Wilson[1], a Chartist and horticulturist, was born on 7th August 1824 at Skircoat Green, Halifax. Of humble parentage, he never attended day school, but learned to read at the Wesleyan Sunday school in the village of Skircoat Green, an early centre of both Methodism and radicalism. His autobiography The Struggles of an Old Chartist, published in 1887, contains the reflections of an archetypal self-educated working man, who experienced the transition from a semi-rural to an urban-industrial society, evolving from physical-force Chartism into the respectability of Gladstonian Liberalism. It makes no reference to his father, but reveals that his mother had gone into mourning for ‘the victims of Peterloo’, attending radical meetings at a shoemaker’s cottage in Skircoat Green and joining a protest march through Halifax in the aftermath of the Manchester massacre of 1819[2]. He surmised that his mother’s radical instincts sprang from the poverty of her own upbringing, when she had been obliged to earn a living pounding sand for a neighbour and subsisting upon a diet of boiled potato peelings. Wilson himself was put to work at an early age as a farm labourer and in the textile industry as a card setter, for which he received a mere ½d for setting some 1500 card teeth.
Wilson later wound bobbins for his uncle, Joseph Wilson, a small piece maker of Skircoat Green, whose wife, ‘a famous politician, a Chartist, and a great admirer of Feargus O’Connor’, aroused his interest in the Chartist movement, prompting him to attend a large rally addressed by O’Connor at Hartshead Moor on Whit Monday 1839[3]. Wilson provides evidence of arming in the West Riding prior to the Newport rising of November 1839 and an eyewitness account of the ‘plug’ riots in Halifax in 1842. The latter were followed by a serious attack on the military at Salterhebble, which Wilson attributed emphatically to local youths rather than ‘plug’ rioters from Bradford or Lancashire. His account confirms that he himself purchased a gun in the heady atmosphere of 1848 when Halifax was rife with rumours of drilling following the outbreak of revolution in France and the rejection of the third Chartist petition. However, he appears never to have used it and was unarmed when he was chased by mounted troops over a wall at Toftshaw Moor, Bradford, on 12th June 1848.
Wilson records his involvement in township and municipal politics and his support in the Halifax parliamentary elections of 1847 and 1852 for the Chartist candidate Ernest Jones. Wilson remained a close friend of Jones for the rest of his life and represented the Halifax branch of the Reform League at his funeral in Manchester in 1869. Between the demise of Chartism and the foundation of the Reform League, Wilson became increasingly involved in the co-operative movement, and in 1849 ‘resolved not to taste of any intoxicating drink or smoke tobacco’ as an example to others in the belief that ‘if working men could have been induced to invest in the co-operative movement what they were spending in intoxicating drinks it would have greatly improved their condition’[4]. He also identified with the campaign for secular education and later joined the Halifax Liberal Electoral Association.
During the 1840s, Wilson earned an average weekly wage of 9s, working variously as ‘a woollen weaver, a comber, a navvy on the railway, and a barer in the delph’, and was ‘frequently short of the commonest of food’[5]. He subsequently worked as a gardener, gaining a reputation locally for his knowledge of horticulture and especially the cultivation of dwarf hybrid perpetual roses, his favourite flowers. He judged horticultural shows and wrote articles on rose cultivation in the local newspaper. He was one of the few Chartist autobiographers not to appear dismissive of the Chartist land plan, believing that ‘the scheme was before its time’ and that ‘the day is not far distant when it will be successfully carried out’. He took a keen interest in the Halifax co-operative farm in the mid-1860s, during his spell as a director of the Halifax Industrial Society[6]. He greatly admired Gladstone, whose first ministry he thought ‘the most Radical that we ever had in this country’[7]. He organised a reunion of twenty-two former Chartists at Maude’s Temperance Hotel, Halifax, in 1885 to celebrate the passing of the third Reform Act, but spent his declining years denouncing the formation of the Independent Labour Party.
A gifted and witty raconteur and writer and gregarious by nature, Wilson was known affectionately as ‘Old Ben’. Surprisingly, no likeness or even a physical description of him is known to exist. On 17th April 1854, he had married Mary Robinson (1826/7–1907), who came from Haley Hill, Halifax, and who had been almost blind since childhood. Wilson died suddenly, probably from heart failure, at a tea party for the elderly in the schoolroom at Salterhebble United Methodist Free Church held to celebrate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee on 21st June 1897 after reminiscing, amid much hilarity, about an inebriated woman’s conduct at local celebrations marking the queen’s accession. He was eulogised as ‘a Cromwell in the cause of progress and liberty’[8] and his funeral at All Saints’ Church, Salterhebble, and burial in the graveyard there on 25th June were attended by a veteran Chartist and by serving Liberal aldermen and councillors and members of the Salterhebble and District Rose Club, each of whom wore white roses as a mark of respect. A memorial service was later held at the Salterhebble United Methodist Free Church, where tribute was paid to Wilson’s ‘honest and straightforward’ desire ‘to do good in his day and generation’[9]. The straitened circumstances of his widow prompted an appeal, which raised over £20, for a tombstone which bore the inscription: ‘erected by public subscription to the memory of one who strove for the civil and social welfare of his fellow men’.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] Sources: B. Wilson The struggles of an old chartist, 1887, reprinted in Testaments of radicalism, ed. D. Vincent, 1977, pages 191–242, ‘Chat on the politics of the century’, Halifax Courier, 16th March–7th September 1895, 26th June 1897, 3rd July 1897, 26th October 1897 and 30th October 1897, J. A. Hargreaves ‘Guns and roses: Benjamin Wilson (1824–1897) of Salterhebble, chartist and horticulturalist’, Aspects of Calderdale, ed. J. Billingsley, 2002, J. A. Hargreaves Halifax, 1999, D. Thompson The Chartists: popular politics in the industrial revolution, 1984, K. Tiller ‘Late Chartism: Halifax, 1847–1858’, The Chartist experience: studies in working-class radicalism and culture, 1830–60, ed. J. Epstein and D. Thompson, 1982, pages 311–344, especially 327, Halifax Guardian, 26th June 1897, Halifax Guardian, 3rd July 1897, B. Wilson, newspaper articles, 2 volumes, Calderdale Central Library, Halifax, Horsfall Turner collection, M. Blatchford History of Halifax industrial society, 1901, Halifax Courier, 22nd June 1897 and A. Taylor ‘Commemoration, memorialisation and political memory in post-chartist radicalism: the 1885 Halifax chartist reunion in context’, The Chartist legacy, ed. O. Ashton, R. Fyson, and S. Roberts, 1999, pages 255–85.
[2] B. Wilson The struggles of an old chartist, 1887, reprinted in Testaments of radicalism, ed. D. Vincent, 1977, page 195.
[3] B. Wilson The struggles of an old chartist, 1887, reprinted in Testaments of radicalism, ed. D. Vincent, 1977, page 197.
[4] B. Wilson The struggles of an old chartist, 1887, reprinted in Testaments of radicalism, ed. D. Vincent, 1977, page 212.
[5] B. Wilson The struggles of an old chartist, 1887, reprinted in Testaments of radicalism, ed. D. Vincent, 1977, page 210.
[6] B. Wilson The struggles of an old chartist, 1887, reprinted in Testaments of radicalism, ed. D. Vincent, 1977, page 210.
[7] B. Wilson The struggles of an old chartist, 1887, reprinted in Testaments of radicalism, ed. D. Vincent, 1977, page 237.
[8] Halifax Courier, 22nd June 1897.
[9] Halifax Courier, 3rd July 1897.
Friday, 7 September 2007
Chartism: A Question of Interpretation 2
The growth of labour history 1880-1940
By the 1880s political and social interpretations of Chartism had been linked by most British historians. This fitted well with the dominant ‘Whig’ interpretation of history[1]. British history was, according to this philosophy, one of progress with the gradual evolution of a representative Parliament by constitutional means. Consequently, Chartism was premature rather than mistaken in its political demands. The Chartist autobiographies published between the 1870s and 1900 reinforced this view and with their emphasis on respectability did much to invent the tradition of Chartism as a forerunner of Victorian Liberalism. The mid-Victorian boom of the 1850s and 1860s improved most working class living standards removing the spectre of ‘distress’. The growth of ill-defined notions of working class ‘respectability’ resulted, in 1867 and 1884, in the gradual extension of the vote to working men. Property qualifications for MPs were abolished in 1858 and the secret ballot introduced in 1872. The debate among the old Chartists and early labour historians was over what Chartism had become. Did the radical Chartist tradition continue into the second half of the century? Had it evolved into socialism or was Gladstonian Liberalism its logical beneficiary?
The confidence of the British economy was undermined by growing foreign competition from the mid-1870s and growing awareness of the extreme poverty of Britain’s cities led to a shift in writings on Chartism. The struggling British labour movement was susceptible to charges that socialism was a doctrine of disorder imported from the continent. The result was the development of two major schools of thought, Fabian and Marxist, both of which looked to Chartism for their intellectual origins. The Fabians emerged in the 1880s as a radical ‘think-tank’ committed to interventionist solutions to the economic and social problems facing late nineteenth century society. By contrast, the Marxists sought revolutionary change in society by shifting all the means of production, distribution and exchange to democratic government, establishing working class power and recognised the common interests between workers across the world. The two approaches may have overlapped but they led to significantly different perspectives on the history of Chartism. In Beatrice and Sidney Webbs’ History of Trade Unionism, 1894, and Graham Wallas’ The Life of Francis Place, 1898, Chartism was according a place of some importance. Wallas wrote in the revised 1918 edition that: “Place’s correspondence at the time [1837-8] shows that he thought Chartism had little chance of immediate success unless some accident, as had happened in 1832, should bring politics into a revolutionary position. But he was sure that a well-managed agitation for the Charter would create a strong democratic party, led by the new class of educated working-men, and able to put pressure upon Parliament…..”
It was the radical artisan tradition the Fabians emphasised. By contrast the Marxists, and especially Marx himself, marginalised the role of artisans within the proletariat. The preoccupation of artisans with changing the political rather than the economic system and their insistence on a political programme that differed little from that of middle class radicals on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries posed a fundamental dilemma. Were the Chartists irrelevant in the process of changing the capitalist system or were they the first proletarian political party? The innumerable references to the Chartists in Marx’s and Engels’ writings meant that Marxist historians paid the movement particular attention especially those Chartists who sought revolutionary solutions.
Hovell and West: A Fabian perspective
Between 1895 and 1920 the first scholarly histories of Chartism appeared. From Germany John Tildersley explained, in 1898, how the social and economic background of the 1830s and 1840s affected the course of the movement. In 1914, Edouard Dolléans published Le Chartisme 1831-1848 coming to the single comprehensive answer that Chartism was the reaction of the working class against the Industrial Revolution. Two years later three studies were published by Columbia University: F.F. Rosenblatt The Chartist Movement in its Social and Economic Aspects, P.W. Slosson The Decline of the Chartist Movement and H.U. Faulkner Chartism and the Churches.
Two other writers, both of whom died young, worked on general narrative accounts of Chartism using the Place Manuscripts in the British Library. Mark Hovell of Manchester University was killed in 1916 but his work was completed by Professor T.F. Tout[2] and was the most influential book on Chartism in the first half of the twentieth century. He was a free trade liberal in economics and a Fabian in politics and this clearly influenced his interpretation of Chartism. The Chartist Movement remains an impressive book for the clarity of its narrative and for the care that it takes to link Chartism to the process of rapid industrial change. Hovell relied for his sources on Chartist autobiographies, Chartist newspapers and on the extensive archive of Francis Place housed in the British Library. He largely followed Place’s London-centred, artisanal interpretation of events and argued that the London Working Men’s Association sought, through peaceful campaigning, to achieve its political objectives but that this was wrenched from their hands by Feargus O’Connor. Middle class opinion was as a result alienated, the first petition was rejected and all hope of a successful movement was destroyed. He drew a stark contrast between the rational behaviour of William Lovett and the LWMA and the “violent, unorganised and undisciplined” provincial radicals motivated by distress rather than reason.
Like history books written by progressive authors of the early twentieth century, Hovell was concerned to explain and justify progress. The Chartists aimed for democracy and so were agents of progress; something achieved for all men and women over thirty in the year the book was published. Hovell recognised that ‘not a single article of Chartist policy had the remotest chance of becoming law until the movement had expired’ though his explanation for this provides clear evidence of his wider views. He continued: ‘It is only when Chartism ceased to be a name of terror that the process of giving effect to its programme was taken up by the middle-class Parliaments of the later Victorian age’[3]. Consequently, his book is far more sympathetic to those leaders he regarded as apostles of progress, such as Vincent, Lowery and especially Lovett than those, such as O’Connor whom he believed were misleading the masses.
Julius West, a Russian exile and Fabian official, died in 1920 and his History of Chartism was seen through to publication by J.C. Squires. His work is more extensive than Hovell’s especially on the later years of the movement which Hovell did not reach. He too focused on the role of the LWMA comparing its tactics to those used by the Fabians. He is less hostile to O’Connor but still inclined to see him as a would-be dictator.
All these works made a similar distinction between the rational, ‘moral force’ ideas of Lovett and the LWMA and the physical and potentially explosive outlook of O’Connor and the provincial radicals, a position that dominated the shape of Chartist historiography until well after 1945. This explanation derived largely from the authoritative use of the Place collection and particularly his judgement that provincial radicals were illiterate and impatient and their leaders “wicked and designing men”. This perspective was of particular value in explaining why Chartism failed to achieve its objectives. The movement was destroyed by divisions, what Hovell called “its own inner contradictions”, within the working class between the more affluent skilled artisans and the less economically secure factory workers and out-workers. This division between, what G.D.H. Cole in 1940 called ‘rational Chartism’ and ‘hungry Chartism’, is too convenient a solution and reflected the gradualist approach of Fabians and liberals rather than the historical record. There is, for example, little to support Hovell’s argument that sufficient voters might have been persuaded to support a rationally argued case for the Charter but for the violent rhetoric and behaviour of O’Connor and his supporters.
A Marxist perspective
There was a widening gulf between those who advocated gradualism and the supporters of armed revolution in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Marxist writers declared that the Chartist movement was part of a revolutionary tradition rather than a gradualist one. Two, Theodore Rothstein and Reg Groves, are of particular importance because they emphasised the ‘class’ dimension of the movement. Rothstein’s From Chartism to Labourism was published in 1929, but based in part on work from several years earlier. It focused on how some Chartist writers, especially James Bronterre O’Brien and George Julian Harney, recognised the need for the destruction of bourgeois institutions more than later leaders of the labour movement. This revolutionary dimension, evident is the activities of groups like the Fraternal Democrats and other Chartist supporters of European revolutions, showed the strength of class feeling within the movement. Rothstein, however, had difficulty in reconciling high levels of Chartist agitation by artisans and small masters rather than by the proletarians in the factories. The Marxist perspective was certainly a useful alternative to the ‘Whiggish’ views of the Fabians. But on one thing they did agree. Both were highly critical of the role played by Feargus O’Connor. To the Fabians, and especially to Hovell, O’Connor had destroyed Chartism by his insistence on violent rhetoric which prevented the peaceful growth of a rational movement that could, perhaps, have convinced the authorities of the argument for further reform. For the Marxists, and especially Reg Groves in his But We Shall Rise Again, published in 1938, it was not O’Connor’s violence but his lack of revolutionary vision and his opposition to socialism that deprived the movement of its success.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] On the historiographical framework for the development of labour history see Christopher Parker The English Historical Tradition since 1850, Edinburgh, 1990.
[2] Mark Hovell The Chartist Movement, Manchester, 1918.
[3] Mark Hovell The Chartist Movement, Manchester, 1918, page 302.
By the 1880s political and social interpretations of Chartism had been linked by most British historians. This fitted well with the dominant ‘Whig’ interpretation of history[1]. British history was, according to this philosophy, one of progress with the gradual evolution of a representative Parliament by constitutional means. Consequently, Chartism was premature rather than mistaken in its political demands. The Chartist autobiographies published between the 1870s and 1900 reinforced this view and with their emphasis on respectability did much to invent the tradition of Chartism as a forerunner of Victorian Liberalism. The mid-Victorian boom of the 1850s and 1860s improved most working class living standards removing the spectre of ‘distress’. The growth of ill-defined notions of working class ‘respectability’ resulted, in 1867 and 1884, in the gradual extension of the vote to working men. Property qualifications for MPs were abolished in 1858 and the secret ballot introduced in 1872. The debate among the old Chartists and early labour historians was over what Chartism had become. Did the radical Chartist tradition continue into the second half of the century? Had it evolved into socialism or was Gladstonian Liberalism its logical beneficiary?
The confidence of the British economy was undermined by growing foreign competition from the mid-1870s and growing awareness of the extreme poverty of Britain’s cities led to a shift in writings on Chartism. The struggling British labour movement was susceptible to charges that socialism was a doctrine of disorder imported from the continent. The result was the development of two major schools of thought, Fabian and Marxist, both of which looked to Chartism for their intellectual origins. The Fabians emerged in the 1880s as a radical ‘think-tank’ committed to interventionist solutions to the economic and social problems facing late nineteenth century society. By contrast, the Marxists sought revolutionary change in society by shifting all the means of production, distribution and exchange to democratic government, establishing working class power and recognised the common interests between workers across the world. The two approaches may have overlapped but they led to significantly different perspectives on the history of Chartism. In Beatrice and Sidney Webbs’ History of Trade Unionism, 1894, and Graham Wallas’ The Life of Francis Place, 1898, Chartism was according a place of some importance. Wallas wrote in the revised 1918 edition that: “Place’s correspondence at the time [1837-8] shows that he thought Chartism had little chance of immediate success unless some accident, as had happened in 1832, should bring politics into a revolutionary position. But he was sure that a well-managed agitation for the Charter would create a strong democratic party, led by the new class of educated working-men, and able to put pressure upon Parliament…..”
It was the radical artisan tradition the Fabians emphasised. By contrast the Marxists, and especially Marx himself, marginalised the role of artisans within the proletariat. The preoccupation of artisans with changing the political rather than the economic system and their insistence on a political programme that differed little from that of middle class radicals on the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries posed a fundamental dilemma. Were the Chartists irrelevant in the process of changing the capitalist system or were they the first proletarian political party? The innumerable references to the Chartists in Marx’s and Engels’ writings meant that Marxist historians paid the movement particular attention especially those Chartists who sought revolutionary solutions.
Hovell and West: A Fabian perspective
Between 1895 and 1920 the first scholarly histories of Chartism appeared. From Germany John Tildersley explained, in 1898, how the social and economic background of the 1830s and 1840s affected the course of the movement. In 1914, Edouard Dolléans published Le Chartisme 1831-1848 coming to the single comprehensive answer that Chartism was the reaction of the working class against the Industrial Revolution. Two years later three studies were published by Columbia University: F.F. Rosenblatt The Chartist Movement in its Social and Economic Aspects, P.W. Slosson The Decline of the Chartist Movement and H.U. Faulkner Chartism and the Churches.
Two other writers, both of whom died young, worked on general narrative accounts of Chartism using the Place Manuscripts in the British Library. Mark Hovell of Manchester University was killed in 1916 but his work was completed by Professor T.F. Tout[2] and was the most influential book on Chartism in the first half of the twentieth century. He was a free trade liberal in economics and a Fabian in politics and this clearly influenced his interpretation of Chartism. The Chartist Movement remains an impressive book for the clarity of its narrative and for the care that it takes to link Chartism to the process of rapid industrial change. Hovell relied for his sources on Chartist autobiographies, Chartist newspapers and on the extensive archive of Francis Place housed in the British Library. He largely followed Place’s London-centred, artisanal interpretation of events and argued that the London Working Men’s Association sought, through peaceful campaigning, to achieve its political objectives but that this was wrenched from their hands by Feargus O’Connor. Middle class opinion was as a result alienated, the first petition was rejected and all hope of a successful movement was destroyed. He drew a stark contrast between the rational behaviour of William Lovett and the LWMA and the “violent, unorganised and undisciplined” provincial radicals motivated by distress rather than reason.
Like history books written by progressive authors of the early twentieth century, Hovell was concerned to explain and justify progress. The Chartists aimed for democracy and so were agents of progress; something achieved for all men and women over thirty in the year the book was published. Hovell recognised that ‘not a single article of Chartist policy had the remotest chance of becoming law until the movement had expired’ though his explanation for this provides clear evidence of his wider views. He continued: ‘It is only when Chartism ceased to be a name of terror that the process of giving effect to its programme was taken up by the middle-class Parliaments of the later Victorian age’[3]. Consequently, his book is far more sympathetic to those leaders he regarded as apostles of progress, such as Vincent, Lowery and especially Lovett than those, such as O’Connor whom he believed were misleading the masses.
Julius West, a Russian exile and Fabian official, died in 1920 and his History of Chartism was seen through to publication by J.C. Squires. His work is more extensive than Hovell’s especially on the later years of the movement which Hovell did not reach. He too focused on the role of the LWMA comparing its tactics to those used by the Fabians. He is less hostile to O’Connor but still inclined to see him as a would-be dictator.
All these works made a similar distinction between the rational, ‘moral force’ ideas of Lovett and the LWMA and the physical and potentially explosive outlook of O’Connor and the provincial radicals, a position that dominated the shape of Chartist historiography until well after 1945. This explanation derived largely from the authoritative use of the Place collection and particularly his judgement that provincial radicals were illiterate and impatient and their leaders “wicked and designing men”. This perspective was of particular value in explaining why Chartism failed to achieve its objectives. The movement was destroyed by divisions, what Hovell called “its own inner contradictions”, within the working class between the more affluent skilled artisans and the less economically secure factory workers and out-workers. This division between, what G.D.H. Cole in 1940 called ‘rational Chartism’ and ‘hungry Chartism’, is too convenient a solution and reflected the gradualist approach of Fabians and liberals rather than the historical record. There is, for example, little to support Hovell’s argument that sufficient voters might have been persuaded to support a rationally argued case for the Charter but for the violent rhetoric and behaviour of O’Connor and his supporters.
A Marxist perspective
There was a widening gulf between those who advocated gradualism and the supporters of armed revolution in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution in Russia. Marxist writers declared that the Chartist movement was part of a revolutionary tradition rather than a gradualist one. Two, Theodore Rothstein and Reg Groves, are of particular importance because they emphasised the ‘class’ dimension of the movement. Rothstein’s From Chartism to Labourism was published in 1929, but based in part on work from several years earlier. It focused on how some Chartist writers, especially James Bronterre O’Brien and George Julian Harney, recognised the need for the destruction of bourgeois institutions more than later leaders of the labour movement. This revolutionary dimension, evident is the activities of groups like the Fraternal Democrats and other Chartist supporters of European revolutions, showed the strength of class feeling within the movement. Rothstein, however, had difficulty in reconciling high levels of Chartist agitation by artisans and small masters rather than by the proletarians in the factories. The Marxist perspective was certainly a useful alternative to the ‘Whiggish’ views of the Fabians. But on one thing they did agree. Both were highly critical of the role played by Feargus O’Connor. To the Fabians, and especially to Hovell, O’Connor had destroyed Chartism by his insistence on violent rhetoric which prevented the peaceful growth of a rational movement that could, perhaps, have convinced the authorities of the argument for further reform. For the Marxists, and especially Reg Groves in his But We Shall Rise Again, published in 1938, it was not O’Connor’s violence but his lack of revolutionary vision and his opposition to socialism that deprived the movement of its success.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] On the historiographical framework for the development of labour history see Christopher Parker The English Historical Tradition since 1850, Edinburgh, 1990.
[2] Mark Hovell The Chartist Movement, Manchester, 1918.
[3] Mark Hovell The Chartist Movement, Manchester, 1918, page 302.
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