Why Botany Bay?

Several misconceptions have arisen about whether the colony of New South Wales was actually established to solve Britain’s convict problem in the late eighteenth century leading to a tendentious ‘Botany Bay debate’. The history is actually far more complex and the convict problem had been an issue since Tudor times. The transportation of thousands of convicts abroad after 1597 provided a good source of cheap labour in Africa, the Caribbean and India, and from 1666 North America, although the latter destination came to an abrupt end after 1776 with the American War of Independence.[1] It was only then that Australia gained importance. However, historians have agreed that the decision to transport large numbers of convicts to eastern Australia in the late eighteenth century was unexpected and sudden.

Why Australia? America was no longer an option. Canada refused to take any more convicts owing to poor previous experiences, although this time the convicts were to be guarded and this might have made a difference. British Honduras was not an option as the settlers preferred coloured slaves to convicted white slaves. The West Indies were not viable as the influential slave traders did not want their profitable slave market, already in decline, to be further weakened by competition from the English gaols. Western Africa already had sufficient cheap labour and so the state could not send its convict labour there. A survey ship was sent to Das Voltas Bay on the south-west coast of Africa in the hope that its strategic position on a major trade route could be made profitable. However, the investigation found its climate and fertility unsuitable. As Africa and America were inappropriate, the whole of the South-West Pacific was available. New Zealand was disregarded owing to Joseph Banks’ dislike of the area. This left the area including Australia. The argument that Australia was chosen as no alternative could be found has been stated by Shaw[2], David Mackay[3] and Mollie Gillen[4]. They argue that convicts were unwanted and a remote site was advantageous. Gillen has suggested that New South Wales had always been a back-up plan since 1786. However, this is not widely accepted. Blainey[5] rightly states there were closer alternatives, such as the uninhabited islands of the Bermudas or the West Indies and the availability of other lands implies that there was deeper reasoning to the decision.

So what were the real reasons for the British Government’s plans to establish a colony there? The traditional view maintains that desperation played a major role in the decision to send convicts to Australia. The mounting numbers of convicts in gaols and hulks was at a dangerous level. Martin has suggested that the attempted assassination of the King by Margaret Nicholson in August 1786 played a part in hastening the decision. [6] Though this may not have been crucial, the influence of pressures at home cannot be underestimated. Most historians accept this was critical in forcing a decision; for example, a survey ship was not sent to investigate Botany Bay before settlement as there simply was not enough time. The traditional view in the debate is that Botany Bay was chosen as a ‘dumping ground’ for convicts and in 1976 Norman Bartlett wrote

There is no evidence that either William Pitt or any member of his cabinet thought of Botany Bay as anything more than a convenient place distant enough for the safe disposal of social waste. [7]

This traditional approach is also supported by Atkinson who believes that ‘Botany Bay was chosen as a convict settlement not because of, but in spite of the possibility that it might become a trading post.’ [8]

The idea of establishing a colony at Botany Bay started with the ‘Matra proposal’ in August 1783, even before the end of the War of Independence between America and England.[9] James Matra who travelled with Cook to the South Seas in 1770, spoke of New South Wales as having good soil, advantages of flax cultivation, the possibility of trade with China, the availability of timber for ships masts and had Sir Joseph Banks’ support. Matra’s idea was that the new colony could be used by ‘those Americans who had remained loyal to Britain in the War of Independence’ such as himself; this idea was, however, rejected. Initially Matra did not mention convicts, but later amended his proposal to ‘include transportees among the settlers but as cultivators in their own right rather than as forced labour’ after an interview with the Home Secretary Lord Sydney.

Did the British government consider the type of labour force that would be required to establish a colony or was Botany Bay just seen as a solution to the ever growing number of convict hulks along the River Thames? Soon after arriving in 1788, Governor Phillip requested ‘carpenters, masons, bricklayers’ to help with the setting up of the colony along with many tools of the trades. Yet the proposal for the establishment of the new colony in the ‘Heads of a Plan’[10] addressed the effective disposing of the convicts to the new colony, along with the cultivation of flax, required stores and provisions, clothing for convicts, how the objective of the convict colony overrides the costs involved, naval staff and such.

However, the tools sent with the First Fleet were of poor standard, with only twelve carpenters among the initial convicts. Women’s clothing was also of poor quality and quantity plus aged and ailing convicts were sent. Poor planning does not support the belief of the non-traditional view of the reasons behind the decision to colonise Botany Bay: The ‘great southern port’ and the ‘development of a flax industry for naval use’ suggested by revisionist historians as the reason for the settlement rather than for the disposal of unwanted convicts seem to have been somewhat negated by the account of inadequate supplies of even the most elementary equipment. The traditionalist may well ask that if Botany Bay was planned to be the ‘great southern port’ why then did free settlers not arrive until 1793 on the Bellona, five years after the arrival of the First Fleet. Governor Phillip was given instruction to cultivate flax

And as it has been humbly represented to us that advantages may be derived from the flax-plant which is found in the islands not far distant from the intended settlement...excellence of a variety of maritime purposes...an article of export...that you do send home…samples of this article...instruct you further upon this subject.[11]

Norfolk Island, some thousand miles east of Botany Bay, offered the prospect of both a timber and flax industry. These orders form part of the non-traditionalist justification for their point of view. Traditionalist historians feel the possibility of the flax industry at Botany Bay was just an additional benefit to England when options for the convicts were being decided. Yet contracted tradesmen were still being sent to New South Wales in 1792 to help with the colony at Norfolk Island and others. Sparse flax producing equipment was sent out with the First Fleet ‘which hardly indicates strong encouragement for any flax enterprise or faith in the success of the new venture’[12].

Traditionalists stand firm to the opinion that Botany Bay was only colonised to ‘rid the nation’s (Britain) prisons and hulks of convicts’. Frost believes the opposite is true approaching the Botany Bay debate from a broader perspective and arguing that there were strategic considerations in Pitt’s Cabinet decision to set up the colony; naval trade, supply of flax and naval timber from Norfolk Island and the fact the use of Britain’s excess convict labour might serve these purposes. [13] Botany Bay had already been surveyed by Cook in 1770 with its supposed ability to shelter a fleet of ships. By colonising New South Wales, Britain would protect Cook’s ‘right of possession’ over Botany Bay from the French and Dutch, thus giving them more positional power over the seas and any possible trade.

The loss of the American colonies came as a great shock, especially to George III who had never taken the threat seriously. In order to re-establish itself as a great power, Britain needed to consolidate its empire and the acquisition of a new colony could do this. In the 1770s, France, keen on becoming a world power, allied itself with every other major nation in Europe, including Russia, against Britain. The threat to Britain and its empire, particularly to its colonies in the Far East and India, forced the government to consider options that would allow Britain to maintain its position and continue to compete on the world stage. A strategic location needed to be secured from that could support its empire from French invasion. A safe harbour was also needed for the British fleet in the Pacific Ocean and Indian Ocean, from where, at short notice, supplies of food and other materials to its colonies could be obtained cheaply. In addition, plantations were needed to grow hemp to supply rope to the Navy and a new source of wood to counteract the effects of depleted English supplies, primarily for naval mast and spar repairs. The strategic argument is perhaps supported by the choice of Phillip as the first governor and Frost points out that both Phillip and his two successors were naval officers.

In 1952, Ken Dallas suggested that Britain wanted to establish a trading post to spearhead British penetration of the Pacific and to service an alternative sea route to China. [14] In his subsequent book, he maintained that it was the fur trade of the north Pacific, trade opportunities with China and South America and the development of sealing and whaling in the Pacific that combined to make British settlement of Australia a viable economic project. There is evidence to support his case: demand for whale and seal oil was in big demand in Britain and many of the shops from the Second Fleet were converted whalers that were reconverted to their original use after the voyage. This has been criticised, but the work of Margaret Stevens[15] and HT Fry[16] indicated that the British were concerned over the security of trade routes to China and that Pitt’s policies in the 1780s were dictated primarily by commercial considerations. David Mackay disputes this by stating that the First Fleet was not sufficiently equipped to provide the protection and manpower to defend the strategic position of Botany Bay. [17] Mackay has also argued against the strategic position of Botany Bay in relationship to naval trade. Like many, Mackay feels that the establishment of the colony was rushed and poorly done and ‘crisis orientated’ not a good start if the motives were really for naval trade and timber supply. After viewing many of what seems to be a circle of comments and opinions that formed the Botany Bay debate, he then accused the non-traditionalists of: ‘Distorting our records of the past, and sought to create a myth of a better national origin.’ They have also overestimated the capacity of governments in the late eighteenth century. Mackay stills acknowledges that regardless of the ‘shoddy’ way in which Botany Bay was set up that ‘from such inauspicious beginnings Australia grew to maturity and nationhood’.

Geoffrey Blainey shared Dallas’ belief that there was a positive reason for the choice of colony. He emphasised Lord Sydney’s announcement that the choice of colony was to be ‘reciprocally beneficial’. This is the only reason given in official documents as to why such a remote land was chosen. This dearth of official information has greatly fuelled the debate surrounding the Botany Bay decision. He reported that an export trade was to be started in flax, hemp, and in wood for mainmasts. This would strengthen Britain’s naval power in the event of a Baltic blockade preventing England getting flax from its usual supply in Russia. Blainey even suggested that the convicts were a convenient smokescreen for gaining strategic materials. The validity of sources used to formulate this hypothesis has been questioned. It has led to Alan Frost’s modified theory[18] that the British sought supplies for their ships in eastern waters that needed to refit without sailing home if they were to defend British lands in India against the French. Another commercial advantage was that the empty convict ships could carry cargoes of tea back, although whether this was realised before the decision-making or not has been disputed. However, during the debates in the 1960s, the fact that New South Wales was almost entirely a convict settlement tended to be overlooked. Both the ‘flax and timber’ theorists and the ‘China route’ party have had to admit that the early years of the New South Wales colony did not triumphantly vindicate their arguments.

In reality, it is likely that there was a jumble of motives. Transportation resolved the convict problem by expelling them from England. It helped the whaling industry that needed a secure base in the Pacific and secured a route for those who wanted to expand trade with China. It limited the territorial ambitions of the French and the claims of the Spanish and Dutch to the continent. It helped repair the damage done to British imperial prestige by the debacle in America. Above all, it was economical since convict labour was expected to become self-funding after initial financial help from the Exchequer. For British politicians, colonising Australia appears to have satisfied many of the different interests that were clamouring for action.

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[1] Innes, Joanna, ‘The role of transportation in seventeenth and eighteenth century English penal practice’, in Bridge, Carl, (ed.), New Perspectives in Australian History, (Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London), 1990, pp. 1-24.

[2] Shaw, Alan, Convicts and the colonies: a study of penal transportation from Great Britain and Ireland to Australia and other parts of the British Empire, (Faber), 1966.

[3] Mackay, D., A Place of Exile: European Settlement of New South Wales, (Oxford University Press), 1985.

[4] Gillen, Mollie, ‘The Botany Bay decision, 1786: convicts not empire’, English Historical Review, Vol. 97, (1982), pp. 740-766 but see also her The Search for John Small: First Fleeter, (Library of Australian History), 1988 and The Founders of Australia, A Biographical Dictionary of The First Fleet, (Library of Australian History), 1989

[5] Ibid, Blainey, G.C., The Tyranny of Distance, pp. 20-39.

[6] Martin, Ged, ‘The founding of New South Wales’, in Statham, P., (ed.), The Origins of Australia’s Capital Cities, (Cambridge University Press), 1988, pp. 37-51.

[7] Bartlett, Norman, 1776-1976: Australia and America through 200 years, (Ure Smith), 1976.

[8] Atkinson, Alan, ‘A Counter-Riposte’ in Martin, Ged, (ed.), The Founding of Australia: The Argument about Australia’s Origins, (Hale and Iremonger), 1978, pp. 265-269.

[9] Matra, James Mario, ‘Proposal for establishing a Settlement in New South Wales’, 23 August 1783, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 1-8, in ibid, Martin, Ged, (ed.), The Founding of Australia: The Argument about Australia’s Origins, pp. 9-15.

[10] ‘Heads of a Plan’, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), pp. 17-20, in ibid, Martin, Ged, (ed.), The Founding of Australia: The Argument about Australia’s Origins, pp. 26-29.

[11] Phillip’s Instructions, 25 April 1787, HRNSW, Vol. 1, (2), p. 89.

[12] Abbott, G.J., ‘Staple theory and Australian economic growth’, Business Archives and History, Vol. 5, (1965), pp. 142-154 and ‘The Botany Bay decision’, Journal of Australian Studies, Vol. 16, (1985), pp. 21-41 are particularly useful on this issue.

[13] Frost, A., Convicts and Empire: A Naval Question 1776-1811, (Oxford University Press), 1980 but see also his ‘The Decision to Colonise New South Wales’, Mulvaney, D. and White, Peter, (eds.), Australians to 1788, (Fairfax, Syme & Weldon Associates), 1987 and his synoptic Botany Bay Mirages: Illusions of Australia’s Convict Beginning, (Melbourne University Press), 1994.

[14] Dallas, K.M., ‘The First Settlement in Australia; considered in relation to sea-power in world politics’, Papers and Proceedings of the Tasmanian Historical Research Association, number 3 (1952), pp. 1-12 reprinted in ibid, Martin, Ged, (ed.), The Founding of Australia: The Argument about Australia’s Origins, pp. 39-49. His ideas were extended in Trading Posts or Penal Colonies, (Richmond and Son), 1969.

[15] Stevens, M., Trade, Tactics and Territory: Britain in the Pacific 1783-1823, (Manchester University Press), 1983.

[16] Fry, H.T., ‘Captain James Cook: the historical perspective’, in The significance of Cook’s ‘Endeavour’ voyage: Three Bicentennial Lectures, (James Cook University of North Queensland), 1970, pp. 1-23 and ‘‘Cathay And The Way Thither’: The Background To Botany Bay’, in ibid, Martin, Ged, (ed.), The Founding of Australia: The Argument about Australia’s Origins, pp. 136-149.

[17] Ibid, Mackay, David, A Place of Exile: European Settlement of New South Wales.

[18] Frost, A., ‘Botany Bay: An Imperial Venture of the 1780s’, English Historical Review, Vol. 100, (1985), pp. 309-330.

What if?

The history of the women’s movement from John Stuart Mill onwards is a fine blend of heroism and farce that came to an abrupt halt in 1914 by which time the movement lacked any obvious strategy for success. The failure of the suffrage movement to achieve its objectives by 1914 is frequently blamed on suffragette militancy and violence, coupled with the personal style of management adopted by the Pankhursts and its effects on both public opinion and the three major political parties. That there was widespread disgust at the activities of the WSPU, something fanned by an antagonistic national and provincial press, is undoubtedly true but this neglects the quieter constitutionalist campaigns whose non-militancy proved equally unsuccessful. Neither suffragettes nor suffragists succeeded in concluding a firm alliance with either of the Conservative or Liberal parties, the WSPU squandered its potentially useful link with the ILP while by 1914, the EFF had yet to deliver real success to the Labour Party. They were unfortunate that Asquith was so personally opposed to women's suffrage and that their campaign coincided with other, more pressing political issues. In many respects, the suffrage campaign was not in a much better position in 1914 than it had been in 1897. True, it was better organised, had developed new methods for getting its message across and had increased support across society but it now faced a well-organised and resourced anti-suffrage movement.

If war had not broken out in 1914, there would been a general election in 1915. If the Liberals under Asquith had won there is no reason to suggest that he would have changed his views of women’s suffrage while a Conservative victory was unlikely to have led to women getting the vote since parliamentary debates could have opened up the question of adult suffrage, an issue the party wished to avoid. Under the existing franchise, it is highly unlikely that the Labour Party would have made an electoral breakthrough and, without their continued pact with the Liberals, could have actually lost seats. In addition, there is the question of what would have happened to the WSPU. By August 1914, it had largely exhausted the scope of its militancy, had alienated many of its supporters and appeared to be in terminal decline. The NUWSS and WFL might have benefitted from this in terms of membership but their constitutionalist methods had failed to deliver change before 1914 and, without an alteration in attitude by the leaders of the political parties, there is no reason to believe that their methods would have been any more successful before or after a general election in 1915. So when would women have got the vote? Assuming a Liberal win in 1915 and assuming that Asquith was not replaced by Lloyd George who was increasingly suffragist in opinion or a Conservative victory, it is quite possible that the 1920 general election would have been fought under the existing franchise. It is unlikely that women’s suffrage could have been delayed beyond 1920 since international trends favoured enfranchisement. The result was that adult suffrage would have been introduced and the election in 1924 or 1925 fought with a broadened electorate that might have included all women, three years before they were actually fully enfranchised.

From convict society to responsible government

From 1788 until 1823, NSW was a penal colony.[1] This meant that there were mainly convicts, marines and the wives of the marines although free settlers started to arrive in 1793. Law courts may have been established when the colony was founded, but, for the first thirty-five years, successive governors were absolute rulers. The British Parliament could control their authority, but England was eight months away by sea: by the time a complaint was heard and decided, nearly two years might have gone by. By 1820, Australia was beginning to look prosperous and sentiments of Australian patriotism were being expressed at gatherings of ex-convicts. The sense of belonging to a new nation must have been encouraged in 1817 when Governor Macquarie recommended the adoption of the name ‘Australia’ for the entire continent instead of New Holland. A growing number of colonists were unhappy with total control in the hands of one person and urged the British Parliament to allow the colony to establish a legislature. The result was significant territorial and governmental changes: first, the British government separated VDL followed, four years later in 1829 with the addition of Western Australia; there was a second subdivision of NSW to create South Australia founded in 1836, and, in parallel, the development of the Port Phillip district founded in 1835 though it did not gain separation from NSW until 1851.

The problems of governing NSW and the other emergent colonies can be illustrated by the question of land. From the foundation of the colony in 1788, all lands were vested in the Crown. Prior to 1856, the whole responsibility for government rested with the residing Governor under direction from the British Parliament. In that time, NSW could almost be classed as a department of the Colonial Office in London, with the Colonial Secretary in Sydney holding the position of permanent Under-Secretary and acting the official link between all other officials and the Governor. The Governor was the supreme authority in the colony with autocratic and personal powers though, almost from the outset these were challenged and defined in the courts. All important correspondence that required either decisions or action on the part of the Governor was addressed to the Colonial Secretary. Matters of minor importance or mere detail were directed to the relevant offices.

In Australia, both the Imperial Government and the various colonial legislatures tried to direct the pace and character of settlement expansion by various modes of land disposal.[2] According to Jeans, the bureaucratic structure above shows

...a basic unit or segment of political organization, stretching from the highest reaches of policy-making to the most subordinate officials who carry out policy by contact with the public. A government may be seen as composed of many such segments, each dealing with its special sphere of administration. Surrounding the components of the segment are external institutions and individuals whose views and needs impinge on the decisions being made at some level within the segment.[3]

Between 1788 and 1850, public business was not separated into different departments and many branches of the public sector were involved in selling, leasing and granting Crown land. Much of the work was routine and many tasks were duplicated. Delays stemming from confusion over responsibilities saw land administration fall further and further into arrears.[4] As the colonies expanded, centralised administration under imperial authority became increasingly ineffective and public business became so vast and complex that the Governor and Colonial Secretary could not cope with the demands of the administration. This was particularly evident in Victoria under Sir Charles Hotham in 1854 when his relationship with his Colonial Secretary broke down and he attempted to rule alone. In 1851, the Australian Colonies Government Act passed by the Imperial Parliament and gave authority to the colonial Legislative Councils to prepare democratic constitutions for the colonies but the problems confronting colonial administrators in NSW and the newly established Victoria were compounded by the onset, development and legacies of the Gold Rush that began in 1851.[5]

In 1855 and 1856, by imperial legislation, responsible Government was granted to the Australian colonies. That Act vested in the colonial legislature the entire management and control of waste lands belonging to the Crown.[6] The establishment of responsible government marked a significant departure from the previous administrative framework for Crown land decision-making and policy-making and the outcomes and impacts of Crown land legislation and policy of this early period in Australian settlement influenced land settlement patterns for many decades after the colonies was granted responsible government.

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[1] Melbourne, pp. 8-46 remains useful on the governance of New South Wales under governor rule.

[2] Powell, J.M., The Public Lands of Australia Felix: Settlement and Land Appraisal in Victoria 1834-1891 with Special Reference to the Western Plains, (Oxford University Press), 1970.

[3] Jeans, D.N., ‘The impress of central authority upon the landscape: south-eastern Australia 1788-1850’, in Powell J.M. and Williams, M., (eds.), Australian Space, Australian Time: Geographical Perspectives in Australia, 1788-1914, (Melbourne: Oxford University Press), 1975, p. 5.

[4] New South Wales Commission of Inquiry into the Surveyor General’s Department, Report from the Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Surveyor General’s Department, with Minutes of Evidence and Appendix, (William Hanson, Government Printer), 1855.

[5] Williams, M., ‘More and smaller is better: Australian rural settlement 1788-1914’, in ibid, Powell J.M. and Williams, M., (eds.), Australian Space, Australian Time: Geographical Perspectives in Australia, 1788-1914, pp. 61-103.

[6] For the debate on waste lands see, Hansard, Vol. 138, (1855), cols. 719-736.

Perceptions and realities

The government has had a bad time since the Budget and much of it has been of their own making.  Whatever the justification for increasing the tax on pasties or equalising personal allowances freezing them for pensioners until the rest of us catch up, and there certainly is justification, the ways in which both issues were handled has been a public relations disaster.  The petrol fiasco was entirely of the government’s making.  Again whatever the justification for the government planning for a strike and it would be a poor government that did not put contingency plans in place just in case, the message that individuals should fill up their jerry cans and store them in their garages was crass stupidity and, whatever the government says, led to panic buying on a massive scale.  Pasties, pensioners and petrol all give the impression that the government is not simply slipping up on banana skins but actually putting the banana skins down themselves.  The electorate can accept a government that puts forward difficult measures, they may not like them but are generally prepared to accept them.  But a government that has become the butt of widespread public ridicule and gives the impression of being helpless and hopeless, rapidly loses any popular legitimacy.  If people think that the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer are ‘two posh boys who don’t known the price of milk’, then it becomes very difficult to put forward serious solutions to our undoubted problems. 

The experience of past governments clearly suggest that if a government sinks so low in public esteem then it is extremely difficult for it to recover.  This happened to John Major in the mid-1990s and Gordon Brown after 2009 and both lost the next general election.  In both cases, there was also a widespread belief that their policies would not resolve prevailing economic problems, despite a recovering economy in 1997 and the situation is now far worse than it was in 1997 or 2010.  The problem for the present government is that their deficit reduction plans and economic policies are perceived not to be working.  Economic growth, promised from its outset, has not occurred and now that we are in a double-dip recession, achieving the growth essential to economic recovery.  So not only is the government seen as laughable by many, it appears that the wheels have fallen off of its economic plans and, as they have consistently stated ‘there is no plan B’. 

A Penal colony

Six years after James Cook landed at Botany Bay in 1770 and gave the territory its English name of ‘New South Wales’, the American colonies declared their independence and the revolutionary war with Britain began. Access to America for transported convicts ceased and overcrowding in British gaols soon raised official concerns. In 1779, Joseph Banks, the botanist who had travelled with Cook to NSW, suggested Australia as an alternative place for transportation. The proposal was repeated later in 1783 by James Matra, who had also sailed on the Endeavour. [1] The advantages of trade with Asia and the Pacific were also raised, alongside the opportunity NSW offered as a new home for the American Loyalists who had supported Britain in the War of Independence and who found themselves dispossessed. Eventually the Government settled (although not without criticism) on Botany Bay as the site for a colony.[2] Secretary of State, Lord Sydney, chose Captain Arthur Phillip of the Royal Navy to lead the fleet there and to be its first governor. He was responsible for keeping law and order, entitled to grant land, raise armed forces for defence, discipline convicts and military personnel and issue regulations and orders. As the colony grew, he could raise taxes through customs duties.

The critical question facing those who arrived in Australia in 1788 was how do you establish a society from scratch and how far was it possible to transport political and social structures as well as convicts? What they found shocked them. The colony represented an inversion of the accepted order of things. It was to be built by Britain’s discards. Members of the First Fleet seem to have been unprepared for the changed seasons, but creatures like the black swan, both the same as, and yet opposite to, the northern white swan, neatly conformed to some of the early theories about what a world upside down might contain. Similarly, being dark-skinned unlike the pale Europeans, it was assumed that the indigenous peoples also had the opposite of ‘civilised’ European values. Creatures like the kangaroo and platypus, however, were much more disturbing, hinting at perverted rather than inverted forms of nature. Interestingly, John Hunter attributed these supposed freaks of nature to a ‘promiscuous intercourse’ between species that served to infect the country and compared it with the moral contagion represented by the cargo of convicts. [3] From a social perspective the ‘proper’ order of society was overthrown, as convicted felons became founding members of a new society. While few became as wealthy as the emancipist merchant Simeon Lord, many came to hold positions of authority and to enjoy greater prosperity than they could have known back home. Most importantly, for the indigenous inhabitants of the country the arrival of an entirely alien culture represented disaster. Transformed from custodians of their ancestral lands, enjoying a rich material and spiritual culture, to dispossessed ‘savages’, their world was indeed turned upside down.

Many convicts began their servitude during transportation. Convicts entered upon what some call a ‘repressive penal system’ through their incarceration in the hulks while waiting for transportation to occur.[4] The problem with this journey was that ‘no vessel was specially designed and built as a convict ship’.[5] Usually the voyage, during which many convicts died, ‘took eight months, six of them at sea and two in ports for supplies and repairs’.[6] During the voyage of the Second Fleet, ‘26% had died, and 488 were landed sick from scurvy, dysentery, and infectious fever’ and after landing, ‘the total of deaths increased by fifty’.[7] Though this was an extreme example, typically conditions during voyages were poor. Many of the weak died before they reached the penal settlements. John White saw ‘a great number of them lying, some half and others nearly naked, without either a bed or bedding, unable to turn or help themselves’. Often if convicts survived the voyage, ‘coming into contact with fresh air, men fainted and died when being taken on shore to the inadequate hospital’.[8]

The 1828 census claimed that ‘emigrants were so far a small minority...that New South Wales had fewer than 5,000 people who had come voluntarily in a population of 36,598’.[9] However, within twenty years, this situation dramatically changed and the 1851 census showed that there were ‘about 80,000 convicts and former convicts still alive and living in Australia but that they were only about one in five of the white population.’[10] Despite the shift from convict to free settlers, around 400 convicts were sent to Australia each year between 1793 and 1810 and more than a thousand a year by 1815. This increased to some 2,600 a year from 1816 to 1825 and nearly 5,000 a year from 1826 to 1835. [11] During the eighty year operation of this policy between 150,000 and 160,000 convicts were transported; about sixty per cent were English, thirty-four per cent Irish and five per cent Scots. 60,000 were transported to NSW from 1788 to 1840 and briefly in 1847, 75,000 to VDL (1803-1853), 1,750 to Victoria (1844-1849) and 10,000 to Western Australia (1850-1868).[12]

Once the convicts entered Australia, they were assigned one of two types of services depending on the severity of the crime committed and the skills the convicted maintained. If the convict survived the journey, he was retained in either ‘government service’ or ‘assigned as labour to a private land owner’. If convicts were retained in government service, they either entered a ‘labour gang in which a variety of tasks on public works’ were completed or in an ‘iron gang which is forced labour while wearing chains fastened to the ankles and waist’. [13] Government convicts were provided with accommodation by their employers and had to be housed by the government. Accommodations in these camps sometime consisted of ‘small shells on wheels in which twenty men slept’ that could be ‘moved elsewhere when the immediate job was finished’. Both the labour gang and the iron gang were employed in areas known as ‘stockades’, which were ‘surrounded by a high stacked fence’ and usually ‘deep in the bush and guarded’. [14] The public work achieved by these ‘convict gangs’ was substantial. These gangs did more than build roads in the 1840s they ‘carried away the whole of the top of Pinchgut Island in Sydney Harbour and prepared the site on which Fort Denison was subsequently constructed’.[15] Convicts assigned to private land holders held different jobs from those in government service. Many convicts were sent to farms to help landowner cultivate and increase the value of his land. They worked as ‘agricultural labourers, they cleaved land, constructed bridges, made salt, produced bricks and mined coal’. [16] These convicts often learned a trade that could be useful once they were freed. Convicts of farm labour were not necessarily treated better and worked just as hard as the convicts in governmental servitude.

Much of the operational administration of the penal system was in the hands of the guards.[17] Unfortunately, ‘the almost total absence of a properly qualified class of persons to fill the situation of superintendents and overseers of probation gangs’ left the colony with many unqualified guards.[18] They came from a ‘lower class of society, from the slums of the cities’ and often used their position as a way of making money and emigrating to a new society. In many respects, the guards were ‘no better and no worse then the men they guarded’ and were ‘victims among victims’ since their lives were also ones of servitude as guards of the convicted. [19] The convicts lived under almost constant ‘scrutiny’ and often the ‘convicts worked and sweated inside as the guards remained outside’ while watching over the convicts.[20] Exploited, abused and subject to arbitrary injustice, it is hardly surprising that some convicts fought back while others ‘bolted’ swelling the ranks of the bushrangers.

Freedom was usually granted to those who had either good behaviour or completed their sentence. There were two kinds of pardons that a convict could receive. The first pardon was ‘absolute’ meaning the sentence was finished and the convict was free to go. The second was ‘conditional pardon’ meaning ‘conditional on never returning to British Isles’.[21] In Great Expectations, Magwitch was granted conditional freedom and knew that his return to London to see Pip would eventually lead to his death.

I was sentenced for life. It’s death to come back. There’s been over much coming back of late years, and I should certainly be hanged if took.[22]

This created a distinction within the convict community between those still under sentence and those who had been pardoned who could leave the colony and return to Britain and those who had been pardoned and could not. This created a chasm between the freed felon or emancipist and the free settler in the nineteenth century. Then, ‘respectable people worried about the future of a community composed so largely of men and women who belonged in it because they had been caught stealing.’ The idea behind this belief was the morals or lack of morals of the free convict. This is definitely a legitimate concern. Macquarie, the governor of NSW declared in 1821, ‘New South Wales should be made the home and a happy home to every emancipated convict who deserves it’ and that ‘once a man is free, his former state should no longer be remembered’. [23] In fact, the word convict was to be ‘forbidden from general discourse’ as freed convicts did not want to be reminded of their former servitude.[24] According to the 1828 census, freed convicts accounted for nearly half of the free population and Australia was in serious need of free immigrants to settle in Australia. The ‘imperial government decided in 1831 to stop giving land away to settlers, and to sell it at not less the five shillings an acre, and to use the money from land sales for the fares of immigrants’.[25]

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[1] Frost, Alan, The Precarious Life of James Mario Matra: Voyager with Cook, American Loyalist: Servant of Empire, (Miegunyah Press/Melbourne University Press), 1995.

[2] For discussion of the contested reasons behind settlement at Botany Bay, see below pp. 62-69.

[3] Bach, John, (ed.), An Historical Journal, 1787-1792, by John Hunter: An Historical Journal of the Transactions at Port Jackson and Norfolk Island, (Angus and Robertson), 1968, pp. 47-48.

[4] Connah, Graham, The Archaeology of Australia’s History, (Cambridge University Press), 1988, p. 50.

[5] Bateson, Charles, The Convict Ships 1787-1868, (Brown), 1959, p. 68.

[6] Inglis, K.S., The Australian Colonists: An Exploration of Social History 1788–1870, (Melbourne University Press), 1974, p. 6.

[7] O’Brien, Eris, The Foundation of Australia: A Study in English Criminal Practice and Penal Colonisation in the Eighteenth Century, (Sheed and Ward), 1937, rep., (Greenwood Press), 1970, p. 168.

[8] Ibid, O’Brien, Eris, The Foundation of Australia, pp. 168-169.

[9] Ibid, Inglis, K.S., The Australian Colonists, p. 14.

[10] Ibid, Inglis, K.S., The Australian Colonists, p. 15.

[11] Ibid, Inglis, K.S., The Australian Colonists, p. 8.

[12] On convict society, see below, pp. 220-228.

[13] Ibid, Connah, Graham, The Archaeology of Australia’s History, p. 51.

[14] Ibid, Connah, Graham, The Archaeology of Australia’s History, p. 55.

[15] Ibid, Connah, Graham, The Archaeology of Australia’s History, p. 57.

[16] Ibid, Connah, Graham, The Archaeology of Australia’s History, p. 51.

[17] See, Robbins, W.M., ‘The Supervision of Convict Gangs in New South Wales 1788-1830’, Australian Economic History Review, Vol. 44, (1), (2004), pp. 79-100.

[18] Brand, Ian, The Convict Probation System: Van Diemen’s Land 1839-1854, (Blubber Head), 1990, p. 14.

[19] Lagrange, Francis, Flag on Devil’s Island, (Doubleday), 1961, pp. 174-175.

[20] Ibid, Lagrange, Francis, Flag on Devil’s Island, p. 191.

[21] Ibid, Connah, Graham, The Archaeology of Australia’s History, p. 51.

[22] Dickens, Charles, Great Expectations, (T.B. Peterson), 1861, p. 118

[23] Ibid, Inglis, K.S., The Australian Colonists, p. 13.

[24] Ibid, Inglis, K.S., The Australian Colonists, p. 14.

[25] Ibid, Inglis, K.S., The Australian Colonists, p. 16.

Other suppliers of leisure

There was much self-made leisure, whether communal or associational on the one hand or personal and family based on the other.  In its communal or associational forms it was a major means of supply of leisure for the middle-class urban culture, typically in the form of subscription concerts and libraries and of clubs, for example, for chess.  In Bradford in 1900, for example, there were 30 choral societies, 20 brass bands, an amateur orchestra, six concertina bands and a team of hand-bell ringers.  In Rochdale, and elsewhere, the churches and chapels were crucial suppliers of leisure up to 1914 with their young men’s and ladies’ classes, their debating societies and numerous other activities.    Much leisure within the family relied on commercial sources of supply, of games, pianos, books and a huge array of hobbies.  In music and hobbies in particular, there was considerable activity in working-class homes: by 1910 there was one piano for every fifteen people, far more than the middle-classes could absorb. 

Voluntary bodies and philanthropists were key agents in the supply of leisure for others.  They were less single-minded than the state, but as with the latter the supply of leisure fell into two groups, a negative controlling one and a positive supply one.  Into the first group fell organisations such as the Vice Society (1802), the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (1824), the Lord’s Day Observance Society (1831), numerous temperance and teetotal societies and the National Council for Public Morals (1911).  The second group included philanthropists and employers who funded parks, libraries, brass bands and football clubs, the Mechanics’ Institutes, the Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Association, the Girls’ Friendly Society (1874) and the Boys’ Brigade (1883).  What united these two approaches was a concern to direct and mould other people’s leisure by control of some sort over its supply.

The hope of weaning people away from bad habits by the provision of respectable alternatives initially became important during the 1830s.  The solution was ‘rational recreation’, quiet and elevating pursuits, modelled on the best contemporary middle-class practice.  As a result, not only would the bad habits themselves disappear or at least diminish, but in the process people, largely men of good will from different classes would meet fraternally and come to understand each other’s point of view.  The amount of leisure provided was enormous.  Parks, libraries and similar institutions were frequently the outcome of philanthropy.  In Glasgow, for example, where ratepayers on three occasions in the second half of the century refused to fund a public library, Stephen Mitchell, a tobacco magnate, left £70,000 for a library that opened in 1877.  In Manchester, T. C. Horsfall raised the funds for an Art Museum opened in 1884.  Bristol acquired a municipally owned museum, library and art gallery between 1895 and 1905, all through private funding.  Much church and chapel activity was organised from above for people deemed to be in need.  Of these, the most important were the young.  The real problem arose when they left Sunday Schools and it was partly to keep a hold on these children that William Smith established the Boys’ Brigade in Glasgow in 1883.  Thereafter uniformed youth movements, particularly for boys, attracted a high proportion of the youth population.    The Boys’ Brigade had its denominational rivals and from 1908 faced serious competition from the Boy Scouts.  By 1914, between a quarter and a third of the available youth population was enrolled in a youth movement.

Lenton’s Boys’ Brigade, Nottinghamshire, c1900

The provision of leisure probably served females less well than males, doubtless in part because the former were thought to pose less of a problem.  The Girls’ Friendly Society, formed in 1874, was predominantly rural and Anglican in outlook and many of its members were young domestic servants.  Two further organisations came into being to meet their needs as they grew older: the Mothers’ Union founded in 1885 expanded to 7,000 branches by 1911 and the Women’s Institutes begun in 1915.

Finally, leisure was supplied on a commercial basis.  Commercialised entertainment played an increasingly significant role in the supply of leisure between 1830 and 1914.  In 1830, it was provided largely for the middle-classes but diffused itself into the working-classes by the 1870s and to the masses by 1914. There was a shift in the nineteenth century from the patron-client relationship that characterised the employment of professionals in cricket and music in 1800 to an employment relationship more akin to that of the industrial world.  This was in part because of the seasonal nature of much of such employment, but also because of the lack of control over entry to leisure jobs. The numbers employed were growing, certainly after 1870.  Between 1871 and 1911, the population of England and Wales rose on average by 0.8% per year and the number employed in the arts and entertainment by 4.7% per year.  The number of actors and actresses peaked in 1911 at over 19,000, having quadrupled in the previous thirty years.

In nearly every section of the leisure industries there were attempts to raise the status of entertainers.  The outcome was the achievement of stardom for the select few while the rank and file had to be content with wages at roughly semi-skilled level.  The best actors and actresses were already getting £150 per week in the 1830s.  In 1890, at least ten jockeys were earning £5,000 per season and the better professional cricketers were earning £275 per year.  Between 1906 and 1914, the wages of performing musicians doubled reaching £200 per year.  The best professional footballers could not earn high wages: the Football Association set the maximum wages at £208 per year and only a minority got that amount.  On the whole, however, complaints about wages and conditions of service within the entertainment and sports world were muted.  The lure of acceptance as a profession, the hope of stardom for the individual and the sense that to be in entertainment was unlike any other job, for the most part curtailed any open conflict.

The importance of leisure in giving people a sense of national and social identity is matched by a greater significance placed on leisure in people’s individual life-choices and priorities.  Leisure preference is normally assumed to have been a feature of pre-industrial society and could not survive the greater emphasis on consumerism of an industrialised society.  Between 1830 and 1914, as hours of leisure grew longer, leisure activities took on a more central role in people’s lives.  It is not surprising that ‘rational recreationalists’ wanted to ‘control’ what people, and especially the working-classes, did in their spare time.  They were successful, to a degree, in mitigating the worst excesses of pre-industrial leisure with its potential violence and cruelty.  Yet the persistence of large-scale spectating, especially of football and horse-racing showed the limits of that success.  Alcohol and gambling remained key working-class leisure activities and, despite increased controls by the state, continued to play a major part in defining working-class consciousness throughout this period.  Leisure was in 1914, as it had been in 1830, largely male-dominated and escapist.

Leisure and the state

Leisure activities were made available in four main ways and as a result provided employment in leisure.  First, the state, whether at local or national level, both created a legal framework and acted as a direct supplier. In the first half of the nineteenth century, its main concern was to control supply, chiefly by licensing, but later its role was more positive and it became a direct supplier of such facilities as parks, libraries and playing fields.  This interpretation provides little to explain the motives for its intervention in the supply of leisure other than dividing its activities into two separate spheres, negative control and positive supply.  One such motive was prestige that entailed support for both the production of high culture in the present and the preservation of the high culture of the past.  By the 1830s, state aid was necessary to maintain or at least subsidise museums throughout the country and from the 1860s governments drew back from subsidising high culture.  Public funding required more justification than had the royal patronage that dominated support for culture in the first half of the nineteenth century.  The public could not be denied right of access.  In 1810, admission to the British Museum was made free and unlimited with dramatic impact on the number of visitors: in 1824-1825, this stood at 128,000 rising to 230,000 in 1835 and 826,000 by 1846. These figures lead into the second motive that governed state supply of leisure, a concern for public order and social harmony.
It is, however, easy to exaggerate the amount of state supply.  The typical pattern was not for the government of the day to take an initiative, but for a pressure group within Parliament to be appeased by the appointment of a select committee.  The outcome tended to be permissive legislation that local authorities could implement if they wished.  Central government provided a legal framework within which museums or libraries could be built and run out of the rates but it was as concerned to protect ratepayers as to encourage the provision of a facility.  Not surprisingly, buildings were often slow to appear on the ground.  Until 1914, libraries stemmed more from philanthropy than from rates and even at that date were within reach of only 60% of the population.  The same was true of museums and parks.  Local authorities played an increasingly important role and shared the same motives as central government: a concern for prestige, in this case in relation to other local authorities and a worry about social order.    But they added to them a more compelling motive, a desire for prosperity.  Seaside resorts led the way after 1875, investing in sea defences, promenades, piers, golf courses and concert halls in an attempt to improve their attractiveness to potential visitors.
A major element in the state’s supply of leisure was its concern to control and monitor the use of space.  The home, as a private space, was beyond its physical reach.  However, licensing of retail outlets for the sale of alcohol was the state’s major intervention in the leisure market and was intended to preserve public order and provide some means of monitoring the leisure of the poorer sections of society.   Public parks, museums and libraries were supported precisely because they were public, open to scrutiny and controlled by bye-laws.  The space provided by theatre, music hall and cinema was potentially more dangerous, but the power or threat of licensing of both building and activity made them relatively acceptable.    The censorship of both plays and films ensured that public entertainment adhered to acceptable moral and political values.  Fire regulations, for example those imposed on music halls in 1878, not only reduced the dangers of fire, but drove many of the smaller, less salubrious halls out of business.  In the cinema, the industry formally established its own form of censorship in 1912 with the British Board of Film Censors.    In horse-racing, by contrast, the government banned off-course betting in the Street Betting Act of 1906.    It was, however, leisure that took place outside these spaces that posed the threat; streets, rivers, canals and privately owned rural areas were spaces where there was almost constant feuding between the state and the people.

Holidays, pubs and popular culture

The seaside holiday may be a dubious contender for inclusion in urban popular culture for it represented escape from the city.  But the manner of that escape suggests that urban popular culture was transposed to the coast.  The history of the seaside holiday was not something initiated by the middle-classes and imitated by the working-classes.    Escape to the sea by workers preceded the coming of the railway.  The major increase in demand, however, came only in the late- nineteenth century and it was only then that the seaside holiday became a recognisable part of urban popular culture though there were regional variations.  The week at the seaside that many working-class Lancastrians had come to enjoy by the 1880s was unique; elsewhere the day trip was the norm.  The expansion of demand can be seen in the increasing number of visitors to Blackpool in season: it rose from 1 million in 1883 to two million ten years later and to 4 million in 1914.,

Crystal Palace, c1905

Spectating at professional sport was already common by 1850 and to some extent what happened after was a switch from one sport to another.  Rowing ceased to be a major spectator sport and amateur athletics could never claim the crowds of the professional pedestrianism that it replaced.  Football, on the other hand, attracted numbers that rose from the late-nineteenth century to 1914 and beyond.,   The average football cup tie attendance rose from 6,000 in 1888-1889 to 12,000 in 1895-1896 and to over 20,000 in the first round in 1903.  In 1908-1909, in the English First Division 6 million people watched matches, with an average crowd size of 16,000.  It was, of course, dominantly a male pastime and it was regionally concentrated in the Lowlands of Scotland, northern and Midland England and to a lesser extent London.

The pub had close ties to this commercialised aspect of urban popular culture.  It was itself a commercial undertaking, increasingly under the control of the major brewers.  It was the main location of what was by far the largest single item of leisure expenditure, alcohol.  Despite this, the pub also managed to be the main organising centre for the self-generating culture.  Publicans were often sponsors of activities that they viewed simply with an eye to profit and some of the activities were on a large scale.  In addition, the pub offered a space for socialising and clubs of all kinds met in pubs.  The community generated by the pub expressed itself in the annual outing.  Above all, within the pub men could take part in a range of competitive activities: darts, draughts, bowls and card playing and gambling of all kinds. 

Members of Bedale Brass Band, c1900, Bedale Museum

This participant competitiveness was indeed a key feature of urban popular culture and its significance is grossly underplayed in those accounts that focus exclusively on music hall, cinema and spectating generally.  As communications improved many of these competitions became regional and national.  Brass bands, for example, were competitive from their beginnings on a significant scale in the 1840s. 

The urban popular culture focused on the home and the street offered different kinds of satisfaction to a different part of the population.    The dominant masculinity of the world of participant competition had its parallel in an equally dominantly female world.  Most working-class women were confined, for their leisure as for their work, to the home and the street and there is increasing evidence from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries that they created their own separate female culture there.  It remains to be established when such a culture can first be identified and when it began to wither away, but there is enough to suggest that it existed as a key component of the ‘traditional working-class culture’ from 1870 to 1950.  Whether it can be called leisure culture is dubious: it was essentially a female network of support based on the separation of male and female world after marriage.  The distinction between the three dimensions of urban popular leisure culture has value to the extent that it identifies different and mutually exclusive worlds of leisure.  Popular urban leisure was to a considerable degree fractured along lines of gender.

Developing urban popular culture

Urban popular culture in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries developed three important dimensions. First, it was a mass culture that permeated across communities. There were activities that people paid to attend as spectators, audience or readers. This included theatres, circuses and fairs and later in the century, music halls, professional football, horseracing, the popular press, seaside excursions and cinemas. [1] This was a commercial leisure in which the size of crowds with consequent financial returns was important to pay the stars and professionals. Secondly, people generated leisure activities within their own communities. There might be some commercial or voluntary input in providing facilities but activities were of and for the people. The pub played a pivotal role and was the location for much more than the consumption of alcohol. The activities included brass bands, mass choirs, flower shows and the allotments that provided the basis for them, fishing and pigeon fancying. Competitiveness was one of the hallmarks of this type of culture: pub against pub, club against club; stars and professionals were absent; there was little formal separation of performers and spectators; and, the participants were mainly adult males.

London recreations - tea gardens, Cruikshank, George

Finally, for women the focus was not on activities, but on space, in particular the space of the home and the street. Women’s leisure was not seen as leisure but something that accompanied work. In its more social aspect, in the street, its most typical form was chatting, was not distinguished from other forms of talk and was a culture heavily based on a sense of neighbourhood.

After 1830, a print culture developed that complemented and eventually superseded the existing oral popular culture. Events were advertised in print and news was conveyed in print. The expanding newspaper press of the eighteenth century had reached a largely middle-class audience primarily because of cost, but during the first half of the nineteenth century, a new literate popular culture emerged grounded in the radical and often ‘unstamped’ press and in the growth of melodramatic ‘penny dreadfuls’. It is difficult to establish an accurate profile of the readership of this expanding quantity of print by age, gender and class. Men, until after 1870, had a higher rate of literacy than women and they may have had easier access to literature. They were probably the main readers of the popular Sunday newspapers that by 1850 were read by one adult in twenty; for Sunday was much more a day of leisure for men than women. [2] Sporting literature was a genre of popular literature, and with its emphasis on ‘manly’ sports, also reached a dominantly male audience. Similarly, participation in and spectating of commercialised sports was largely, though not exclusively, male. Horseracing was immensely popular despite attempts to control its spread by law.

After 1850, figures for attendance become more reliable and their general trend is upwards. Music hall was the first new form of entertainment to make its mark. [3] Charles Morton’s opening of the Canterbury Hall in Lambeth in 1851 was to gain him immediate and retrospective attention, but there were important precedents in the saloon theatres that had flourished since the 1830s and in the ‘music halls’ that already existed in the larger provincial towns.

Weston’s Music Hall, c1880

What is striking about the 1850s and 1860s was the multiplicity of forms in which people could experience what was eventually to become standardised as ‘music hall’. The focus on songs has distracted attention from the range of entertainment on offer in the halls; dance, acrobatics, mime drama and clowning as well as the occasional associated facility a museum, art gallery or zoo, were part of the ‘variety’ of the halls from the beginning. The emergence of music halls that were architecturally similar to theatres came relatively late during the second great wave of music hall building in the late 1880s and 1890s when chains of ownership were becoming common. It was in the 1890s, too, that there was a partially successful attempt to win middle-class audiences. Cinema can be seen as superseding music hall as the most popular form of mass entertainment, but there was a long period of overlap. Music hall was indeed the commercial cinema’s first home. From 1906, onwards, however, cinemas acquired their own homes, some 4,000 of them by 1914. [4] Until 1934 we can only guess at the number of admissions but an average of 7 or 8 million a week seems plausible in the years immediately before 1914 or 400 million admissions a year.

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[1] See, Russell, Dave, ‘Popular entertainment, 1776-1895’, in ibid, Donohue, Joseph, (ed.), The Cambridge history of British theatre: Vol. 2, 1660 to 1895, pp. 369-387.

[2] See, Kamper, D. S., ‘Popular Sunday newspapers, respectability and working-class culture in late Victorian Britain’, in Huggins, Mike, and Mangan, James Anthony, (eds.), Disreputable pleasures: less virtuous Victorians at play, (Cass), 2004, pp. 83-102, and ‘Popular Sunday newspapers, class, and the struggle for respectability in late Victorian Britain’, Hewitt, Martin, (ed.), Unrespectable recreations, (Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies), 2001, pp. 81-94.

[3] On music generally, see, Russell, Dave, Popular Music in England 1840-1914: A Social History, (Manchester University Press), 1987, 2^nd ed., 1997. Bratton, J. S., (ed.), Music hall: performance and style, (Open University Press), 1986, Till, Nicholas, ‘“First-Class Evening Entertainments”: Spectacle and Social Control in a Mid-Victorian Music Hall’, New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 20, (2004), pp. 3-18, Scott, Derek B., ‘Music and social class in Victorian London’, Urban History, Vol. 29, (2002), pp. 60-73, and Kift, Dagmar, The Victorian music hall: culture, class and conflict, (Cambridge University Press), 1996.

[4] Much of the research on early cinema is in the form of studies of particular localities or entrepreneurs but see, Hiley, Nicholas, ‘“Nothing more than a ‘craze’”: cinema building in Britain from 1909 to 1914’, in Higson, Andrew, (ed.), Young and innocent? The cinema in Britain, 1896-1930, (University of Exeter Press), 2002, pp. 111-127, and McKernan, Luke, ‘A fury for seeing: Cinema, audience and leisure in London in 1913’, Early Popular Visual Culture, Vol. 6, (2008), pp. 271-280.

Artisan leisure culture

Artisan leisure culture was based on a particular type of work and its rise and decline paralleled that of the artisans. In the first half of the nineteenth century it flourished, but as the artisans themselves became more absorbed into the structure of capitalist industry they began to lose the characteristic feature of their culture: independence. Independence in the workplace was paralleled in the leisure culture where it took the form of a rejection of any patronage from above. Artisans made their own goods and also made their own culture. If the workplace was one factor leading to independence, masculinity and age were others; this was a leisure culture of adult males. Women were admitted rarely and then only on sufferance and the young apprentices, who had once had a culture of their own, were now firmly subordinated. In Birmingham, artisans formed debating societies and clubs and attended the theatre. [1] The friendly societies and the trade union both had their strongest roots among the artisans, and they were instinctively radical in their politics. But it was not an expansive culture and had no missionary zeal to spread its way of life more widely. By 1850, the heavy drinking artisan culture became isolated to certain trades and regions. A more respectable, even family-based, culture began to replace it. In perception the artisan was now becoming the ‘labour aristocrat’, a respectable, hard-working member of society who took his pleasures seriously. In Edinburgh, the clubs that artisans joined for horticulture, golf and bowling and their participation in the patriotic Volunteer Force, suggested a new conformity to the values and norms of middle-classes. These clubs, however, retained their own independence. Insofar as artisan culture became more respectable, it was a respectability generated from within the class and for the class, not one imposed from outside. [2]

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[1] See Money, J., Experience and Identity: Birmingham and the West Midlands 1760-1800, (Manchester University Press), 1977, pp. 80-120, Tholfsen, T. R., ‘The artisan and the culture of early Victorian Birmingham’, University of Birmingham Historical Journal, Vol. 4, (1954), pp. 146-166.

[2] Beaven, Brad, Leisure, Citizenship and Working-class Men in Britain, 1850-1945, (Manchester University Press), 2005, pp. 16-124.

Middle-class urban culture?

By contrast, urban middle-class culture, in its origins, was distinctively provincial. Until 1800, it was a culture that was more obviously urban than middle-class, expressing many of the values of the urban gentry, who themselves, may be considered as part of the leisure class and its aristocratic way of life. It was inherently social rather than intellectual. Its existence can be documented from figures of theatre building: only ten purpose-built theatres were erected in the larger provincial towns between 1736 and 1760 but more than a hundred were built between the 1760s and the 1840s. [1] The music festivals in the provinces are another indicator. In London it was not until the 1830s that the patronage and market for classical music passed from the aristocracy to the upper middle-classes; the provinces can be said to have led the way. [2] The new culture was visible too in the classical style of its architecture and in the design of squares and boulevards that were emphatically the territory of the aristocracy. For this culture was unashamedly exclusive.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, the intellectual dimension of this urban culture became more pronounced. So also did its masculinity. [3] Like-minded men turned typically to the club or society as a forum within which they pursued their interests. If this culture is projected forward into the second quarter of the nineteenth century, its leaders can be seen turning away from a provincial pursuit of high culture towards a direct concern with the social and political problems of their own towns: they formed statistical societies and diffused useful knowledge. They became a culture anxious to influence the ways of life of the working-classes from their narrow but powerful middle-class bridgehead and were increasingly concerned with the supply of leisure to others than with the enjoyment of it themselves.

The emergence of this male, intellectual, socially concerned and distinctly middle-class urban culture marked part of the wider challenge to the lack of seriousness and the frivolity of the urban gentry. The interlocking impact of evangelicalism, the French Revolution and British radicalism posed a threat to the essence of eighteenth century urban culture: its urbanity, its stress on manners and behaviour as opposed to feeling. The shock waves were to be felt far into the nineteenth century in two particular forms. First, particular activities, theatre-going for example, or novel reading or cards or even cricket, now had to be scrutinised to see if they served any purpose that God, rather than Society, would approve. Many such activities ceased to be ‘respectable’. Secondly, the sociability that had been so highly prized in the eighteenth century ceased to be a virtue. The attraction of a life lived in public within a defined and exclusive society gave way to an emphasis on domesticity. The effect, undoubtedly, was to shift the emphasis of middle-class urban culture away from sociability towards domesticity, and away from frank enjoyment of leisure towards a more calculating performance of duty, towards a ‘rational’ view of recreation.

This ‘call to seriousness’ began to be relaxed after the middle of the nineteenth century. In the 1860s and 1870s the press and pulpit endlessly discussed the legitimacy of this or that activity and of leisure in general. The official view was that the purpose of leisure was to re-create a person for the more serious business of life, work. Recreation was only necessary for those who worked and was justified not for its own sake but for its ulterior purpose of re-creating men for work. Under this umbrella, however, more and more activities became legitimate and were doubtless enjoyed for their own sake. It was in physical activity, however, that the change was greatest. Sport conjured up images of an aristocratic style of life and gambling, or the corrupt seediness of pub-based prize fighting. Middle-class urban culture, especially the public schools, was able from 1850 to transform the nature and image of sport. Sport encouraged qualities of leadership; it took boys’ minds off sex was the best training for war. [4] As rules were drawn up and enforced, sport became increasingly an analogy for middle-class male life: a competitive struggle within agreed parameters. The middle-classes not only imposed a new ideology on sport; they were also in the period up to 1914 the chief beneficiaries of the expansion of facilities. There can be little dissent from the view that up to 1914:

...the sporting revolution belonged, in the main, to the middle-classes in their leafy suburbs. [5]

Middle-class urban leisure culture, then, was a shifting entity. An eighteenth century urban pursuit of pleasure turned in the nineteenth century to an anxious scrutiny of the legitimacy of particular pursuits and to a corresponding emphasis on domesticity rather than sociability. Gradually there was a relaxation, but it occurred within the safe boundaries of school and suburb. Indeed the most obvious and continuing thrust of the culture was towards social exclusivity. Within the wide middle-class boundary, lines to demarcate status were carefully drawn and upper and lower middle-classes would never meet in leisure. What they had in common was an attitude to leisure and a view of its social function: in leisure people could meet others of similar social status in environments, whether public or private, that were in accordance with the canons of respectability of the day.

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[1] See, Garlick, Görel, ‘Theatre outside London’, and Schoch, Richard W., ‘Theatre and mid-Victorian society’, in Donohue, Joseph, (ed.), The Cambridge history of British theatre: Vol. 2, 1660 to 1895, (Cambridge University Press), 2004, pp. 165-182, 331-351.

[2] Dale, Catherine, ‘The Provincial Musical Festival in Nineteenth-century England: A Case Study of Bridlington’, in Cowgill, Rachel, and Holman, Peter, (eds.), Music in the British provinces, 1690-1914, (Ashgate), 2007), pp. 325-348, and Sprittles, Joseph, ‘Leeds musical festivals’, The Thoresby Miscellany, Vol. 13, (Thoresby Society), 1959-63, pp. 200-270, provide good case studies.

[3] Danahay, Martin A., Gender at work in Victorian culture: literature, art and masculinity, (Ashgate), 2005.

[4] Lowerson, John, Sport and the English middle classes, 1870-1914, (Manchester University Press), 1993, Huggins, Mike, ‘Second-class citizens? English middle-class culture and sport, 1850-1910: a reconsideration’, International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 17, (2000), pp. 1-35, and Lowerson, John, ‘Sport and British Middle-Class Culture: Some Issues of Representation and Identity before 1940’, International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 21, (2004), pp. 34-49.

[5] Meller, H. E., Leisure and the Changing City 1870-1914, (Routledge), 1976, p. 236.

A leisured class?

How did people spend their leisure time? Leisure time can be seen as free time, time in which the individual is relieved from the pressures of work and other obligations, the choice of how to spend leisure time can be seen as distinctly personal. However, some would argue that to some extent it is not a personal choice and so is not in any positive sense leisure, but merely adherence to social custom or obligation. Choice is constrained by material circumstances and by the availability of facilities, but within those constraints on this argument, there is nothing to stop the chimney sweep fox-hunting or the peer attending the music hall. It is the beauty of leisure that it enabled individuals to escape from the pressures that otherwise circumscribed their lives.

This idealist approach to the study of leisure may recommend itself to philosophers, but to historians it has rarely seemed to accord with reality. Many have suggested that the key analytical tool for the study of leisure is the distinction between the rough and respectable. The implication of this distinction is that the respectable of all classes had more in common with each other than they did with the rough members of their own class. This distinction is, as we have already seen, is a simplistic one and may beg more questions than it answers. With some activities, of course, there is no difficulty but with many other activities, going to the theatre for example, there may be some disagreement about whether it is rough or respectable. The rough/respectable division is in fact an extraordinarily crude tool for the description of social reality; the fact that contemporaries made the distinction is, of course, of interest, but in adopting it themselves historians have confused the history of moral fears with the history of lived experience.

Gustave Dore, The Epsom Derby- Arrival of the Well-to-Do

The latter can best be approached through a culturalist analysis. Leisure activities did not float freely above the world of work and daily life; on the contrary, they were intimately related to and derived from that world. Boundaries of class, of gender, of age and of geography were therefore likely to be reproduced in leisure. Leisure activities may themselves have reinforced or shifted those boundaries and not merely passively reflected them. The issue, therefore, is not one of leisure per se but of different leisure cultures that were not hermetically sealed against each other but overlapped and influenced each other. Nor were any of these cultures ever static; they were constantly changing, both in themselves and in relation to other cultures.

The phrase ‘the leisured or leisure classes’ can be traced back to the 1840s and may well have existed earlier. In 1868, Anthony Trollope was confident that England possessed:

...the largest and wealthiest leisure class that any country, ancient or modern, ever boasted. [1]

At the end of the century Thorstein Veblen subjected them to the most trenchant analysis they would ever received in his 1899 The Theory of the Leisure Class.[2] He argued:

The fundamental reason for the development of a leisure class was that only in conspicuous leisure and in conspicuous consumption could the wealthy achieve the status they sought. [3]

The critical word here is ‘conspicuous’. Leisure for the leisure class was not something carried on in private; its function, to establish status, demanded that it be seen both by fellow members of the class and by an envious or admiring excluded public. Since the function of that display was so fundamental to its social position, it is difficult to determine whether there was any separation of work and leisure within the class. Since by definition, though with some qualifications that will come later, they did not work in any sense in which the rest of the population would understand work, it followed that their duties and obligations in life lay in a highly ritualised leisure whose demands they often bemoaned.

The leisure class existed at the level of the nation and of the provinces. At the national level it could be most readily observed in the London Season and until the 1880s, this was as much a political as a social occasion. In the circumscribed political world of the nineteenth century the numbers involved were relatively small, perhaps 500 families compared to the 4,000 families who participated in the more purely social London Season of the late nineteenth century. Until then entry to London ‘Society’ was carefully guarded and its social functions were mostly private. Thereafter, it became easier to but one’s way into ‘Society’. [4] This reflected a change in the nature of the leisure class. It became less easy to identify a class whose members manifestly did not work; by contrast, public attention began to focus on the plutocracy whose male members worked, but so successfully that they could spend their fortunes in their leisure. The London Season formed one clearly demarcated phase in the annual life of the leisure class; the remainder of the year was centred on the country houses in a mixture of activities some of which were thoroughly exclusive while others entailed a carefully calculated patronage of more popular occasions. [5] Shooting was the most exclusive of sports while foxhunting was, in ideology at least, open to peer and peasant. In the late nineteenth century, as in London Society, the plutocracy began to supplant the aristocracy as its leaders.

From the mid-eighteenth century the London Season had its provincial counterparts. There existed in the larger provincial towns, perhaps particularly in southern England the ‘urban gentry’ who in a modest way provided the lower echelons of the leisure class. After 1830, such people living on income from capital tended to gravitate towards the spas and more select seaside resorts. They were disproportionately female and old. In contrast to the national leisure class, there was neither firm structure to their year nor any flamboyance in their leisure. They maintained their status by careful observance of the formalities that helped to distinguish them from those who had to work for a living. In the later nineteenth century a new category, the retired, began to fuse with this older, modest, provincial leisure class, to form a substantial proportion of the population of the southern and coastal towns in which they congregated.

Such people had little in common with the national leisure class, and it may be questioned whether they should be included within the leisure class at all. It was luxury and its overt enjoyment, not modest affluence, which characterised the leisure class in its higher reaches. One mark of that luxury was the role accorded to women. Within the leisure class it was always legitimate for a man to have certain duties that were scarcely distinguishable from work, like running an estate. Indeed by 1870, it became possible for them to be more obviously part of the world of work and most obviously in the City of London. Women, however, apart from duties as hostesses, had to be kept rigidly separate from any money-making activity. Other social classes might emulate or aspire to the luxury of the leisure class. Even as far down the social ladder as the upper working-class, it was a mark of status that a woman should have no employment; clearly, however, such women did not fall within the leisure class. What could not be prevented was the copying of the manners and dress of the leisure class by those without the means to sustain the life-style.

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[1] Trollope, A., (ed.), British Sports and Pastimes, (Virtue & Co.), 1868, p. 18.

[2] Tilman, Rick, Thorstein Veblen and His Critics, 1891-1963: Conservative, Liberal, and Radical Perspectives, (Princeton University Press), 1992, is a good critique of Veblen’s ideas.

[3] Cunningham, H., ‘Leisure and culture’, in ibid, Thompson, F. M. L., (ed.), The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950, Vol. 2, p. 290.

[4] On this see Pullar, Philippa, Gilded Butterflies: The Rise and Fall of the London Season, (Hamish Hamilton), 1978, and Davidoff, L., The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season, (Taylor & Francis), 1973.

[5] Mandler, Peter, The fall and rise of the stately home, (Yale University Press), 1997, Sykes, Christopher Simon, The big house: the story of a country house and its family, (HarperCollins), 2004, Gardiner, Juliet, The Edwardian country house, (Channel 4 Books), 2002, and Wilson, Richard, and Mackley, Alan, Creating paradise: the building of the English country house 1660-1880, (Hambledon), 2000.

Reforming or re-forming leisure?

There was a strong impression among some contemporaries that the attempt to abolish certain pastimes had done more harm than good because it had resulted in the working-classes being left with very few outlets for leisure, other than those of a debased kind. Drunkenness, violence and fornication, it was claimed, were on the increase. This alarm that moral standards were declining combined with the fear that the social stability of the country was being undermined. The MP, Robert Slaney, argued that it was the duty of those governing the working-classes to provide suitable alternative recreations for those people who otherwise ‘will fly to demagogues and dangerous causes.’ [1] By the 1830s, there was a growing sense among reforming and Evangelical groups that, though the working-classes seemed to have an inbuilt disposition towards spending any free time they had in sexual excesses, gambling and drinking. The middle and upper-classes were not entirely free from blame or responsibility for this situation.

There were several reasons for this feeling of guilt. Urbanisation and enclosures, it was argued, had resulted in a loss of public open spaces and footpaths and hence restricted the scope of working-class leisure time activities. As a result they were driven from comparatively healthy outdoor pastimes towards the numerous temptations offered by drinking houses. It was not until the opening of the Birkenhead and Manchester parks in the 1840s that serious consideration was given to setting up places of amusement within the parks themselves for the playing of games and sports. [2] It was not until the 1850s and 1860s and in some places the 1870s, that municipal parks were established in most provincial towns and cities. Nearly all the places of cultural improvement from which the working-classes could benefit -- art galleries, botanical gardens, libraries and museums -- were denied to them, either because they could not afford the subscriptions or entrance fees or because they were, if not positively excluded, at least not welcomed. Both the Museums Act of 1845 and the Public Libraries Act of 1850 [3] gave local authorities permission to build museums and libraries out of public funds. By 1860, however, only 28 library authorities had been set up. The lower classes had been influenced and harmed by the lax manners and moral of their social superiors. It was the duty of the rich, Hannah More and others argued, to set a wholesome example to the poorer classes through their own behaviour and this was not being done.

The early Victorians were genuinely concerned and bewildered about how leisure time should be used. For one thing leisure was often associated with idleness, so while it was recognised that spare time could bring benefits it was also acknowledged that it had its dangers. In a society where the gospel of work was so deeply ingrained and its virtues so vigorously extolled, it was perhaps inevitable that leisure time should be regarded with suspicion. Leisure requires time. Though there are problems in trying to assess working hours historians agree that there was an extension of hours in the early nineteenth century. [4] Factories imposed a twelve or thirteen hour day as opposed to the ten-hour norm of pre-industrial society. The factory movement may be seen as sanctioned and motivated by a desire to return to the norm, an achievement symbolically if not actually achieved in the Ten Hours Act of 1847.

Coalminers, whose hours in the eighteenth century were relatively short, six to eight hours a day, were by 1842 nearly all working a twelve hour day with only short breaks for refreshment. Agricultural workers too suffered an increase in hours in the 1830s. In mining, agriculture, domestic service and the ‘dishonourable’ sections of the artisan trades and in all domestic work, the eighteenth century norm had been breached and hours were longer.

After 1850, the campaign for the nine-hour day started in the building trade, but success was limited until the economic boom of the early 1870s when most organised trades were able to breakthrough to a 54 hour week and by and large were able to maintain than position in the subsequent depression. The campaign for the eight-hour day was even longer in gestation than that for the nine-hour day. Despite all the pressure mounted in the 1890s and beyond, reduction in hours was insignificant on a national scale until 1919 and 1920 when seven million workers obtained reductions. Collective bargaining was unquestionably the chief means by which hours of work were reduced. Parliamentary action was of marginal importance by comparison. In the nineteenth century, it was never used overtly to control the hours of adult males. The key breakthroughs were achieved without parliamentary aid and acts, such as those in 1874 (reducing the hours of factory textile workers to 56 and a half), 1902 (a further reduction of one hour a week for factory workers) and 1909 (restricting underground work in the coalmines to eight hours), had only a marginal effects on the overall national statistics. [5]

If some regularity had been introduced to the working week by 1900, can the same be said for the working year? There had been a sharp decline in the number of holidays that were recognised and observed since the seventeenth century. They continued to be observed, with some regional variation, around Christmas or New Year, at Easter and Whitsuntide, at the local fair, feast or wake, and to some extent on such national days as the 5 November and Shrove Tuesday. They were not yet holidays with pay but their existence established a precedent that others later could follow. It was in the areas where holidays were measured by the day that the Bank Holidays Acts of 1871 and 1875 were of most significance. [6] They were not the first legislative recognition of holidays, which was included in the Factory Act 1833 but they were the first in which the state’s intervention was widely recognised and applauded. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries employers increasing conceded holidays to their workforce. Brunner Mond, Lever Bros., the Gas Light and Coke Company, the London and North-Western Railway Company and the Royal Dockyards had done so by the 1890s. In 1897, the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants negotiated one-week’s paid holiday after five years service. Other unionised workers, in coal and iron, for example, were putting forward similar claims before 1914.

The hours of work for the working-classes are relatively easy to establish in comparison to those of the middle-classes. There are no national statistics and only the most scattered and perhaps unrepresentative data. Three trends may be distinguished. First, within the professions and the civil service hours were relatively short and imprecise until late in the nineteenth century, perhaps six hours a day. In the private sector, clerks worked rather longer hours, generally 40 hours per week in five days. Secondly, among businessmen, the days of long hours occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century and by 1900 they too began to internalise the 9 to 5 norm. Finally, at the lower end of the middle-classes, amongst shopworkers, hours were notoriously long and remained so. After over fifty years of effort to curtail hours, a House of Lords Select Committee in 1901 could only confirm that many shops were working 80 or 90 hours a week. Pressure from the Shop-Assistants Twelve Hours’ Labour League, founded in 1881, and from the Early Closing Association did result in some improvement but the shift towards a legislative solution was only very partially successful. The 1911 Act did, however, enact a half-day holiday. As far as annual holidays were concerned the middle-class workers undoubtedly had the advantage and in 1875 the Civil Service Inquiry Commission indicated that clerks working for insurance companies, solicitors, banks, railway companies and the civil service were at getting at least two week’s holiday a year. They had achieved this some seventy-five years before the bulk of manual workers.

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[1] See, Richards, Paul, ‘R. A. Slaney, the industrial town, and early Victorian social policy’, Social History, Vol. 4, (1979), pp. 85-101.

[2] See, for example, Elliott, Paul, ‘The Derby Arboretum (1840): the first specially designed municipal public park in Britain’, Midland History, Vol. 26, (2001), pp. 144-176, Taylor, A., ‘‘Commons-stealers, land-grabbers and jerry-builders’: space, popular radicalism and the politics of public access in London, 1848-80’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 40, (1995), pp. 383-407, and MacGill, Lynn, ‘The emergence of public parks in Keighley, West Yorkshire, 1887-93: leisure, pleasure or reform?’, Garden History, Vol. 35, (2007), pp. 146-159.

[3] On libraries, see, Hewitt, Martin, ‘Extending the public library 1850–1930’, in Black, Alistair, and Hoare, Peter, (eds.), The Cambridge history of libraries in Britain and Ireland: Vol. 3: 1850-2000, (Cambridge University Press), 2006, pp. 72-81, Peatling, Gary K., ‘Public libraries and national identity in Britain, 1850-1919’, Library History, Vol. 20, (2004), pp. 33-47, Johnman, W. A. P., and Kendall, H., ‘A Commission Appointed to Inquire into the Condition and Workings of Free Libraries of Various Towns in England (1869)’, Library History, Vol. 17, (2001), pp. 223-238, Fletcher, J., ‘Public libraries, legislation and educational provision in nineteenth-century England’, Journal of Educational Administration & History, Vol. 28, (1996), pp. 97-113, and Sturges, Paul, ‘The public library and its readers 1850-1900’, Library History, Vol. 12, (1996), pp. 183-200.

[4] Hopkins, E., ‘Working hours and the conditions during the Industrial Revolution: a re-appraisal’, Economic History Review, 2^nd ser., Vol. 35, (1982), pp. 52-66.

[5] Johnson, Paul A., and Zaidi, Asghar, ‘Work over the life course’, in ibid, Crafts, Nicholas F. R., Gazeley, Ian, and Newell, Andrew, (eds.), Work and pay in twentieth-century Britain, pp. 98-116.

[6] See, Smart, Eynon, ‘Bank holidays...and much else’, History Today, Vol. 21, (12), (1971), pp. 870-876.

Oxford Bibliographies: Chartism

The excellent Oxford Bibliographies offers exclusive and authoritative research guides on subscription including Atlantic History, Medieval Studies and Military History.  Each subject area contains a series of articles that are regularly updated.  Included in the material on Victorian Literature is a section on Chartism.  The extracts below may be of interest.
‘Chartism has been fortunate in attracting enthusiastic professional and amateur historians with a desire to make their knowledge accessible via the Internet: there are several superb resources run by individuals. Richard Brown’s Looking at History and Stephen Roberts’s Chartism and the Chartists offer individual takes by leading historians on Chartism and include significant commentary on recent events and publications on their respective sites. Mark Crail’s Chartist Ancestors is a major online source containing a wealth of historical information. Ian Petticrew’s Minor Victorian Poets and Authors, originating as a site on Gerald Massey, is the web’s most significant open-access resource on working-class poetry and literary criticism of the period...’
‘Brown, Richard. Looking at History  The author of this useful blog on his historical interests has written a highly regarded A-level textbook on Chartism and a 2010 study of the Newport rising in conjunction with Australian and Canadian uprisings. All his posts on Chartism, which include book reviews and scholarly essays and reflections on various aspects of the movement, may be found here. A 2007 essay on Chartist historiography partly updates the published work of Taylor (Taylor 1996) and Messner (Messner 1999), both cited under Historical Studies. Highly recommended.’