The 1820s
Despite the defeat of 1819, Place’s reputation as an organizer and a repository of information on social issues grew. His political influence, his practical experience of business, and his wide reading gave him a new status among the theorists. In 1808 he had met and befriended Jeremy Bentham and through him encountered James Mill, who in turn introduced him to the economist David Ricardo. In 1810 Place befriended his old mentor Godwin, now a chronically insolvent figure, who seems to have expected him to contribute regularly to his maintenance. Place had a horror of debt and the two men disagreed. Already attracted to the doctrines of Bentham and Mill, because they seemed to offer a firm theoretical foundation for popular education and a safe principle for the extension of the franchise, Place began to shed the utopian radicalism he had absorbed in the 1790s. A visit to Bentham at Ford Abbey in 1817 confirmed his membership of the utilitarian circle. Place accepted Bentham’s jurisprudence, Malthus’s principle of population, and Ricardo’s doctrine of the wages fund, but when Godwin published a defence of his position against Malthus in 1820, he wrote a lengthy reply called Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population (1822). In this Place criticised Malthus for his ignorance of the conditions in which the poor lived and Godwin for giving up all hope for their improvement. If Godwin was too despondent, Malthus was too naïve to suppose that working men would be persuaded to avoid hardship by marrying later in life. Place himself thought that the poor could be persuaded to avoid the burden of large families only if they were encouraged to use contraception, and his frank propaganda for this lost him many friends.
Place tried to stay loyal to his artisan origins, and he never wavered in his dislike of aristocratic society, but his new allegiances affected, and in some ways compromised, his claim to speak for the poor. He was abused by leaders of popular radicalism: Cobbett disliked him as a utilitarian and a Malthusian. He retaliated by calling Cobbett ‘an unprincipled cowardly bully’, and by using all his influence to keep him out of the representation of Westminster. He also distrusted the radical agitator Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt. He thought such men owed their popularity to their readiness to deceive simple people into believing in easy solutions to complex social problems. After some disillusioning experiences with the educational schemes of Joseph Lancaster, who disagreed with him over his ‘infidel’ opinions (Baker, 377), Place was inclined to follow the utilitarian policy of James Mill, who, by conveying the main texts of his political creed in simple, accessible treatises, sought to form a new democratic public of candid, self-reliant, and rational individuals who would teach by their example. But utilitarian theories never commanded a wide popular following. Meek converts such as Rowland Detrosier could prove ineffectual; but able and original ones such as Thomas Hodgskin might turn heretic.
More effective than such proselytism was the policy of lobbying sympathetic people in power on insulated issues. Here Place’s mastery of detail was more effective than his grasp of theory. His greatest success came in 1824, when he helped the radical MP Joseph Hume first to effect the repeal of the combination laws, and then to stave off the threat of their reintroduction by the government the following year. His motive was not to make trade unions a part of the social fabric; he thought they were brought into being in response to employers’ combining to lower wages, and that they would wither away when the legislation against them had been repealed. Working men, once convinced that they could control their own numbers, would not need any other contrivance for raising wages. Place was not, as later historians claimed, pioneering a new form of objective parliamentary investigation. Managing committees and priming witnesses were devices his opponents could use against him, as he discovered in his efforts against the evangelically inspired select committee on drunkenness in 1834. What he most disliked were restrictions on the power of the working man to make his own choices. In union organisation as in the temperance movement, he thought well-meaning interference worse than the faults it sought to cure.
From 1830
Place’s commitment to free contract and self-help made him a staunch defender of capital honestly earned. What made him radical was his hatred of what he regarded as the unearned wealth of the landed classes. But when the Whigs came to power in 1830 he supported all their reforms. The first Reform Bill surprised him by its thoroughness, and though he deplored the fact that the £10 household franchise deprived many Westminster electors of their votes, he approved the bill as a whole. When in October 1831, the Lords rejected it, he helped form the moderate National Political Union to support ministers and to counter the more extremist National Union of the Working Classes, which met at the Rotunda in Blackfriars Bridge Road. His aim was to prevent the middle classes from deserting their poorer allies in alarm at threats to property and order. In the ‘days of May’ in 1832, when Grey’s resignation raised the prospect of a Wellington ministry, Place claimed that his placard urging a run on the banks (‘To Stop the Duke, Go for Gold’) had deterred the duke and reinstated Grey. Place said that the Reform Act, when finally passed, was valuable as a start of the destruction of ‘the old rotten system’ of representation, and at first he wrote as if further reforms leading to a republic were a mere matter of time, given a strong popular demand. He supported the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the reform of municipal corporations in 1835, and collaborated with Joseph Parkes over the framing of the latter. But he was not prepared for the rapid disintegration of the reforming majority in parliament, and he could not understand why his friends there became more and more reluctant to propose further radical measures or support a government which declared the Reform Act a final measure. By then his own reputation as a radical was also compromised. After 1836, the popular radicalism he had wanted to revive developed ideas of which he disapproved. In 1838, he helped draft the Peoples’ Charter in a gathering of the London Working Men’s Association. But the Chartist movement was soon captured by currency reformers, Owenite socialists, and advocates of ‘physical force’. Its political aims were discredited by the violence of its meetings, and Place became disillusioned. He opposed factory reform and supported the Anti-Corn Law League without apparently realizing that these attitudes associated him with the enemies of the working man. Despairing of influencing events, he turned more to arranging his recollections and accumulating the records with which he hoped to write a social history of his time.
Place’s private life had meanwhile undergone a change which he ironically called ‘my own revolution’. On 19th October 1827, Elizabeth Place had died, to his great grief. In February 1830, he married Louisa Chatterley, an actress twenty-six years his junior. Her first husband had died of drink, and her second partner had been transported. To a man of Place’s antecedents these were not objections, but his son called the marriage ‘a terrible falling off from his former rigidly virtuous life’. It is not clear if she was the cause of his financial losses which he suffered in 1833 and which led him to leave Charing Cross and settle at Brompton. By the move he ceased to enjoy the close contacts he had had with politicians and reformers in the library above his shop. He also lost status. He would have liked to be offered a post on one of the many commissions instituted by the Grey government, but was passed over. This vindicated his bitter criticisms of the system, but it meant that he had never any direct experience of the responsibilities of government, and remained a critic on the margin. Readers of Place’s voluminous papers, now one of the chief nineteenth-century collections in the British Library, cannot be surprised at this. Place’s doctrinaire outlook, together with the dogmatism of the autodidact, made him a difficult colleague in any public business. He tended to decide in advance what course should be followed and to attribute all subsequent difficulties to the fact that his advice had not been taken. His papers are full of bullying interviews with humble men, brutally candid appraisals of the shortcomings of colleagues, and hectoring letters of advice to MPs and officials. James Mill once tried to cure him of his habit of ‘raving’ and it may be that in later life Place indulged this habit in the long drafts of letters which, if sent at all, could only have caused offence. His advice to the Chartist Henry Vincent when he announced his intention of standing as a candidate for Banbury is characteristic: ‘Become a man of business for the next ten years. You may perhaps at the end of that time be in a condition to do some public service. You will be quite in time for enacting the Charter, or for doing any other great national good.’
The obverse of this dogmatism was an impulse to collect evidence, at first probably to illustrate his own rectitude, but later to document the larger movements of his time. From 1898, when Graham Wallas published the first biography, until our own day, the Place papers, including his autobiography, have provided one of the richest sources for the history of radical reforming movements in the period covered by his life, from the LCS to the Chartists. In 1844 Place suffered a stroke which left him partially disabled. In 1851 he separated from his second wife, and went to live with his daughter Annie. He died in her house in Hammersmith on 1st January 1854. The editor of The Times, J. T. Delane, told Joseph Parkes on 4th January that he would be glad to publish his memoir of Place, ‘but can’t you get him into one column? A column used to be enough for a hero; it ought to suffice for a tailor—even a Radical tailor’.
Friday 31 August 2007
Chartist Lives: Francis Place 1
Place[1] was born on 3rd November 1771, the illegitimate son of Simon Place and Mary Gray.
Background and early life
Simon Place was by trade a baker who had become the keeper of a ‘sponging house’, or debtors’ prison, in Vinegar Yard, near Drury Lane Theatre in London, where Francis was born. Such places were made illegal in 1779 and he became an innkeeper. He was a violent, erratic man of strong character. Francis had some schooling from 1775 to 1785, the last two years in a school kept by a Mr Bowis, whom he remembered for his kindness and learning. In 1785, Simon Place impulsively apprenticed his son to a breeches-maker called France, in Bell Yard, Temple Bar, a man whose three daughters lived on immoral earnings and who was himself to die in a workhouse.
Place’s upbringing had been rough, and much of his education had been in the streets, but he was literate and he soon showed more business acumen than the small tradesmen struggling around him. He prospered enough to marry in March 1791, at Lambeth, Elizabeth Chadd. She was sixteen, while he was only three years older. A slump in the breeches trade in 1791–2 caused them great distress, and when early in 1791 he joined and led a strike of breeches-makers which collapsed, they came close to starvation. For six months Place could get no work, until relief came from a former employer and he and his wife were able to buy back the possessions they had pawned. These years left a permanent mark on Place’s outlook. From his father he had learned how great assets could be lost by impulsiveness and folly, ‘keeping a blood horse and high company’. On the other side, the misfortunes of his fellow artisans showed the disastrous effects of ignorance and improvidence. He saw that his education, for all its shortcomings, had saved him from both.
But Place too had given hostages to fortune. Elizabeth Place was to bear fifteen children; only eight reached adulthood. The second, but the first to survive, also called Elizabeth, was born in April 1794. In January 1796, a second daughter, Annie, was born, followed in June 1798 by a son, Francis. His growing family did not turn Place away from radicalism, but it helps explain the turn his radicalism took.
Paine, Godwin, and the London Corresponding Society
In April 1794, Place read Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and was so pleased by it that he decided in June to join the London Corresponding Society (LCS). He was probably too innocent of foreign politics to know how dangerous a move it was. In Paris the reign of terror was at its height and in the same month Robespierre inaugurated the cult of the Supreme Being. The LCS was known for its French sympathies and its meetings were watched and often infiltrated by spies. In 1794, one of its founders, Thomas Hardy, and two leaders of the more respectable Society for Constitutional Information, Horne Tooke and John Thelwall, were arrested; tried for seditious activities, they were acquitted in November.
The government followed this reverse with two acts defining treason and restricting political meetings. Place was active in supporting prisoners in Newgate who were charged with treason, and he was and remained a friend of Hardy. But on the LCS he seems to have been a moderating influence. He chaired its general committee from September 1795 to February 1796 and was assistant secretary from May 1796 to early 1797. He opposed the policy of calling provocative meetings and the publication of a magazine which would only lose money. He also deprecated attacks on Christianity: not that he had any religious convictions, though he has been claimed as a professed atheist. But he moved from the agrarian radicalism of Paine to the philosophic anarchism of William Godwin, and while remaining a republican he repudiated the revolutionary doctrines of natural rights and the social contract, and embraced the ideals of independence, absolute sincerity, and the gradual elimination of injustice through the spread of philosophic reason. He was not an abstract thinker. He adopted and professed those doctrines which confirmed his own experiences. Godwin repudiated violence and revolutionary agitation. Place saw that they did not bring work in a country at war with revolutionary France. He left the LCS in June 1797.
In March 1799, Place entered a partnership with Richard Wild and they opened a shop at 29 Charing Cross. Wild sought to buy Place out in the following year, but Place borrowed enough money to set up on his own at 16 Charing Cross. Within a few years he had become a prosperous man. In 1815, he was making an annual profit of £2500 and two years later he handed over a prosperous business to be managed by his son Francis. He was not alone in this prosperity. The war economy was good for the London shopkeeper, especially one so centrally situated. In 1820, Place attended a dinner to commemorate Thomas Hardy’s acquittal and noted that of the company twenty were former members of the LCS and all prosperous men. For the first time in his life he had leisure to elaborate his views with reading and reflection and to apply them in everyday politics. His Jacobin connections, his friendships with men such as the Irishman Father James O’Coigley and Colonel Despard (both executed for revolutionary activities), made him a natural confidant of radical politicians of every sort. His practical experience and his ready sympathy with people in distress made many poor people seek his advice. He was also consulted by a new class of theorists, planners, and philanthropists who, in the unreformed political system, could not find the information they wanted from official sources. To them all Place, as a good Godwinian, gave shrewd practical advice with a dash of unpalatable candour.
Westminster elections, 1807–1820
What gave Place’s advice weight was his growing authority in the elections in Westminster. The borough’s scot and lot franchise gave the vote, in effect, to ratepayers and until 1807 its elections had been heavily influenced by the owners of large London estates such as the duke of Bedford and the duke of Northumberland, who dictated the voting of their many tenants. The size of the electorate—about 15,000—made standing for election expensive, but the meetings in Covent Garden attracted such crowds that Westminster elections took on the air of a national plebiscite. In times of popular unrest candidates for the two main parties could each ask for one of an elector’s two votes, and in this way keep out a radical candidate. In the general election of 1806 James Paull, the radical candidate, had been defeated in this way. Another general election followed in May 1807, and Paull claimed to be standing in alliance with Sir Francis Burdett. The two men quarrelled and fought a duel, and Place and his friends decided to drop Paull and back Burdett, despite the fact that he had been wounded and could not appear at the hustings. This time they won, and their victory gave Westminster at least one radical member for the next twenty-eight years. As Place kept meticulous records of Westminster elections, he has often been credited with ‘masterminding’ them. In fact he was the most literate and systematic member of a committee of like-minded men, several quite as wealthy, who had hit upon a new way of marshalling the popular vote. By asking each elector to subscribe what he could to meet the expenses of the poll, they secured a core of loyal voters while increasing the expense for any competitor, and by organizing their following through committees in every parish of the borough, co-ordinated by a central committee, they were able to choose a candidate and guarantee him a substantial following before a rival could appear. They had invented the first constituency caucus. Their slogan, ‘Westminster and Purity of Election’, implied that they had done away with landlordism and intimidation. It did not mean that they secured obedient democrats as MPs.
Place quarrelled with Burdett in 1812, and withdrew from Westminster elections until 1818. In the general election of that year his old friends begged him to help and he relented only when the election had already begun. His help was sorely needed: Burdett’s seat was secured but he was second on the poll to the Whig lawyer Sir Samuel Romilly. Romilly’s suicide in November 1818 caused a by-election, and Place tried to secure the return of J. C. Hobhouse. But on the eve of the poll he rashly published a paper abusing the Whigs as a ‘corrupt and profligate faction’. They retaliated by starting their own candidate, George Lamb, who won the seat in an election of unusual violence. It was only after the radical outcry over the Peterloo massacre in 1819, in which Burdett and Hobhouse joined, each sealing his popularity with a short prison sentence that both men were returned at the general election of 1820. Before long, however, Place was highly critical of their attitude to radical causes, calling them ‘little if any better than mere drawling Whigs’. J. C. Hobhouse went on to become a Whig minister. Burdett joined the Tories in 1834 but still retained his Westminster seat.
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[1] Sources: G. Wallas The life of Francis Place, revised edition, 1918, The autobiography of Francis Place, 1771–1854, ed. M. Thale, 1972, M. Thale (ed.) Selections from the papers of the London Corresponding Society, 1792–1799, 1983, London radicalism, 1830–1843: a selection from the papers of Francis Place, ed. D. J. Rowe, London Record Society, volume 5, 1970, W. E. S. Thomas ‘Francis Place and working class history’, Historical Journal, volume 5, (1962), pages 61–70, W. Thomas The philosophic radicals: nine studies in theory and practice, 1817–1841, 1979, chapters 1, 2, D. J. Rowe ‘Francis Place and the historian’, Historical Journal, volume 16 (1973), pages 45–63 and D. Miles, Francis Place, 1771–1854: the life of a remarkable radical, 1988. Archives: British Library correspondence and papers, press cuttings, Add. MSS 27789–27859; 35142–35154; 36623–36628; 37949–37950; 57841A, B.
Background and early life
Simon Place was by trade a baker who had become the keeper of a ‘sponging house’, or debtors’ prison, in Vinegar Yard, near Drury Lane Theatre in London, where Francis was born. Such places were made illegal in 1779 and he became an innkeeper. He was a violent, erratic man of strong character. Francis had some schooling from 1775 to 1785, the last two years in a school kept by a Mr Bowis, whom he remembered for his kindness and learning. In 1785, Simon Place impulsively apprenticed his son to a breeches-maker called France, in Bell Yard, Temple Bar, a man whose three daughters lived on immoral earnings and who was himself to die in a workhouse.
Place’s upbringing had been rough, and much of his education had been in the streets, but he was literate and he soon showed more business acumen than the small tradesmen struggling around him. He prospered enough to marry in March 1791, at Lambeth, Elizabeth Chadd. She was sixteen, while he was only three years older. A slump in the breeches trade in 1791–2 caused them great distress, and when early in 1791 he joined and led a strike of breeches-makers which collapsed, they came close to starvation. For six months Place could get no work, until relief came from a former employer and he and his wife were able to buy back the possessions they had pawned. These years left a permanent mark on Place’s outlook. From his father he had learned how great assets could be lost by impulsiveness and folly, ‘keeping a blood horse and high company’. On the other side, the misfortunes of his fellow artisans showed the disastrous effects of ignorance and improvidence. He saw that his education, for all its shortcomings, had saved him from both.
But Place too had given hostages to fortune. Elizabeth Place was to bear fifteen children; only eight reached adulthood. The second, but the first to survive, also called Elizabeth, was born in April 1794. In January 1796, a second daughter, Annie, was born, followed in June 1798 by a son, Francis. His growing family did not turn Place away from radicalism, but it helps explain the turn his radicalism took.
Paine, Godwin, and the London Corresponding Society
In April 1794, Place read Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason and was so pleased by it that he decided in June to join the London Corresponding Society (LCS). He was probably too innocent of foreign politics to know how dangerous a move it was. In Paris the reign of terror was at its height and in the same month Robespierre inaugurated the cult of the Supreme Being. The LCS was known for its French sympathies and its meetings were watched and often infiltrated by spies. In 1794, one of its founders, Thomas Hardy, and two leaders of the more respectable Society for Constitutional Information, Horne Tooke and John Thelwall, were arrested; tried for seditious activities, they were acquitted in November.
The government followed this reverse with two acts defining treason and restricting political meetings. Place was active in supporting prisoners in Newgate who were charged with treason, and he was and remained a friend of Hardy. But on the LCS he seems to have been a moderating influence. He chaired its general committee from September 1795 to February 1796 and was assistant secretary from May 1796 to early 1797. He opposed the policy of calling provocative meetings and the publication of a magazine which would only lose money. He also deprecated attacks on Christianity: not that he had any religious convictions, though he has been claimed as a professed atheist. But he moved from the agrarian radicalism of Paine to the philosophic anarchism of William Godwin, and while remaining a republican he repudiated the revolutionary doctrines of natural rights and the social contract, and embraced the ideals of independence, absolute sincerity, and the gradual elimination of injustice through the spread of philosophic reason. He was not an abstract thinker. He adopted and professed those doctrines which confirmed his own experiences. Godwin repudiated violence and revolutionary agitation. Place saw that they did not bring work in a country at war with revolutionary France. He left the LCS in June 1797.
In March 1799, Place entered a partnership with Richard Wild and they opened a shop at 29 Charing Cross. Wild sought to buy Place out in the following year, but Place borrowed enough money to set up on his own at 16 Charing Cross. Within a few years he had become a prosperous man. In 1815, he was making an annual profit of £2500 and two years later he handed over a prosperous business to be managed by his son Francis. He was not alone in this prosperity. The war economy was good for the London shopkeeper, especially one so centrally situated. In 1820, Place attended a dinner to commemorate Thomas Hardy’s acquittal and noted that of the company twenty were former members of the LCS and all prosperous men. For the first time in his life he had leisure to elaborate his views with reading and reflection and to apply them in everyday politics. His Jacobin connections, his friendships with men such as the Irishman Father James O’Coigley and Colonel Despard (both executed for revolutionary activities), made him a natural confidant of radical politicians of every sort. His practical experience and his ready sympathy with people in distress made many poor people seek his advice. He was also consulted by a new class of theorists, planners, and philanthropists who, in the unreformed political system, could not find the information they wanted from official sources. To them all Place, as a good Godwinian, gave shrewd practical advice with a dash of unpalatable candour.
Westminster elections, 1807–1820
What gave Place’s advice weight was his growing authority in the elections in Westminster. The borough’s scot and lot franchise gave the vote, in effect, to ratepayers and until 1807 its elections had been heavily influenced by the owners of large London estates such as the duke of Bedford and the duke of Northumberland, who dictated the voting of their many tenants. The size of the electorate—about 15,000—made standing for election expensive, but the meetings in Covent Garden attracted such crowds that Westminster elections took on the air of a national plebiscite. In times of popular unrest candidates for the two main parties could each ask for one of an elector’s two votes, and in this way keep out a radical candidate. In the general election of 1806 James Paull, the radical candidate, had been defeated in this way. Another general election followed in May 1807, and Paull claimed to be standing in alliance with Sir Francis Burdett. The two men quarrelled and fought a duel, and Place and his friends decided to drop Paull and back Burdett, despite the fact that he had been wounded and could not appear at the hustings. This time they won, and their victory gave Westminster at least one radical member for the next twenty-eight years. As Place kept meticulous records of Westminster elections, he has often been credited with ‘masterminding’ them. In fact he was the most literate and systematic member of a committee of like-minded men, several quite as wealthy, who had hit upon a new way of marshalling the popular vote. By asking each elector to subscribe what he could to meet the expenses of the poll, they secured a core of loyal voters while increasing the expense for any competitor, and by organizing their following through committees in every parish of the borough, co-ordinated by a central committee, they were able to choose a candidate and guarantee him a substantial following before a rival could appear. They had invented the first constituency caucus. Their slogan, ‘Westminster and Purity of Election’, implied that they had done away with landlordism and intimidation. It did not mean that they secured obedient democrats as MPs.
Place quarrelled with Burdett in 1812, and withdrew from Westminster elections until 1818. In the general election of that year his old friends begged him to help and he relented only when the election had already begun. His help was sorely needed: Burdett’s seat was secured but he was second on the poll to the Whig lawyer Sir Samuel Romilly. Romilly’s suicide in November 1818 caused a by-election, and Place tried to secure the return of J. C. Hobhouse. But on the eve of the poll he rashly published a paper abusing the Whigs as a ‘corrupt and profligate faction’. They retaliated by starting their own candidate, George Lamb, who won the seat in an election of unusual violence. It was only after the radical outcry over the Peterloo massacre in 1819, in which Burdett and Hobhouse joined, each sealing his popularity with a short prison sentence that both men were returned at the general election of 1820. Before long, however, Place was highly critical of their attitude to radical causes, calling them ‘little if any better than mere drawling Whigs’. J. C. Hobhouse went on to become a Whig minister. Burdett joined the Tories in 1834 but still retained his Westminster seat.
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[1] Sources: G. Wallas The life of Francis Place, revised edition, 1918, The autobiography of Francis Place, 1771–1854, ed. M. Thale, 1972, M. Thale (ed.) Selections from the papers of the London Corresponding Society, 1792–1799, 1983, London radicalism, 1830–1843: a selection from the papers of Francis Place, ed. D. J. Rowe, London Record Society, volume 5, 1970, W. E. S. Thomas ‘Francis Place and working class history’, Historical Journal, volume 5, (1962), pages 61–70, W. Thomas The philosophic radicals: nine studies in theory and practice, 1817–1841, 1979, chapters 1, 2, D. J. Rowe ‘Francis Place and the historian’, Historical Journal, volume 16 (1973), pages 45–63 and D. Miles, Francis Place, 1771–1854: the life of a remarkable radical, 1988. Archives: British Library correspondence and papers, press cuttings, Add. MSS 27789–27859; 35142–35154; 36623–36628; 37949–37950; 57841A, B.
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