lees Relief Committee.’98 In a memorable passage, Stephens told Mayor Hopwood how he had seen through his game: First of all you catch the lion, then you lock him up, clip his claws, and then feed him on water gruel – (cheers and laughter) then you put on the gag, and then you call the people to look at the lion, – a happy lion, a contented lion, a gentle lion – (renewed laughter), the

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Figure 19. Stalybridge Riot, Illustrated Times, 4 April 1863. lion turned into a lamb, and you want everybody to believe that if that lion was not so poor in that cage, that if his claws were not clipped, and that if it is not fed on water gruel, he will soon break those bars and let us know what for. (Cheers and laughter.)99

In this way, Stephens argued that the reduction of Lancashire workers’ consumption norm was a deliberate strategy that simultaneously lowered costs and weakened working-class resistance. It was a message that was eagerly listened to in the spring of 1863. Riots eventually broke out at Stalybridge on Friday 20 March. Confronted by the relief committee’s continued intransigence, a large crowd smashed open the committee’s store and seized £800 worth of goods. Notwithstanding Stephens’s gendered discourse, women were to the fore from the outset, as the illustration in Figure 19 suggests. The Riot Act was read and a troop of hussars temporarily restored order. Eighty-nine people were arrested, a third of whom were women, and magistrates despatched twenty-nine of these to Chester for trial the following day on charges of riot and felony. An

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incensed crowd attempted to release prisoners on the way to the railway station, young, fashion-conscious working women goading their men to action with taunts of cowardice: ‘The “Garibaldi jackets” were especially excited on this point, and set their companions the example of what they ought to do by now and then hurling stones themselves at the escort.’ Undaunted by the show of force, operatives were becoming more determined than ever not to accept the demeaning ticket system, despite the fact that many of them had probably not eaten for at least two days. Also worrying from the authorities’ point of view was that the crowd was composed not only of young men and the Irish poor, but also of many respectable men and women, as the local newspaper underlined. Threatening that ‘they would have something to eat before they went to bed, they would “clem” no longer’, the crowd set their face squarely against the organisation of relief: ‘Men and women – respectable working men and women, who had refused to lift up their hands against the committee in any way, denounced those gentlemen for wishing to press upon them “paper money” as they called it, and declared that it was the ever-shifting and changing conduct of the committee that had brought this fearful evil upon the town.’ Following a lull on the Sunday, the next day hundreds marched to the nearby townships of Ashton and Dukinfield, where shopkeepers were intimidated and their goods appropriated. Once again, order was not restored until the Riot Act had been read, specials sworn in and cavalry deployed. At the height of the disturbances at Ashton at least 10,000 mostly ‘respectable looking operatives’ took control of the streets.100 The claim made by one recent scholar that there were no bread riots during these disturbances seems curious to say the least and they deserve to be regarded as one of the last spasms of ‘moral economy’ crowd action, in which the riot was the method of last resort.101 Admittedly, the events did not simply recall older practices, inflected as they were by the new mechanisms of relief, and indeed some participants also refused to regard themselves as being engaged in riotous behaviour at the time, for understandable reasons. When Hugh Mason, ex-Mayor of Ashton, tried to calm things down and lamented the ‘little rioting’ that had occurred, he was interrupted with cries of ‘No, no; not a riot; we want bread.’ Nevertheless, shopkeepers were intimidated into handing over hundreds of loaves in these towns as well as other provisions including cheese, ham, bacon, tea, coffee, beer and, on one

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occasion, even oysters. Although many shops were forced open, the overall lack of violence testifies to the discipline of the crowd, as does the discrimination employed. Despised shopkeepers such as George Beaumont, a pork butcher and beer seller from Dukinfield, undoubtedly received harsh treatment. Headed by two women ‘more violent than any of the men’, ‘the mob’ forced their way into Beaumont’s shop, ate all the pies and cooked meat, then ‘went into the kitchen and ate the family’s dinner, besides helping themselves to drink’. Despite this, at the subsequent trial at Chester, the judge, Justice Mellor, discountenanced claims made by the butcher’s wife, Elizabeth, that she had feared for her life and recommended leniency. Unusually, the local co-operative store was raided in this town, while at Ashton and Stalybridge they were deliberately left alone. This was perhaps due to the relatively narrow membership base of the co-operative society here as well as popular dislike for the manager of the Dukinfield store, James Dickinson, who later testified against rioters. Overall, however, a sense of fair play and justice informed the actions of the crowd as it had done in previous decades. Appropriated goods were distributed in a highly regulated manner. Thus, at Stalybridge, ‘the inhabitants passed out their loaves to the crowd as soon as the attack began. Three boys were seen fighting for a loaf in the scramble, until some of the crowd parted them, and gave the loaf to the least.’ Some shopkeepers responded very coolly to crowd demands, as if recalling earlier confrontations. At Dukinfield, for instance, a number of bakers cut up loaves before throwing them out of their windows, ‘whilst others again, after throwing two or three loaves, declared their bread was all done. This seemed to satisfy the mob, and they passed on to the next shop. Thus, by saving their bread, as the adage says, they at the same time “saved their bacon”.’102 Ground down by hunger and facing staunch opposition, the operatives’ position was hopeless. They were not totally defeated, however. Sympathising with their plight, the Mansion House Fund sent £500, much to the consternation of local elites and the local relief committee. Despatched by the Central Executive Committee in Manchester to help restore order, Farnall took a predictably hard line but Kay-Shuttleworth urged compromise, fearing not unreasonably that the outbreak would spread as it had done twenty years earlier and that there would be a general rising in the Burnley area, his home patch. He had been much alarmed by letters from his son,

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Ughtred, who reported a meeting at Padiham at which a speaker had supported direct action: ‘The Stalybridge people have got up a disturbance and gone and helped themselves at the relief stores. There was no reason why they should not do so. The things were sent for them, they were not given them, and they had a right to them, so they have taken them.’103 After prolonged negotiations with Mayor Hopwood, on 24 March Stalybridge workers decided to end their protest and accept the committee’s offer, whereby shopkeepers would return 5d in cash on every shilling ticket spent, amounting to a cash sum of 1s 3d per week. Most significantly, direct action by operatives convinced Parliament of the need for intervention in order to check the ‘demoralisation’ of respectable workers that many regarded as a major cause of disorder.104 Kay-Shuttleworth lobbied MPs to support the Public Works (Manufacturing Districts) Act that was passed with little debate on 21 July 1863, which enabled local authorities to borrow money at low interest from a £1.2 million fund for infrastructural projects such as roads and sewers. Although the measure was never used to full effect, its impact was probably greater than often supposed and its symbolic importance should not be underestimated, either; by providing work and wages the state was effectively underwriting for the first time the social norm of consumption of respectable, industrious workers who had learnt to respond appropriately to the incentives of the capitalist market.105 Conclusion The Stalybridge riots generated profound shockwaves that reverberated nationally. Many middle-class commentators warned that such behaviour would lead many of those who sympathised with the plight of cotton operatives to recoil: recipients of relief were required to be consistently passive and grateful. The metropolitan bourgeois press asked what right had working-class consumers to revolt when they were not actually starving and blamed Stephens and the Irish for the unrest. The Daily News, for instance, described the riots as ‘Donnybrook Fair, with its accompanying faction fight’.106 The authorities encouraged this view by filtering out mainly young Irish men and women for prosecution, despite the fact that a wide cross-section of the population had taken active part, as we have seen. Arnold lent his support here, remarking that after

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the first day of riots magistrates faced ‘two or three benches filled with half-blown Irish sluts, behind whom were a rather larger number of ragged boys, and a few men’.107 His history, along with other accounts that appeared soon after, served to both marginalise the riots – which ‘stain the history of the Cotton Famine’ – and memorialise the crisis more generally as an example of class co-operation and national solidarity. Thus, the Athenaeum welcomed Arnold’s work as having ‘all the interest of a romance’ and concluded: ‘The conduct during the cotton famine is a far nobler trophy to England than a hundred years of the “terrific prosperity” of 1860.’ The nonconformist British Quarterly Review marvelled at the way in which half-a-million workers had been ‘reduced from affluence to a relief scale just sufficient to keep body and soul together, and this for years, without bloodshed or confusion’. The writer went on to remark that this would have been impossible twenty years earlier, when classes had been alienated from one another, but during the famine ‘every other feeling was lost in the cry, “The nation to the rescue!”’108 And although the pain in the gut was certainly felt by many during the crisis, it was a shared hunger for and love of things that increasingly knit classes together, manifested through the humanitarian relief operation. Arnold inadvertently drew attention to this by means of a poignant anecdote: ‘There is sentiment in old clothes. One little cap, for example, contained a volume. Upon the lining was stitched a note, to this effect: “My darling child wore this: he is gone to heaven; may the little head that shall wear my sweet child’s cap be blessed!”’109 Besides the Public Works Act, the ‘Cotton Famine’ had major repercussions on the movement for democratic reform. While the precise impact has been disputed, a great deal of evidence points to strong links between a rejuvenated reform campaign and the quiescence of working-class consumers in Lancashire during the crisis.110 Gladstone forged connections early on, promising in a speech at Newcastle in October 1862 that ‘When Parliament again considered the franchise the conduct of the men of Lancashire would be taken into account.’111 The vote was a mark of moral worth for Gladstone, and the patient, even heroic manner in which cotton operatives had borne their suffering provided eloquent demonstration that some male artisans at least were now entitled to full citizenship. Many working-class supporters of reform also adopted this stance, including the glass blower, Joseph Leicester, who contested Robert Lowe’s

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portrayal of workers as morally unfit drunkards at a meeting of the Reform League: ‘When the people were described as unfit for the franchise the word “Lancashire” should be whispered.’112 Others including Kay-Shuttleworth singled out as especially deserving members of co-operative societies who had sacrificed their hardwon savings and possessions.113 Gladstone eagerly picked up this particular thread himself and wove the ‘Rochdale argument’ into a memorable speech in favour of reform in the House of Commons that recommended the co-operative system as encouraging manly independence and self-government.114 As G. D. H. Cole pointed out, the Second Reform Act passed by the Conservatives in 1867, which awarded the vote to rate-paying urban householders, ‘in effect enfranchised the Co-operative movement and totally changed the civic status of its membership’.115 A moment richly symbolic of the complex meaning of this inclusion occurred when Gladstone visited the co-op stores at Oldham towards the end of that year. Here he was presented with an illuminated address that declared labour to be the source of all wealth, asserted that national contentment depended on the distribution rather than the amount of wealth and insisted that ‘mutual co-operation’ was as far in advance of ‘unrestricted individual competition as that was in advance of forced or slave labour’.116 Liberal leaders such as Gladstone, Cobden and Bright found it easier to build alliances with workers as consumers rather than producers after mid-century, not least because of the reality of industrial conflict, which persisted despite the mellowing of political economy.117 Cotton districts were convulsed by recurrent strikes and lock-outs throughout the 1850s, including the great Preston lock-out of 1853–4, and the national press was replete with reports of the ‘Sheffield outrages’ in the year the Second Reform Act was passed. Notwithstanding affiliations between co-operation and utopian socialism and Chartism, little opprobrium clung to working-class consumers or their institutions by comparison. Forms of working-class consumer practice thus provided vital material out of which popular liberalism was constructed. When in work, eager plebeian consumers could aspire like Gladstone to possess some choice pieces of china of their own. They could also develop institutions that would help tide them over difficult times as well as encouraging the development of those intellectual and moral qualities necessary for active citizenship. However, when idle for long periods, working-class consumers had to accept passively whatever support was

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offered by the state and sympathetic middle-class humanitarians.118 The bargain that was struck between working-class consumers and liberalism therefore involved relinquishing older kinds of market regulation, most obviously the food riot, deliberately forgotten or else dismissed by Liberal leaders as the tactic of an uncivilised ethnic minority that had yet to fully understand the true meaning of things. Notes 1 Marcia Pointon, ‘W. E. Gladstone as an art patron and collector’, Victorian Studies, 19:1 (1975), 73–98; Jonathan Conlin, ‘Gladstone and Christian art, 1832–1854’, Historical Journal, 46:2 (2003), 341– 74; Deborah Cohen, Household gods: the British and their possessions (New Haven, CT, 2006), pp. xi, 149. 2 Fraser’s Magazine, 47 (May 1853), 607. This view was not uncontested. See, for example, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 87 (March 1860), 384. 3 Joseph Schumpeter, History of economic analysis (1954), pp. 403–5. 4 Colin Matthew, ‘Disraeli, Gladstone, and the politics of mid-Victorian Budgets’, Historical Journal, 22:3 (1979), 615. 5 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 24 April 1853, p. 1; Luke James Hansard, The people’s Budget, to produce millions of money … and millions of blessings to the British and Irish nation, as a people … by one of the people (1854); The Times, 19 April 1853, pp. 3–6; C. D. Collet, History of the taxes on knowledge (1899; 1933), pp. 107–8. 6 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 1 May 1853, pp. 8–9; The Times, 19 April 1853, p. 7; Francis W. Hirst, Gladstone as financier and economist (1931), pp. 138–54. 7 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 19 February 1860, pp. 1, 5; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 19 February 1860, p. 1; 26 February 1860, p. 1. 8 Hansard, vol. 156, cols 844–50 (House of Commons, 10 February 1860). 9 Eugenio Biagini, ‘Popular Liberals, Gladstonian finance, and the debate on taxation, 1860–1874’, in Eugenio Biagini and Alastair Reid (eds), Currents of radicalism: popular radicalism, organised labour and party politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge, 1991). 10 See Roger Scola, Feeding the Victorian city: the food supply of Manchester, 1770–1870 (Manchester, 1992). 11 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence, 1846–1895 (1934), pp. 115–16. For incisive criticism of the argument that ‘affluence’ led necessarily to a decline in class consciousness during this phase, see E. P. Thompson, ‘Revolution again!’, New Left Review, 1:6 (1960), 25–7.

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12 D. A. Farnie, The English cotton industry and the world market, 1815–1896 (Oxford, 1979), p. 136. 13 David Chadwick, ‘On the rate of wages in Manchester and Salford, and the manufacturing districts of Lancashire, 1839–59’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, 23:1 (1860), 5, 8, 19; R. Arthur Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine: from the fall of Sumter to the passing of the Public Works Act (1864), p. 36. 14 John Watts, The facts of the Cotton Famine (1866), p. 41. 15 Fifth report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council (1863), pp. 308, 321, 340, 351. 16 Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (1855; 1970), p. 100. 17 See Edwin Waugh, Home-life of the Lancashire factory folk during the Cotton Famine (1867), p. 37. 18 Neville Kirk, The growth of working class reformism in mid-Victorian England (1985), p. 82; John K. Walton, Lancashire: a social history, 1558–1939 (Manchester, 1987), p. 234. 19 James Kay-Shuttleworth, Words of comfort and counsel to distressed Lancashire Workmen, spoken on Sundays in 1862: by a country squire – their neighbour (Manchester, 1862), no. 1, p. 13; Norman Longmate, The hungry mills: the story of the Lancashire Cotton Famine, 1861–5 (1978), pp. 143–5. 20 Ellen Barlee, A visit to Lancashire in December 1862 (1863), p. 5. See also ‘Lancashire in 1862’, National Review, 16 (January 1863), 220–3. 21 See Donna Loftus, ‘Capital and community: limited liability and attempts to democratize the market in mid-nineteenth-century England’, Victorian Studies, 45:1 (2001), 93–120. 22 Dorothy Thompson, ‘Women and nineteenth century radical politics: a lost dimension’, in Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (eds), The rights and wrongs of women (1976); Peter Gurney, ‘The middle class embrace: language, representation and the contest over co-operative forms in Britain, c. 1860–1914’, Victorian Studies, 37:2 (1994), 253–86. 23 Watts, The facts of the Cotton Famine, pp. 74, 82, 88. Note also Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, p. 252, who similarly asserted that co-operation had achieved a great deal since ‘casting off the old dross of communistic Owenism’; John K. Walton, ‘Co-operation in Lancashire, 1844–1914’, North West Labour History, 19 (1994), 115–25. 24 The Co-operator, June 1860, p. 15; September 1861, p. 1; Barnett Smith, The life and speeches of the Rt. Hon. John Bright, MP (1881), p. 211; Keith Robbins, John Bright (1979), p. 228; R. S. Roper, The Co-op chapel of Rochdale (Rochdale, 1993), pp. 17–18; John K. Walton, ‘Revisiting the Rochdale Pioneers’, Labour History Review, 80:3 (forthcoming).

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25 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 16 December 1860, p. 7. See also Preston Guardian, 6 January 1865, p. 2. 26 Daniel Stone, The Rochdale Co-operative Societies; a study for working men; being the substance of a village address, delivered in the National School Room, Cheadle, near Manchester (Manchester, 1861), pp. 5, 12. 27 W. O. Henderson, The Lancashire Cotton Famine 1861–1865 (Manchester, 1934; 1969), pp. 95–8. 28 Watts, The facts of the Cotton Famine, pp. 340–1; G. J. Holyoake, ‘Co-operation during the cotton scarcity’, Transactions of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science (1866), 618–22; L. Lynne Kiesling, ‘Institutional choice matters: the Poor Law and implicit labor contracts in Victorian Lancashire’, Explorations in Economic History, 33 (1996), 65–85. 29 Kirk, The growth of working class reformism, pp. 43–4. 30 Manchester Times, 4 December 1847, p. 4; Morning Post, 13 December 1847, p. 1; Liverpool Mercury, 14 December 1847, p. 752; Hampshire Advertiser, 18 December 1847, p. 3. 31 Northern Star, 25 December 1847, p. 2. 32 Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, p. 44. See also Watts, The facts of the Cotton Famine, pp. 230–2; Henderson, The Lancashire Cotton Famine, pp. 11–15. 33 Manchester Weekly Times, 20 December 1862, p. 5; Reynolds’s Newspaper, 7 December 1862, p. 5. 34 The Times, 8 October 1862, p. 7; 9 October 1862, p. 7; Hirst, Gladstone as financier and economist, p. 213. 35 Eugenio Biagini, Liberty, retrenchment and reform: popular liberalism in the age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 379–85. 36 ‘A Merchant’, Observations on Mr Gladstone’s denunciation of certain millowners of Lancashire, contained in a speech delivered by him at Newcastle, on the 7th of October, 1862 (1862), pp. 8, 35; Longmate, The hungry mills, pp. 133–4. 37 S. A. Nichols, Darwen and the Cotton Famine (Darwen, 1893), p. 99. Nichols had written to Gladstone when serving as secretary to the local relief committee. Defending the practice of stock jobbing a few years earlier, Gladstone had observed: ‘The time was also when forestalling and regrating were considered immoral; but we know that no class of men were more beneficial to the community than the forestallers and re-graters, who bought up grain for a time of scarcity, and by raising the price induced economy in consumption when the time of scarcity actually came.’ Hansard, vol. 157, cols 1299–300 (House of Commons, 26 March 1860). 38 ‘An Act of Mercy’, All The Year Round, 20 December 1862, p. 344.

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39 Ibid., p. 346. 40 Ibid., p. 349. 41 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 14 December 1862, p. 1; Reverend John Baillie, What I saw in Lancashire: a plea for the distressed operatives (1862), p. 8. See also National Review, 16 (January 1863), 229. 42 Ibid., p. 227. 43 Joseph Ramsbottom, Phases of distress: Lancashire rhymes (Manchester, 1864), pp. 25–6. This work was edited by ‘A Lancashire Lad’, John Whittaker. 44 Some observers stressed how cotton workers regained their things fairly soon after the famine. See W. A. Abram, ‘Social condition and political prospects of the Lancashire workmen’, Fortnightly Review, 4 (October 1868), 429. 45 See Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: a study in the relationship between classes in Victorian society (Oxford, 1971); Michael E. Rose, ‘Rochdale man and the Stalybridge Riot: the relief and control of the unemployed during the Lancashire Cotton Famine’, in A. P. Donajgrodzki (ed.), Social control in nineteenth century Britain (1977), pp. 186–7. 46 Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, p. 105; Rose, ‘Rochdale man and the Stalybridge Riot’, p. 189. 47 Henderson, The Lancashire Cotton Famine, pp. 53–4. At Preston, Farnall had recommended able-bodied claimants be subjected to a digging test, which was rejected by guardians. 48 T. C. Barker, D. J. Oddy and John Yudkin, The dietary surveys of Dr Edward Smith 1862–3 (1970), pp. 16–17. 49 A. J. P. Taylor put it succinctly in Essays in English history (1977), p. 71: ‘The New Poor Law swept away the old principle of the right to work or maintenance, the idea that society had some responsibility for its members; it substituted the idea that men must be driven to work by hunger – the basic idea without which capitalism will not work.’ 50 Under the terms of this Act, which was extended by the Union Chargeability Act of 1865, if parishes had expenses that could not be met by a three shilling rate, other parishes in the Union could be charged. Kingsley had made much of the low poor rates in Lancashire compared with the south, a misleading comparison because of the normally high levels of employment and wages in cotton textile districts. More generally, the ‘Cotton Famine’ seemed to Kingsley as further proof that John Bright’s ‘Manchester school’ or ‘Lancashire system’, which was held up ‘as the model of human society’, was in fact ‘no system at all’. Henderson, The Lancashire Cotton Famine, pp. 55–8; Charles Kingsley and F. E. Grenfell Kingsley, Charles

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52 53 54

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Kingsley: his letters and memories of his life – edited by his wife (1883), p. 248. Barker et al., The dietary surveys of Dr Edward Smith, pp. 20, 27, 39–40; Fifth report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council (1863), pp. 321–51. Smith concluded that the effects of distress on health were negligible, though this contradicted Dr Buchanan’s report, which drew attention to epidemics of typhus at Preston and Manchester. Ibid., pp. 299–300. See also D. J. Oddy, ‘Urban famine in nineteenth-century Britain: the effect of the Lancashire Cotton Famine on working-class diet and health’, Economic History Review, 36:1 (1983), 68–86. In Hunger: a modern history (Cambridge, MA, 2007), p. 326, James Vernon sees Smith’s influence as generally humane, which may have surprised paupers fed according to scales set forth in the report Smith wrote for Villiers, Dietaries for the inmates of workhouses (1866). Fifth report of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council, p. 17. National Review, 16 (January 1863), 224–5. See also ibid., 229. Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, p. 95; Lynn Hollen Lees, The solidarities of strangers: the English Poor Laws and the people, 1700–1948 (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 233–8. Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, pp. 191–7; Henderson, The Lancashire Cotton Famine, pp. 73–80. Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, ‘Manual of suggestions for the guidence of local relief committees in the cotton districts; suggested by the experience of 1862–3’, in Thoughts and suggestions on certain social problems contained chiefly in addresses to meetings of workmen in Lancashire (1873); Frank Smith, The life and work of Sir James KayShuttleworth (1923), pp. 279–80. See Rose, ‘Rochdale man and the Stalybridge Riot’, pp. 190–2; Rosalind Hall, ‘A poor cotton weyver: poverty and the cotton famine in Clitheroe’, Social History, 28:2 (2003), 233–8. A less critical view is presented by Peter Shapely in ‘Urban charity, class relations and social cohesion: charitable responses to the Cotton Famine’, Urban History, 28:1 (2001), 46–64. Barlee, A visit to Lancashire, pp. 30–2; Mary Bayley, Lancashire homes and what ails them (1863), pp. 16–20; Clare Evans, ‘Unemployment and the making of the feminine during the Lancashire cotton famine’, in Patricia Hudson and W. R. Lee (eds), Women’s work and the family economy in historical perspective (Manchester, 1990). Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, p. 493. See also L. Lynne Kiesling, ‘The long road to recovery: postcrisis coordination of private charity and public relief in Victorian Manchester’, Social Science History, 21:2 (1997), 219–43.

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60 Dickens, who was spending the winter in Paris, gave three readings at the British Embassy in aid of distressed operatives in January 1863. See Preston Guardian, 20 December 1862, p. 3; Standard, 20 January 1863, p. 5; Malcolm Andrews, Charles Dickens and his performing selves: Dickens and the public readings (Oxford, 2006), p. 269. 61 Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, pp. 229–30, 248; Shapely, ‘Charitable responses’, p. 53. 62 In The Great Famine: Ireland’s agony 1845–1852 (2011), p. 192, Ciarán Ó Murchadha concludes that private charity was one of the ‘two great failures’ at the heart of the famine, the other being state relief. See also ibid., pp. 75–8, 83–8, 193–5; Cormac Ó Gráda, The great Irish Famine (Cambridge, 1995); Christine Kinealy, Charity and the Great Hunger in Ireland: the kindness of strangers (2013). 63 Tait’s Magazine, February 1850, p. 84; Karen Halttunen, ‘Humanitarianism and the pornography of pain in Anglo-American culture’, American Historical Review, 100:2 (1995), 303–34; J. R. Oldfield, Popular politics and British anti-slavery: the mobilisation of public opinion against the slave trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester, 1998). 64 The Times, 22 April 1862, p. 11. See also Waugh, Home-life of the Lancashire factory folk, p. 72. 65 Anon., The distress in Lancashire: a visit to the cotton districts (1862), p. 59. See also Anon., Distress in Lancashire: a sermon (1862), p. 11. 66 The Times, 14 April 1862, p. 11; Anon., The distress in Lancashire, p. 89. 67 David Fieldhouse, ‘For richer, for poorer?’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge illustrated history of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1996), p. 132; Mike Davis, Late Victorian holocausts: El Nino famines and the making of the Third World (2001); Vernon, Hunger. 68 Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, p. 154. Arnold went on to refer to the Indian Famine. See also National Review, 16 (January 1863), 227–8. 69 London Quarterly Review, 23 (January 1865), 327. 70 Baillie, What I saw in Lancashire, p. 14. 71 Anon., The distress in Lancashire, p. 16; Anon., Distress in Lancashire: a sermon, pp. 8–9. 72 Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, p. 387; John Whittaker, ‘Lancashire operatives’, Leisure Hour, 27 December 1862, p. 825. 73 See H. W. McCready, ‘Elizabeth Gaskell and the Cotton Famine in Manchester’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 123 (1972), 144–50.

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74 Boyd Hilton, The age of atonement: the influence of evangelicalism on social and economic thought, 1785–1865 (Oxford, 1988); Cohen, Household gods, pp. 12, 25–6. 75 Baillie, What I saw in Lancashire, pp. 10–11; Anon., The distress in Lancashire, p. 89. See also Thomas Goodwin Hatchard, ‘The workmen, they are of men’: a sermon on behalf of the Lancashire distress (1862). 76 F. W. H. Myers, The distress in Lancashire: a poem which obtained the Chancellor’s Medal, etc. (1863), p. 11; Manchester Weekly Times, 22 November 1862, p. 3; Kay-Shuttleworth, Words of comfort and counsel, no. 3, pp. 11–13; no. 5, p. 13; no. 6, pp. 8–9. 77 Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, pp. 384–6; Henderson, The Lancashire Cotton Famine, p. 82. 78 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 25 January 1863, p. 4; Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, pp. 261–2; Watts, The facts of the Cotton Famine, pp. 82–8. 79 Arnold admitted, though quickly dismissed as ‘absurd’, the fact that many operatives resented their lack of control over charitable donations and often regarded relief committees as ‘intruders and middlemen – as jobbers, standing between them and their rights’. The history of the Cotton Famine, p. 395. 80 See Patrick Joyce, Democratic subjects: the self and the social in nineteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1994). 81 Martha Vicinus, The ambiguities of self-help (Littleborough, 1984), p. 27. 82 Waugh, Home-life of the Lancashire factory folk, pp. 26–7, 57, 72, 118. 83 Ibid., p. 141. See also ibid., p. 173. 84 Ibid., pp. 25, 70, 147–8. 85 Ibid., p. 12. 86 Ibid., pp. 29–30, 120–2; Hall, ‘A poor cotton weyver’, 249. There is a detailed discussion of workers’ protests in P. J. Augar, ‘The Cotton Famine, 1861–65: a study of the principal cotton towns during the American Civil War’ (University of Cambridge PhD thesis, 1979), ch. 6. 87 Kirk, The growth of working class reformism, pp. 256–7. 88 Manchester Weekly Times, 7 June 1862, p. 6; 28 June 1862, p. 6; Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, p. 181; Watts, The facts of the Cotton Famine, pp. 130–1. 89 Blackburn Standard, 12 November 1862, p. 4; 19 November 1862, p. 4; ‘An act of mercy’, All The Year Round, 20 December 1862, p. 349; Harvey Osborne and Michael Winstanley, ‘Rural and urban poaching in Victorian England’, Rural History, 17:2 (2006), 193.

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90 The Times, 14 March 1863, p. 14; Henderson, The Lancashire Cotton Famine, p. 110. Bridges wrote to fellow positivist Frederic Harrison, who was lukewarm about the impact of the crisis: ‘What I saw at Manchester and Preston is enough to drive me wild … You want to know the object of my thoughts and feelings. It is this – that Lancashire is not only threatened, but already plunged in the abyss of pauperism. But you – you don’t know what the word means. I earnestly implore you – come and see.’ Susan Liveing, A nineteenth century teacher: John Henry Bridges (1926), pp. 96–7. 91 Ashton and Stalybridge Reporter, 7 March 1863, p. 2; Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, pp. 390–2; Henderson, The Lancashire Cotton Famine, p. 110. 92 Kirk, The growth of working class reformism, p. 258. For a more sanguine view of mill owner benevolence, see Anthony Howe, The cotton masters 1830–1860 (Oxford, 1984), pp. 275–6. 93 Rose, ‘Rochdale man and the Stalybridge Riot’, p. 195; Liveing, A nineteenth century teacher, p. 100. In April Bridges wrote to Harrison that Stephens ‘does not know what fear is’. Ibid., p. 192. 94 Ashton and Stalybridge Reporter, 31 January 1863, p. 2; 7 February 1863, p. 4. 95 In a letter to the Central Committee in Manchester, which was forwarded to the Home Office. See Michael S. Edwards, Purge this realm: a life of Joseph Rayner Stephens (1994), pp. 126–7. 96 Ashton and Stalybridge Reporter, 31 January 1863, p. 2; Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, p. 399; Edwards, Purge this realm, p. 122. 97 Ashton and Stalybridge Reporter, 7 February 1863, p. 4; 14 February 1863, p. 3. The 2 February speech was reprinted, in a slightly altered form, as a pamphlet entitled The unemployed operatives of Lancashire and the Lancashire Relief Committees (Oldham, 1863). Though Stephens’s view was undoubtedly patriarchal, he disparaged the sewing classes much beloved by middle-class observers. See ibid., p. 14. Janet Toole makes some useful observations in ‘Workers and slaves: class relations in South Lancashire in the time of the Cotton Famine’, Labour History Review, 63:2 (1998), 170–4. 98 Ashton and Stalybridge Reporter, 14 February 1863, p. 3. 99 Ibid., 7 February 1863, p. 4, differently worded in The unemployed operatives of Lancashire, p. 13. 100 Ashton and Stalybridge Reporter, 28 March 1863, pp. 3, 4. 101 Oddy, ‘Urban famine in nineteenth-century Britain’, 85. For later examples, see Anthony James Coles, ‘The moral economy of the crowd: some twentieth-century food riots’, The Journal of British Studies, 18:1 (1978), 157–76; Robert D. Storch, ‘Popular festivity

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103

104

105

106 107

108

109 110

111 112 113

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and consumer protest: food price disturbances in the southwest and Oxfordshire in 1867’, Albion, 14:3 (1982), 209–34. Ashton and Stalybridge Reporter, 28 March 1863, pp. 3, 4; 11 April 1863, p. 4; Blackburn Standard, 25 March 1863, p. 2; Watts, The facts of the Cotton Famine, pp. 268, 270. Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, p. 407; Henderson, The Lancashire Cotton Famine, pp. 54, 113; Rose, ‘Rochdale man and the Stalybridge Riot’, pp. 196–7. William Torrens, Lancashire’s lesson: or, the need of a settled policy in times of exceptional distress (1864); Examiner, 11 June 1864, p. 372; Athenaeum, 7 January 1865, p. 14. Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, p. 519; Rose, ‘Rochdale man and the Stalybridge Riot’, pp. 199–200; Howe, The cotton masters, pp. 157–8. Daily News, 24 March 1863, p. 4. Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, p. 401. The accused eventually appeared before Justice Mellor and received relatively lenient sentences of between one and six months’ imprisonment with hard labour. See Ashton and Stalybridge Reporter, 11 April 1863, p. 4. Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, p. 396; Athenaeum, 13 August 1864, pp. 202–4; British Quarterly Review, April 1865, pp. 359, 369. See also London Review, 27 August 1865, p. 240. Arnold, The history of the Cotton Famine, p. 307. Royden Harrison, ‘Professor Beesly and the working-class movement’, in Asa Briggs and John Saville (eds), Essays in labour history (1960); Longmate, The hungry mills, p. 284; Rose, ‘Rochdale man and the Stalybridge Riot’, pp. 187–91; Walton, Lancashire: a social history, p. 241. In his otherwise excellent Democracy and the vote in British politics, 1848–1867 (Farnham, 2011), Robert Saunders unfortunately overlooks the impact of the ‘Cotton Famine’ on reform debates. The Times, 8 October 1862, p. 7. See also W. E. Gladstone, Speeches and addresses delivered at the election of 1865 (1865), pp. 25–6. Reynolds’s Newspaper, 9 December 1866, p. 3. Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, ‘Co-operative associations of workmen’, in Thoughts and suggestions on certain social problems, pp. 100–14. See also Edinburgh Review, 120 (October 1864), 429–30. Hansard, vol. 175, cols 325–6 (House of Commons, 11 May 1864). See also vol. 182, cols 37–8 (House of Commons, 12 March 1866). John Bright developed this argument most extensively in Parliament. See vol. 182, cols 1895–7 (House of Commons, 23 April 1866). G. D. H. Cole, A century of co-operation (Manchester, 1945), p. 188. Daily News, 19 December 1867, pp. 5–6. Gladstone ignored this address in speeches at the Town Hall and the Mechanics’ Institute

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later that day, though he did, predictably, praise Cobden and free trade and also co-operative societies for enabling ‘labourers’ to become ‘capitalists’, thereby mitigating ‘whatever there was left of collision between labour and capital’. Note also Hirst, Gladstone as financier and economist, pp. 256–7. 117 See Eugenio Biagini, ‘British trade unions and popular political economy, 1860–1880’, Historical Journal, 30:4 (1987), 811–40. 118 Representations of ‘innocent’ victims of strike action are discussed in Andy Croll, ‘Starving strikers and the limits of the “humanitarian discovery of hunger” in late Victorian Britain’, International Review of Social History, 56:1 (2011), 103–31.

Epilogue

‘The Age of Veneer’: the limits of liberal consumerism

Looking at the contest between Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League through the lens of consumption helps better illuminate the historical alternatives that polarised the nation in the early Victorian period. In this book, I have endeavoured to unfold a central strand in the story of how working people were both cajoled and hammered into modern consumers during these crucial transitional years. There was no outright victory for free trade radicalism, no clear-cut ‘middle-class’ or ‘bourgeois’ revolution, much to Richard Cobden’s chagrin, no absolute transfer of political power from the landed aristocracy to ‘the people’. Neither was laissez-faire triumphant in any straightforward sense, as politics and economics continued to be intertwined in practice, again to the disappointment of those who advocated hard-line ‘Manchesterism’. The new order of things imagined by John Bright was only partially realised and always deeply contested. In the end, this new order involved not so much an abrupt break with the past nor a compete remodelling of the class structure or political relationships. Instead, it entailed the generalisation of the belief that capitalism not only constituted an ‘immovable horizon’ in a negative sense but also offered hope for a kind of liberation for ‘the people’ through acquisitive consumption. Material improvement measured by the diffusion of more comforts throughout society was therefore vital to it. As the last chapter demonstrated, this achievement remained very precarious indeed in the early 1860s; massive aid from the state and private philanthropy was necessary to support Lancashire cotton workers who suffered nearly as much from the loss of things as from the pain in the gut. As we have seen, modern humanitarianism was partially constructed on the terrain of working-class consumption, ironically enough only after the threat

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of actual starvation, cannibal stories and revolution had receded. It is significant surely that modern forms of protest such as the hunger strike and the hunger march only appeared after working-class consumers had no longer to fear absolute want as they had done in the ‘Hungry Forties’; marching on an empty stomach is impossible and the hunger strike is not a useful tactic for those who are truly hungry.1 By the end of our period elite commentators were worrying less about the lack of food and more about the enervating effects of working-class affluence, an anxiety that soon became a trope of modern life. In 1873, for instance, the Cambridge economist Alfred Marshall disparaged the way prosperity had gone to the heads of artisans, turning them sometimes into ‘dandified perambulating machines, for the display of the cheaper triumphs of the haberdasher and the tailor’.2 Emerging from the wreckage of the momentous struggle between Chartists and the League, popular liberalism was underpinned by a particular kind of consumer politics, by a historically contingent engagement with the grievances and ambitions of workers as consumers. Speaking successfully for ordinary consumers was vital to the maintenance of liberal hegemony. But the consumer underpinnings of popular liberalism – what I refer to as liberal consumerism – took a great deal of ideological and practical work to shore up. One obvious method was to trumpet signs of material progress and this partly explains the passion for inventory among free traders such as G. R. Porter at the Board of Trade, who documented England’s quantitative advance in exhaustive detail. Free traders also underlined the fact that British workers were already enjoying many benefits because of their policy, especially when provoked by Tory protectionists wanting to fight a rearguard action. The mill owner W. R. Greg, for instance, railed against those who reckoned that workers were essentially ‘producers’ rather than ‘consumers’ and thus shut out from improvement. He insisted that labourers were in fact consumers ‘par excellence’, because they spent more of their total income on ‘articles of consumption’ than any other class, and that their progress was borne out by the gradual diffusion of comforts among them.3 Similarly, a correspondent for that bastion of metropolitan free trade radicalism, the Morning Chronicle, eagerly reported that the homes of miners and ironworkers in Merthyr Tydfil at mid-century were ‘literally crammed with furniture’. In the parlour of one of these houses could be found ‘a good

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four-post bedstead, a French-polished chest of drawers, covered with a profusion of glass and other articles, including a cruet-stand and decanters, with small figures of the Queen and Prince Albert in chinaware, a neat work-box, and some ornamental shells’.4 Merthyr had been a hotbed of Chartism, so it was no wonder that middleclass readers were keen on accounts of how workers in this wild border region were being domesticated and transformed into loyal English subjects by a growing consumerism. Not all were persuaded by this. G. W. M. Reynolds, for example, contrasted the experience of ‘The Prosperous Classes and the Oppressed One’, arguing that only the upper stratum of workers had seen any improvement since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Even the position of this group had deteriorated in relative terms, while the prosperity of the middle classes was evinced by their ‘furniture, plate, wine, the use of jewels, and rich clothing’.5 It often proved extremely difficult, therefore, for Liberal leaders to substantiate claims about progress as the 1850s or indeed the 1860s were as hungry as the 1840s had been, for substantial numbers at least. Material benefits spread unevenly and very slowly among some occupational groups, especially seasonal and rural workers. Even the propagandist collection of working-class memoirs that was edited by one of Cobden’s daughters to aid the free trade cause in the Edwardian period, and which popularised the term ‘Hungry Forties’, contained evidence of continuing scarcity long after the repeal of the Corn Laws. Writing from rural Northamptonshire, one contributor vividly recalled the meagre fare of his youth in the 1850s and later, which consisted largely of bread, skimmed milk, flour or pork dumplings, some potatoes and onions, a little tea, coffee and sugar.6 Interestingly, the writer concluded his letter by stressing that although he supported the campaign for free trade, the only real solution to the problems faced by working people was the establishment of ‘a Co-operative Commonwealth, to fight for rather than against each other’.7 The limitations of liberal consumerism were therefore apparent even when it was in the ascendant. Clearly, the 1850s and 1860s were crucial decades and there is evidence to suggest that popular scepticism towards free trade was gradually lessening, at least among the upper echelons of the organised working class – among co-operators, for instance. But we should be careful not to presume any easy or total acceptance. The editor of The Times observed in

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1859 that free trade was ‘not so much a prevalent opinion as an article of national faith’ among ‘the more intelligent classes’, which dominated the political field. However, events such as the recent acrimonious dispute in the London building trade, the editor continued, demonstrated that ‘the sound economical creed’ generally accepted by governing elites was at present ‘almost exclusively confined to their own country and class’.8 Other commentators agreed. Reflecting on the twenty years that had elapsed since the Great Exhibition, the hard-nosed ‘journeyman engineer’ Thomas Wright underlined the success of certain aspects of liberal fiscal policy, admitting that ‘those of the working classes who take note of or think upon political matters readily acknowledge … the legislature have, in reducing taxes upon commodities, materially benefited the working classes’.9 Wright also emphasised, however, that ‘the great majority of the people do not accept the doctrines of political economy as an explanation of their condition’. Rather, according to Wright, they tended to blame the persistence of poverty on an unfair ‘constitution of society’ and the inaction of governments, ‘the members of which being taken exclusively from among “those who have,” legislate in their spirit and on their behalf, to the neglect, and injury of “those who want”’.10 Once again, it is important to underline both the continuing dialogue that made popular liberalism viable and the conditional take-up of the ideology and vision of middle-class spokesmen for ‘the people’ in mid-Victorian England. The continuing reality of consumer exploitation exposed the limits of liberal consumerism most visibly. The practice of truck, for example, was a continuing source of complaint. Though largely confined to districts where coal mining and iron making predominated, it was estimated that at least half-a-million workers were still affected by truck in Britain at the end of our period. From 1849, an alliance of shopkeepers, employers and workers formed anti-truck associations that sought to bring prosecutions against employers who continued to use truck, with some success, particularly in South Staffordshire. Stymied by ineffectual legal powers, attempts were made to push more effective legislation thorough Parliament in 1854, but despite determined pressure, these proved unsuccessful. One of the fiercest opponents of reform was the ‘people’s tribune’, John Bright, who firmly rejected the case for intervention in the parliamentary debate, arguing that working people ought to rely

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on their own efforts rather than on the state. Bright pointed to the spirit of self-help that characterised the Lancashire and Yorkshire working class to support his case.11 Demands to clamp down on adulteration, especially adulteration of foodstuffs, came from various quarters and found wider support. Warnings had been sounded by the German chemist Frederick Accum in the 1820s but his revelations had been ignored.12 By the mid-Victorian period the problem had reached truly epidemic proportions. Medical men played leading roles here in the 1850s, including Arthur Hill Hassall and the radical Thomas Wakley, editor of the Lancet, which publicised cases of adulteration in intricate, gory detail. Following this exposé, a Select Committee of the House of Commons investigated the situation throughout 1855 and 1856.13 Reynolds’s Newspaper threw its weight behind the campaign, publishing a series of letters from ‘Northumbrian’ as the Bill intended to check abuses eventually made its way through Parliament four years later. In these, adulteration was condemned as a class issue, for the rich could avoid harmful food and drink if they chose, while the poor usually had no choice because to ‘be obliged to devour all sorts of pollutions under the name of food and drink is one of the penalties of poverty’. The state lacked the means to check even the most harmful examples and defenders of free trade were keen to spring to the defence of the status quo, regardless of the frequently dire consequences for consumers: ‘unhappily for the cause of fair – though fortunately for the cause of “free” – trade, this interposition has hitherto been of a very ineffectual character’, the correspondent concluded.14 Critics were to be acutely disappointed by the Adulteration of Foods Act of 1860, which, as commentators across the political spectrum convincingly demonstrated, was completely ineffective. The Act left the appointment of analysts to Courts of Quarter Sessions and local bodies such as vestries and town councils and limited the maximum fine that could be levied against those found guilty of adulteration to the paltry sum of £5. The Westminster Review described it as ‘almost totally useless’ as the machinery and level of punishment for adulteration were ‘quite inadequate both for its discovery and prevention’.15 Marx concluded that the Act showed ‘the tenderest consideration for every free-trader who determines by the buying and selling of adulterated commodities “to turn an honest penny”’, and modern historians have confirmed his verdict.16

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Figure 20. George Cruikshank, ‘Buy cheap furniture’, Comic Almanack, 1852.

The heated public debate on adulteration after mid-century provoked more generalised questioning of the moral basis of the early Victorian achievement. Articles in Fraser’s Magazine entitled ‘The Age of Veneer’, for example, generated widespread interest. The writer of them claimed that what had originally been a method of making cheap furniture look more expensive had lately assumed a more profound significance – a ‘universal moral veneering’ – which affected education and politics as well as material goods. The average Englishman, the writer asserted, ‘is becoming superficial and unreal in everything. In mind and body he is veneered.’ Adulteration and modern advertising were distinctive symptoms of the age; future generations would regard political reform as merely ‘trifles’, whereas ‘steam locomotion and the puff-advertisement system’ would together constitute ‘the grandest of world phenomena’.17 George Cruikshank brought his own distinctive perspective to the debate, sending out a memorable warning to gullible consumers (see Figure 20). In this image, a recently married lowermiddle-class couple stare surprised and dumbfounded as their cosy domestic world literally collapses around their ears. This fits in well with Deborah Cohen’s emphasis on the moral meanings of furniture to the Victorians, certainly, though it also underlines the fact that consumption practices continued to generate a good deal

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of anxiety, even among the middle class, for not all of them could afford good furniture and inferior goods might undermine the stability of even quite genteel families, according to Cruikshank at least.18 Charles Dickens proved one of the most trenchant critics of adulteration. His last completed novel, Our Mutual Friend (1865), portrayed it as a guiding principle of contemporary social as well as economic life, rather than as merely an irritating epiphenomenon. A far bleaker work than Dombey and Son, which, as we saw in Chapter 6, held out as least some hope of salvation for the individual capitalist, Our Mutual Friend offered readers only a number of dead ends.19 At the centre of the novel is a vituperative attack on the world of finance capitalism, represented chiefly by the Veneerings, ‘bran-new people’ who make their money from stock market speculation and quack medicines – morally equivalent practices as far as Dickens was concerned. The Veneerings embody a commercial regime characterised by duplicity and deceit, as their name suggests, and are therefore as suspect as their shoddy furniture: ‘what was observable in the furniture, was observable in the Veneerings – the surface smelt a little too much of the workshop and was a trifle sticky’.20 The superficiality and essentially fraudulent nature of the Veneerings and their circle is constantly reiterated in the text. Like many fashionable commodities, people such as the Veneerings are all show and image; it would be as foolish to trust such people as it would to put one’s faith in adulterated goods. They are linked to the immoral and sometimes dangerous practices of adulteration by their ownership of a drug house, ‘Chicksey, Veneering, and Stobbles’, situated in Mincing Lane, an area that specialised in the production of drugs, perfumes and dyes and was a renowned centre of shady practice. To rub it in even more, Dickens refers to one of the Veneerings’ servants as the Analytical Chemist, ‘always seeming to say, after “Chablis, sir?” – “You wouldn’t if you knew what it’s made of.”’ Dickens makes it clear that all this rottenness emanates from the ‘rusty-black’ heart of the City of London itself, which is enveloped by a dense fog that obscures moral as well as physical perception.21 In this way, adulteration is figured as a typical characteristic of modern life in the novel, not simply an unfortunate market anomaly but a persistent, structural feature that posed fundamental and ultimately unanswerable questions about the morality of liberal consumerism.

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As Chapter 5 emphasised, the earliest retail co-operatives were in part established to help check fraudulent practices such as short weight and adulteration. Co-operators had called for state intervention for years and continued to exert pressure despite this disappointment. They also did a great deal to tackle abuses through voluntary effort. Admittedly, sometimes the fault lay with workingclass consumers themselves who had become accustomed to adulterated foodstuffs and preferred them. ‘Northumbrian’ noted the popularity of bread artificially whitened by the addition of alum to flour that had found favour in Rochdale until the local co-operative society managed to educate the tastes of plebeian consumers. Despairing of state solutions, the writer concluded: ‘Working-class co-operative stores, honestly and intelligently managed, and nothing else, can overcome the giant evil of adulteration.’22 When cooperators’ formal legal status improved following the passage of the Industrial and Provident Societies Act in 1862, they immediately set up a national wholesale society to cut out middlemen and ensure the purity of supplies.23 More generally, co-operative ideologues agreed with those who regarded adulteration as merely a symptom of a much wider malaise and continued, like Chartist cooperators had done, to maintain that social as well as economic life urgently needed to be effectively moralised, though they continued in the main to eschew the necessity of political means to achieve this goal. Despite his earlier rejection of state intervention to curb truck, when John Bright was appointed as President of the Board of Trade at the end of the 1860s, hopes that a real attempt would be made to get to grips with the problem of adulteration revived, only to be quickly dashed. In March 1869, Bright rebutted Lord Eustace Cecil’s request for a debate on fraudulent trade practices such as false weights and adulteration. He dismissed the former with the claim that faulty weights worked just as often in favour of the purchaser! As far as adulteration was concerned, and regardless of a plethora of stomach-churning evidence, Bright brazenly insisted that the problem had been greatly exaggerated and that ignorant consumers were just as much if not more to blame than traders: ‘My own impression with regard to this adulteration is that it arises from the very great, and, perhaps, inevitable competition in business; and that to a large extent it is promoted by the ignorance of customers. As the ignorance of customers generally is diminishing,

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we may hope that before long the adulteration of food may also diminish.’24 To be fair to Bright, there was some truth in this – cooperative societies often had difficulty weaning workers off adulterated bread, as we have noted – but to place the blame so squarely on the shoulders of consumers was to travesty the real situation. It was little wonder that after this performance G. W. M. Reynolds described Bright as ‘the hanger-on of the Court, the apologist of jobbery, and colleague of some of the most incorrigible jobbers’.25 Radicals were not the only ones to be incensed by Bright’s flippant treatment of an issue that for many posed vital questions about the nature of Victorian ‘progress’. The Oxford historian J. A. Froude, for instance, accused Bright of being no more than a spokesman for the ‘modern creed … that adulteration is the fruit of competition, and, at worst, venial delinquency’. Continuing a line of critique that ran back to Thomas Carlyle, Froude wrote that ‘this vile belief has gone like poison into the marrow of the nation’.26 While legislation slightly improved matters in the early 1870s, the co-operative propagandist G. J. Holyoake similarly underlined how the dominant competitive ethos continued to spread the broader principle: ‘In Parliament, Bills against adulteration are honestly passed against little tradesmen, in the presence of men who on a grand scale adulterate business, adulterate banking, public companies, railway administration, and politics too.’27 The practice of adulteration became ever more sophisticated during the late nineteenth century and was to remain, like the ‘machinery question’, a perennial feature of industrial capitalism down to the present day.28 As we noted at the beginning of the preceding chapter, advertising received a major fillip by Gladstone’s repeal of the duty on newspaper advertisements in 1853, which before then had stood at 1s 6d for each insertion. It was not only that the duty was becoming increasingly difficult to collect – there was a point of principle at stake here also. The Chancellor of the Exchequer and other Liberal leaders believed that advertising was a key progressive force of the modern age, as necessary as free competition and free trade for the efficient working of markets, so it seemed entirely natural therefore that any impediment to its advance ought to be removed. The total abolition of stamp duty on newspapers two years later further encouraged the press to mushroom enormously. More advertising agencies sprang up – there were at least ninety-two agents and contractors in 1862 – expanding their work as brokers of newspaper

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space and devising more sophisticated ways of placing notices of their clients’ products in the most appropriate periodical to enable them to reach potential buyers. One of the pioneer agents, Charles Mitchell, produced a hugely successful Newspaper Press Directory that effectively mapped the different markets covered by various publications in terms of class, region and opinion. The 1856 edition of the work included an essay on ‘The Philosophy of Advertising’, which made inflated claims about the artistic as well as the commercial nature of the business, claims that became commonplace as the century wore on.29 More mundane but no less important than spectacular showcases of consumption like the Crystal Palace, developments such as these spread the reach of print advertising across society. Working-class buyers were deeply affected by all this. They were eager consumers of goods that were among the first to be heavily advertised and marketed on a national scale. Even the Northern Star, for instance, carried advertisements for patent or quack medicines and ready-made clothing. By the mid-1850s, Thomas Holloway was spending about £30,000 a year on advertising and may even have tried, unsuccessfully, to hire Dickens to puff his pills. Commodities that had only recently been considered luxuries for the majority, including tea, coffee, cocoa, soap, starch, mustard but also ready-made cotton clothes, boots and shoes, were frequently regarded as necessities by mid-century and they were pushed hard to new markets.30 It would be unwise to overestimate the speed of this transformation, certainly; most metropolitan newspapers refused to publish illustrated advertisements, for example, until after our period, and many traders continued to question the morality as well as the economic rationality of advertising, including the department store owner William Whiteley. Nevertheless, the drift was clear enough to contemporaries. Dispelling the doubters in 1859, an editor of one local newspaper on the south coast of England declaimed: ‘Advertising is an open, fair, legitimate and respectable means of competition; bearing upon its face the impress of free trade; and of as much advantage to the consumer as the producer.’31 A decade later, an article in Fraser’s Magazine that described advertising as nothing less than ‘The Grand Force!’ could not have been dismissed as merely hyperbolic. For the writer, the phenomenon was as characteristic of modernity as the steam engine and appeared similarly to have an almost unlimited power, making

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it possible for manufacturers to sell superfluous, often adulterated goods by means of the creation of images: ‘Magical and cabalistic, compelling mere words to alter, confuse, and confound the reality of things, or to endow them with ideal properties, qualities, and perfections beyond the belief of credulity itself.’32 If the persistence of truck and adulteration and the spreading reach of advertising posed serious questions about the meaning of liberal consumerism for radical and other critics, dogmatic free traders had their own complaints. For ideologues like Cobden, repeal of the Corn Laws represented only a very partial remedy for the many fetters that he believed bound consumption and trade. Not surprisingly, Cobden lent his backing to the Liverpool Financial Reform Association that was formed in 1848 by merchants and manufacturers in that city to agitate for a more full-blown, systematic policy. Its two main aims were government retrenchment and abolition of all customs and excise duties and their substitution with some form of direct taxation. Robertson Gladstone, William’s elder brother, served as its first president and the body organised an impressive propagandist campaign over subsequent decades. Described by its historian as ‘the most persistent and single-minded free trade lobby England has known’, it made determined efforts to appeal to workers.33 In a pamphlet published in 1862, for instance, G. H. Smith underlined how the burden of indirect taxes on ‘necessaries and comforts’ was borne mainly by the working class; the duty on goods such as tea, he wrote, ‘comes crushingly down on the poor consumer’. Reminding readers how Sir Robert Peel had saved the country from disaster with the new fiscal regime inaugurated twenty years earlier, Smith went on to argue that the time was now ripe to continue his work. Despite these efforts, the organisation failed to garner much working-class support.34 Notwithstanding such setbacks, Liberal leaders worked hard to reach out to working-class consumers. As Keith McClelland has argued, John Bright in particular linked the questions of financial and parliamentary reform in the 1860s, maintaining that the large sums of indirect taxation paid by skilled artisans in particular gave them a right to the franchise.35 In parliamentary debates at the time, Bright famously drew a clear dividing line between steady, deserving workers such as those who had shares in co-operative stores, a regular family life and good furniture and those profligate elements within the ranks of the working class – the so-called ‘residuum’.36

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A few months later, in early 1868, Bright launched a campaign for the ‘free breakfast table’ – that is, untaxed tea, coffee and sugar – in a speech to the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce, which he believed would inevitably give ‘a greater power to consume to the whole body of the people’. Bright pitched his appeal directly at workers that stood to benefit most by remission of the £12 million per annum currently levied on tea and sugar alone, ‘because they are the people who consume less than they would consume if these things were cheaper … the great bulk of it would be a donation to the working-classes of the country’. There was a gendered, moral dimension to the proposed change naturally, for a cheaper breakfast table would help ‘to wean the people from the consumption of articles which are pernicious … it would make the home, the domestic hearth, more tempting and more comfortable to the workman’.37 Such appeals proved responsive to some working-class radicals and consumers. Although the presence of Holyoake at the first annual meeting of the Financial Reform Union, which was formed in London in an effort to take the cause to a wider audience following the extension of the franchise, does not signify much perhaps, other voices were heard in support.38 In a series of articles in the Co-operator, for example, John Parker argued the case for cheap food against calls for reciprocal import duties that were now being heard more insistently than they had been for over two decades: ‘The labour of Englishmen will never be free’, Parker opined, ‘so long as the present laws of taxation are allowed to prey on their industry.’39 And ‘Northumbrian’ in Reynolds’s Newspaper also bemoaned the unfairness of a taxation system that favoured the aristocracy and the ‘plutocracy’ and criticised the way Robert Lowe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (‘the finance director of the great joint-stock company called England’), refused to give workers a free breakfast table despite the relatively healthy state of the public finances.40 On the whole, however, though Bright believed that the free breakfast table would make an excellent ‘flag’ or campaign issue for prospective parliamentary candidates, he was to be disappointed as this demand generated little popular enthusiasm in the longer term. In this book, I have tried to show how contests over who could speak for the consumer lay at the heart of popular politics in early- to mid-Victorian England. In the 1830s and 1840s Chartists argued that government and community regulation of markets was

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necessary in order to protect and empower working people, for in their role as consumers they were frequently subject to the most blatant forms of exploitation imaginable. They argued that ‘pure’ or ‘true democracy’ was the only real solution to problems of poverty and inequality. Wedded to an abstract notion of ‘freedom’ for capitalist markets, the Anti-Corn Law League maintained that the existence of scarcity that scarred the lives of many ordinary consumers could only be eradicated by removing the shackles that fettered free exchange. The former projected an ideal of balance and sufficiency for the consumer; the latter celebrated the coming into being of a cornucopian world of goods that knew no bounds. The outcome of this struggle, leavened as it admittedly often was, fortunately, by fellow feeling and humanitarian sympathy that often cut across class boundaries, shaped the course of historical development for the rest of the century and beyond. Indeed, it remains the major issue for our own times. Here as elsewhere, the Chartist challenge was defeated and although Bright and the rest did not achieve all that they desired, they came close. Importantly, and notwithstanding their much-vaunted successes, it seems doubtful whether free trade ideologues won the straightforward assent of the majority after mid-century. The view of historians such as Anthony Howe, who has recently argued that for most of Victoria’s reign ‘free trade was a dominant ideology to which virtually all Britons publicly subscribed’, is, therefore, simply not supported by the historical evidence, even if we put to one side the more obvious conceptual problems inherent in this claim.41 Indeed, if England could ever really be described as a ‘free trade nation’, it was only for a few brief years during the 1860s as liberal trade agreements spread across Europe following the Anglo-French treaty of 1860 and the trauma of the Lancashire ‘Cotton Famine’ subsided. The foundation of the Cobden Club in 1866 in a sense marked its zenith. It was to be a rather short-lived heyday. Free trade was soon abandoned by other countries as the world economy faltered. At home, doctrinaire ideas of free trade were never accepted by the moderate majority, including W. R. Greg who, debating taxation principles with doctrinaire free traders such as the Financial Reform Association, maintained that tea, coffee and sugar were ‘luxuries and superfluities’ rather than necessaries as far as working-class consumers were concerned.42 Greg was also unimpressed by the expanding consumer desires of his middle-class

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peers, it ought to be noted, and yearned for the spread of a more ‘rational and homely spirit’, which he thought could still be found outside the big cities and on the continent. ‘If the English people could all at once be induced to lay aside their luxurious, wasteful, and showy mode of life, and adopt the frugality and temperance of the Spaniards, the simple habits of the Tyrolese, and the unostentatious hospitality of the Syrians’, Greg mused whimsically, ‘how few among us would not find a superfluity at their disposal!’43 It is impossible to know precisely how many of Greg’s middle-class peers shared his vision of a simpler, less materialistic way of life, though his was certainly not a lone voice. This ambivalence may help to explain why the keywords ‘consumption’ and ‘consumer’ continued to be negatively freighted for such a long time. In his magnum opus of 1850, Nassau Senior was so exasperated by the way in which consumption was often equated unproblematically with waste or destruction that he suggested that it would be better if the term ‘to use’ be substituted for ‘to consume’.44 Ideologically more flexible and therefore appealing to a much wider constituency than Cobdenite free trade, the liberal consumerism that shaped Gladstonian political rhetoric helped heal rifts within the middle class and made it possible to build bridges with workers after their own alternative had been buried. Committed to limited free trade in practice but able to genuflect to the universality of Cobden’s ideal when appropriate, liberal consumerism managed to combine an image of the good life dependent on the spread of commodities with a commitment to fairness, embodied by Gladstone’s fiscal regime. It could also bend enough to enable the state to prop up the consumption norm of deserving workers who had gone to the wall through no fault of their own. Liberal consumerism had social as well as political dimensions, encompassing the co-operative societies that were spreading rapidly throughout industrial districts and linking the promise of citizenship with the ownership of goods; it is worth recalling for a final time Trevelyan’s telling observation about Bright understanding the link between a good coat and the franchise, which neatly captures the centrality of the idea of the citizen consumer for liberalism. In fine, liberal consumerism served to underpin the fragile social and political ‘equipoise’ that characterised mid-Victorian England. However, it was destabilised from the outset by its core commitment to free trade, because of the historical baggage this notion carried. Many

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workers remained deeply disappointed after the defeat of Chartism and continued to live in quiet hate after mid-century, a sensibility that historians have found very difficult to recover.45 When support for the liberal project was forthcoming, it was often highly conditional and could easily waver. Among working-class co-operators, for instance, free trade often meant little more than being left alone to trade how they liked and was not part of any grandiose capitalist utopia. Moreover, there is evidence to suggest that working people were gravitating towards protectionist schemes of one kind or another before and after some of them received the vote. Demands from below for reciprocal or ‘fair trade’ agreements to protect British consumers and producers were first heard before the clamour that accompanied the establishment of the Cobden Club had even died down. Immediately following the passage of the Second Reform Act, for example, Conservatives attempted to bolster their working-class credentials by holding a grand dinner for nearly 2,000 guests at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, at which a number of working men spoke. One of these, Mr Pitman of the Greenwich Constitutional Association, used the opportunity to hit out in forthright terms at the effects of fiscal policy on the labouring poor: ‘Liberalism had given us free trade, and a nice price the loaf was just now. (Cheers.) Butchers’ meat was also a nice price. In fact, working people were starving by thousands. The Liberals had settled everything and settled nothing.’ None of the gentleman Tories who spoke at the dinner put the matter quite as bluntly, though Lord John Manners, who had been a staunch protectionist himself, contested the way in which the Crystal Palace itself had been appropriated in the main by Liberal free traders, and underlined the importance of reclaiming ‘this great temple’ that urgently ‘required a purification and a lustration’.46 A growing popular appeal of protectionism at this time may even account for splits within the ranks of the Co-operative movement; Conservative co-operative societies were operated successfully in Bacup, Darwen, Oldham and even in Rochdale during the 1870s, though they did not spread outside Lancashire.47 The prolonged agricultural and industrial depression that commenced in the early 1870s provoked searching criticism of the direction of economic policy and shook the Victorian notion of progress to its foundations. The threat of war in Europe and the rise of nationalism made the global, pacific aspects of the free trade

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utopia look increasingly unrealistic during the closing decades of the nineteenth century, as the German economic historian Carl Fuchs emphasised at the time.48 The ideology of pure laissez-faire seemed to many untenable during a period when trade unionists, socialists and co-operators were agitating successfully for more government intervention into and regulation of economic life. Some workers were drawn to ‘Tory socialism’ that combined economic nationalism and support for forms of protection with a hedonistic cultural politics, which was at odds with the tradition of radical nonconformity that exerted such a crucial influence within the labour movement.49 In short, the long-drawn-out crisis of liberalism involved the loss of its ability to speak with the same authority on behalf of the majority of consumers, which it had done with consummate skill since Gladstone’s earliest term as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The campaign against free trade was eventually spearheaded by the National Fair Trade League (NFTL), established in 1881. The organisation argued for a preferential system of tariffs that would maximise the potential of the empire to supply Britain’s demand for food, raw materials and luxury goods, while enabling colonies to purchase British manufactures at a reduced rate. Its largely gentlemanly leadership stressed that ‘real free trade’ or a ‘Free-trade Empire’ was urgently required rather than the present system of ‘one-sided trade’. Although the NFTL hardly merits much more than a footnote in most modern accounts, at the time it came within a whisker of capturing the Conservative Party and managed to mobilise a considerable amount of working-class support, certainly among workers in particular industries such as sugar refining, hard hit by cheap imports, but also from a much wider constituency.50 We should not underestimate the tenacious grip of the past, however, particularly over an older generation of radicals and labour leaders. Though the term was not coined until the early years of the twentieth century, the experience of the ‘Hungry Forties’ weighed like a nightmare on the consciousness of the living in late-Victorian England. Despite the continuing reality of working-class poverty in some places and among some groups, the gnawing pain in the gut thankfully now only existed in popular memory for the majority of workers whose lives had indeed been made slightly easier by the diffusion of comforts. It was hardly surprising, then, that many sprang to the defence of free trade when it seemed that protectionism was

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going to carry the day. The middle-class freethinker and socialist Annie Besant heaped praise on the ‘noble John Bright’ in 1881 and recalled the dark times when a ‘wealthy dean advised the people to use as food Swede turnips and mangel-wurzel. The Duke of Norfolk assured the starving that excellent soup could be made out of hot water and curry-powder.’51 A few years later, Joseph Arch, President of the National Agricultural Labourers’ Union, who as a boy had known the pains of hunger all too well, recalled the ‘universal starvation’ endured by workers in 1842 and the resulting bread riots. He painted these events in melodramatic hues that recalled the structure of feeling that had characterised the earlier phase. Poor consumers had even been driven to cannibalism, according to Arch, metaphorically if not in actuality: Famine, ruin and death, reigned throughout the land … I do not know an instance where a mother actually killed her child and ate it, as was the case in the famine at Samaria, but there were thousands of young children who, by taking the last bit and drop necessary for the parental existence, might be said, figuratively, to have consumed their own parents.

Arch went on to compare this gothic past with a present in which workers enjoyed the ‘cheap loaf’ as well as quite remarkable increases in the consumption of a wide variety of goods; forty-two times more potatoes, thirty-two times more ham and bacon, seven times more butter, two-and-a-half times more cheese, four times more cocoa, four times more tea, and so on.52 The most visible forms of starvation were now a thing of the past, in the metropole at any rate; hunger for a more varied, appetising diet and material comforts substituted for a mere grubbing after the basic necessities of life in a way that would have been thought unimaginable only a generation before. The complete unravelling of liberal consumerism was to come after the period discussed in this book, from the fin de siècle onwards, when the protectionist cause found a charismatic leader in Joseph Chamberlain, who attempted, with a good deal of success, to persuade workers to throw in their lot with the Empire and embrace a distinctively imperial consumerism.53 It was also contested at this time by a younger generation of co-operators and socialists who cast off the legacy of free trade and tried to re-envisage the project of regulated consumption once more. They began to advocate a

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‘Co-operative Commonwealth’, which in many ways attempted to resuscitate Chartist demands for market regulation and the protection of working people as consumers. The context had changed greatly; though working-class consumers were now immeasurably better organised, the rise of monopoly capitalism and the extended reach of the state made the task even harder than it had been half a century before.54 Inasmuch as they are arguing a case for the regulation of markets against those who – despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary – continue to equate the spread of free trade capitalism with progress, some of the fair traders of today are also unwittingly harking back to the fraught political gestation and birth of the citizen consumer in Victorian England.55 The most seductive promise of capitalist modernity has proved to be the promise of more goods and greater choice of goods for the mass of consumers, and political parties have vied with each other on how best to achieve material improvement for the majority since the mid nineteenth century. It was not merely a coincidence surely that the institutions and practices of ‘representative democracy’ were developed synchronously with the growth of popular consumerism. From the beginning our circumscribed democracy has been bound together historically with our presumed agency and fulfilment as consumers.56 A meaningful response to the manifold problems that have been caused by unregulated consumer desire, not least impending ecological disaster, will therefore require radical questioning of not only our consumption habits but also our democratic practices. Here, Chartism still represents a vital resource of hope. Notes 1 For the history of these tactics in both the metropole and the colonies, see Kevin Grant, ‘The transcolonial world of hunger strikes and political fasts, c. 1909–1935’, in Durba Ghosh and Dane Kennedy (eds), Decentering Empire: Britain, India, and the transcolonial world (New Delhi, 2006); James Vernon, Hunger: a modern history (Cambridge, MA, 2007). 2 Alfred Marshall, ‘The future of the working classes’ (1873), in A. C. Pigou (ed.), Memorials of Alfred Marshall (1925), p. 116. Marshall later argued that capitalists needed to restrain their consumer appetites too and learn to practise what he called ‘economic chivalry’ – best

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4

5 6 7

8 9 10

11

12 13

14 15 16

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exemplified by the Co-operative movement – in order to smooth the waters of class conflict. See ‘Co-operation’ (1889) and ‘Social possibilities of economic chivalry’, in ibid., pp. 251, 324–46. Edinburgh Review, 93 (April 1851), 313. Greg was reviewing William Johnston’s England as it is; political, social, and industrial, in the middle of the nineteenth century (1851), a crude Tory attack on ‘progress’. Morning Chronicle, 8 April 1850, p. 5. See also ibid., 18 March 1850, p. 5; Paul O’Leary, ‘Mass commodity culture and identity: the Morning Chronicle and Irish migrants in a nineteenth-century Welsh industrial town’, Urban History, 35:2 (2008), 248–9. Reynolds’s Newspaper, 7 December 1851, p. 1. Jane Cobden-Unwin, The Hungry Forties: life under the Bread Tax (1904), pp. 71–2. Ibid., p. 77. For useful background, see Anthony Howe, ‘Towards the “Hungry Forties”: free trade in Britain, 1880–1906’, in Eugenio Biagini (ed.), Citizenship and community: liberals, radicals and collective identities in the British Isles, 1865–1931 (Cambridge, 1996). The Times, 31 December 1859, pp. 6–7, cited by W. L. Burn, The age of equipoise: a study of the mid-Victorian generation (1964), p. 112. Thomas Wright, Our new masters (1873; New York, 1969), p. 99. Ibid., pp. 94–5. For a useful discussion of Wright, see Alistair J. Reid, ‘Intelligent artisans and aristocrats of Labour: the essays of Thomas Wright’, in Jay Winter (ed.), The working class in modern British history: essays in honour of Henry Pelling (Cambridge, 1983). Christopher J. Frank, ‘Truck or trade? Anti-truck associations and the campaign against the payment of wages in goods in mid-nineteenth century Britain’, Historical Studies in Industrial Relations, 27 (2009), 1–40; ‘The sheriff’s court or the company store: truck, the arrestment of wages and working-class consumption in Scotland, 1837–1871’, Labour History Review, 79:2 (2014), 139–64; Hansard, vol. 131, cols 830–3 (House of Commons, 15 March 1854). Accum’s major work was A treatise on adulterations of food and culinary poisons (1820). Hassall published the findings in Food and its adulterations: comprising the reports of the Analytical Sanitary Commission of ‘The Lancet’ for the Years 1851 to 1854 (1855). For an analysis, see S. D. Smith, ‘Coffee, microscopy, and The Lancet’s Analytical Sanitary Commission’, Social History of Medicine, 14:2 (2001), 171–97. Reynolds’s Newspaper, 25 March 1860, p. 7. ‘The adulteration of food and drugs’, Westminster Review, 35 (January 1869), 193–4. Karl Marx, Capital: a critique of political economy (1867; Middlesex, 1976), vol. I, p. 232; John Burnett, Plenty and want: a social history of

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17 18 19

20 21

22 23

24 25 26

27 28 29

30

Epilogue diet in England from 1815 to the present day (1966; Middlesex, 1968), p. 257; Michael French and Jim Phillips, Cheated not poisoned? Food regulation in the UK, 1875–1938 (Manchester, 2000). Fraser’s Magazine, September 1850, pp. 239, 244; January 1852, p. 90. Deborah Cohen, Household gods: the British and their possessions (New Haven, CT, 2006). For a fascinating discussion of how Dickens wrestled with the amorality of modern capitalism in his last published novel, see Mary Poovey, Making a social body: British cultural formation, 1830–1864 (Chicago, 1995), pp. 155–81. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (1865; 1997), p. 17. Ibid., pp. 20, 417. Dickens’s Household Words had helped publicise the findings of Hassall’s analytical sanitary commission. See Catherine Waters, Commodity culture in Dickens’s ‘Household Words’ (Farnham, 2008), pp. 47–50. Reynolds’s Newspaper, 1 April 1860, p. 7; see also ibid., 15 April 1860, p. 3. Percy Redfern, The story of the C.W.S. (Manchester, 1913), pp. 39–40; Philip Backstrom, Christian socialism and co-operation in Victorian England: Edward Vansittart Neale and the Co-operative movement (1974), pp. 67–9; Lozah Kassim, ‘The Co-operative movement and food adulteration in the nineteenth century’, Manchester Region History Review, 15 (2001), 12–14. Hansard, vol. 194, col. 733 (House of Commons, 5 March 1869). Reynolds’s Newspaper, 26 November 1871, p. 54. J. A. Froude, ‘On progress’, Fraser’s Magazine, December 1870, reprinted in Short studies on great subjects (1890; 1903), vol. II, p. 388. Samuel Clarkson, a dissenting minister, published a sycophantic pamphlet in defence of Bright: The censor censured in correspondence with Mr. Froude (Manchester, 1870). G. J. Holyoake, ‘A dead movement which learned to live again’, Contemporary Review, 28 (August 1876), 454. For a useful discussion, see Ben Fine and Ellen Leopold, The world of consumption (1993), pp. 156–62. Diana and Geoffrey Hindley, Advertising in Victorian England, 1837– 1901 (1972), pp. 20–6; T. R. Nevett, Advertising in Britain: a history (1982), pp. 67–71, 99–100. E. S. Turner, The shocking history of advertising! (1952), pp. 65–8; Nevett, Advertising in Britain, pp. 28–9; Roy Church, ‘Advertising consumer goods in nineteenth century Britain: reinterpretations’, Economic History Review, 53:4 (2000), 631–5.

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31 Eastbourne Gazette and Fashionable Intelligencer, cited in Raymond Williams, ‘Advertising: the magic system’, in Problems in materialism and culture (1980), pp. 173–4. 32 Fraser’s Magazine, March 1869, p. 380. 33 W. N. Calkins, ‘A Victorian free trade lobby’, Economic History Review, 13:1 (1960), 90. 34 George Henry Smith, The rights of rich and poor: just taxation; abolition of all duties on the necessaries of life; and of all restrictions on trade, commerce, manufactures, agriculture; and on all professions (Liverpool, 1862), pp. 6, 8; Calkins, ‘A Victorian free trade lobby’, 97–8; N. C. Edsall, ‘A failed national movement: the Parliamentary and Financial Reform Association, 1848–54’, Historical Research, 49 (1976), 108–31. 35 See Keith McClelland, ‘“England’s greatness, the working man”’, in Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall (eds), Defining the Victorian nation: class, race, gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 97–8. 36 José Harris, ‘Between civic virtue and social Darwinism: the concept of the residuum’, in David Englander and Rosemary O’Day (eds), Retrieved riches: social investigation in England 1840–1914 (Aldershot, 1995), p. 74. 37 John Bright, ‘A free breakfast table’: speeches at Edinburgh and Birmingham (1868), pp. 5–6; Speeches on the public affairs of the last twenty five years (1869), p. 337. 38 Report of the Financial Reform Union for the year 1868 (1869), p. 14. 39 Co-operator, 4 December 1869, p. 5. Note also ibid., 18 December 1869, pp. 4–5; 1 January 1870, pp. 10–11. 40 Reynolds’s Newspaper, 10 April 1870, p. 3. 41 Anthony Howe, ‘Free trade and its enemies’, in Martin Hewitt (ed.), The Victorian world (2012), p. 108. Howe notes (p. 114) how O’Connor voiced support for free trade when he shared a platform with Cobden at a public meeting at Aylesbury in 1850, but fails to discuss the context for O’Connor’s supposed ‘conversion’. At the head of a demoralised and divided movement after the defeat of 1848, O’Connor flirted for a while with middle-class leaders of the National Parliamentary and Financial Reform Association, especially Sir Joshua Walmsley. This meeting, which was attended by many tenant farmers in Buckinghamshire who feared being squeezed by landlords if protection was reintroduced, passed a resolution that condemned the bread tax, but which also demanded that ‘the people should possess a complete control over the choice of the members of parliament’. O’Connor

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42

43 44 45

46

47

48 49

50

51

52

Epilogue also reaffirmed his commitment to the Charter ‘amid acclamations’. See Northern Star, 12 January 1850, p. 1; Anthony Howe (ed.), The letters of Richard Cobden, vol. II, 1848–1853 (Oxford, 2010), p. 188; Paul Pickering, Feargus O’Connor: a political life (Monmouth, 2008), pp. 136–7. ‘British taxation’, Edinburgh Review, 111 (January 1860), 262; Martin Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: the politics of taxation in Britain, 1799– 1914 (Cambridge, 2001), p. 163. Edinburgh Review, 93 (April 1851), 326. William Nassau Senior, Political economy (1850), p. 54. See Carolyn Steedman, The radical soldier’s tale: John Pearman, 1819–1908 (1988) and my article, ‘Working-class writers and the art of escapology in Victorian England: the case of Thomas Frost’, Journal of British Studies, 45:1 (2006), 51–71. The Times, 12 November 1867, p. 12; Standard, 12 November 1867, p. 3; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 17 November 1867, p. 5. For a critical view, see London Review, 16 November 1867, pp. 534–5. G. D. H. Cole, A century of co-operation (Manchester, 1945), pp. 95, 188; Blackburn Standard, 9 November 1878, p. 3; 12 April 1879, p. 8; 19 April 1879, p. 3; Pall Mall Gazette, 1 May 1876, p. 4. Carl Johannes Fuchs, The trade policy of Great Britain and her colonies since 1860 (1893; 1905), p. 185. For the suppressed alternative represented by ‘Tory socialism’, see David Howell, British workers and the Independent Labour Party, 1888–1906 (Manchester, 1983), pp. 373–88; Gregg McClymont, ‘The cultural politics of Tory socialism: The Clarion in the Labour movement during the 1890s’, in Clare V. J. Griffiths, James J. Nott and William Whyte (eds), Classes, cultures, and politics: essays on British history for Ross McKibbin (Oxford, 2011). W. Farrer Ecroyd, The policy of self-help: suggestions towards the consolidation of the Empire and the defence of its industries and commerce (1879), pp. 3–4; 18; Sydney H. Zebel, ‘Fair trade: an English reaction to the breakdown of the Cobden Treaty System’, Journal of Modern History, 12:2 (1940), 161–85; Benjamin H. Brown, The tariff reform movement in Great Britain, 1881–1895 (1943; New York 1966), p. 89; E. H. H. Green, The crisis of Conservatism: the politics, economics and ideology of the British Conservative party, 1880–1914 (1995), p. 33. Annie Besant, Free trade versus fair trade: being the substance of five lectures delivered at the Hall of Science, London, in October 1881 (1888), p. 6. Joseph Arch, Free trade versus protection; or, fair trade, weighted in the balances and found wanting: lessons from English history for English working men (Coventry, 1884), pp. 13, 44–6.

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53 David Thackeray, Conservatism for the democratic age: conservative cultures and the challenge of mass politics in early twentieth-century England (Manchester, 2013), pp. 24–5, passim. 54 See my monograph, Co-operative culture and the politics of consumption in England, 1870–1930 (Manchester, 1996) and Frank Trentmann, ‘Wealth versus welfare: the British left between free trade and national political economy before the First World War’, Historical Research, 70 (1997), 70–98, the argument of which jars somewhat with that presented in his Free trade nation: commerce, consumption, and civil society in modern Britain (Oxford, 2008). 55 See Kathryn Wheeler, Fair trade and the citizen-consumer: shopping for justice? (Basingstoke, 2012). 56 For the partial nature of democracy in nineteenth-century Britain, see Michael Bentley, Politics without democracy: Great Britain, 1815– 1914 (Totowa, NJ, 1985); James Vernon, Politics and the people: a study in English political culture, c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993); Malcolm Crook and Tom Crook, ‘The advent of the secret ballot in Britain and France, 1789–1914: from public assembly to private compartment’, History, 92 (2007), 449–71; Matthew Roberts, ‘Resisting “arithmocracy”: parliament, community, and the Third Reform Act’, Journal of British Studies, 50:2 (2011), 381–409.

Index

A Christmas Carol 80, 191–4 Abinger, Lord 49, 122 Accum, Frederick 305 adulteration 37, 152–3, 261, 305–9 Adulteration of Foods Act (1860) 305 advertising 11, 227, 241, 245, 258, 306, 309–11 alienation 6 All The Year Round 266 allowance system 12, 65–6, 68–9, 71, 73, 75, 79; see also labour rate Althorp, Lord 13 America 17, 125, 146, 165, 183, 203, 210, 275 American Civil War 265 American Revolution 108–9, 116, 120, 128 Andover scandal 81–95; see also cannibalism; Ugolino myth; workhouse Anglo-French treaty (1860) 313 Anti-Bread Tax Circular 34, 48 Anti-Corn Law Circular 32, 162 Anti-Corn Law Operative Associations 36 Anti-Corn Law League 1–2, 7–8, 10, 17, 19–20, 29–30, 44, 47– 8, 52–4, 107, 117–18, 121–3, 125, 146, 153, 155, 188, 198, 200, 203, 212, 234–7, 238–41, 243, 301–2, 313 language 31–6, 39–42 culture 220–30

female participation 114, 230–3; see also free trade; free trade utopia; middle classes; pocketbook democracy; populist discourse Anti-Poor Law Movement 36, 76, 78, 187–8, 190, 276, 284 Anti-Slavery Society 33, 275 Argentina 275 aristocracy 1, 33, 120–2, 127, 131–2, 146, 170, 202, 211, 234, 301, 312 Arch, Joseph 317 Armstrong, William 266 Arnold, Arthur 261, 265, 273, 277–8, 282, 288–9 Arran, William 111 Art Union 226–7, 230 Ashton-under-Lyne 160 Athenaeum 289 Atkinson, William 112 Atwood, Thomas 120 Auerbach, Jeffrey 241 Australia 275, 279 Ayr, James 159 Babbage, Charles 242–3 Babeuf, Gracchus 108 Bacup 315 Baillie, Reverend John 278 Baines, Edward 130–1 Bairstow, Jonathon 35 bankruptcy 206, 209 Barker, Joseph 130, 165 Barnsley 111, 159

Index Bauman, Zygmunt 3–4 Beaumont, George 287 Bedlington 162–3 Beeton, Mrs Isabella 238 Belfast News-Letter 148 Bellows, Henry 244 Benbow, William 163 Bentham, Jeremy 68, 70 Besant, Annie 317 Beswick, Richard 45 Bezer, John James 30, 174–5 Biagini, Eugenio 7 Bill of Rights 111 Binns, George 160, 167 Birmingham 120, 123, 133, 146, 160, 173 Birmingham Political Union 120, 146 Blackburn 149, 264, 267, 280–1 Blackburn, John 43 Blackburn Times 277 Blackstone, William 38 Blackwood’s Magazine 88, 148 Blanc, Louis 129 Bleak House 203 Board of Guardians 46, 75, 83, 87, 91, 187 Board of Trade 156, 232, 240, 259, 302, 308 Bohstedt, John 16 Bolton 148–9, 264, 281 Bolton Chronicle 149 Book of Household Management 238 Bowen, John 77–9 Bowring, Dr John 236 boycotts 33, 145–7, 154–5, 160, 162, 230; see also exclusive dealing Bradford 111, 160 Bradford Observer 130, 132 Braintree workhouse riot 76–7 branding 11 Brantlinger, Patrick 198, 203 Brazil 275 Bridges, Dr John 282–3 Bridgwater scandal 67, 77–9, 83; see also gruel; workhouse

325

Bright, John 1–2, 4, 8, 17, 21, 32–4, 45, 47–8, 53, 107, 130–1, 133, 135, 184, 200, 222–5, 235, 237, 240, 244, 263, 290, 301, 304–5, 308–9, 311–14, 317 Bright, Priscilla 223 Brighton 37 Bristol 152, 223 Bristol Mercury 149, 152 British Medical Journal 185 British Quarterly Review 289 Brougham, Henry 38, 78, 106, 113, 209 Buchanan, Dr 261 Buckland, William 53 Budget 17, 43–4, 52; 257 (1842), 257 (1845); 257–8 (1853); 258–9 (1860); see also fiscal regime; taxation Buonarroti, Philippe 108 Burnley 262, 281, 287 Bury 148, 163 Bury St Edmunds 73 Byles, William 130, 132 Canada 71, 120 cannibalism 39–40, 42–3, 67, 78, 87–91, 95, 188, 194, 208, 220–1, 234, 317; see also Andover scandal; Ugolino myth Carlisle 160 Carlyle, Thomas 2, 9, 29, 40, 132, 135, 187, 309 Catholic Association 112, 147–8 Catholic Emancipation Act 169 Cavaignac, General 128 Central Relief Committee 262 Chadwick, David 260–1 Chadwick, Edwin 65, 67–73, 78, 80, 92–5, 184, 187, 189, 194, 196 Chalmers, Thomas 20, 237 Chamberlain, Joseph 317 charity 45–6, 128, 183, 191–2, 273; see also humanitarianism Charter 163 Chartist Circular 155

326

Index

Chartist joint stock companies 17, 145, 147, 157, 163–7, 175; see also co-operatives Chartist movement 2–3, 6–7, 10, 17, 21, 30–1, 35–9, 42–4, 46, 48, 51–4, 76–9, 95, 105–6, 108–11, 120–31, 133–5, 144–7, 154–7, 159–75, 199, 278, 301–2, 308, 312–13, 318 Chartist Convention 36, 38, 111–12, 124, 146, 159–61, 163, 172 Chartist Land Plan 124–5, 157, 170 language 18–19, 35–6, 107, 112–13 culture 113–17; see also Chartist joint stock companies; class discourse; democracy; working classes Chase, Malcolm 124 Chester Special Commission 122 Christian Socialism 169 Christianity 111, 114, 165, 185, 193, 278 Christmas 79–80, 95, 156–7, 185, 191–4, 199, 266 citizenship 2, 17, 19, 289–90, 314; see also democracy civilization 13–14, 40–1, 89–90, 131, 245, 247, 270, 276 Clark, George Kitson 39 class discourse, 6–7, 35–6, 48, 106–7, 119–24, 130–1, 154–5, 160, 163–4, 171, 199, 281; see also middle classes; populist discourse; working classes Clayton, John 114 Cleave, John 52 clocks 206, 241, 246, 268, 270 Cobbett, William 115, 148, 154 Cobden, Catherine 223 Cobden, Richard 1, 8, 21, 29, 44, 47–8, 52, 118, 130–1, 133, 135, 200, 220, 223, 225, 230, 239, 244, 263–5, 290, 301, 311, 314

Cobden Club 313, 315 Cohen, Deborah 8, 278, 306 Cohen, Lizabeth 17 Cole, G. D. H. 290 Colman’s mustard 9, 184 commodities 3, 6, 9, 20, 70, 146, 172, 194, 197, 201–2, 204–6, 208, 229–30, 242–6, 258, 263, 270, 304–5, 307, 310, 314; see also commodity fetishism; material culture commodity fetishism 6, 205, 230; see also commodities; material culture Communism 262–3, 266 Complete Suffrage Union 107, 122–3 ‘Condition of England’ novel 144, 197, 199 Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 152–3 Coningham, William 265 Conservatives 43, 148, 290, 315–6; see also Tories Conservative Tradesmen’s Association 152 conspicuous consumption 33, 204 constitutionalism 6, 35, 115 consumer 1–11, 4–5, 13–21, 30–40, 48, 50, 52–4, 65–7, 75–6, 82, 95, 107–8, 117, 125, 134, 144–8, 151–7, 159, 165–74, 183–4, 204, 212, 221, 225, 230–1, 233–5, 257–63, 268, 270, 270, 278, 283–4, 288–90, 301–18 citizen consumer 7, 17, 108, 314, 318; see also luxuries; material culture; necessaries; social norm of consumption consumer desire 14, 240, 313, 318 invention of 222–3, 237–47 negative views of 235–7, 247, 313–14 Cooper, Thomas 109–11, 112–14, 121, 124, 128, 134

Index co-operatives 17, 19, 37–8, 53, 95, 125, 146–7, 157, 162–4, 168–9, 170–1, 173, 238, 262–4, 279, 287, 290, 308, 311, 314–15; see also Chartist joint stock companies Co-operative Commonwealth 303, 318 Co-operator 37, 312 Corn Laws 1, 29, 31–2, 35, 38, 48, 87, 121–2, 131, 147, 171, 173, 184, 198–9, 221–3, 229, 239–41, 303, 311 Cosford Union 74–5 ‘Cotton Famine’ see Lancashire ‘Cotton Famine’ Coulson, Walter 68 Cousin, Victor 128 Covent Garden Theatre see National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar Coventry 131, 223 Cox, F. A. 118 Cracow Manifesto 127 credit 235 Croker, John Wilson 43 Cruikshank, George 119, 185, 230, 242, 306–7 Cruikshank, Robert 82 Crystal Palace 20, 129, 222, 242, 244–7, 310, 315 Cuffay, William 172 Daily News 199–200, 288 Dalkeith 163 Darwen 281, 315 Davenport, Allen 150–1 Dawn Island 199–221, 244 Dean Stanley 211 democracy 2, 19, 95, 105–35, 144, 164, 168, 246–7, 313, 318 in ancient Greece 108–10 in Anglo Saxon England 110–11 in American Revolution 108 in French Revolution 108–9, 266 pocketbook 19, 107, 246–7; see also citizenship

327

demoralisation 69, 274, 288 Denman, Justice 109 Derby, Lord 273, 279 Devyr, Thomas 147, 164, 166–7, 171 Dewsbury 163 Dickens, Catherine 188 Dickens, Charles 8, 19, 65, 67, 77, 80, 119, 183–212, 221, 230, 242, 266–8, 275–6, 307, 310 Dickinson, James 287 Disraeli, Benjamin 34, 91, 197 Dodson, Reverend Christopher 83–5, 87, 91–2 Dombey and Son 185, 199–210 Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine 226, 229 Douglas, Mary 10 Douglass, Frederick 125 Doyle, Christopher 50 Dublin 112 Dublin Morning Messenger 148 Duke of Norfolk 53, 317 Duke of Wellington 158 Dukinfield 282, 286–7 Durham County Social Institute 166–7 Economist 118, 199, 234 Edinburgh 163, 231, 312 Edinburgh Review 194 Egypt 275 Eliot, George 184 Elliott, Ebenezer 32, 40 emigration 70, 270, 275 Engels, Friedrich 9, 135, 152–3, 260 engrossing 38 entitlement 18, 36, 46–7, 50, 66–7, 81–2, 95, 190–1, 272; see also consumer; luxuries; material culture; necessaries; social norm of consumption Examiner 87 exclusive dealing 17, 19, 38, 145–52, 157, 159–66, 168–9, 172–5; see also boycotts

328

Index

Factory Act (1847) 274 factory reform 203, 265 fair trade 315–16 Farr, William 189 Farnall, H. B. 271–2, 287 fashion 72, 204, 206, 221, 226, 228, 231, 235–6, 261–3, 286, 307 Ferrand, William 37, 42 Field, William 39–40 Fielden, John 91, 148, 265 Financial Reform Association 311–14 Financial Reform Union 312 Finn, Margot 11 Finnigan, John 146 Reform Act 17, 108, 147, 150 (1832); 290, 315 (1867) fiscal regime 17, 311, 314; see also budgets, taxation Fletcher, Matthew 111 forestalling 38, 266 Forster, John 200 Forster, W. E. 130 Fox, W. J. 200, 236 Fraser, James 211 Fraser, John 44 Fraser’s Magazine 245, 257, 306, 310 Fraternal Democrats 126 ‘free breakfast table’ 312 free trade 1–3, 6–8, 10, 20–1, 29–31, 33–4, 38, 52, 107–8, 118, 121, 130, 132, 198, 200, 202–3, 220, 229, 232, 234, 236–7, 239–40, 242, 247, 259, 304, 311–12, 313 global project 5, 131, 199, 201, 221, 241, 244, 315; see also free trade utopia; progressivism free trade utopia 3, 16, 20, 184, 199, 212, 224, 234, 238, 257, 259, 270; see also free trade; progressivism freehold land movement 133–4

French Revolution 108–9, 111, 116, 120, 128, 130 Frost, John 114 Froude, J. A. 309 frugality 234–5, 238, 314 Fuchs, Carl 316 Gagnier, Regenia 238 Gardner, William 227 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 129 Gaskell, Elizabeth 135, 144–5, 156, 174, 234, 261, 278 gender 32–5, 155, 159, 235, 237, 246, 274, 276, 284–5, 312 General Election 43 (1841); 148 (1832); 172 (1847) general strike 18, 38, 44–8, 122, 124, 145, 147, 160–1, 168, 234; see also sacred month Germany 127, 129 Gillespie, Frances 106 Gladstone, Robertson 311 Gladstone, William 7–8, 17, 156, 211, 257–9, 260, 265–6, 279, 289–90, 309, 314, 316 Glasgow 160–1, 231 Glasgow Anti-Monopoly Association 228 Glossop 282 gothic imagery 18, 31, 39–43, 156, 189, 267, 317 Goulburn’s Act 70 Graham, Sir James 37, 42, 45–6, 52, 83–4, 87, 91 Gramsci, Antonio 5 Gravesend 71 Grant, C. J. 158 Graphic 210 Great Exhibition 20, 183, 221–2, 238, 241–5, 247, 260, 304 Greg, W. R.31–2, 66, 302, 313–4 Greenwich Constitutional Association 315 Grey, Henry 36 Grieve, Thomas 225 Grote, George 94, 110 Grotius, Hugo 44

Index gruel 67, 77–8, 94, 185, 187–9, 284–5; see also Bridgwater scandal Guildford Union 76 Halifax 169, 172 Hard Times 203 Harling, Philip 7 Harney, George Julian 50, 105, 107, 109, 112, 123–31, 133–4, 159, 161, 172 Hassall, Arthur Hill 305 Hawick, Lord 162 Hetherington, Henry 48, 113, 120, 133, 156, 161 Heywood, Abel 52, 168 Heyworth, Lawrence 33 Hill, William 43–4, 54, 113, 116–7, 120, 153–4, 160–1, 168 Hilton, Boyd 278 Hobsbawm, Eric 5 Hobson, Joshua 171 Holberry, Samuel 105, 107, 114, 118 Holloway, Thomas 9, 310 Holyoake, G. J. 106, 129, 133, 309, 312 Home-Life of the Lancashire Factory Folk During the Cotton Famine 279–81 Hoppen, Theodore 231 Hopwood, Robert 283–4, 288 House of Commons 29, 37, 42, 87, 91, 93, 119, 221, 290, 305 House of Lords 78 household suffrage 19, 107, 130, 132–5 Huddersfield 162–3 Hull 162–3 humanitarianism 18, 21, 34, 67, 79, 81, 90, 95, 191, 212, 260, 275–9, 289–90, 301, 313; see also charity Hume, Joseph 38, 130, 133 Hungary 127, 129 ‘Hungry Forties’ 10, 18, 30, 43, 88, 152, 155, 185, 196, 244, 263, 276, 302–3, 316

329

Hunt, Henry 115 Hyde 282 Illustrated London News 46, 227, 233, 246, 267, 274 India 276–7 Indian meal 276–7 Industrial and Provident Societies Act 168 (1852); 308 (1862) Ireland, Thomas 111 Irish 9, 15, 40, 53, 119, 148, 277–8, 286, 288 Irish Famine 67, 234, 275–6, 277–8 Italy 127, 129 Jackson, Reverend 117 Jacobin 109, 111, 266 Jacobs, Meg 19 Jerrold, Douglas 200, 205, 247, 258 Jevons, Stanley 238 Jones, Ernest 131, 169, 172–3 Jones, Gareth Stedman 6 Jones, Lloyd 169 Jones, Owen 244–5 Jones, William 113–5 Joyce, Patrick 6 Kay-Shuttleworth, Sir James 15, 73–5, 262, 273, 279, 287–8, 290 Kay-Shuttleworth, Ughtred 268 Kendal Milne 231 Kersal Moor 282 Kettering 35, 51 Keynes, John Maynard 3 King, William 37 Kingsley, Charles 272 Kossuth, Lajos 129 labour rate 13, 68; see also allowance system Laing, Samuel 245, 247 laissez faire 3, 8, 16, 221 Lancashire and Cheshire Operatives Relief Fund 273

330

Index

Lancashire ‘Cotton Famine’ 21, 259, 261–2, 264–6, 275–6, 280–1, 283, 289, 313 Lancaster 31, 46, 50, 52, 121, 168 Leach, James 51, 147, 173 League 32–3 Ledger, Sally 187 Leeds 35, 42, 114–5, 160, 163, 172 Leeds Mercury 118, 130–1, 160, 162 Leeds Northern Union 162 Leeds Reform Association 121 Leeds Working Men’s Association 116, 120, 146 Leeds Working Men’s Parliamentary Reform Association 263 Lees Relief Committee 284 Leicester 109, 173, 223 Leicester, Joseph 289 Lewis, George Cornewall 75, 94 Lewis, Thomas Frankland 72–3 Liberals 7, 121, 130, 245, 257–9, 265, 290–1, 303, 309, 311, 315; see also Whigs liberal consumerism 20–1, 222, 259, 302–4, 307, 311, 314, 317 Little Dorrit 203 Liverpool 29, 33, 49, 113, 200 Liverpool Financial Reform Association 311 Livesey, Joseph 40, 149, 235, 240 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper 90, 247, 258 London 3, 20, 30, 42, 80, 87, 94, 110–11, 114, 126, 146, 163, 171, 173–4, 183, 191, 193, 220, 225, 232, 244, 270–1, 273, 304, 307, 312 London Democratic Association 42, 109, 111 London Working Men’s Association 111, 159 Louis Philippe 127 Lovett, William 111, 115–6, 120, 122–4, 161 Lowe, Robert 289, 312 Lowery, Robert 147, 163–6

luxuries 13–15, 50, 70–1, 76, 79, 95, 122, 144, 161, 167, 174, 225, 259, 261–2, 271, 310, 313; see also consumer; entitlement; material culture; necessaries; social norm of consumption Macaulay, T. B. 38, 106, 135 Mackay, Thomas 82 Magna Charta 110 Malthus, Thomas 11–14, 237 Malthusianism 47, 192, 194 Manchester 1, 9, 15, 45, 115, 117–8, 120, 130, 146, 155, 160, 163, 211–2, 223–4, 226, 231, 236, 263–4, 267–8, 281–2, 287 Manchester Anti-Corn Law Leage Bazaar 223–4 ‘Manchesterism’ 8, 301 Manchester Political Union 116, 162 Manchester School 34, 133 Manchester Examiner and Times 279 Manchester Times 224 Manners, Lord John 315 Mansfield 160 Mansion House Fund 273–4, 283, 287 Marsden, Richard 36 Marshall, Alfred 238, 302 Marsham, Robert Bullock 29, 40 Martineau, Harriet 187, 199, 203, 212, 220–1, 226, 230, 242, 244 Marx, Karl 5–6, 12, 201, 230, 235, 305 Mary Barton 144 Mason, John 164 mass platform 118 material culture 8, 75, 184, 194, 197, 203–9, 221, 225–30, 231–2, 241–2, 246, 257, 261–3, 267–70, 280, 302–3, 306–7; see also consumer; commodities; commodity

Index fetishism; entitlement; luxuries; necessaries; social norm of consumption Matthew, H. C. G. 258 Mayhew, Henry 242, 280 Mazzini, Guissepe 129 McClelland, Keith 311 McCord, Norman 117 McCulloch, John Ramsay 14–16, 68 McDouall, Peter 130, 161 McDougal, Colin 84–7, 91–2 McGrath, Philip 172–3 Mechanics’ Institutes 173, 223 Mellor, Justice John 287 Mellor, James, 131 melodrama 18, 31–40, 88, 90, 113, 156, 185, 189, 317 Merthyr Tydfil 163, 302–3 Miall, Edward 172 middle classes 4–5, 7–8, 12, 17, 19–20, 33–4, 46, 48, 50–1, 53, 67, 77, 79–80, 90, 94–5, 106, 108–9, 112–13, 117, 119–25, 129–33, 144–6, 150, 155–60, 163–5, 167, 169–70, 183, 191, 205–6, 210, 212, 222–4, 228– 31, 233–4, 236–42, 245–6, 257, 260–3, 266, 268, 270, 273–9, 288, 290, 301, 303–4, 306–7, 313–14, 317; see also class discourse; populist discourse; working classes Midland Mining Commission 153 Mill, John Stuart 118, 209 Mills, C. Wright 116 Mitchell, Charles 310 monopoly 32–3, 35, 38, 147, 170, 318 Monteagle, Lord 38 Moore, Robert 220, 236 moral economy 2–3, 16, 30–1, 38, 44–5, 47, 53–4, 65, 191, 234, 260, 286 Morning Chronicle 80, 84, 94, 172, 198–9, 227, 246, 302 Morning Herald 224–5, 229 Munday, Hugh 83–4, 88

331

Napoleonic Wars 66, 154–5, 231, 303 National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar 20, 33, 220–2, 224–37, 243–4 National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar Gazette 226 National Association of United Trades for the Protection of Labour 125, 171 National Charter Association 51, 124 National Fair Trade League 316 National Petition 35, 115, 119 (1842), 160, 163 (1839) National Review 269 necessaries 13–14, 46, 50, 70, 132, 161, 191–2, 258, 311, 313; see also consumer; entitlement; luxuries; material culture; social norm of consumption Newcastle 112, 159, 163–4, 168, 265, 289 Newcastle Female Political Union 160 New Deal 17 New Moral World 37, 156, 167 New Movement 130, 132 New Poor Law 19, 36, 46–7, 54, 65–7, 73, 77–9, 87, 90, 93–4, 106, 129, 183, 187, 193, 198, 259, 270 Newport 163 Newport Rising 166 Newspaper Press Directory 310 Newton, William 173 Nicholls, George 72 Nonconformist 172, 237 Norman yoke 128 North East of England Joint Stock Provision Stores 164 North and South 234 Northern Liberator 164 Northern Political Union 164 Northern Star 39, 42–4, 48, 53, 77–8, 80, 95, 113, 117, 120–5, 133, 153, 165, 168, 170–2, 199, 265, 310

332

Index

Nottingham 159–61, 171, 223 Nottingham Working Men’s Association 146 Oastler, Richard 78 O’Brien, James Bronterre 2–3, 11, 54, 78, 108–9, 125, 128, 149–50, 154, 156, 159, 161 O’Connell, Daniel 112–3, 123, 148 O’ Connor, Arthur 115 O’ Connor, Feargus 29, 35, 38–9, 52, 110–11, 113–16, 120–1, 123–5, 126–7, 130, 159, 161, 168, 170, 172 Odd Fellow 156 Old Poor Law 12, 65, 68, 187 Oldham 148, 271, 290, 315 Oliver Twist 77, 184–91, 209 Operative 3, 191 Opium War 173 Orwell, George 184, 192, 211 Our Mutual Friend 307 Outdoor Relief Prohibitory Order 271 Outdoor Relief Regulation Order 271 Owen, Robert 37, 162, 167 Owenites 37, 150–1, 156, 162, 166–7, 169, 262–3 Oxford 12, 29, 68, 309 Padiham 262, 288 Paine, Thomas 109, 111, 154 Palmerston, Lord 266 Parker, Henry 84, 86–7 Parker, John 312 Parker, William 111 Parkes, Samuel 50–1, 105 Parry, J. H. 122 paternalism 95, 185, 191, 194 Patriquin, Larry 65 Paxton, Joseph 245 Pears’ soap 184 Peel, Sir Robert 17–18, 20, 37, 43–4, 52, 158, 198, 257, 311 Penny Satirist 88, 158 Peterloo 35, 120

Petworth 80 Philosophic Radicals 34, 149 Phrygian cap 115, 119 pianos 208, 231, 262, 267, 280 Pickering, Paul 7 Pilling, Richard 46, 48, 51 Poland 127 Polanyi, Karl 11, 66 Political Economy Club 68 Poor Law Amendment Act 18, 65, 75; see also New Poor Law Poor Law Board 94, 270–1 Poor Law Commissioners’ Report 67–72 Poor Man’s Guardian 108, 113, 148–51, 154 popular liberalism 5–7, 20–1, 259, 290, 302, 304 populist discourse 1, 6–7, 30, 32–6, 48, 106, 121, 123–4, 165, 200, 210–11, 246, 258, 301; see also class discourse; middle classes; working classes Porter, George 232, 240 potatoes 29, 40–2, 46, 48–9, 91–2, 152, 190, 192, 195, 276, 303, 317 Potteries 45 Prentice, Archibald 45, 221 Preston 36, 40, 264, 271, 290 Price, Dr 236–7 Prince Albert 303 Prochaska, Frank 223 Progress of the Nation 232, 240 progressivism 14–15, 17, 19, 29–31, 33–4, 39, 153, 171, 198–202, 221–2, 228, 230, 232, 240, 246, 259, 302–3, 309, 315, 318; see also free trade; free trade utopia protection 2, 19, 29–34, 39, 153, 171, 198–9, 202, 225, 230, 241, 265, 302, 315–18 Public Works (Manufacturing Districts) Act 288–9 Puffendorf, Samuel von 44 Punch 87, 231–2

Index Quarterly Review 42, 277 Queen Victoria 44, 46, 131, 246–7, 275, 303 Ramsbottom, Joseph 269–70 railways 199, 201–2, 206, 209, 309 Rathbone, William 29 Reform League 289 regrating 38, 266 republicanism 110, 116, 127 retailing 8–9; see also shopping Reynolds, G. W. M. 20, 53, 199, 258, 303, 309 Reynolds’s Newspaper 202, 210–11, 242, 268, 305, 312 Ricardians 237 Richards, Thomas 241 Richardson, R. J. 130 Richson, Canon 263 Ridgeway, John 226 Rights of Man 154 Robespierre, Maximilien 109, 131 Rochdale 34, 45, 148, 160, 223, 235, 264, 279, 308 Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers 126, 164, 169, 262–3, 290 Roebuck, John 118 Rolfe, Judge Baron 50–2, 168–9 Rollin, Ledru 127, 129 romanticism 114, 226 Ross, David 114 roundsman system 68 Rushton, Archdeacon John 268 Russell, Lord John 94, 161–2, 174 Sabden 147–8 sacred month 18, 38, 145, 160–1, 163; see also general strike Salford 45, 49, 160 Salt, Titus 130 Sankey, William 126 Saville, John 128 Say’s law 237 Scarlett, James see Abinger, Lord Schapper, Karl 126 Scotland 13, 45, 155, 163

333

self-government 17–18, 95, 106–7, 116, 135, 144, 168, 290; see also slavery Sen, Amartya 46 Senior, Nassau William 12–16, 65, 67–72, 95, 187, 314 Shaw-Lefevre, George 73 Sheffield 32, 54, 105, 163, 171, 241, 244, 290 Shell, George 114 shopping 8, 19, 146, 152, 155, 173–4, 183, 224, 227, 231–3, 235, 240, 245–6, 261; see also retailing shopocracy 121, 147, 149–51, 155, 159, 173 Simon, Sir John 261, 271–2 Skelton, John 126 skilly 36, 164, 284 slavery 12, 33, 35, 37, 73, 77, 108, 125, 146; see also selfgovernment Smith, Adam 14, 173, 237, 266 Smith, Dr Edward 261, 271–3, 276 Smith, G. H. 311 Smith, T. B. 155 social norm of consumption 18, 21, 66, 94, 106, 260, 272, 284, 288; see also consumer; entitlement; luxuries; material culture; necessaries Society for the Suppression of Mendicity 174, 183 Somerville, Alexander 118 soup kitchens 273, 284 South Shields 163 Speenhamland 11, 13, 65–6 Spirit of the Age 129 Stafford Special Commission 49, 110 Stalybridge 121, 160, 264, 281–2 Stalybridge riots 279, 282–8 Stamford 80 Stanhope, Lord 78–9 starvation 31, 42–3, 82, 90, 95, 187–9, 194, 230, 260, 272, 277, 302, 317

334

Index

Stephens, Joseph Rayner 29, 36, 44, 76, 78, 111, 260, 281, 283–5, 288 Stockport 46, 50, 149, 163, 264 Stockport Advertiser 51 Stockport riots 46–7 Stockton 163 Stone, Daniel 263 Stone, Elizabeth 155 Struggle 40–1, 235 Stuart, Dudley Coutts 134 Sturge, Joseph 122, 124, 131, 172 Sturges-Bourne, William 68 Sumner, John Bird 247 Sunderland 159, 163, 166–7 Swing riots 69 Sybil, or the Two Nations 91 Symonds, Jellinger 121 Tait’s Magazine 276 Tancred, Thomas 37 taxation 33, 35, 43–4, 130, 146, 154–5, 158, 165, 234, 257–9, 304, 312–13; see also Budget; fiscal regime Taylor, Dr John 160, 164 Taylor, William Cooke 45 The Chimes 185, 194–9, 210, 212 Theatre Royal, Manchester 223–4 Thompson, E. P. 7, 16, 30 Thompson, George 125 Thompson, Peronnet 220, 236 Thompson, William 37 Times 18, 42, 52, 77, 83–4, 86–91, 93, 95, 132, 134, 148–9, 169, 191, 199, 227, 236, 246, 258, 272–3, 276, 282, 303 Tocqueville, Alexis de 66, 118, 132 tommy shops 37, 129, 152–3; see also truck Tories 106, 146–7, 149, 152, 224, 315; see also Conservatives Townsend, Joseph 11 Trentmann, Frank 7 Trevelyan, G. M. 2, 107, 222, 235, 244, 314 Trowbridge 163

truck 37, 152–4, 304–5, 308, 311; see also tommy shops Truck Act 37, 153 Tweedale, Samuel 263 Tynemouth 220 Tyrrell, Alex 7 Ugolino myth 40, 90, 234; see also Andover scandal; cannibalism underconsumption 31–2, 35, 52, 237 Union Relief Aid Act 272 Vale, Benjamin 45 Vernon, James 10 Villiers, Charles 29, 225, 271 Vincent, Henry 111, 115, 120, 122 Volney, Comte de 111 Vries, Jan de 16 Wakley, Thomas 83, 91, 149, 305 Walmsley, Sir Joshua 130, 200 Walter, John 18, 77, 93, 191 Warwick 39 Watts, John 261–4 Waugh, Edwin 279–81, 284 Wealth of Nations 173, 237 Weale, Robert 78 Webber, George 172 Weitling, Wilhelm 126 Westminster Abbey 211 Westminster Review 149, 305 Wharncliffe, Lord 78 Whigs 43, 65, 67–8, 78, 94, 106, 112, 121, 146–7, 167, 172, 174, 228; see also Liberals White, George 120–1 Whiteley, William 238, 242, 310 Whittaker, John 273, 276–7 Williams, James 166 Williams, Raymond 239 Williams, Zephaniah 114 Wilson, Benjamin 172 Wilson, George 47, 223, 232 Winlaton 163, 167 Wood, Sir Charles 172

Index women 8, 33–4, 47, 71–2, 82, 85–6, 90, 112, 114–5, 119, 128–30, 153–4, 159–60, 172, 220, 222–4, 226, 230–6, 261, 267, 274, 284–8 workhouse 29, 46, 65–6, 71, 73, 75–7, 190, 192 dietaries 18–19, 36, 67, 73–4, 76–80, 185, 187, 189, 190, 192; see also Andover scandal; Bridgwater scandal working classes, 1–4, 8–9, 17, 19, 29, 31, 33–7, 39–40, 44–5, 47, 50, 52, 76–7, 79, 94–5, 107,

335

109–10, 112, 115, 125, 128, 130, 132–3, 144–5, 147, 151– 6, 158, 160, 162, 164–5, 168, 170–1, 184, 191, 194–5, 197, 199, 202, 206, 210, 224, 239, 240–2, 257–62, 266–7, 275–6, 279–80, 284–5, 288–90, 301–5, 308, 310–13, 315–16, 318; see also class discourse; middle classes; working classes Wright, Thomas 304 York 38, 105, 114, 120 Young England 91, 197