What does democracy mean in Britain?

Britain undergoes periods of democratic introspection about once every decade but what is often a frenzy of calls for constitutional change quickly subsides and the country returns to its normal state of constitutional lassitude.  Britain is not unique in doing this—crises in the body politic globally tends to lead to existing governmental structures baring the brunt of public opprobrium with the emergence of new political parties saying that they have the solution of the nation’s woes.  So what does democracy actually mean in Britain and why is our attitude to it so ambivalent?

For many in Britain, democracy relates to the right to express their opinion through the ballot box, a right that evolved between the Reform Act in 1832 and the Representation of the People Act in 1928—a process that took almost a century.  The extension of the vote to include those between 18 and 21 in 1969 marked an end to the democratisation of the electorate and the only way this could be altered is to extend the vote down to 16 and 17 year olds—something achieved with some success in the Scottish referendum.  Parallel to the extension of the vote has been the emergence of pressure group politics where interest groups seek to exert influence on government through parliamentary and extra-parliamentary pressure and party politics through which different sections is society seek to achieve electoral dominance.  So democracy in Britain can be expressed individually through participation in local, national, Union and European elections, through seeking to influence government policy through legitimate pressure and lobbying and from within political parties, processes made both more complex and more immediate by the twenty-four hour nature of the media and the emergence of social networking.  Politicians are now expected to be able to react immediately and often instinctively to emerging stories in the media with an appropriate and often inappropriate sound bites almost before events occur.  Today democracy is played out on the television screen, the tablet or smartphone—everyone it seems has an opinion—and there has been a ‘technologing’ of politics as never before.

The problem is that our constitutional and political structures have not been keeping pace with the changes in how people experience democracy.  In one sense that may not be a bad thing since constitutional change needs to be a considered process—rapid constitutional change is often poor constitutional change.  But the lag between people’s perceptions of how democracy works for them and a responding repackaging of constitutional structures to reflect those perceptions has resulted in a growing dissatisfaction with Westminster politics and its seeming inability to do more than adopting the classic ‘we know what’s best’ approach to challenges to its legitimacy.  This is reflected in the falling numbers of people who votes in elections, further reducing their legitimacy and the legitimacy of those elected to public office—why should we bother to vote when it doesn’t change anything?  Our democratic system is linked almost exclusively to the question of voting rather than taking a broader view of democracy as a participatory process—the campaigns in Scotland clearly show what the impact of active participation are and their effect on voter turnout.  Our representative system based on the notion that ‘if you don’t like what we’re doing you can vote us out at the next election’ is today insufficiently responsive to people’s democratic aspirations.  Whether an English Parliament is the solution to this is unlikely—it simply adds another tier of already discredited politicians. 

Sir Benjamin Stone 1838-1914

Sir Benjamin Stone 1838-1914: Photographer, Traveller and Politician, 107pp., 20 photographs, ISBN 13: 978-1499265521, ISBN 10: 149926552, £7.99, paperback. Published by the Author under his imprint Birmingham Biographies, this volume is available from Amazon and from other booksellers.

 

Includes twenty rarely-seen or previously unpublished photographs by Sir Benjamin Stone.

Sir Benjamin Stone lived a full life, and was certainly a more contented man than his restless Birmingham contemporary Joseph Chamberlain. Elected to Parliament in 1895, Stone would have been an undistinguished backbencher had it not been for his camera. On the terrace of the House of Commons he lined up his fellow-MPs and various interesting visitors to have their pictures taken. Dubbed ‘Sir Snapshot’ by the press, he became in these years the most well-known amateur photographer in the country. Stone was an intrepid traveller too, embarking – equipped, of course, with his camera – on a voyage around the world in 1891 and a journey of almost one thousand miles up the Amazon in 1893. He was also an insatiable collector, particularly of botanical and geological specimens and a shrewd businessman, with investments in glass and paper manufacture and house-building and quarrying. Stone was also a Tory politician. He doggedly promoted the Tory cause in Liberal-dominated Birmingham in the 1870s and early 1880s, and, after the Liberal rupture over Irish Home Rule in 1886, became an equally-determined supporter of the new Unionist alliance.

Drawing on newspapers and his own extensive personal papers, this is the first biography of Sir Benjamin Stone to be written. It is published to mark the centenary of his death.

Stephen Roberts is Visiting Research Fellow in Victorian History at Newman University, Birmingham.  His published work focuses on Chartism and the political history of Victorian Birmingham.

Reviewing the Wakefield Court Roll 1812-13

This post is a copy of my review of the excellent Wakefield Court Roll 1812-13 published on The Historical Association website:  http://www.history.org.uk/resources/general_resource_7189_73.html

John A. Hargreaves, (editor)

Wakefield Court Roll 1812-13

(Volume XVI, Wakefield Court Rolls Series, Yorkshire Archaeological Society), 2014

262pp., £20 plus £2.75 postage and packing, ISBN 978-1-903564-17-2

Whether 1812 was the worst year in British history, it is certainly up there amongst the worst—1066, 1349, 1914, 1929 and 2008. Britain had been enmeshed in sporadic warfare with France on land and sea since 1793 and its effects were biting hard on Britain’s growing economy. Trade was dislocated, there were widespread bankruptcies, unemployment was growing in part because of technological change and in West Yorkshire this was compounded by the bellicose and destructive activities of the Luddites who sought to reverse the growing tendency of employers to introduce labour-saving machinery to increase their productivity and profits at the expense of the already pressurised workforce.

Halifax in 1834

The publication of the Wakefield Court Roll from 16 October 1812 to 15 October 1813 provides an important insight into the experience of the West Riding in these turbulent times. Manorial court rolls are an important, if neglected, source for the lives and priorities of people and how they coped with changing economic and personal situations. The Wakefield Court Rolls are ‘of outstanding value and importance to the United Kingdom—something recognised by UNESCO—because they survive virtually continuous from 1333 until the manorial courts disappeared in 1925.

Although transcribed medieval and early-modern court rolls are widely published, this volume, for the first time, makes a court roll from the nineteenth century available. John Hargreaves has produced an exemplary edition of what is an extremely important source. His introduction and notes and a detailed index are well-written and an invaluable glossary and map of the Manor of Wakefield make what will be an unfamiliar source for many teachers eminently accessible. What is of particular importance for the classroom is the evidence in the rolls for the Luddite movement—it appears that the Luddite attack on the mill of Joseph Foster in April 1812 did not have a marked impact on his business—and its insight into the legal position of women and their financial and economic autonomy, something often missing from discussions of their role in this period.

This is a volume that deserves a wide audience and has a resonance that extends far beyond the West Riding. I thoroughly recommend it.

Volume 16 of the Wakefield Court Rolls series can be obtained from the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Claremont, 23 Clarendon Road, Leeds, LS2 9NZ,   for £20 plus £2.75 postage and packing. Cheques should be made payable to Yorkshire Archaeological Society or you can buy the book on the website by using the link provided.

Wakefield Court Rolls

Dr John Hargreaves has produced an excellent edition of the Wakefield Court Roll from 19 October 1812 to 15 October 1813.  Volume 16 of the Wakefield Court Rolls series can be obtained from the Yorkshire Archaeological Society, Claremont, 23 Clarendon Road, Leeds,  LS2 9NZ,   for £20 plus £2.75 postage and packing. Cheques should be made payable to Yorkshire Archaeological Society or you can buy the book on the website by using the link provided.

Dr J. A. Langford (1823-1903): A Self-Taught Working Man and the Sale of American Degrees in Victorian Britain

In the next few weeks, I will be publishing under my imprint Authoring History  a short pamphlet on John Alfred Langford (1823-1903) written by Stephen Roberts.  This is my first venture into publishing another author’s work and it is a pleasure to take what is well-researched and written and original material into print. 

Langford was a man much like Thomas Cooper--whom he knew well.  He was an autodidact and the author of much poetry.  He also wrote a lot of local history, notably the compendiums A Century of Birmingham Life and Modern Birmingham (1868-73)  that are still regularly consulted  by local historians.  Unlike Cooper, Langford did not get involved in Chartism but worked closely with middle-class radicals like George Dawson in promoting Birmingham's famous ‘Civic Gospel’.  Most interestingly, he acquired a doctorate from a little-known American college--a little digging has discovered that this particular institution was selling degrees in mid-Victorian Britain--more than 50 men acquired them according to his research and there was much controversy in the newspapers.

Before Chartism: Exclusion and Resistance

AVAILABLE FROM 1ST JANUARY 2014

'An accessible and illuminating study based on an impressive range of reading and with footnotes which in effect provide a critical bibliographical guide to the most relevant... sources, which enhances the utility of the book for students at all levels seeking to engage with the vast literature on Chartism and its antecedents which shows not signs of diminishing. The book is well structured and clearly signposted by headings and sub-headings which are always fresh and entirely fit for purpose, e.g. ‘politics of the Excluded’, ‘Rebellions of the Belly’ etc. The index entries are clearly differentiated. Bibliographical references are invariably balanced and informative, for example, the balanced references to the sources for the life of Robert Peel. Hitherto neglected texts are utilised such as R.I. Moore’s Sir Charles Wood’s Indian Policy which reinforces Brown’s facility for discussing themes in a broad global context...It is also refreshing to see such a strong emphasis on regional and local studies in a work of synthesis of this kind...' Dr John A Hargreaves

Chartism was the largest working-class political movement in modern British history.  Its branches ranged from the Scottish Highlands to northern France and from Dublin to Colchester.  Its meetings drew massive crowds: 300,000 at Kersal Moor and perhaps as many as half a million at Hartshead Moor in 1839.  The National Petition in 1842 claimed 3.3 million signatures, a third of the adult population of Britain.  At its peak, the Northern Star sold around 50,000 copies a week, more than The Times.  This was a national mass movement of unprecedented scale and intensity that was more than simply a political campaign but the expression of a new and dynamic form of working-class culture.  Across Britain, there were Chartist concerts, amateur dramatics and dances, Chartist schools and cooperatives and Chartist churches that assaulted the political hegemony of the wealthy, the conservative and the liberal.  For over a decade, Chartists led a campaign for the franchise with a mass enthusiasm that has never been imitated.

Before Chartism: Exclusion and Resistance acts as a preamble to the four volumes in the Reconsidering Chartism series and seeks to summarise current thinking.  The prologue examines the nature of economic networks in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. The first chapter explores the ways in which society changed in the decades leading up to the beginnings of Chartism and confronts the central issue of how far society was a class-based. Chapter 2 considers the radical legacy from the 1790s to the collapse of the Whig government in 1841 and surveys key questions such as the ways in which working people responded to economic change.  Chapter 3 looks at the ways in which working- and middle-class radicals confronting the question of reform from the 1790s through to 1830. The importance of the radical press and the ‘war of the unstamped’ is explored in Chapter 4.  The politics of inclusion and exclusion and the role of repression by the Whig governments in the 1830s is examined in Chapter 5 while the dilemma faced by radicals provides a short conclusion to the book.

Blue plaque for E. P. Thompson

It’s been half a century since Edward Thompson’s seminal study The Making of the English Working Class was published.  I first read the book not long after it was published…my father who occasionally bought me books purchased a copy that I still have.  I read it quite quickly and was struck by three things: how little of the theory behind the book I understood; its monumental scale and particularly its style and use of language.  It is a literary as well as a historical masterpiece whether you agree with Thompson or not.  It is appropriate I think twenty years after his death and fifty years after Making was published that a blue plaque will be unveiled on 16 November on the house where he and Dorothy lived in Halifax and where he wrote Making.  Dr John A. Hargreaves, the doyen of Halifax historians, is currently preparing a free booklet and guided history trail to mark E.P. Thompson's association with Halifax.

The 1820s: writing off a decade of radical activity

The 1820s is often written off as a decade of little radical activity yet it was during these years that Britain became a manufacturing society. Whether factories and firms were small or larger-scale, whether increases in productivity were achieved by increasing the labour force or using machine technology, whether growth was achieved using skilled or unskilled labour or in urban or rural settings, British society was increasingly and irrevocably manufacturing in its emphasis. The relative stability and long perceived certainties of pre-industrial Britain were replaced by the vibrancy, uncertainties and class tensions of a free market economy and modernising society.

The economy revived in the early 1820s and there was a decline in radical political activity, something that reinforces the link between poor economic conditions and concerted radical action. But popular radicalism always meant more than demanding inclusion in the political system and embraced a range of causes of beliefs. Some radicals focused on building cooperative institutions such as trade unions, friendly societies, mutual aid societies and Mechanics Institutes. Others sought greater religious equality for nonconformists and to establish a system of secular education. Many nonconformists also were radical in their politics because they objected that being a member of the established Church of England gave individuals important legal privileges denied to nonconformists. Religious issues could stir deeper passions than politics and the religious question, as contemporaries called it, was a key political issue for most of the century.

Some workingmen turning to religion--there were revivals in particularly in the north and south-west. There was, for instance, a Primitive Methodist revival among lead miners in Weardale and more generally across the North-East in 1822 and 1823. [1] Revivalism in the 1820s occurred largely in areas with a significant rural population. Primitive Methodism was largely rural in character and, with the exception of the North-East and the Potteries; its main strength was in the largely agricultural counties of England. It was not until after 1850 that its appeal to the urban worker became obvious. Primitive Methodism was the medium through which agricultural labourers could fight for social and economic recognition and its chapels provided rural workers with a symbol of independence and defiance of the established social order.

While Primitive Methodism represented a radical theology, Wesleyan Methodism was increasingly strident in its support for the existing social order and, under the influence of Jabez Bunting, large numbers of people were expelled for radical activities. Growth in the northern manufacturing districts came to a halt and even went into temporary decline in 1819 and 1820 and in Rochdale there was a fifteen per cent decrease in membership between 1818 and 1820.[2] Although Bunting and his supporters recognised the value of revivalism and encouraged it so long as it did not disrupt regular circuit life and could ideally be managed, they disapproved of some of its methods, especially ranting and disassociated themselves from the emotionalism of Primitive Methodism.[3] This, and John Wesley’s policy before his death in 1791 which was continued by his successors of concentrating on evangelising urban areas where the Church of England was failing in its functions, meant that the links between Methodism and urban radicalism were loosening, although the extent to which this occurred varied from locality to locality. This view of Methodism, akin to E. P. Thompson’s excoriating critique of the movement as an instrument of social control, neglects the internal battles of the 1790s and early years of the nineteenth century in industrial towns over lay participation in church governance, control over Sunday schools and the extent of denominational control over the political activities of its members. In the 1820s, its nature as a popular movement meant that it could still undermine the established order of Church and State even if, by 1850, its role as an alternative national faith had evaporated. [4]

The 1820s also represented a critical decade for workers in textile industries as it saw an intensification of the demise of handloom weaving. The introduction of powered spinning largely in spinning factories from the 1780s resulted in surging production of yarn that had to be woven on handlooms by weavers whose numbers in Britain reached a peak of about 240,000 workers in 1820. For several generations, handloom weavers had enjoyed high prices, a relatively good standard of living and benefitted from increasing demand for the products of their looms. They were also vocal in defence of their livelihood with, for instance, 130,000 signing a petition in 1807 calling for a minimum wage and the following year, some 15,000 attended a demonstration in Manchester. The development of a reliable power loom by Richard Roberts, a Manchester engineer, in 1822—he also perfected a fully mechanised self-acting mule for spinning between 1825 and 1830—led to the rapid adoption of powered weaving. Edward Baines estimated that there were 2,400 power looms in British factories in 1813, 14,150 in 1820 but over 115,000 by 1835. This shift placed handloom weaving under growing pressure, its profitability tumbled and the numbers of handloom weavers in Lancashire fell from between 150,000 to 190,000 in 1821 to about 30,000 by 1861.

The decline in handloom weaving was uneven with some millowners using both machinery and hand-working while some weavers used finer grades of cotton, which early power looms could not weave, or turned to silk that remained largely unmechanised. Even so, handloom weaving was in terminal decline and, as many children of handloom weavers did not follow their fathers in the trade, it was increasingly characterised by an ageing workforce. [5] By the late 1820s, progressive cuts in wage-rates left many handloom weaving families with serious economic problems. Handloom weavers who move into urban areas might mitigate this by deploying women or children in the factory labour market while those weavers who remained in rural areas could take advantage of supplementary earning opportunities afforded by farming and mining. Nonetheless, by 1830 both sets of weavers found themselves in endemic structural poverty unable to generate sufficient income to cover basic costs and heavily dependent on poor relief.

The idea of a government-applied minimum wage to give give handloom weavers a degree of security was still being suggested and not just by the weavers. Some of the more respectable ‘putting-out’ firms, facing competition from machine-weaving businesses who undercut them by paying their unskilled workers low wages, saw the benefits of such a scheme. In September, 1819, a month after the Peterloo Massacre, 35 calico producers supported the call for a minimum weavers' wage and as late as 1822, several manufacturers met in Rossendale to demand restrictions on the use of power looms. The Committee of Manchester Weavers joined the outcry, claiming:

The evils of multiplying power looms, by first ruining half a million who depend on manual weaving (he was presumably referring to families rather than individuals), and especially those unhappy young people they now employ, are such as no human being can think are counterbalanced by any good expected from them.

Having repealed the legislation that might have protected weavers in 1809, the government was unwilling to introduce obstacles to the free market accelerating the trend towards mechanisation and it was not until 1834-1835 that a Select Committee examined the problems faced by weavers. James Hutchinson, one of the calico producers who had protested in 1819, like many of his fellow businessmen, finally opened his own power-loom mill at Woodhill, Elton.

Handloom weavers publicised their plight whenever the opportunity arose. Actress Fanny Kemble, one of the guests at the opening on the Liverpool-Manchester Railway in 1830, described the arrival of the first train into Manchester, packed with dignitaries including Wellington:

High above the grim and grimy crowd of scowling faces, a loom had been erected, at which sat a tattered, starved-looking weaver, evidently set there as a representative man, to protest against the triumph of machinery and the gain and glory which the wealthy Liverpool and Manchester men were likely to derive from it. [6]

For radicals such as Peter Murray McDouall writing in his Chartist and Republican Journal in 1841, the gradual disappearance of handloom weavers, represented the destruction of independence, family economy and control over the pace and nature of work and the creation of wage slavery by ‘factory slaves’ within the developing factory system of industrial capitalism.

Other radicals campaigned successfully against the Combination Acts leading to their repeal in 1824. A downturn in the economy led to a rapid increase in trade union activity with extensive strikes, including some violence in the winter of 1824-1825. Employers lobbied for the reintroduction of the Combination Acts and in 1825 new legislation was passed allowing unions to negotiate over wages and conditions but without the legal right to strike. This effectively limited trade unions to peaceful collective bargaining with employers and if they went beyond this narrow definition of legal activity for trade unions, they could be prosecuted for criminal conspiracy. Faced with technological change and the considerable powers left to employers after 1825, workers were increasingly convinced that small unions could never succeed. What was needed, some argued, were national or general unions representing all the workers in a particular trade from different parts of the country. In 1829, John Doherty, leader of the Lancashire cotton spinners formed a Grand General Union of Spinners. For greater negotiating power, the next step was to try to unite all unions in all trades into a single union. He formed the National Association for the Protection of Labour in late 1829 in Manchester and it spread into the neighbouring cotton towns the following year and subsequently into other manufacturing areas especially the East Midlands. [7]

The 1820s also saw a refinement of working-class analysis of the exploitative nature of the economy. [8] William Cobbett’s solution was to get rid of the system of corruption, the national debt and paper money and he implied that life would revert to the patterns of the past; little analysis, simply populist nostalgia. By contrast, Thomas Spence, William Ogilvie, Thomas Hodgskin, William Thompson, Robert Owen, John Gray and later John Francis Bray, Ernest Jones, James ‘Bronterre’ O’Brien and George Harney argued that the rights of man must be grounded in the possession of economic power. Their anti-capitalist and socialist political economies stood in stark contrast to the classical political economies of James and John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, Robert Torrens, John Ramsey McCulloch and Nassau Senior. [9]

Robert Owen had outlined his cooperative views in A New View of Society in 1813. Although Owen was influential in the working-class movement in the early 1830s, he sought social reform from above, a reflection of his elitist and paternalist attitudes. His reform programme was not confrontational: he saw his reforms as a means of avoiding class conflict, violent protest and revolution. His most important contribution was seeing capitalism not as a collection of discrete events but as a system. Throughout the 1820s, a growing group of labour radicals embraced Owen’s critique of capitalism and his views on cooperation. Thompson, Hodgskin and Gray articulated not simply the theoretical basis for a distincly anti-capitalist political economy but also considered its scope, methods, content and aims. All were, to a degree, Ricardian socialists who adopted the labour theory of value while rejecting the elements of Ricardo’s model that claimed capital, too, was productive. Hodgskin, for instance, argued that capitalists were parasites who diverted the fruits of labour’s productivity into unproductive consumption.

Thompson rejected the notion, expressed particularly by Thomas Malthus that any increase in the wages of labourers could only lead to their further immiseration. [10] Hodgskin, though he rejected Thompson’s cooperative views, suggested:

…the real business of men, what promotes their prosperity, is always better done by themselves than by any few separate and distinct individuals, acting as a government in the name of the whole.[11]

In 1825, in his Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital, he argued that free-trade economists had invested ‘capital’ with productive powers that it did not possess and that capitalists could only grow rich where there was an oppressed group of workers kept in poverty. Writing in the aftermath of the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824 and the repressive legislation the following year, Hodgskin believed that laws against trade unions and collective bargaining had created an unfair advantage against workers in favour of capitalists and that the large profits made by capitalists were not the result of natural economic forces but were generated by the coercive power of government. Only with the freedom of the free market, he maintained, could labourers of every kind receive just compensation for their work. Economic intervention by governments could do nothing to increase wealth or to accelerate its progress and that the laws of economics would only have the power to transform society when unrestricted by arbitrary legal systems. [12]

John Gray argued that the producers receive only about a fifth of the value of their products, whereas their labour creates all of that value. [13] However, he did not believe that this issue could be resolved by the unrestricted operation of the free market arguing that free market competition hampered the economy’s productivity because incomes remain low, limiting demand and therefore production. The market was seen as a source of exploitation and economic depression and the competitive pressures unleashed by the market resulted in socially destructive and morally corrosive behaviour. To overcome the limits competition places on social production and the hardships it imposes, Gray proposed a communitarian solution. What was necessary, Gray maintained, was central direction and control over the industrial economy by a National Chamber of Commerce, which would own the means of production, as a way of achieving certain socialist objectives. He also called for the formation of a National Bank that would ensure that money would increase as product increased and decrease as produce was consumed or redemanded as well as a system of cooperative associations to organise supply and demand. In this way, Gray believed that economic activity could be managed to ensure distributive and commutative justice, price stability, efficient allocation of resources and an end to economic depression resulting from supply outstripping effective supply.

The major problem with populist anti-capitalist thinking in the 1820s was that it lacked a comprehensive understanding of the nature of the causes of the exploitation and alienation of capitalism. Largely because of their failure to address this issue, Thompson sought to establish cooperative solutions irrespective of what was going on in the wider capitalist society. His solution was not to replace the existing capitalist system but to circumvent it by creating separate cooperative communities. The communities established by Robert Owen failed to translate the theory of cooperative living into communities that worked largely because of his paternalistic and undemocratic approach to running them and their need to operate within a capitalist environment. Gray, however, went further in suggesting socialist solutions to replace market capitalism. Although anti-capitalist economists had developed an effective critique of capitalism in the 1820s and this continued into the 1830s, what they had not done was to link their critique to the question of parliamentary reform. It was the publication of the Poor Man’s Guardian, edited by Bronterre O’Brien that proved crucial. Although strongly influenced by the popular economists and by Owen, he rejected Owen’s opposition to political action. He transformed the traditional rhetoric of radicalism by treating parliamentary reform as meaningless on its own. Without social and economic transformation, he argued, parliamentary reform could not address the ills of the working-classes.

---

[1] Patterson, W. M., Northern Primitive Methodism, (E. Dalton), 1909, pp. 154-170.

[2] Engemann, T. S., ‘Religion and political reform: Wesleyan Methodism in nineteenth-century Britain’, Journal of Church & State, Vol. 24, (1982), pp. 321-336, provides a good summary. Hempton, David, The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion, c1750-1900, (Routledge), 1996, pp. 162-178, is excellent on the historiography.

[3] Hempton, D., Methodism and Politics in British Society 1750-1850, (Hutchinson), 1984, Edwards, M., After Wesley: a study of the social and political influence of Methodism in the middle period, 1791-1849, (Epworth Press), 1948, Taylor, E. R., Methodism and Politics 1791-1851, (Cambridge University Press), 1935, and Wearmouth, R. F., Methodism and the Working-class Movements of England 1800-1850, (Epworth Press), 1937.

[4] Ibid, Hempton, David, The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion, c1750-1900, pp. 170-171.

[5] Bythell, Duncan, The Handloom Weavers: A Study in the English Cotton Industry During the Industrial Revolution, (Cambridge University Press), 1969, Nardinelli, Clark, ‘Technology and Unemployment: The Case of the Handloom Weavers’, Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 53, (1), (1986), pp. 87-94, and Timmins, Geoffrey, The Last Shift: The Decline of Handloom Weaving in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire, (Manchester University Press), 1993.

[6] Kemble, Frances Ann, Records of a Girlhood, (R. Bentley & Son), 1878, p. 304.

[7] The development of trade union is explored in greater detail.

[8] Thompson, Noel W., The People’s Science: The popular political economy of exploitation and crisis 1816-34, (Cambridge University Press), 1984, and The Real Rights of Man: Political Economies for the Working Class, 1775-1850, (Pluto Press), 1998.

[9] McNally, David, Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique, (Verso), 1993, pp. 104-138.

[10] Thompson, William, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth, (Longman, Hurst Rees, Orme, Brown & Green), 1824, and Labor Rewarded. The Claims of Labor and Capital Conciliated: or, How to Secure to Labor the Whole Products of Its Exertions, (Hunt and Clarke), 1827.

[11] Hodgskin, Thomas, Travels in the North of Germany: Describing the Present State of the Social and Political Institutions, the Agriculture, Manufactures, Commerce, Education, Arts and Manners in that Country Particularly in the Kingdom of Hannover, 2 Vols. (Constable), 1820, Vol. 1 p. 292.

[12] Slack, David, Nature and Artifice: The Life and Thought of Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869), (Boydell), 1998, pp. 89-136, considers his thinking in the 1820s.

[13] Gray, John, Lecture on Human Happiness: Being the First of a Series of Lectures on that Subject in which Will be Comprehended a General Review of the Causes of the Existing Evils of Society, and a Development of Means by which They May be Permanently and Effectually Removed, (Sherwood, Jones & Company), 1825, and The Social System: A Treatise on the Principle of Exchange, (Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green), 1831. See also, DLB, Vol. 6, pp. 121-125, and Kimball, J., The Economic Doctrines of John Gray, 1799-1883, (Catholic University of America Press), 1946.

4000,000 and counting

PASSING 400,000

I started my Looking at History blog on Blogger on 30 July 2007 and it’s taken until 7 June 2013 to reach 400,000 ‘hits’: an average of around 66,000 per year.  I’ve published 823 blogs in that time, around 137 blogs a year.  Inevitably, take-up of the blogs was initially slow but once they began to appear in Google Search the number of hits began to rise significantly and in the past two years the blog has consistently been getting 20,000 hits a month.

Analysis of which blogs have been particularly popular shows that ‘Disease in the Victorian city: extended version’ has over 9,000 hits followed closely by ‘Suffrage since 1903: Arguments against  women’s suffrage’ with 8,300.  Generally the blogs on nineteenth century British society, women’s history and Canada have performed the best.  Given the nature of the blogs, their audiences is not surprising with the United Kingdom (150,000) and United States (121,000) being the most important.  There has also been a good take-up from Canada (23,000), Australia (13,000), France (11,000) and Germany (10,000) with a gap before Russia (2,000) and India (2,000). 

The bulk of the hits are accessed through Internet Explorer (41%), Firefox (21%) and Chrome(20%) using Windows (77%), Macintosh(10%) and Linux (5%).  Access using tablets or phones is currently more limited with iPad (2%), iPhone(2%) and Android (1%) but this represents a significant increase since the end of 2011 when these did not register at all. 

Comments on the site have been overwhelmingly positive and in several cases helpful in enabling me to correct errors and I have been both gratified by this as well as pleased that readers take the time to make comments (whether critical or not). 

The Anti-Suffragist movement

The anti-suffragist movement aimed to resist any proposal to admit women to the parliamentary franchise and to Parliament but to maintain the principle of the representation of women on municipal and other bodies concerned with the domestic and social affairs of the community. The more active anti-suffragists were prepared to argue about their role in society, speak on public platforms, write articles and campaign for the causes which they believed allowed them to realise their potential for service and self-expression. As Violet Markham said in 1912:

We believe that men and women are different – not similar – beings, with talents that are complementary, not identical, and that they therefore ought to have different shares in the management of the State, that they severally compose. We do not depreciate by one jot or tittle women’s work and mission. We are concerned to find proper channels of expression for that work. We seek a fruitful diversity of political function, not a stultifying uniformity. [1]

The first meeting of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League took place on 21 July with Lady Jersey in the chair. [2] In addition to Mary Ward, its executive committee included Gertrude Bell, the writer and traveller, Ethel Bertha Harrison, a writer and reformer and Joseph Chamberlain’s daughter Beatrice, an active social worker. A small number of men were already actively involved in the League including John Massie and Heber Hart on its executive committee. The first issue of The Anti-Suffrage Review appeared in December 1908 that, especially when Mary Ward wrote for it, gave some intellectual respectability to the anti-suffragist cause. The organisation also included ultra-conservatives such as Lady Havesham and Frances Low who did not believe in Ward’s progressive social feminist view of ‘civic housekeeping’ but in maintaining the separate sphere ideology and resisted her desire for a ‘Forward Policy’. This linked anti-suffragism to calls for social reform, women’s participation in local government and to womanly self-development through the performance of womanly duties to God, family, nation and empire. It emphasised women’s service not women’s rights. [3] Difference between reformers and conservatives did not prevent them collaborating in a membership drive and publicity campaign that resulted in over eighty branches by July 1909.

Anti-Suffrage postcard, 1908

The rhetoric that informed both ‘anti’ and suffragist political argument was remarkably similar. Ward’s view of differentiated citizenship celebrated the distinctive roles of men and women in society while suffragists emphasised what men and women had in common. [4] Her reforming imagination, commitment to women’s service, and sympathetic literary depictions of friendships between women, the hallmarks of much of her fiction, lend weight to the argument that there is more common ground between suffragists and ‘antis’ than is sometimes supposed. [5] Suffragists and anti-suffragists shared beliefs in sexual difference but disagreed about the extent to which women should carry their particular gifts to the national arena. Suffragists believed that women should reshape national government through the vote, ends with which anti-suffragists disagreed. Millicent Fawcett always considered that Mary Ward was a social reformer whose forte was philanthropic work and that she had somehow wandered into the wrong camp on women’s suffrage.

The earliest achievements of the anti-suffragists were impressive. The Women’s Anti-Suffrage League expanded rapidly and developed a considerable number of branches throughout Britain. In December 1908, it had 2,000 members and by October 1909, around 10,000 members. By April 1910, there were 104 branches; and by April 1912, 235 branches. Analysis of the branch distribution shows that London and the southeast accounted for most of the anti-suffragist effort, 42 per cent of the total membership between 1908 and 1914. The League’s regional pattern of support paralleled Edwardian rural and suburban Conservatism and Brian Harrison argues that, despite its elitist leadership, it appealed widely to the conservative working-class. [6] The movement was weaker in the industrial north and in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. [7] By 1910, Scottish anti-suffragists had established their own affiliated anti-suffrage organisation, the Scottish National Anti-Suffrage League, presided over by the duchess of Montrose and in 1913 affiliated to the League as the Scottish League for Opposing Woman Suffrage. The annual council of the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage was told in 1914 that membership stood at ‘42,000 subscribing members and 15,000 adherents at the end of six years' work…a very good record which compares very favourably with the records of the associations organised by our opponents’. [8] This total included the members of the affiliated Scottish League for Opposing Woman Suffrage. Other records reveal that about five out of every six members of the League were female, and that branch leadership remained largely in the hands of women.

Charles Lane Vicary, Ye Anti Suffrage League, (Printed and Published by the Artists Suffrage League), 1908

In December 1908, male anti-suffragists launched a parallel and much less active Men’s Committee for Opposing Female Suffrage. Although it was skilled at fundraising, it failed to gain popular support. Dominated by the imperialist leadership of Lord Cromer and Lord Curzon, it was a collection of major public figures rather than a nationwide movement. Its supporters also included Rudyard Kipling, and A. V. Dicey but also newspaper editors such as Charles Moberly Bell, editor of The Times and John St Loe Strachey, editor of The Spectator. In a still largely deferential society, a great strength of the anti-suffragists was the list of great men who gave it support. Both groups were set up to be non-party organisations and had members from all parties even though Harrison maintains the Conservatives were the natural home of the anti-suffragists.

Within two years it was clear that both Leagues faced serious practical problems. The Women’s League had little parliamentary influence or sufficient campaign funds, while the Men’s League lacked active campaigners and female support. It was its success in raising a £20,000 anti-suffrage fighting fund that made the prospect of a merger enticing to the anti-suffrage women. They were eager to put their faith in complementary gender roles into practice though not at the cost of abandoning important priorities of the Women's League. In addition, both Leagues feared that a majority of MPs were now in favour of giving votes to women householders. Amalgamation was achieved after months of tortuous negotiation over the name of the new organisation, its constitutional gender balance and the continued endorsement by the Women's League of women's local government work within the objectives of the new, mixed-sex league. [9] In December 1910 the National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage was formally launched, with Lord Cromer as president, Lady Jersey as vice-president and an executive of seven men and seven women. [10]

Between 1911 and 1914, the League’s performance was disappointing, though its achievements were far from negligible.[11] Lord Cromer wanted to focus the campaign on Parliament but anti-suffrage interventions during by-elections proved ineffective and the League was notably unsuccessful in influencing the views of Parliament itself. A parliamentary committee of the League led by Mary Ward’s son Arnold, MP for Watford between 1910 and 1918, failed to rally a united opposition, even though growing militancy checked the advancing tide of parliamentary suffrage support. [12] In addition, the League’s leadership suffered from divisions exacerbated by Cromer’s difficulty in collaborating with independently-minded women. Supporters of the ‘forward policy’ attempted to press ahead with a positive agenda of local government work and womanly social action, initially organised under the auspices of a separate women’s Local Government Advancement Committee and publicised through the Anti-Suffrage Review. Despite opposition from the League’s male leaders, Mary Ward firmly believed in increasing the role of women in municipal affairs and that the League should do more than occupy itself with ‘opposition and denial’. Lord Cromer and Lord Curzon were hostile to such diversionary activity, a position reinforced by their growing awareness that the anti-suffrage women themselves were far from united behind such a programme. Their hostility was further aggravated by local government campaigning that cut across party politics and appeared to set women’s perceived social needs above those of the anti-suffrage movement.

Although local government work was gradually relegated from the League’s programme during 1911 and 1912, Ward’s backing of Dr Elizabeth Jevons as a candidate for a seat on the London County Council contributed directly to Cromer’s resignation in early 1912. He may have been right in his belief that any attempt to promote wider women’s issues would be politically divisive but his resignation was testimony to the problems he encountered in holding this particular line. He commented to Curzon that he did not have the ‘health, strength, youth and I may add, the temper to go on dealing with these infernal women’. [13] Efforts by the League’s leaders to impose masculine authority within their own headquarters proved equally counter-productive. Lucy Terry Lewis, the leading Women’s League administrator, refused to be upstaged by inferior male colleagues and drew support from fellow supporters of the ‘forward policy’. [14] Though she was driven from office shortly before Cromer’s resignation, male replacements proved ineffective and antagonised the leading women. Peace was only restored when Lord Curzon, Cromer’s successor as president, acknowledged the formidable skills of Gladys Pott, another woman administrator during 1913. [15]

The League could justifiably claim some success in holding a number of large-scale public meetings that demonstrated the harmonious collaboration of male and female opponents of the vote. The most famous, at the Albert Hall on 28 February 1912, attracted 20,000 ticket applications and an audience of over 9,000.[16] Violet Markham, a Liberal Unionist, imperialist and womanly social reformer, made an imposing defence of progressive anti-suffragism, alongside male speakers from both major parties. The marchioness of Tullibardine had almost equal success at a 6,000-strong meeting in Glasgow a few months later, though on that occasion the most striking speech was undoubtedly Lord Curzon’s resounding defence of the British Empire against the suffragist threat. [17] Despite these successes, the anti-suffragists proved less efficient than the suffragists. There is little evidence of working-class women taking part in the anti-suffrage movement though there is some evidence for tacit male working-class support. They also found it difficult to recruit younger middle-class women. Anti-Suffrage League meetings were drab and its press office less effective than either the WSPU and NUWSS. Nonetheless, the League did have most of the press on its side ensuring it communicated its message effectively.

With the outbreak of war, the League swiftly suspended all campaigning, devoting its resources to the war effort. [18] This proved difficult to maintain when patriotic suffragists grasped every opportunity to strengthen their cause through well-advertised war service. Though weakened by the departure of male supporters, the League continued to publish its journal and maintained a low level of anti-suffrage propaganda throughout the war. By 1916, some London branches were demanding a more active stance. During the following year the suffrage issue was again before parliament and women leaders were once again to the fore at the highest levels of the League. By this stage, many long-term supporters including Lord Curzon were prepared to bow to the inevitable. By contrast, Mary Ward, confident in the latent anti-suffragism of the silent majority of British women, was acting chairman as the Representation of the People Bill passed through parliament but her frantic last-minute attempts to check its progress failed. At a determinedly positive final meeting of the League in April 1918, Lady Jersey, Mary Ward, Gladys Pott and Beatrice Chamberlain emphasised the justice of their cause to a post-war future in which women would need to be educated to use their votes wisely. For them, the gendered values of British womanhood remained worthy of defence.

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[1] Markham, Violet, Miss Violet Markham’s Great Speech at the Albert Hall, (National League for Opposing Woman Suffrage), 1912.

[2] Ibid, Bush, Julia, Women against the vote: female anti-suffragism in Britain, pp. 163-192.

[3] Bush, Julia, ‘British Women’s Anti-suffragism and the Forward Policy, 1908-14’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 11, (3), (2002), pp. 431-454.

[4] This position was evident in the 1889 Appeal and especially in Harrison Ethel B., The Freedom of Women: an argument against the proposed extension of the suffrage to women, (Watts & Co.), 1908.

[5] For the contradictions in Ward’s work see, Saunders, Valerie, Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists, (Palgrave), 1997, and Sutton-Ramspeck, Beth, ‘Shot out of the Canon: Mary Ward and the claims of conflicting feminisms’, in Thompson, Nicola Diane, (ed.), Victorian Women Writers and the Woman Question, (Cambridge University Press), 1999, pp. 204-222.

[6] Ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, pp. 140-141.

[7] For the regional impact of anti-suffragism see, ibid, Wallace, Ryland, The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Wales, 1868-1928, pp. 184-218, and ibid, Leheman, Leah, A Guid Cause: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland, pp. 70, 106, 192, 215.

[8] Anti-Suffrage Review, Vol. 69, (July 1914), p. 110.

[9] Ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, pp.128-130.

[10] Owen, Roger, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul, (Oxford University Press), 2004, pp. 374-378, examines his anti-suffragist activities.

[11] Ibid, Sutherland, John, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian, pp. 310-337, considers Mary Ward’s role between 1910 and the outbreak of war.

[12] Arnold Ward was dropped by the Conservative Party as their candidate in Watford for the 1918 General Election. His anti-suffragist credentials would have been a liability in the first election when women could vote.

[13] Cromer to Curzon, 8 February 1912, cit, ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, p. 134.

[14] Ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, pp.131-132.

[15] Ibid, Harrison, Brian, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, p. 184.

[16] Ibid, p. 149.

[17] Ibid, pp. 43, 75.

[18] Ibid, Bush, Julia, Women against the vote: female anti-suffragism in Britain, pp. 257-287, examines the anti-suffragists during the War.

Why was religion so important in Victorian politics?

The religious conflicts of the Victorian period were fought out not only in pulpits and pamphlets but also in the political arena. [1] The churches during much of the period did more to mobilise political feeling than the political parties themselves. The antagonism between Protestants and Catholics intensified in a period that saw heavy Irish immigration, the nationalist struggle in Ireland and the adoption of aggressive evangelising tactics both by the Catholic Church and by its Protestant opponents. [2] It had its effect at national level on such issues as the Maynooth grant in 1845 and Irish home rule; locally, in areas with large Irish Catholic populations, it led to party divisions along religious lines. No less hard-fought were the battles over the established churches. Even the Church of Ireland was a leading issue in the election of 1868 before being disestablished the following year by Gladstone. In Wales, disestablishment was the chief aim of the Liberal nonconformist majority and the central political issue from the 1860s to 1914. [3] But it was England that saw the conflict between church and chapel in its classic form.

On one side were the nonconformists, allied with Whigs and Liberals, seeking to remove their disabilities; on the other were the Anglicans, allied with the Conservatives defending the privileges of the establishment. They clashed at national and especially at local levels where nonconformists entered municipal politics in large numbers after 1835. The struggle to turn the confessional state into a secular state was a long one. The Whig governments of the 1830s did little to whittle down Anglican privileges. It introduced civil registration, allowed nonconformists to perform their own marriages, but compulsory church rates remained in force despite bitter local struggles. In the 1850s, the church courts lost their jurisdiction over divorce and wills was abolished. The main breakthrough came with Gladstone’s first government: it abolished church rates in 1869 and opened Oxford and Cambridge up to nonconformists the following year. The last disability was removed by the Burials Act 1880 that allowed nonconformist ministers to perform their own funeral services in parish churchyards. [4] But the establishment itself remained a matter for dispute as did a variety of other issues above all the closely related and bitterly contested issue of education.  Any attempt to channel public money into denominational schools or to give the Church of England a privileged position in state schools provoked intense opposition from Nonconformity. That England was late in creating a system of public education was mainly due to rivalry and mistrust between the churches. The Education Act 1902, that favoured the Anglicans, spurred a large nonconformist vote for the Liberals in the 1906 general election. By this time, however, religious issues were being replaced by class ones, the ‘social gospel’ attracted little interest and support grew for the notion that the churches should stay out of politics altogether.

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[1] Ibid, Machin, G. I. T., Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1832 to 1868, and Politics and the churches in Great Britain 1869-1921, (Oxford University Press), 1987.

[2] See, Ruotsila, Markku, ‘The Catholic Apostolic Church in British Politics’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 56, (2005), pp. 75-91.

[3] See, Machin, Ian, ‘Disestablishment and democracy, c.1840-1930’, Biagini, Eugenio F., (ed.), Citizenship and community: liberals, radicals and collective identities in the British Isles, 1865-1931, (Cambridge University Press), 1996, pp. 120-147, Bell, P. M. H., Disestablishment in Ireland and Wales, (SPCK), 1969, and O’Leary, Paul, ‘Religion, nationality and politics: disestablishment in Ireland and Wales, 1868-1914’, in Guy, John R., and Neely, W. G., (eds.), Contrasts and comparisons: studies in Irish and Welsh Church history, (Welsh Religious Historical Society), 1999, pp. 89-113.

[4] Stevens, Catrin, ‘The “burial question”: controversy and conflict, c.1860-1890’, Welsh History Review, Vol. 21, (2002), pp. 328-356, and Wiggins, Deborah, ‘The Burial Act of 1880, the Liberation Society and George Osborne Morgan’, Parliamentary History, Vol. 15, (1996), pp. 173-189.

Just published: Famine, Fenians and Freedom, 1840-1882

In these days when students often have a bad press, Famine, Fenians and Freedom, is dedicated to the sixth form students whom I taught and tutored in the two years before I retired. They were a witty, interested and interesting set of over fifty students who challenged both their own ideas and mine in lessons that combined the best of learning: achievement of the skills and understanding necessary to do well in examinations and in education in its broadest sense. They were amongst the most affable, brightest and certainly the most challenging (in the nicest sense of that word) individuals I had ever taught. Their collective success, something that continued at university and beyond is something I have followed with intense interest.

Famine, Fenians and Freedom is a detailed and nuanced study of the exodus of the impoverished and persecuted from Ireland before and after the Great Famine of the 1840s as they emigrated, or in some cases were transported to, America, Canada and Australia as well as to the British mainland. The critical question for many Irish men and women was whether Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom, or whether they should seek greater freedom through devolved power or separation. This was an Ireland dominated by personalities such as Daniel O’Connell, James Stephens, Isaac Butt, and Charles Stewart Parnell, and by movements such as the Repeal Association, Young Ireland, the Fenians and Home Rule, and by rebellions against British domination in 1848 and 1867. It examines how those who saw themselves as exiled sought to restore Irish independence from what they determined as British tyranny. This led to unsuccessful Fenian invasions of Canada by Irish-Americans in 1866, 1870 and 1871, the attempted assassination of a member of the British Royal family, Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, in Australia in 1868, and the murder of two British politicians in Phoenix Park, Dublin in 1882. It is a story replete with dramatic events; the monster meetings of the Repeal Association, the battle of Ridgeway, the voyages of the Erin's Hope and the Catalpa, the Manchester ‘outrages’, and the Clerkenwell bombing, and considers developments in Ireland in their global colonial context and setting.

Mutual aid and self-help

Mutual aid started spontaneously on a local level. It became a custom for groups of men to meet in the local inn for a drink on payday, and to contribute a few pence a week to a common fund. From these simple beginnings, friendly societies[1], trade unions, housing associations, people’s banks and co-operatives were all to develop. Rose’s Act of 1793 required friendly societies to register and laid down rules for their operation. The provision made by friendly societies varied. Some were primarily burial societies, protecting the working-classes against the feared pauper‘s funeral. Some provided for widows and children, or for sick or aged members. Some were ‘collecting’ societies, pre-cursors of the People’s Banks. Some were ‘dividing’ societies that had a share-out from time to time, often at Christmas. It was almost exclusively a male movement, though there were three ‘female’ clubs in the villages of Cheddar, Wrington and Shipham in the 1790s.

The first housing society was founded in Birmingham in 1781 and by 1874, there were some 2,000. They developed in two rather different ways. Housing associations had a philanthropic element, and built houses for the working-classes. Building societies were mainly a means of investment for the middle-classes. Many subscribers made quarterly payments; they were not weekly wage earners. Building societies were not friendly societies and their legal position was obscure until the passing of the Building Societies Act 1836. People’s Banks grew naturally out of the collecting societies. As wages improved for some classes of skilled workers, they needed a safe place to keep their limited reserved. By the second half of the nineteenth century there were village banks and municipal banks among many other forms of savings institutions. The Post Office Savings Bank dated from 1861, an innovation of Sir Rowland Hill, who had introduced the penny post in 1840.

The co-operative movement had its origins in the eighteenth century and in the pioneering work of Robert Owen. But the idea of linking labour directly to the sale of goods without the intervention of the capitalist class survived until in 1844 a group of flannel weavers in Rochdale set up a shop in a warehouse in Toad Lane to sell their own produce. [2] They sold at market prices but gave members of their society a dividend on their purchases that could be reinvested. This encouraged ‘moral buying as well as moral selling’. Co-operative production did not last more than a few decades but co-operative retailing flourished.

‘Heaven helps those who help themselves’. Samuel Smiles announced at the beginning of Self-Help published in 1859.[3] An example of his own philosophy, he was apprenticed to a group of medical practitioners at the age of fourteen after his father died of cholera and studied in his spare time gaining a medical diploma from Edinburgh university. He abandoned medicine, first for journalism and then for the exciting world of the developing railway system. From 1854, he managed the South-Eastern Railway from London. His experience provided Smiles with his main theme

The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth in the individual.... help from without is often enfeebling, but help from within invariably invigorates.[4]

Bad luck or lack of opportunity was no excuse. There were many examples of development by men who started from humble beginnings and achieved wealth and fame: Isaac Newton, James Watt, George Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Smiles preached a gospel of social optimism. Self-Help was followed by a series of other books with similarly promising titles: Character (1871), Thrift (1875) and Duty (1880). These never achieved the overwhelming success of Self-Help and over the years the message became somewhat repetitive; but it had made its mark.

Samuel Smiles, Sir George Reed, 1891

By the 1880s, Britain’s economic dominance was increasingly challenged by competition from Europe and the United States. A long economic depression from the mid-1870s to the mid-1890s stretched the Victorian welfare system beyond its limits. As a result, Jose Harris argued

Between 1880 and 1890 the uneasy synthesis of Poor Law, thrift, and charity which had relieved distress from want of employment since the 1830s broke down.’[5]

It was increasingly clear that philanthropy, mutual aid and self-help could not resolve the national problems of poverty and unemployment. The London COS provided caseworkers to help only 800 people a year; model villages accommodated barely a few thousand; and the Ragged Schools movement at its height only numbered 192 schools. Social reformers such as Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree challenged the preconceptions that drove the COS and other charities. Pioneering work supported by charity and philanthropists was taken over by the state on a massive scale, including the provision of sanitation in cities. The debate on poverty had started to move on. George Sims’ poem Christmas Day in the Workhouse was not written until 1903, but social reformers like Dickens had long been pointing to the inhumanity of the system. Dickens had pilloried the ideas of Malthus in his character Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, who justified his meanness on the grounds that he did not want to support ‘surplus population’. Ricardian economic had blamed idleness on ‘excess wages’ but this was undermined by Alfred Marshall, whose revolutionary concept of ‘unemployment’ caused by trade cycles, made poverty a product of the economic environment rather than moral degeneracy. As one of Kipling’s characters put it

...you can’t pauperise them as hasn’t things to begin with. They’re bloomin’ well pauped.[6]

By 1900, there was a growing political consensus in Britain that government needed to do more to address social problems and fear of political unrest pushed the ruling elite towards social programmes to ease the pressure. Winston Churchill argued

With a ‘stake in the country’ in the form of insurances against evil days these workers will pay no attention to the vague promises of revolutionary socialism.[7]

In Victorian Britain, philanthropy, mutual aid and self-help were contrasting and competing philosophies. The three voluntary movements were in many respects complementary to one another, providing different pieces of the jigsaw of future social service provision. Philanthropy highlighted the extent of social misery. At worst it was patronising and snobbish, but at best, it reached out to the poorest and most disadvantaged classes in a divided society and developed a public conscience about conditions. Mutual aid was an intensely practical movement for the better-off sections of the working-classes. It was not a way out of poverty, but it was a means for supporting and protecting members of society against sudden financial disaster. Self-help was tough-minded, of greatest value to the individualistic and hardworking who were prepared to strive in order to further their own ambitions. The problem for each of these approaches was that they could only address the symptoms of the problem of national poverty, not its causes.

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[1] See, Cordery, Simon, British friendly societies, 1750-1914, (Palgrave), 2003.

[2] Brown, W.H., The Rochdale pioneers: a century of Cooperation in Rochdale, Rochdale, 1944 and Hibberd, Paul, ‘The Rochdale tradition in cooperative history: is it justified?’ Annals of Public & Co-operative Economy, Vol. 39, (1968), pp. 531-557. Jackson, John Platt, John, History of the Castleford Co-operative Industrial Society Ltd., 1865-1915, (CWS), 1925, Childe, W.H., Batley Co-operative Society Limited: A Brief History of the Society, 1867-1917, (CWS), 1919, Rhodes, Jos, Half a Century of Co-operation in Keighley, 1860-1910, (CWS), 1911 and Hartley, W., Fifty Years of Co-operation in Bingley: A Jubilee Record of the Bingley Industrial Co-operative Society Limited 1850-1900, (T. Harrison), 1900 for the co-operative experience in West Yorkshire.

[3] On Smiles see the chapter in Briggs, Asa, Victorian People, (Penguin), 1975 for a short introduction. Jarvis, Adrian, Samuel Smiles and the Construction of Victorian Values, (Alan Sutton), 1997 is a more detailed study.

[4] Smiles, Samuel, Self Help with Illustrations of Character, Conduct and Perseverance, (Ticknor and Fields), 1866, p. 15.

[5] Harris, J., Unemployment and politics: a study in English social policy, 1886-1914, (Oxford University Press), 1972, p. 51. This is evident in local studies such as Crocker, Ruth Hutchinson, ‘The Victorian Poor Law in Crisis and Change: Southampton, 1870-1895’, Albion, Vol. 19, (1), pp. 19-44.

[6] Kipling, Rudyard, ‘The Record of Badalia Herodsfoot’, in Many Inventions, (D. Appleton), 1893, p. 283.

[7] Cit, Addison, Paul, ‘Church and Social Reform’, in Blake, Robert and Louis, William Roger, (eds.), Churchill, (Oxford University Press), 1996, p. 62.

Sources: Peel in death

Lord Hatherton writing at the time of Peel’s death in 1850

Peel always seemed to me the most faultless of Ministers. The steadiness of his application and his facility of research, acquired from habit and good memory, were quite wonderful; he always appeared to me to do everything with great ease. He seemed to me not to have a particle of vanity or of undue ambition about him, but a constant of love of truth and desire to give it the victory. Naturally he did not appear to me good-tempered, but his temperament was not hasty, and his feelings were held under wonderful control. His friends, and even his most intimate colleagues, all complained that they could never learn his mind; yet at table or in the society of those he liked, or in a country ride or walk, he seemed unreserved and cordial, and at such times the good sense of his remarks and the liveliness of his anecdotes were very charming. He frequently carried the House away with him, but it was by his greater knowledge of his subject, and his superior power in handling facts, and by the moral character of his sentiments.

The death of Sir Robert Peel

The following report of Peel’s death was published in The Lamp, a Catholic newspaper, in July 1850

Sir Robert Peel is dead! A great instrument in the hand of Divine Providence has ceased to operate in mundane affairs! His task has been fully performed. He has been called to render an account of his stewardship, and in our heart’s core we wish that he may have been found acceptable in the unveiled presence of his JUDGE! It is not our object to follow in the track of the mere politicians of the day, who view his exit from this earthly scene as an event big with misfortune or fertile in blessings, as party feelings or personal bias may prompt them to prognosticate. Neither our judgment nor our hopes are limited to so narrow a range. True, our best sympathies for the last twenty years towards the man, and still shall they cling tenaciously to his memory; nor could any one more sincerely condole with the bereaved and deeply afflicted family of the great departed statesman; but we must confess we do not, like many others, hold his sudden call from among us, as an irreparable national loss. The designs of divine providence, though impervious to human intellect, must be wise and perfect - to us, to every thinking mind, they must be all-in-all, and we would sooner mistrust our own existence, than doubt for a moment that other fit agencies await the summons, to carry out and complete the great work or regeneration so well and nobly begun; by the late and deservedly lamented Sir Robert Peel.

Beyond comparison the most remarkable and distinguished English statesman of the age, it would appear he was called into existence to shiver the theories, and dash, by his extraordinary career, the prejudices, the hopes, the wishes, and the unsound principles of the millions who had staked their earthly welfare upon the power of genius and the subtle exercise of the human intellect. Starting into political life under the auspices of the proud old Tory Faction, he became at once their most able instrument, their cherished and favoured protégé. Endowed, however, with a mind capable of gathering and storing up practical wisdom, another name for expediency, he soon perceived that his haughty patrons secretly looked down on the young aspiring Commoner; but he was prudent, he had a noble card to play, and he was not slow in learning the true value of what the old school called constitutional principles. In the honesty of his heart he despised their hackneyed and used-up absurdities; He found himself trammelled, however, by the extensive influence and powerful interests of those whose index he had become, and who deemed him to be the best expositor of their sordid wishes and over-weening pretensions. Acting with that caution and moderation which were two great ingredients of his character, he closely watched the progress of events, drew knowledge from facts, waited his opportunity, and gradually converted his early masters into the unresisting slaves of his own proud will. On the altar of his loved country he immolated the Tory Faction, and gathered round his own name the grateful respect and admiration of that great body from which himself had sprung, the middle classes of Englishmen. Thus, under the direction of an over ruling providence, did he assume the championship of the men and the principles that in early life he had been brought forward to crush and annihilate.

While secretary in Ireland, he had the misfortune to earn the applause, almost the adoration of the Orangemen. It was because he came forward the bitter opponent of Catholics and Catholicism. This was a great error on his part, a defect in the statesman, a crime in the governor, a sin against a crushed people. But time and opportunity were vouchsafed to correct it, and he did not permit the occasion to slip. Under his tyranny the Catholic people began to learn their own importance. O’Connell concentrated their powers, the association sprung into existence, grew rapidly into gigantic strength, and, finally assumed a position, from which the united efforts of religious bigotry and political intolerance failed to dislodge them. Sir Robert quailed before this new creation, this offspring of a mind mightier than his own; accordingly, he reconsidered his position, drew wisdom from facts, and casting all former prejudices aside, he gracefully bent to necessity and became the reluctant benefactor of the Church of God. Strange destiny his, if aught which God marks by a special interposition may be called strange. Singular that he was made not only the scourge of early party, but the champion of those whom he formerly despised and oppressed! but so it was. His great merit as a statesman was, that when he knew himself to be right, he proceeded in his course with fearlessness and candour. What he did, he did not do by halves; with the grace of sincerity he made his recantations and concessions; and in the case of emancipation, without hankering after or attempting to impose silly and insulting securities, &c., he admitted the Catholics freely into the temple of the constitution. The drag being thus removed from the wheel, Catholicity has since rolled forward with such an accelerating motion, as neither he nor his fellow labourers, nor his opponents, nor those whose condition he sought to ameliorate, had ever dreamed of. Two men alone perhaps possessed correct anticipations of the results. O’Connell, in the vivid picturings of faith, beheld the conquests which the untrammelled Church was destined to achieve. Lord Eldon, in the depression of despair, saw through his tears, as through an inverted lens, that ‘the sun of England’s glory had set for ever,’ and in his narrow view he was indeed prophetic. In Protestant ascendancy his bigoted soul had concentrated England’s glory, and with the emancipation act, that sun did truly set never to rise again!

Peel a ‘working class hero’

Obituary article on Sir Robert Peel in Chambers’ Papers for the People, volume iv, a cheap popular periodical aiming at a mass circulation.

He fell from official power into the arms of the people, whose enthusiastic plaudits accompanied him, on the evening of his resignation of office, to his residence in Whitehall Gardens. The spontaneous feeling of gratitude and respect which prompted those plaudits has since widened, strengthened, deepened, and will become more and more vivid and intense as the moral grandeur of his motives - the unselfish, self-sacrificing spirit which dictated his public conduct - pierce through, and consume in the clear and brilliant light of that truth and justice which, we are assured by an illustrious authority, has ever inspired his acts, the calumnious misrepresentations so unsparingly heaped upon him. By his humbler countrymen, that testimony to the moral worth of the departed statesman was not waited for, nor needed. They felt instinctively that he must be pure and single minded, as he was intellectually vigorous and great; for what had he, raised aloft upon the bucklers of a powerful and wealthy party, to gain by stooping from that dazzling height, to raise tip the humble and lowly from the mire into which ignorant and partial legislation had so long trampled them.

Sources: Peel the man

These extracts give contemporary descriptions of Sir Robert Peel: his appearance and habits

In person he was tall and well formed. His figure, slender rather than robust, made at that time no approach to corpulence. He was active, given to athletic sports; a good walker; fond of shooting, and a good shot...At twenty-one he was attentive to his dress, and dressed well and fashionably... It was still the fashion to wear powder in the hair at a dinner or evening party; and this fashion, which concealed the sandy colour of his hair, and suited his complexion, became him well.

Sir Lawrence Peel A Sketch of the Life and Character of Sir Robert Peel, London, 1860

Sir Robert was tall and well-made, except in his legs, and the defect of those only was that they were too thin, and that, as they tapered much towards the ancle [sic], they seemed too small for the upper man. From some peculiar formation he walked like a woman, - to use a common phrase, he ‘sidled’ along. [The tones of his voice] were more peculiar than those of any voice I ever heard, either on or off the stage. It combined all the softness and persuasiveness of a woman’s with the strength and sonorousness of a man’s.

Captain H. Martin A Personal Sketch of the late Lamented Sir Robert Peel, Hamburg, 1850

He seems self-assured that he is of importance [in the House of Commons]. As he enters at the green door below the bar, and the members, of whatever party, instinctively make way for him, he looks at no one, recognises no one, receives salutation from no one. He seems neither to know nor to be known by any member present. He moves straight on, gliding along the floor like something unreal, with steps half-sidling, on what O’Connell called his two left legs, as though he were preparing for the stately minuet. The broad, full frame tending, of late, to portliness, and looking still more full in the ample vest and long broad-skirted frock-coat seems almost a weight to its supports: an apprehensive man might fear that the sidling step would weaken into a slight stagger. An air of formality and pre-occupation is on the face. The countenance, though handsome and of fine mould, looks broad, flat, not open and traitless. An habitual suppression of feeling has left it without marked features. A complacent gravity alternates with an austere coldness. Or, the brows are elevated with a haughtiness not natural to him; and a strange contradictory smile, sometimes nearly humorous, sometimes almost self condemning, plays with a slight convulsive motion, as though not quite under control. Arrived at his place, he exchanges no recognitions with his immediate colleagues, but sits apart, his body prone upon his crossed legs, his hat down upon his ears, his face stretched forward in anxious attention or agitated with nervous twitches, while his right hand, the two fore-fingers forked, strokes slowly down the nose, or plays unconsciously with his seals, or the keys of his despatch-boxes, which lie before him on the speaker’s table.

Anon. Sir Robert Peel as Statesman and Orator, London, 1846

Peel: Changing historiography

Peel’s reputation in political and intellectual circles declined quite rapidly after his death in 1850. In part, this was a mark of the success of his free trade policies that remained the basis of government policy for the remainder of the century and it is easy to lose sight of just how significant Peel’s achievement actually was. In 1841, Britain was a country still wedded to protectionism; by 1846 it look forward to free trade. For Peel’s early historians, he comes across as an overly cautious administrator with a limited intellect and whose ideas evolved at roughly the same rate as the average person (Walter Bagehot) or as a half-hearted Liberal who spent his life pursuing modest measures of reform from within a party obviously unsuited to the task (Justin McCarthy and J.R. Thursfield).

Since the 1920s, Peel has been subject to some degree of rehabilitation beginning with the work of Anna Ramsey and George Kitson Clark and culminating in the two volume biography by Norman Gash published in 1961 and 1972. Gash sees Peel as a pragmatic administrator and an instinctively consensual politician whose great achievement was to establish the principles of the modern Conservatism. Peel’s career took on greater historical significance with the demise of the Liberal party and the impressive record of the Conservatives as the dominant political party in the twentieth century. For Gash, the Tamworth Manifesto was the key document in the evolution of Conservative ideas with its emphasis that his party must accept the need for gradual change to become a viable party of government and occupy the middle ground in politics. He argues that Peel helped the Conservatives extend the social basis of their support by appealing to urban middle class voters as well as landowners and farmers. Even the Conservative part, which repudiated his leadership in 1846, was soon forced to learn that there was no alternative but to adopt Peelite approaches to politics. Gash concluded that the period between 1830 and 1850 in British history was justifiable known as the ‘Age of Peel’.

This assessment of Peel has been called into question by a number of historians approaching the subject from different positions. Peel’s allegedly pragmatic style of administration, for example, does not fit well with his resolutely anti-reformist stance that he took on many major issues early in his career. The granting of Catholic Emancipation in 1829 came after a decade in which Peel had been one of the leading critics of such a policy. He opposed the 1832 Reform Act to the end; resisted the extension of religious equality to cover Jews in 1830 and, while he never explicitly opposed the abolition of slavery, his speeches in the 1820s and 1830s did nothing but place obstacles in the way of decisive action. Any claim that Peel was a consistent supporter of reform therefore rests on his record at the Home Office in the 1820s. Gash presents his efforts of consolidate the criminal law, abolishing many capital offences in the process as evidence of Peel’s humanitarian concerns. In 1974, however, Derek Beales demonstrated that Peel’s rationalisation of statutes had only limited effects and that credit was really due to the Whig ministers who continued the reforms in the 1830s. Gatrell[1] argued that Peel has no right to be regarded as a humanitarian Home Secretary and that his instinct was to resist appeals for clemency and allow the law to take its course.

It is difficult to accept that before 1832 Peel was a great reformer. However, it could be argued that the true test of Peel’s credentials comes with an examination of his career after 1832. Gash may be right in arguing that Peel tried to persuade the Conservative party to be more adaptable but it is less clear that he succeeded in transforming his party. Robert Stewart and Ian Newbould[2] have both shown that, despite Peel’s advocacy, the Conservative party was little changed by 1841. It remained the party of the English counties and smaller boroughs in the 1841 election, an event that was dominated in Conservative seats by agricultural protectionism. Peel certainly promoted constructive reforms after 1841 but he did so with the declining support of his own MPs.

The most important revision of Gash’s view of Peel has come from Boyd Hilton in a seminal article published in 1979[3]. Hilton does not see Peel as a pragmatist who sought the middle ground in politics, but as a rigid and doctrinaire leader who was unwilling to compromise on his views. His analysis focuses mainly on Peel’s thinking on economic policy arguing that it betrayed signs of his training as a mathematician at Oxford. Hilton maintains that Peel’s intellect was readily susceptible to the charms of a system and once convinced of the theoretical correctness of a proposition, it was necessary for him to fit everything else into the model. The problem was that Peel had an insufficiently flexible or creative intellect to adjust the model when the ‘facts’ did not fit. He suggests that Peel was probably converted to the principle of Corn Law repeal by the end of the 1820s and his doctrinaire adherence to laissez-faire principles meant that in the 1840s an opportunity was missed for the government to establish regulatory control over the railway network. So Hilton concludes that Peel’s legacy was not to modern Conservatism but that he could properly be seen as the originator of Gladstonian Liberalism and certainly the ‘moral energy’ created by his supreme sacrifice in 1846 was eventually transfused into the Liberal political tradition.

Peel’s stature as a Great Statesman may have been reduced to some degree by recent historical writing. In part, this historiographical reaction against Peel is a consequence of the attention currently being given to the Whig governments of the 1830s and 1840s. We can no longer treat them as dismissively as Gash did. This should not, however, undervalue his political achievements. Peel did establish a system of fiscal and commercial policy that endured for almost a century. Perhaps even more importantly, he compelled the whole of the British ruling elite, Liberals and Conservatives, to be responsive to the needs of the growing urban population and this influence was vital in terms of establishing social stability. Peel’s influence lay across the political system and he may be said to have lad for foundation for the mid-Victorian ‘age of equipoise’ if only because this depended on the endorsement of his free trade policies across the political spectrum.

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[1] V. A. C. Gatrell, ‘Mercy and Mr. Peel’, The hanging tree: execution and the English people, 1770–1868, Oxford University Press, 1994, chapter 21.

[2] I.D.C. Newbould ‘Sir Robert Peel and the Conservative Party, 1832-1841: a Study in Failure?’ English Historical Review, volume xcviii, (1983), pages 529-557.

[3] Boyd Hilton ‘Peel: a re-appraisal’, Historical Journal, volume 22, (1979), pages 585–614.