Re-presenting Women:3

Middle class anxieties about working class sexuality

The Registrar General reported that in 1842, 6.7 per cent of births were illegitimate and that during the century as a whole the figure was around 6.0 per cent[1]. Albert Leffingwell wrote of the “annual harvest of sorrow and shame” shown by the tables of illegitimate births produced by the Registrar General in the 1880s[2]. The fallen woman, clasping an infant, the badge of her shame, was a commanding icon in Victorian art and literature[3]. In Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) and E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End (1910), Ruth Hilton’s son Leonard and Forster’s Leonard Bast (literally as Bastard) sought to hide the stain of their illegitimacy. The critical question is whether the rhetoric corresponded to actual experience.

Reay[4] concludes that the “experience of rural Kent suggests that bearing children outside marriage should be seen not as a form of deviancy but rather as part of normal sexual culture.” Half the brides in Reay’s three-parish sample were pregnant when they married or had actually given birth before their marriage. This paralleled the experience in villages and small towns in Bedfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Hampshire, Leicestershire and Devon. There is little evidence that pre-nuptial pregnancy was regarded as shameful or that social pressure was used to force a pregnant bride to marry quickly. Though there is some evidence of teenage promiscuity – Reay finds that about a third of pregnant brides were between 16 and 19 – it appears that most women were sexually active around the time they married rather than when they reached sexual maturity. Reay’s conclusions call into question the contemporary middle class views of Leffingwell and others that women who had illegitimate children were either deviant or powerless.

Evidence from urban Britain suggests levels of illegitimacy lower than in the countryside with London having the lowest national levels around mid-century. There was, however, considerable diversity in the urban experience. Bristol, Birmingham, Liverpool, Portsmouth and Sheffield had low rates. Nottingham, Preston and Bolton rates were almost twice as high, though none as high as Norwich. The reasons for this are difficult to identify with certainty though there may be a link between high urban illegitimacy and levels in its rural hinterland. Both Norwich and Nottingham were in counties with high levels of illegitimacy. Of the eight counties with the highest rates in 1842, five predominantly rural counties remained in this group sixty years later: Cumberland, Norfolk, North Riding, Nottinghamshire and Shropshire. This indicates a regional dimension to sexuality that lasted through the century. However, elsewhere in urban Britain, non-marital fertility was low enough in 1851 for marriage still to be regarded as having particular importance as a regulator of sexuality. By 1911, only 4 per cent of all births were illegitimate in England and Wales. The social stigma of illegitimacy was not as pronounced as contemporary middle class commentators would have historians believe. Social attitudes to sexuality were much more complex and varied.

Pre-nuptial pregnancies were class specific. Women from higher social groups were less likely to be pregnant. Middle class observers regarded their own class as sufficiently rooted in home, work and family to prevent or at least limit pre-nuptial sex. Below this, however, pre-nuptial pregnancy and intercourse were widespread phenomena. This was seen as a challenge to established order and consequently something that needed, especially with regard to women, to be controlled. Contemporaries often looked at the working classes through the medium of illicit sexual behaviour. Engels spoke of their “unbridled search for pleasure”[5], their shared sleeping arrangements and the ways work was organised. “The moral consequences of the employment of women in factories are even worse…A witness in Leicester said that he would rather let his daughter beg than go into a factory; that they are perfect gates of hell; that most of the prostitutes of the town had their employment in the mills to than for their present situation.” Another, in Manchester, “did not hesitate to assert that three-fourths of the young factory employees, from fourteen to twenty years of age, were unchaste… If the [factory] master is mean enough…his mill is also his harem; and the fact that not all manufacturers use their power, does not in the least change the position of the girls.” [6]

The problem for writers like Engels and for reformers like James Kay and Peter Gaskell, writing in the 1830s and 1840s was that there was little evidence to support their assertions about illicit urban sexual behaviour. In addition, most of the evidence used in the debate about working class sexual behaviour comes from areas of textile production. Kay noted that though crime can be “statistically classed”, “the moral leprosy of vice cannot be exhibited with mathematical precision. Sensuality has no record…”[7]. Gaskell maintained that statistics on illegitimacy were “worse than useless” and showed higher levels of illegitimacy in rural than urban areas[8]. There is little here to support the assertions of Edward Shorter that urbanisation led to a ‘sexual revolution’[9]. Middle class anxieties were grounded in concerns about working class female sexuality and their economic autonomy. Because of their view of the proper role of women in the family, many middle class commentators focussed their criticism less on the conditions under which women laboured than on the moral and spiritual degradation said to follow from female employment. For them the dangers posed by class and changed sexual attitudes were closely linked. For evangelicals like Lord Ashley sexual freedom inevitably led to social dangers especially the loss of middle class control. Consequently, they exaggerated the situation and misread the evidence to support bourgeois, male ideological assumptions. There was a lack of concrete evidence to support the case for working class immorality or early marriages. Despite this, the sexual perspectives of Gaskell and Kay tumbled into their fears about the sexual consequences social mobility. It became “licentiousness capable of corrupting the whole body of society, like an insidious disease…”[10] Sexual freedom posed a threat to the stability of society to such an extent that[11] “Morality is worthy of the attention of the economist.”

The problem historians face is one of continuity and change. Traditional essentially pre-industrial sexual attitudes among the working class remained important throughout the nineteenth century. These can be seen particularly in rural Britain where sexual relationships could begin at betrothal and where evidence of a woman’s fertility might be economically necessary. This was gradually weakened by the transformation of working class sexual experience caused less by urbanisation than by the effects of developing industrial capitalism on society as a whole. Weeks argues, [12] “The key factor seems to have been proletarianisation rather than urbanisation, that is the generalisation of the wage-labour relationship”. There was a fall in the age of marriage from around 28 years in the 1750s to 24 by the 1820s. This increased the years of potential childbearing and he suggests these changes were motivated in part by economic factors: “children could be a positive asset, as sources of domestic labour and increased income”. He also shows the weakening of customary control over sexual relations in the context of growing social mobility where illegitimacy was often the result not of rampant promiscuity but “Marriage Frustrated”[13]. The effect of this was to diminish female control and sexual autonomy. In the second half of the nineteenth century illegitimacy and irregular marriages declined, as working class women became more conservative in their sexual behaviour. This was less the result of the diffusion of middle class values than a pragmatic response to the loss of control over the consequences of pre-nuptial relations.

In what respects did the working class adopt middle class values in the last third of the nineteenth century? Social factors such as the availability of marriage partners in areas of high emigration or persistent out-migration (throughout rural England) limited marriage levels and affected births. Limitations on marriage in certain occupational groups, for example, living-in domestic servants and farm labourers, also affected local fertility patterns. The general increase in the mean age of marriage to about 25.8 years for women and some two years higher for men by 1850, and further increases from the 1870s, reflected changing economic circumstances and the desire for more spending power and independence. There were considerable differences between industrial areas (where there were more and earlier marriages), rural areas (where marriages tended to be later). There were also differences between social classes (urban labourers and miners married young; white-collar workers, shopkeepers and working-class artisans postponed marriage until they felt able to afford it). How far these changes were the result of middle class attitudes or of the emergence of a distinctive working-class culture impervious to middle class guidance is a matter of considerable debate. The problem for historians lies in the gulf within the working class between skilled workers and, what middle class moralists called ‘the residuum’. There is evidence of the transmission of middle class moral values and the pursuit of ‘respectability’ among skilled workers. However, there is little doubt that this ideology of respectability was grounded in their general experience and growing sense of class identity. The demands of skilled workers to take an active role in local institutions were a source of social tension with the middle class. The assimilation of middle class sexual mores was not as straightforward as contemporaries believed. By 1900, it had become clear that middle class ‘civilising’ evangelism had not created a working class in its own image. Most workers were not chaste or temperate by middle class standards but by their own. The changed sexualities of the working class cannot be seen as evidence of the success of middle class social control but was produced from deeply felt experiences of the class itself.

Middle class respectability and sexual control

The question of respectability is arguably a question of desires. In 1850, The Westminster Review stated that[14]: “In men, in general, the sexual desire is inherent and spontaneous, and belongs to the condition of puberty. In the other sex, the desire is dormant, if not non-existent, till excited; always till excited by intercourse…If the passions of women were ready, strong and spontaneous, in a degree even approaching the form they assume in the coarser sex, there can be little doubt that sexual irregularities would reach a height, of which, at present, we have happily no conception.” W. R. Greg had exposed the fear felt by middle class society by the thought of unregulated female sexuality. He distinguished between active male sexuality and passive female sexuality. It had its social expression in the notion of the ‘double standard’. Sexual activity was regarded as a sign of ‘masculinity’ while in women it was represented as deviant or pathological behaviour. The concept of double standards was based on the division between madonna and whore, between the ‘respectable’ or the ‘fallen’. Women were seen as either controlling or heightening male sexual behaviour and their sexual identity determined whether they were seen as respectable members of society. This definition of female sexuality was class specific. The notion of the middle class woman’s sexual respectability was contrasted not only with the prostitute but also with all working class women especially the unrespectable poor. Working class women, like prostitutes were regarded as potential health hazards and as a general public danger because of their uncontrolled and uncontrollable breeding.

William Acton argued that sexual desire was unknown to the virtuous woman. He said that[15] “a perfect ideal of an English wife and mother…so pure-hearted as to be utterly ignorant of and averse to any sensual indulgence, but so unselfishly attached to the man she loves, as to be willing to give up her own wishes and feelings for his sake.” This image of the passionless respectable woman was, however, one aspect of a more complex view of female sexualities in the nineteenth century. Other doctors argued that respectable women did experience sexual desire and that, far from being deviant was extremely healthy. George Drysdale, an active campaigner for family limitation and a supporter of the mid-century women’s movement attacked the values of respectable morality[16]: “To have strong sexual emotions is held to be rather a disgrace for a woman, and they are looked down upon as animal, sensual, coarse and deserving reprobation. The moral emotions of love are indeed beautiful in her; but the physical ones are rather held unwomanly and debasing; this is a great error… If chastity must continue to be regarded as the highest female virtue; it is impossible to give women real liberty.” Drysdale’s view did not fit with the dominant discourse of woman’s mission. This was based on the relationship between woman’s nature and woman’s duty. Because of the ambiguity of woman’s nature, control and regulation were justified to enable women to fulfil their domestic duty. Sexual control was part of the far wider dependency of women. The issue of dependency was not one of repressive male power over women. Dependency was regarded as a natural part of respectable femininity. Male protection of women was not represented as control but as a shield to protect them against the harshness of public life. Contemporary doctors supported this view. The major features of respectable femininity were believed to develop naturally during puberty and were part of women’s biological development. Edward Tilt wrote in 1852[17] “That what makes men more bold, will generally awaken greater timidity in women. Puberty, which gives man the knowledge of greater power, gives to woman the conviction of her dependence.”

The notion of female respectability was accepted by many, though not all middle class women. Adultery was regarded as the extreme form of sexual deviancy. Female unchastity was a betrayal: betrayal of father, husband, home and family. It violated women’s femininity and its effects were both permanent and irrevocable. For women, a fall from virtue was final. Men’s natural urges and sexual lapses were seen as regrettable but unavoidable. Acton believed that male sexual impulses could be controlled but not repressed. Male adultery was accommodated within the dominant codes of morality. Male sexuality rested on the twin contradictions of motherhood and prostitution. Maternity and sexuality were separated by the representation of prostitution as existing exclusively to gratify male sexual lusts. Many Victorians believed that it was the prostitute who kept middle class women pure by satisfying the sexual needs of middle class men[18]: “Herself the supreme type of vice, she is ultimately the most efficient guardian of virtue. But for her, the unchallenged purity of countless happy homes would be polluted… On that degraded and ignoble form are concentrated the passions that might have filled the world with shame.” Prostitution acted as a sexual safety valve and did not corrupt the home in the ways in which female adultery did. This meant that adultery must be committed with a woman who was either without a family or who did not belong to the respectable classes and whose family was therefore considered to be of little account.

The view that historians until recently had of nineteenth century middle class sexuality was a caricature. Prudery, as repugnance of sexual contact and the cold, highly functional asexuality within the privacy of marriage was complemented by male permissiveness within the public arena. This is not to suggest that these attitudes were untrue but asks to what extent they were typical and representative of the experience of the middle class as a whole. The dominant attitudes to male and female sexuality were both a means of female sexual control and of male sexual license. There was, Jeffrey Weeks[19] argues “no Golden Age of sexual propriety, and the search for it in the mythologised past tells us more about present confusions than past glories.”

Sex education, family limitation and sexuality

Sex education was as contentious then as it is today. Sex education for young girls was usually assigned to their mothers. However, this was increasingly felt to be an unsatisfactory approach and by the 1890s, there was considerable support for girls being taught ‘some of the necessary physical facts’. The content of that education remained a difficult question. The Reverend Edward Lyttleton was quite clear in 1900 that more sex education was needed but that girls required less information than boys. He argued, “for most girls it would be enough for the parent to advise that the seed of life is entrusted by God to the father in a very wonderful way, and that after marriage he is allowed to give it to his wife.” The problem was that sex education was inextricably linked to different views about female sexual character and the religious emphasis on moral restraint.

Nineteenth and early twentieth century writings on birth control provide a revealing source for attitudes towards female sexuality and social roles. Supporters of birth control were seen as supporters of atheism, depravity and social unrest especially by organised religion and the medical profession. Effective birth control shattered the link between sexuality and reproduction and created the real possibility of greater sexual freedom and control for women as well as helping to reduce family size. Michael Ryan, an evangelical physician argued in 1837,[20] “None can deny that, if young women in general were absolved from the fear of consequences, the great majority of them…would rarely preserve their chastity.” Chastity according to Ryan was a consequence of fear of pregnancy. Birth control brought the possibility of unrestrained female sexuality and with it the breakdown of sexual control and social order. Medical opposition to birth control was expressed in a mixture of warnings about the injurious results for health and the associated moral decline. The Lancet, virulent in its condemnation of contraception commented in 1869[21] “A woman on whom her husband practises what is euphemistically called ‘preventative copulation’, is, in the first place necessarily brought into the condition of mind of a prostitute…” There was, however, an unresolved problem in medical thinking grounded in class. Self-denial was recommended as fertility control. However, the working class could not be expected to show restraint such was[22] “the natural predominance of the animal life in the illiterate.” Doctors were generally unwilling to recommend contraception but also assumed that there was little restraint in working class sexuality. This reinforced the widespread anxiety in the assumed sexual depravity and unrestrained breeding of the poor. Medical conservatism was illustrated when H.A. Allbutt was struck off the medical register for publicising birth-control methods in his popular The Wife’s Handbook in 1887. There were, however, strong public advocates of birth control and of the right of women to choose whether and when to have children. Francis Place and Richard Carlisle popularised methods of contraception in the 1820s. The publicity surrounding the Bradlaugh-Besant trial in 1876 was a major boost to the birth-control cause and opponents in the middle and upper classes felt increasingly pressure from what they called 'the evil in our midst'.

Religious and cultural beliefs delayed the adoption of family limitation in some sectors of society but increasing secularisation caused barriers to be broken down. The argument that family limitation represented the diffusion of birth control from the professional and upper middle classes -- the maid learning from her mistress -- to the lower classes does not stand up to close examination. Among the first to limit family size were ‘skilled’ non-manual and commercial workers (shopkeepers and clerks) who were also prominent among cautious late-marriers. There were considerable differences in marital fertility between different types of area by the late nineteenth century. Birth rates were relatively low in textile districts and residential towns, with large numbers of single women in domestic service and middle class households. This contrasts with earlier and more universal marriages with larger families among iron and steel-making and coal-mining communities. In these areas the abundant use of high-paid boys and young men in the mines reduced incentives to limit families, while fewer opportunities for female employment meant that girls married earlier.

Economic incentives limiting the number and spacing of births were strong where women were prominent in the workforce. In the mills of Lancashire or West Yorkshire or in the Potteries women might delay having children, or have a smaller family and return to work as soon as possible. Increasing numbers of women involved in shop and, from the 1890s, office work might also have deferred marriage and limited their families. Among the middle class, the increasing expense of raising children with rising costs for domestic servants and school fees, as well as a growing desire for greater freedom and more money to spend on luxuries and entertainment, were obvious incentives to having fewer children. Even within geographical areas there were often significant differences in rates of marriage. In London, there was a very close relationship between the proportion of women married and the percentage of women employed in domestic service. In middle class Hampstead, the proportion of married women was 27.4 while in Poplar, in the East End, it was 63.8 per cent in 1861 and little changed by 1891. As child mortality declined, more children survived to adult life and there was less need for large families and more incentive to put space between births to avoid excessive pressure on mothers and households. The average family size fell from 6.2 children in the 1860s, to 4.1 for those marrying in the 1890s and to 2.8 by 1911. The rapid decline in the average age at which the mother’s last child was born -- from age 41 to 34 over this period -- is a clear reflection of deliberate spacing and limitation of births within marriage.

Conclusions

Historians are accustomed to the ideas of the prudish, sexually repressed Victorians cautiously guarding themselves against any temptation, no matter how slight. This notion of sexuality has been successfully challenged and shown to be both inaccurate and misleading. Sex and sexuality were unavoidable issues for the Victorians. It was not until the early 1900s that scientists connected sex chromosomes to sex-linked characteristics or discovered the workings of hormones. This helps to explain why during the nineteenth century the exact nature of sex-differentiation was a subject of intense, though inconclusive debate. What exactly differentiated men from women and why the species evolved into the two sexes confounded Victorian theorists such as Herbert Spencer and Patrick Geddes. As a result, they and other specialists constructed a stereotypical dual model. Other than the different sex organs and physical differences, men were considered active agents, who expended energy while women were sedentary, storing and conserving energy. Victorian theories of evolution maintained that these feminine and masculine attributes could be traced back to the lowest forms of life. Such beliefs laid the groundwork for the separation of spheres for men and women. According to the model, since men only concerned themselves with fertilisation, they could also spend energies in other public arenas, allowing as Spencer says “the male capacity for abstract reason... along with an attachment to the idea of abstract justice... [which] was a sign of highly-evolved life.” On the other hand, woman's heavy role in pregnancy, menstruation (considered a time of illness, debilitation, and temporary insanity), and child-rearing left very little energy left for other pursuits. As a result, women's position in society came from biological evolution -- she had to stay at home in order to conserve her energy, while the man could and needed to go out and hunt or forage. This evolutionary reasoning was used to justify the emotional and mental differences between men and women. Conway shows how the logic led Geddes to believe that “Male intelligence was greater than female, men had greater independence and courage than women, and men were able to expend energy in sustained bursts of physical or cerebral activity... Women on the other hand... were superior to men in constancy of affection and sympathetic imagination... [They had] greater patience, more open-mindedness, greater appreciation of subtle details, and consequently what we call more rapid intuition.” The Victorians still, however, had to deal with the actual sexual act. Women were considered the weaker, more innocent sex in the early nineteenth century. They had little or no sexual appetite, often capturing all the sympathy and none of the blame over indiscretions. Men represented the fallen, sinful, and lustful creatures, wrongfully taking advantage of the fragility of women. However, this situation switched in the later half of the period. Women had to be held accountable, while the men, slaves to their sexual appetites, could not really be blamed. Therefore, women were portrayed either passionless or else insatiable. A young lady was only worth as much as her chastity and appearance of complete innocence. Once led astray, she was the fallen woman, and nothing could reconcile that until she died. However, in their lived experience and in contemporary fiction, Victorians recognised the complexities and contradictions in their view of their sexualities.

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[1] E.A. Wrigley, R. S. Davies, J.E. Oeppen and R.S. Schofield English Population History from Family Reconstitution 1580-1837, Cambridge, 1997, pages 219-224 deals with the problems of determining levels of illegitimacy.

[2] A. Leffingwell Illegitimacy and the Influence of the Seasons upon Conduct, London, 1892.

[3] Lynda Nead Myths of Sexuality: representations of women in Victorian Britain, Oxford, 1988, especially plates 48-50.

[4] Reay Microhistories, page 180.

[5] F. Engels The Condition of the Working Class in England, Leipzig, 1845, London, 1969, page 158.

[6] Engels The Condition of the Working Class, pages 176-177.

[7] James Kay The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes Employed in the Cotton Manufacture in Manchester, 1832, page 62.

[8] Peter Gaskell Artisans and Machinery: The Moral and Physical Conditions of the Manufacturing Population, 1836, page 100.

[9] Edward Shorter The Making of the Modern Family, London, 1976, pages 86-124.

[10] Kay The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, pages 81-82.

[11] Kay The Moral and Physical Condition of the Working Classes, page 82.

[12] Jeffrey Weeks Sex, Politics and Society. The regulation of sexuality since 1800, London, 1981, page 62-64.

[13] David Levine Family Formation in an Age of Nascent Capitalism, London, 1977.

[14] W.R. Greg ‘Prostitution’, The Westminster Review, volume 53, (1850), pages 456-7, quoted in Nead Myths of Sexuality, page 6.

[15] William Action The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, 4^th ed., London, 1865 page114 quoted in Nead Myths of Sexuality, page 19.

[16] George Dysdale Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion: by a Student of Medicine, London, 1855, pages 172-173.

[17] Edward Tilt The Elements of Health and Principles of Female Hygiene, London, 1852, page 173.

[18] William Lecky The History of European Morals, London, 1869, volume 2, page 299.

[19] Weeks Sex, Politics and Society, pages 22-3.

[20] Michael Ryan The Philosophy of Marriage, London, 1837, page 12.

[21] ‘Checks on Population’, The Lancet, 10^th April 1869, page 500.

[22] ‘Checks on Population’, page 500.

Re-Presenting Women : 2

Representing sexuality

The view that women and men naturally have distinctive and separate characteristics is today treated with justifiable scepticism[1]. This was not the case in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Christian position was clear. God created Adam first and then, in what James Simpson[2] the pioneer of chloroform saw as the first case of anaesthesia “caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man and while he slept took one of his ribs and…made [it] into a woman…”[3] Women were subject to the rule of man. This view was reinforced in the New Testament where St Paul stated, “as the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands”[4]. This view dominated medieval and early-modern thinking. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these theological arguments were gradually undermined by the development of medical science though both remained important well into the nineteenth century[5]. Early-modern medicine, still grounded in the notion of the four ‘humours’ maintained that men were more perfectly and physically formed because they were hotter and drier than women. They were active, intelligent and superior. Women by contrast had weaker brains than men because their lack of body heat reduced the amount of blood sent to the brain. They were governed by their lower organs especially the uterus where they had an excess of blood[6]. This led to lust, hysteria and irrational behaviour. Sexual differences were not based on anatomy – men and women were regarded as identical apart from the fact that female genitalia had failed to emerge externally because of their lower body temperature. Thomas Laqueur termed this a ‘one-sex’ model of sexual difference. He argues that during the eighteenth century a ‘two-sex’ model to explain sexual differences replaced it. The focus moved from differences in body temperature to differences in the structure of nerves. Women had finer nerves and this made them more sensitive than men to external emotions and, contemporaries argued made them prone to mental disorders and hysteria. Maudsley argued, “their nerve-centres being in a state of greater instability, by reason of the development of their reproductive functions, they will be more easily and more seriously deranged.” The reasoning may have changed but the subordinate realities for women remain unaltered. Popular medical texts, conduct books[7], popular literature, novels and periodicals promoted the culture of female domesticity with vigour and considerable popularity. Influential though these concepts are in gender studies, it is questionable how significant Laqueur’s ‘one-sex’ theory was in practice. Medical books may have seen women’s bodies as variants on maleness – women as inverted men – rather than as uniquely female, but doctors were a minority in early modern society and we should not assume that their theories were accepted by the wider world.

The distinction between men and women was at its starkest in contemporary attitudes to sexuality and sexual behaviour. Female sexuality is the one of the most problematic and sensitive issue historians have to face. Its history has undergone an extensive and fundamental revision in recent years. The French social theorist Michel Foucault argued that[8] “The central issue is not to determine whether one says yes or no to sex…whether one asserts its importance or denies its effects…but to account for the fact that it is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the positions the viewpoints from which they speak.” Sexuality and desire were not universal, a-historical conditions but part of the discourse of gender that allows the development of political control of the body. Changing attitudes to sexuality in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are, however, difficult to chart with any precision[9]. There are studies of middle class attitudes, notably by Peter Gay, Jeffrey Weeks and more recently, Michael Mason, but we still do not know a great deal about working class sexuality. This has led to historians taking different positions on the issue. Lawrence Stone, for example, argues that sexual permissiveness grew in the eighteenth century, a process reversed in the nineteenth century[10]. Others, by contrast, see the eighteenth century as one of increasing sexual repression. The critical issue is how far attitudes to sexuality changed in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and, if so, when that change occurred. Foucault saw an explosion of sexual discourses during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries corresponding to revolutionary changes in economic, demographic and social structures. Laqueur[11] argues that changes in attitudes to sex were part of the Industrial Revolution:[12] “Desire, whether for sexual gratification or for consumer goods, lies at the heart of theories of capitalism.” The market economy is based on openness of exchange in stark contrast to a society based on ranks and order in which convention and sumptuary laws were designed to keep desire under control. Freedom of exchange and of labour was economically desirable, but sexual freedom was not. Consuming goods was acceptable, with observers in the 1790s noting that the rural poor was ‘panting to imitate London fashions’, consuming sex was not. However, recent research on the early modern period suggests that the Foucauldian notion of multiple expressions of sexuality should be pushed back into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries[13]. Barry Reay’s study of Kent in the nineteenth and early twentieth century supports the view that there was considerable continuity of attitudes to sexuality especially in rural Britain across the early-modern-modern divide[14].

Nineteenth century writings emphasise the preoccupation of Victorian doctors and moralists in defining ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ or deviant female sexuality. However, their pronouncements were overwhelmingly middle class. There were two broadly opposed discourses of female sexuality in nineteenth century Britain. Some authors, like William Acton, argued that women were only capable of a limited or negligible sexual response: “the best mothers, wives and managers of households know little or nothing of sexual indulgence. Love of children, home and domestic duties are the only passions they feel”. Mary Scharlieb, in 1915, favoured self-control by men and women as a solution to a common problem. The suffragettes went one step further and advocated 'votes for women and chastity for men'. How did the idea that women were passionless develop? Until the 1720s, many believed that women’s lust was unquenchable but that they could become spiritual and less carnal through God’s grace. This view was reversed and in the nineteenth century, women were increasingly seen as less lustful than men. Middle class society effectively denied women’s sexuality yet ironically sharpened the awareness of women as reproductive and sexual individuals. Women were viewed as ‘the Sex’, not simply defined by their reproductive systems but controlled by them as well. However, many contemporaries maintained a more positive view of female sexuality. Dr. George Drysdale believed that sexual pleasure was natural and beneficial to both sexes. Priscilla Barker argued in 1888 that the passion of lust was stronger in the female sex, an interpretation redolent of Adam and Eve. James Walvin[15] rightly maintains, “It is hard to think of any aspect of Victorian life that has been more comprehensively misunderstood and misrepresented than sexuality”. I intend to consider three areas of sexuality as a means of testing the dominant middle class discourse.

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[1] I have drawn heavily on Shoemaker Gender in English Society 1650-1850, pages 15-44, an invaluable summary of this complex subject.

[2] Simpson used this argument against those in the Church who believed that the pain of childbirth was punishment for Eve’s responsibility for the Fall. See Mary Poovey Uneven Developments. The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England, London, 1989, pages 24-50 for the anaesthesia debate.

[3] Genesis 2: 18-22.

[4] Letters to the Ephesians 4: 24.

[5] Thomas Laqueur Making Sex: The Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge, Mass., 1990 provides an invaluable overview on this issue. More specific studies are: Christine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (eds.) The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1987, Ludmilla Jordanova Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, London, 1990 and Tim Hitchcock English Sexualities 1700-1800, London, 1997. Barry Reay Popular Cultures in England 1550-1750, London, 1998, pages 4-35 provides an excellent overview of current thinking.

[6] It was believed that menstruation was necessary because women had insufficient body heat to purify their blood.

[7] Conduct books were designed for moral instruction and included examination of the purposes of marriage and domestic relationships. Two – Richard Allestree The Whole Duty of Man and an anonymous author’s New Whole Duty of Man: Containing the Faith as well as Practice of a Christian – were widely read. The former went through sixty-four editions between 1659 and 1842; the latter thirty-seven editions between 1744 and 1850.

[8] Michel Foucault The History of Sexuality, volume 1, London, 1978, page 11.

[9] J. Weeks Sex, Politics and Society: the regulation of sexuality since 1800, London 2^nd. ed., 1989 is the best introduction to changing notions of sexuality. Peter Gay The Bourgeois Experience: Education of the Senses, London, 1984 and Michael Mason The Making of Victorian Sexuality, and The Making of Victorian Sexual Identity, Oxford, 1994 debunks the myth of Victorian ‘repression’.

[10] Lawrence Stone The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800, London, 1977.

[11] Thomas Laqueur ‘Sex and Desire in the Industrial Revolution’, in Patrick O’Brien and Roland Quinault (eds.) The Industrial Revolution and British Society, Cambridge, 1993, pages 100-123.

[12] Laqueur ‘Sex and desire in the Industrial Revolution’, page 114.

[13] Reay Popular Cultures in England, pages 33-5.

[14] Barry Reay Microhistories. Demography, society and culture in rural England, 1800-1930, Cambridge, 1996, pages 179-212.

[15] James Walvin Victorian Values, London, 1987, page 120.

Re-presenting Women:1

The images that women, especially in the middle classes, had of themselves were overwhelmingly the construction of men. Martha Vicinus suggests that the notion of the Perfect Lady is probably the best known.[1] “Throughout the Victorian period, the Perfect Lady as an ideal of femininity was tenacious and all pervasive in spite of its distance from the objective situations of countless women.” Until the 1870s, this image was certainly dominant and its influence continued until the outbreak of the First World War and arguably beyond. It was a middle class or bourgeois view of the family and the woman's role within it: male breadwinner, dependent, home-based wife and dependent children. This paper[2] seeks to unpack the notion of separate spheres, to understand what ideological principles lay at its core and to see how far it represented a social construct rather than the lived experience of most women. Essentially historians have to ask the question: how did men and women ‘see’ themselves and each other?[3]

Representing the female body

Female writers were at a major disadvantage as authorities on the female life cycle because of their lack of scientific training. Before the 1880s, women were largely excluded from the medical profession, except in secondary roles as nurses or midwives. The number of female doctors increased from 25 in 1881 to 101 in 1891 and 477 by 1911 but the overwhelming majority of doctors were male. Their religious beliefs, the medical education they received and the prevailing medical fashions conditioned even these women. Gynaecology remained a male specialisation, though the practices of the few women doctors consisted mainly of female patients and their children[4].

Contemporaries saw the nature of women in the nineteenth century in biological terms, expressed in the inevitable cycle of female life from menstruation to menopause. Different writers identified different phases and features of the female life cycle but the most important stages seemed self-evident. Birth and childhood were followed from the onset of menstruation by the years of puberty. Marriage was the social institution in which sexual experience and pregnancy were legitimated. Pregnancy, childbirth, nursing and child-care occupied the major functional period of a woman's life. The final part of the cycle was the process of ageing, the menopause and death. The personal and social significance of these developmental stages were not physiologically determined but socially constructed. This representation of women was the cultural invention of a particular time and place but was disguised as dogma and supported by the findings of biological, medical and other sciences. This represented ideological control, whose social function included the restriction of the social and economic activities of women in the public sphere. Science sought to define female ‘normality; and ‘deviance’. Many women accepted these arguments. They were used to justify a continuance of the status quo and formed an important focus for the anti-suffragist campaign in the decades before 1914. Lucy Cavendish, for example wrote in 1858 “Your idea that women’s absence of mental creative power is accounted for by their having so much of physical creation to do is splendid. Who can say how much of a mother’s mental power must go to a baby’s brain during those miraculous nine months, not to speak of all that she puts into the child during its first years…?”[5] Henry Maudsley, an eminent psychiatrist, argued in 1874 that nature was given women a finite amount of energy and that this should be used in reproduction. To use this limited energy in other directions undermined their reason for being. Eliza Lynn Linton wrote in the early 1890s that “Be its pleasant or unpleasant, it is none the less an absolute truth --- the raison d'être of a woman is maternity. For this and this alone nature has differentiated her from man…this clamour for political rights is woman's confession of sexual enmity…No woman who loves her husband would wish to usurp his province…. It is a question of science...And science is dead against it. Science knows that to admit women -- that is, mothers -- into the heated arena of political life would be as destructive to the physical well-being of the future generations as it would be to the good conduct of affairs in the present...”[6]

Analysis of female health, or more often female ill health, the notion of the 'conspicuous consumptive' played a central role in the economic and social evaluation and devaluation of women[7]. Many doctors identified the stages of the female life cycle and women’s reproductive role as particular sources of ill health. An extreme view, expressed more often in America than Britain, was that woman's natural state was invalidism. Medical views were not, however, monolithic and their ambiguities arose from scientific ignorance and divided opinion. Sir Thomas Allbutt, consulting physician to the Leeds Hospital argued in 1884 that women were being systematically induced into sickness[8]: “She is tangled in the net of the gynaecologists, who finds that her uterus, like her nose, is a little on one side…Her mind thus fastened to a more or less nasty mystery, becomes newly apprehensive and physically introspective, and the morbid chains are riveted more strongly than ever. Arraign the uterus, and you fix in the woman the arrow of hypochondria, it may be for life.”

Trifling maladies were magnified into chronic diseases. This produced a climate in which some women doubted their own physical capability. Lucy Cavendish wrote in 1858[9] “I think those who insist on ignoring their own weakness…are running counter to Nature’s clearest indications and are perverse in wishing women to go at men’s work until they drop, or at any rate till their poor babies and homes comes to grief.” This climate affected some gifted women. Beatrice Webb talked about her constant doubts about her health in her diaries. In October 1901, she wrote, “Then we moved to Saltburn. Here my mental health improved, but physically, I remained ill-at ease and constantly fatigued…then the morbidness took another turn. I was overtaken with a presentiment of disease and death: I had some mortal complaint, the heart, the kidneys, were probably diseased.”[10] Later, in December, she commented, “This year has been the most unsatisfactory of my life since I was married. How far I must apportion blame between a bad state of physical health and a rotten state of mind, I cannot tell…Doubtless the ‘waste products’ accumulated by wrong feeding have had largely to do with it, stimulating activity in some organs and clouding the brain. Until I took to the rigid diet, the sensual side of my nature seemed to be growing at the expense of the intellectual…”[11] George Eliot despaired over her “want of health and strength”. Less common was the use of the invalid state by women to serve their own personal ends. Florence Nightingale[12] used sickness to isolate herself from her family so she could continue her professional work and Elizabeth Barrett employed sickness as a means of escaping complex family tensions. Women writers strongly attacked the infirmity theory of female health. Its absurdity was well illustrated in the great bicycle debate in the early 1890s when the threatened physiological perils of cycling for women were exposed as nonsensical: “Let it at once be said, an organically sound woman can cycle with as much impunity as a man. Thank Heaven, we know now that this is not one more of the sexual problems of the day. Sex has nothing to do with it, beyond the adaptation of machine to dress and dress to machines. With cycles as now perfected, there is nothing in the anatomy or the physiology of a woman to prevent their fully and freely enjoyed within the limits of common sense.... It was expected that women specially might be exposed to injury from internal strains and from the effects and shaking and jarring when riding on the roads. In practice, this has been found to be nothing but a bogey.... Already thousands of women qualifying for general invalidism have been rescued by cycling...”[13] The decisive argument was statistical: women had lower mortality rates and lived longer than men. Medical books and articles on female health usually focused on the peculiar biological features of women, especially menstruation, maternity and menopause. The common health problems of men and women were a separate territory of mainstream medicine. Doctors recognised that the medical approach to women often had a preoccupation with the womb (hysteria) and its effects.

The debate over anaesthetics in the 1850s and early 1860s, especially in relation to childbirth was of importance in the medical redefinition of women[14]. In late 1847 Dr. James Young Simpson, professor of midwifery at Edinburgh University used chloroform successfully as an anaesthetic and strongly argued that other doctors should follow his lead. Others were less enthusiastic and between 1847 and the mid-1850s a vigorous debate took place in the Lancet, the London medical journal. In 1853, Queen Victoria was given chloroform during the birth of her eighth child and the debate declined. Some mothers opposed it at first on scriptural grounds that justified pain during childbirth. Most women, however, welcomed this clinical innovation and according to Simpson[15] “set out like zealous missionaries to persuade other friends to avail themselves of the same measure of relief”. The significance of the debate lay in an ideological shift justifying the subordination of women. The authority of the Church based on woman’s fallen nature that linked woman’s pain in labour to Eve’s sin was gradually replaced by a scientific representation based upon biological difference.

Gynaecological attitudes formed an important part of the debate on feminism, the New Woman and the crisis in gender from the 1880s[16]. Feminism was seen by some as a threat to the nation with declining birth rates among the better-educated middle classes while remaining high for the poorest, least-educated sections of the population. Eugenics, the science of race improvement saw women largely as mothers or as citizens involved in race reproduction. The raising of good quality children was an issue of national importance. It would seal the fate of the economy and even of the British Empire. Lord Rosebery wrote in The Times in 1900, “an empire such as ours requires as its first condition an Imperial Race – a race vigorous and industrious and intrepid.” Female calls for the vote, expanded education, greater economic and occupational opportunities as well as control over property, children and their sexuality called into question the nature of male authority, the stability of the family and, by extension the future of the race. Women’s activities especially the struggle for entry into universities and the professions led to a fall in marriages and a declining birth rate[17]. Emancipated women, it was believed would not marry or, if they did would lack the capacity or desire to have children. Others might neglect their children and husbands for a career outside the home. Arabella Kinealy, a eugenics doctor thought that modern women were “all nerves and restless activity”[18]. Many politicians believed feminists needed treatment rather than rights, a view echoed by William Barry in 1894[19] when he wrote that the New Woman “ought to be aware that her condition is morbid or at least hysterical”. The English anti-feminist novelist Eliza Lynn Linton coined the term ‘the shrieking sisterhood’ to caricature women who spoke out in public for women’s rights. Arnold Ward warned in 1910 that giving women the vote would ‘incorporate that hysterical activity permanently into the life of the nation”[20].

The major problem in the late nineteenth century was a subdivision of medical practice in relation to women. Obstetrics included the study of childbirth, ante and post-natal care rather than simply the ‘art of delivering women in labour’. Gynaecology was the study of the physiological functions and diseases of women and in Britain was largely approached through surgery. Most female diseases, contemporaries argued, were caused by some disorder of the reproductive system. Medical definitions of acceptable behaviour for women were reinforced by the ultimate threat of surgical intervention to reshape the female body, if the female mind could not be disciplined[21]. Dr. Barnes called it vivisection of the noblest kind. It was effective in treating some conditions but represented a dangerous model for gynaecological practice. In 1866, Isaac Baker Brown, a London gynaecologist, reported a number of successes in curing various illnesses through clitoridectomy, or the removal of the clitoris. About 600 such operations were performed in Britain between 1860 and 1866 but then ceased. Ten years later, Dr. Robert Battey urged the removal of healthy ovaries as the most effective treatment for menstrual difficulties and other ailments generally grouped under the heading of ‘manias’[22]. Surgical solutions could be sought inappropriately for nervous disorders like hysteria or for socially unacceptable or deviant practices. This could mean the failure of a woman to perform her duties as wife and mother or a tendency to show an unwarranted and unwomanly interest in sex. Several distinguished doctors were appalled by what in 1895 Sir William Priestley, consulting physician to King’s College Hospital called ‘over-operating in Gynaecology’. Neither the British Medical Journal nor the Lancet supported women’s rights opposing women’s suffrage and the opening of the medical profession to women. In 1876, the Lancet stated, [23] “We believe women’s work is to console and support man, not to usurp his functions.” Both, however, opposed unnecessary intrusive surgery on women. For many feminists like the doctor Elizabeth Blackwell, the prevailing image was of women as vivisected animals. The Anatomy Act of 1832[24] and Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s shaped working class attitudes to the medical profession. The first requisitioned the corpses of the poor instead of hanged murderers for dissection by surgeons transferring the penalty from murder to poverty. The second allowed women to be dragged off the streets and examined to see whether they had venereal disease. Anna Kingsford, the first Englishwoman to graduate with a medical degree from the Faculté de Médicine of Paris was disgusted at how poor patients were treated[25]: “Paupers are thus classed with animals as fitting subjects for painful experiment, and no regard is show to the feelings of either, it is not surprising that the use of anaesthetics for the benefit of the patient is wholly rejected. Even the excruciating operation of cautery with a red-hot iron is performed without the alleviation of an anaesthetic…” The only difference between rich and poor women was that the poor could not always expect to be anaesthetised or the comfort of her own home when she was examined or operated on.

The historiography of women as patients has, until recently been polarised[26]. Medical histories highlighted clinical progress, the efforts of male doctors and the ways in which treatment benefited women[27]. Modern feminists initially focused on the sexual politics of illness and the nature of intervention by the medical profession as part of the cultural subjection of women. Recent work has offered a more balanced perspective[28]. It emphasises that women were not simply victims or male doctors merely oppressors and that co-operation between women, usually middle class and their doctor was quite common.

---

[1] Martha Vicinus ‘The Perfect Victorian Lady’, in Martha Vicinus (ed.) Suffer and Be Still. Women in the Victorian Age, London, 1980, page xi.

[2] This paper was given at a conference on women and politics at Reading University in August 2000 though much of it was drafted in 1999.

[3] For developments in the early modern period see Anne Laurence Women in England 1500-1750: A Social History, London, 1994, Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford Women in Early Modern England, Oxford, 1998, Jacqueline Eales Women in early modern England 1500-1700, London, 1998 and Robert B. Shoemaker Gender in English Society 1650-1850, London, 1998

[4] Christopher Lawrence Medicine in the Making of Modern Britain 1700-1920, London, 1994 is a good, brief introduction to the issue of medicine and its gendered nature.

[5] Lucy Cavendish to Mary Gladstone Drew, 27^th November 1858, British Library, Add MS. 46235, fos. 239-40.

[6] Eliza Lynn Linton ‘The Wild Women as Politicians’, The Nineteenth Century, (30), July 1891, pages 80-82, 86.

[7] See in particular Lorna Duffin ‘The conspicuous consumptive: woman as invalid’ in S. Delamont and L. Duffin (eds.) The Nineteenth Century Woman, London, 1978, pages 26-56.

[8] British Medical Journal, 15 March 1884 quoted in H.D. Rolleston Sir Thomas Allbutt. A Memoir, London, 1929, page 87.

[9] Lucy Cavendish to Mary Drew, 27^th November 1858 British Library, Add MS 46235, fo. 240 quoted in Anne Digby Making a medical living. Doctors and patients in the English market for medicine 1720-1911, Cambridge, 1994, page 277.

[10] Norman and Jeanne MacKenzie The Diaries of Beatrice Webb, volume 2 1892-1905, London, 1983, page 216.

[11] MacKenzie The Diaries of Beatrice Webb, pages 224-225.

[12] This is clearly evident in her letters: Sue M. Goldie (ed.) Florence Nightingale. Letters from the Crimea 1854-1856, Manchester, 1997 and especially in Martha Vicinus and Bea Nergaard (eds.) Ever yours, Florence Nightingale. Selected Letters, London, 1989, especially immediately after the Crimean War and in a letter to John Stuart Mill in 1867 where she says she is “an incurable invalid”. It is interesting to note that the nursing reforms for which she is remembered were seen by contemporaries as essentially ‘female’ and appropriate for a Victorian woman while her contribution to sanitary reform and as an unofficial government adviser, work in the ‘male’ sphere has been largely forgotten. Mary Poovey Uneven Developments, pages 164-198 examine the social construction of Florence Nightingale.

[13] W.H. Fenton ‘A Medical View of Cycling for Ladies’, The Nineteenth Century, (39), May 1896, pages 797, 800.

[14] What follows draws on Mary Poovey Uneven Developments, pages 24-50.

[15] Quoted in Digby Making a medical living, page 271.

[16] The writings of Elaine Showalter are of major importance on this theme especially her The Female Malady. Women, Madness and English Culture 1830-1980, London, 1987, pages 121-166 and Hystories. Hysterical Epidemics and the Modern Media, New York, 1997, pages 49-61.

[17] The debate on women and falling birth rates is best explored in Richard A. Soloway Birth Control and the Population Question in England 1877-1930, Chapel Hill, 1982, pages 133-158 and Demography and Degeneration. Eugenics and the Declining Birth Rate in Twentieth-Century Britain, Chapel Hill, 1990, pages 110-137. Simon Szreter Fertility, class and gender in Britain 1860-1940, Cambridge, 1996 provides a detailed statistical examination.

[18] Eugenics Review, 3, No 1 (April 1911) page 44.

[19] William Barry ‘The Strike of a Sex’, Quarterly Review, 179, (1984), page 312, quoted in Showalter Hystories, page 49.

[20] Quoted in Showalter Hystories, pages 49-50.

[21] Coral Lansbury The Old Brown Dog. Women, Workers and Vivisection in Edwardian England, Madison, 1985 provide a detailed analysis of the impact of vivisection on women in this period. It takes the antivivisection riots between feminists, working women and trade unions and medical students from London University that took place in Battersea in 1907 over the statue of a brown dog as its backdrop.

[22] Elizabeth Blackwell characterised Battey’s work as ‘the castration of women’ in her Essays in Medical Sociology, London, 1909, pages 119-120.

[23] Lancet, 16^th October 1876.

[24] Ruth Richardson Death, Dissection and the Destitute, London, 1988 provides a detailed analysis of the 1832 Anatomy Act.

[25] Quoted in Edward Maitland Life of Anna Kingsford, London, 1913, volume 1, page 82.

[26] Digby Making a medical living, pages 259-279 provides an excellent summary of the historiographical debates through an examination of childbirth, surgery and invalidism.

[27] H.R. Spooner The History of British Midwifery 1650-1800, London, 1927 and J.M. Kerr et al Historical Review of British Obstetrics and Gynaecology 1800-1950, Edinburgh, 1954 fall into this category.

[28] Ludmilla Jordanova Sexual Visions. Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, New York, 1989, Ornella Moscucci The Science of Women: Gynaecology and Gender in England 1800-1929, Cambridge, 1990 and Roy Porter and Lesley Hall The Facts of Life. The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain 1650-1950, London, 1995 examines the development of sexual and medical discourse.

Women's Suffrage: Annotated Bibliography

Core texts

Two core texts are available for students: Paula Bartley Votes for women, 1860-1928, Hodder & Stoughton, 2^nd ed., 2003 and Harold L. Smith The British women’s suffrage campaign, 1866-1928, Longman, 1998, 2nd ed., 2007. Both provide an excellent, readable and relatively short discussion of the major issues. Bartley is perhaps the easier starting point but Smith contains a good collection of primary material. Elizabeth Crawford The Women’s Suffrage Movement, Routledge, 2000 is an important reference guide covering 1866-1928.

Martin Pugh Votes for women in Britain 1867-1928, The Historical Association, 1994 is a very brief introduction to the subject. Sophia A. van Wingerden The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain 1866-1928, Macmillan, 1999 looks at the major events, themes and problems of the suffrage movement from its inception to ultimate victory in 1928. Martin Pugh The March of the Women: a revisionist analysis of the campaign for women’s suffrage, 1866-1914, Oxford University Press, 2000 provides the most accessible and recent introduction to the major problems of interpretation. Melanie Phillips The Ascent of Woman, Little Brown, 2003 is a sound if polemical populist study. Constance Rover Women’s suffrage and party politics in Britain 1866-1914, Routledge, 1967 is, despite its age still worth reading. David Morgan Suffragists and Liberals, Oxford University Press, 1975 remains important on the relationship between political parties and women suffragists.

The suffrage question before 1897

June Purvis (ed.) Women’s History: Britain 1850-1945, UCL, 1995 is an excellent collection of articles many of which are relevant to this unit. Jane Lewis Women in England 1870-1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change, Harvester, 1984 and Kathryn Gleadle British Women in the Nineteenth Century, Palgrave, 2001 are good introductions to the economic position of women in this period. Philippa Levine Victorian Feminism 1850-1900, Hutchinson, 1987 looks at feminist protest before the Suffragettes. Barbara Caine English Feminism 1780-1980, OUP, 1997 and Susan Kingsley Kent Gender and Power in Britain 1640-1990, Routledge, 1999 take a longer perspective. Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska Women in Twentieth-Century Britain, Longman, 2001 is excellent on twentieth century developments.

A.V. John (ed.) Unequal Opportunities: Women’s Employment in England 1800-1950, Blackwell, 1986, Jane Rendall (ed.) Equal or Different: Women’s Politics 1800-1914, Blackwell, 1987 and Angela V. John (ed.) Our Mothers’ Land: Chapters in Welsh Women’s History 1830-1939, University of Wales Press, 1991 are outstanding collections of papers including a seminal article on Welsh suffragism. M. Joannou and J. Purvis. (eds) The women’s suffrage movement: new feminist perspectives, Manchester University Press, 1998 is more specific. Claire Eustance, Joan Ryan and Laura Ugolini (ed.) Theme and directions in British suffrage history: a reader, Cassell Academic, 1999 and June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton Votes for Women, Routledge, 2000 are extremely valuable collections of articles.

Women’s participation in public life is explored in Patricia Hollis Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government 1865-1914, OUP, 1987 and Patricia Hollis (ed.) Women in Public: The Women’s Movement 1850-1900, Allen & Unwin, 1979. David Rubinstein Before the suffragettes: women’s emancipation in the 1890s, Harvester, 1986 considers the changing face of feminism in the 1890s. Barbara Caine Feminism, suffrage and the nineteenth-century English women’s movement, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol.5, no.6, 1982 remains useful if somewhat dated. Susan Kingsley Kent Sex and suffrage in Britain 1860-1914, Princeton, 1987 is the best introduction to the ‘sex question’. Jane Lewis (ed.) Before the vote was won: arguments for and against women’s suffrage 1864-1896, Routledge, 1987 is an excellent collection of documents with incisive introduction.

The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS)

Leslie Parker Hume The National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies 1897-1914, New York: Garland, 1982 provides the best introduction to what was a neglected topic. It should be read in conjunction with the revisionist biography by David Rubinstein A different world for women: the life of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Harvester, 1991 and Sandra Stanley Holton Feminism and democracy: women’s suffrage and reform politics in Britain 1900-1918, Cambridge University Press, 1986. Jill Liddington and Jill Norris One hand tied behind us, Virago, 1978, 2^nd ed., 2000, the seminal study of radical suffragists. Les Garner Stepping stones to women’s liberty: feminist ideas in the women’s suffrage movement, Heinemann, 1984. Richard Symonds Inside the Citadel: Men and the Emancipation of Women 1850-1920, Macmillan, 1999 is a valuable study of a neglected topic, the support men gave to women’s suffrage.

Important biographical studies of women who took a broadly constitutionalist stance include: Ray Strachey Millicent Garrett Fawcett, John Murray, 1931, Helena Swanwick I have been young, Gollancz, 1935, Jo Vellacott From Liberal to Labour with women’s suffrage: the story of Catherine Marshall, McGill, 1993, Jill Liddington Life and times of a respectable rebel, Virago, 1984, Hannah Mitchell, The hard way up. ed. Geoffrey Mitchell, Virago, 1977, Liz Whitelaw The life and rebellious times of Cicely Hamilton, Women’s Press, 1990, Margaret Mulvihil Charlotte Despard: a biography, Pandora, 1989, and Andro Linklater, Charlotte Despard: An unhusbanded life, Hutchinson, 1980. Sandra Stanley Holton Suffrage days, Routledge, 1996 focuses on the activities of seven women, whose participation in the suffrage movement is less well known and is especially useful for Hannah Mitchell. Carol McPhee and Ann Fitzgerald (eds.) Teresa Billington-Greig The non-violent militant: selected writings of Teresa Billington-Greig, Routledge, 1987 is a valuable collection of her writings.

The Women’s Social and Political Union (the Suffragettes)

The best introduction to the Suffragettes is Andrew Rosen, Rise up, Women!, Routledge, 1974 which expanded and improved on Roger Fulford Votes for Women, Faber 1957, although Fulford is still the most readable study. Laura E. Nym Mayhall The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860-1930, Oxford University Press, 2003 is an important revisionist study. It considers the image of upper-class women chaining themselves to the rails of 10 Downing Street, smashing windows of public buildings, and going on hunger strikes in the cause of ‘votes for women’ have become visually synonymous with the British suffragette movement over the past century. Their story has become lore among feminists, in effect separating women's fight for voting rights from contemporary issues in British political history and disconnecting their militancy from other forms of political militancy in Britain in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. Mayhall examines the strategies that suffragettes employed to challenge the definitions of citizenship in Britain. She examines the resistance origins within liberal political tradition, its emergence during Britain's involvement in the South African War, and its enactment as spectacle. Enlarging the study of the militant campaign for suffrage, she analyses not only its implications for the social history of gender but also, and more importantly, its connections to British political and intellectual history. Antonia Raeburn The militant suffragettes, Michael Joseph, 1973 and The suffragette view, David & Charles, 1976 and Midge Mackenzie (ed.) Shoulder to shoulder, Penguin, 1975 are valuable, shorter studies. Diane Atkinson The purple, white and green: suffragettes in London, 1906-14, Museum of London, 1992 and Cheryl R. Jorgensen-Earp “The transfiguring sword”: the just war of the Women’s Social and Political Union, University of Alabama Press, 1997 are more recent. Rosamund Billington Ideology and feminism: why the suffragettes were “wild women”, Women’s Studies International Forum v.5, no. 6, 1982 is an interesting article. Lisa Tickner The spectacle of women: imagery of the suffrage campaign 1907-14, Penguin, 1988 is excellent on the visual dimension to the movement. Diane Atkinson The Suffragettes in pictures, Sutton, 1997 is a useful collection of photographs, sources and posters. Joyce Marlow (ed.) Votes for Women: The Virago Book of Suffragettes, Virago, 2000 is a useful and accessible collection of primary sources.

Much of the work on the Pankhursts is to be found in their own writings or in biographical works. Martin Pugh The Pankhursts, Allen Lane, 2001 should now be regarded as the standard work. Although Emmeline and Sylvia have been subject to recent biographies, there are still no modern biographies of Christabel other than the extremely critical works by David Mitchell The fighting Pankhursts, Cape, 1967 and Queen Christabel, MacDonald and Jane’s, 1977. Timothy Larsen Christabel Pankhurst: Fundamentalism and Feminism in Coalition, Boydell Press, 2002 considers her role after 1918 when she turned her energies to Christian fundamentalism and carved out a new career as a writer of best-selling evangelical books and as a high-profile speaker on the fundamentalist preaching circuit, particularly in the United States. Primary material can be found in the autobiographies: Christabel Pankhurst Unshackled: the Story of How We Won the Vote, Hutchinson, 1959 and Emmeline Pankhurst My own story, 1914, Virago, 1978. June Purvis Emmeline Pankhurst, UCL, 2002 and Paula Bartley Emmeline Pankhurst, Routledge, 2002 are the best biographies. Elizabeth Sarah ‘Christabel Pankhurst: reclaiming her power’ in Dale Spender (ed.) Feminist theorists, Women’s Press, 1983 is more recent and short.

Sylvia Pankhurst has been better served. Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst, The suffragette movement, 1930, Virago, 1977 and Estelle Sylvia Pankhurst, A Sylvia Pankhurst reader, edited by Kathryn Dodd, Manchester UP, 1993 provide valuable primary material. There are four modern biographies: the first, by her son, Richard Keir Pethick Pankhurst, Sylvia Pankhurst: artist and crusader. Paddington Press, 1979, Patricia Romero Sylvia Pankhurst: portrait of a radical, Yale, 1987, Barbara Winslow Sylvia Pankhurst: sexual politics and political activism, UCL Press, 1996 and Shirley Harrison Sylvia Pankhurst: A Crusading Life 1882-1960, Aurum Press, 2003. Fran Abrams Freedom’s Cause: The Lives of the Suffragettes, Profile Books, 2003 is the story of the movement told through the lives of twelve of its leaders. Ann Morley with Liz Stanley The life and death of Emily Wilding Davison, Women’s Press, 1988 deals with the most tragic event of the Suffragette movement. Jane Marcus (ed.) Suffrage and the Pankhursts, Routledge, 1987 is a good collection of primary sources.

Anti-suffragists

Brian Harrison Separate spheres: the Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain, Croom Helm, 1978 is the only serious study of those who opposed calls for women’s suffrage. John Sutherland Mrs Humphrey Ward, OUP, 1991 considers the life of a feminist and prominent novelist who played a leading role in the campaign against women getting the vote.

Women’s Suffrage outside England

Leah Leneman A guid cause: the women’s suffrage movement in Scotland, Aberdeen University Press, 1991, 2^nd ed., 1998 is the leading text on Scotland. Cliona Murphy The Women’s Suffrage Movement and Irish Society in the Early Twentieth Century, Temple University Press, 1989 is a good introduction to the movement in Ireland. Louise Ryan Irish feminism and the vote: an anthology of the Irish citizen newspaper 1912-1920, Folens, 1996 is the best collection of sources.

First World War and after

Arthur Marwick Women at war, Fontana, 1977 is both well written and well illustrated. Gail Braybon Women workers in the First World War, Routledge, 2^nd ed., 1989 and Deborah Thom Nice Girls and Rude Girls: Women Workers in World War I, Tauris, 1998 look in greater detail at industrial workers. Carol Twinch Women on the land: their story during two world wars, Lutterworth, 1990 considers the agrarian dimension. Diana Condell and Jean Liddiard Working for victory? Images of women in the First World War 1914-1918, Routledge, 1987 provide a visual dimension. Gail Braybon and Penny Summerfield Out of the cage: women’s experiences in two world wars. Pandora, 1987 looks at both wars. Vera Brittain Testament of Youth, 1933, Virago, 1978 is the most poignant of autobiographies. Joyce Marlow (ed.) The Virago Book of Women and the Great War, Virago, 1998 is a valuable collection of primary sources.

Jill Liddington ‘The Women’s Peace Crusade’ in Dorothy Thompson (ed.) Over our dead bodies, Virago, 1983, Jo Vellacott, Jo Feminist consciousness and the First World War, History Workshop, no. 23, Spring 1987 and Anti-war suffragists, History, vol. 62, October 1977 and Ann Wiltsher Most dangerous women, Pandora, 1985 look at those women who did not support the war.

Johanna Alberti Beyond suffrage: feminists in war and peace 1914-1928, Macmillan, 1989 examines the lives of seven key feminists in the 1910s and 1920s. Deirdre Beddoe Back to home and duty, Pandora, 1989, Brian Harrison Prudent revolutionaries: Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars, Oxford University Press, 1987, Cheryl Law Suffrage and power: the women’s movement 1918-1928, I.B. Tauris, 1997 and Martin Pugh Women and the women’s movement in Britain 1914-1999, Macmillan, 2^nd ed., 2000 take the story to 1928 and beyond.

Aspects of Chartism: Dr William Price

Dr William Price (Llantrisant)

Reference code(s): GB 0210 WPRICE, National Library of Wales

Title: Dr William Price (Llantrisant) Papers

Biographical history

William Price[1] was born at Ty’n y Coedcae, the parish of Rudry, Glamorgan on 4^th March 1800. He was the third son of the seven children of Rev. William Price and his wife Mary. He went to school in Machen. When he was thirteen, he was sent to Dr Evan Williams, surgeon, of Caerphilly. In 1820, Price went to study medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons. He passed the examinations of both the College and the Hall within twelve months. He returned to South Wales in 1823 and was a doctor in the Nantgarw, Treforest and Pontypridd area. As one steeped in Druidic lore, Price was a worshipper of Nature.

Later, he became interested in the Chartist movement and was appointed the leader of the Pontypridd Chartists. He had also been involved in the planning of the armed uprising Newport and was thus forced to flee to France. Price met John Masklyn, an English doctor friend of his college days and set up a practice. Price returned to Wales in 1840, took up residence in Eglwysilan and opened a practice combining a holistic approach with his version of Druidism. His first child was born of Ann Morgan of Pentyrch in 1841, and named her Gwenhiolen Hiarhles Morganwg (Gwenllian Iarless Morgannwh).

In 1860, he made his way to Paris again after a warrant was issued. Here, he was introduced to Pierre Joseph Proudhon, French philosopher of revolutionary bent. Price returned to Wales in June 1866, bought a practice in Llantrisant and established himself in Ty’r Clettwr. In December 1870, he met Gwenllian Llywelyn, from Clawddnewydd near Ruthun. On 18^th January 1884, Price secured a place for himself in history. As the villagers were coming out of Church, they found him cremating the dead body of his five month old son, Iesu Grist. Cremation was illegal in the British Isles at the time, but his success in the court case paved the way for the Cremation Act, 1902. Before he died at the age of 92, he had fathered another son, Iesu Grist and daughter, Penelope Elizabeth. He died on 23^rd January 1893, in Llantrisant, and his body was cremated, as he had instructed, on top of two tons of coal.

Scope and content

Deeds, 1697-1835, relating to properties in Bedwas and Maugham; correspondence, [c. 1825]-1884; financial papers, 1859-1896; pedigree of the Price family, compiled [c. 1865]; printed works written by William Price, [1838]-1871, including Y Maen Chwyf and Gwyllllis Yn Nayd; works concerning Price, [c. 1855]-1965, with press cuttings, [c. 1920]-1953; and miscellaneous ephemera relating to the Price family, 1859-1906.

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[1] The following sources were consulted in the compilation of this description: National Library of Wales Minor Lists and Summaries, (1988); Meic Stephens Oxford Companion to the Literature of Wales, Oxford, 1986; Cyril Bracegirdle Dr William Price: Saint or Sinner?, Llanrwst, 1997; John Cule ‘The Eccentric Doctor William Price of Llantrisant (1800-1893)’; Morgannwg: Transactions of the Glamorgan Local History Society, volume vii, (1963), pages 98-119; Islwyn ap Nicholas A Welsh Heretic: Dr William Price, Llantrisant, Aberystwyth, 1973; The Rev Dr John R. Guy ‘The Rudry Radical: Dr William Price of Ty’n Y Coedcae, Part 2’, Caerphilly, 6, (March 2000), pages 52-64; Brian Davies ‘Empire and Identity: the case of Dr William Price’, in David Smith (ed.) A People and a Proletariat : Essays in the History of Wales 1780-1880, London, 1980; National Library of Wales W. W. Price Biographical Index, volume xxii.

Aspects of Chartism: Mid-Wales

The main industry in 19^th century Mid-Wales was the woollen mills. There were three main towns involved, Newtown[1], Llanidloes[2] and Welshpool. The conditions of the woollen workers were poor. It was common for workers to work 14 hours per day and on occasions they would work 36 hour continuous shifts. Children were employed as feeders (feeding the wool into the machines) and horrific accidents to the children were not infrequent, with losses of limbs. Wages, living conditions and public health were poor in the towns. Poverty was rife, unemployment high and there were outbreaks of Cholera in the 1830s and the1840s. Although there were no trade unions the Friendly Societies acted as a type of union to which most workers belonged. In 1819, there was a march of Friendly Society members at Newtown to demonstrate against reductions in wages and this saw outbreaks of violence and damage to property. At Llanidloes in 1830 there was a five week strike by woollen workers which succeeded in winning higher wages. During the Reform Crisis of 1831-32, whilst the riots were taking place in Merthyr Tydfil, Political Unions were being formed in Mid-Wales. Expecting violence the authorities swore in 300 Special Constables, but there was no trouble. However, the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 did occasion violence and troops were required to restore order in Llanfair Caereinion in 1837 when a Relieving Officer was attacked.

In 1839, Llanidloes became well known all over the country as one of the centres of a growing revolutionary movement among working people. As well as not being allowed to vote, there were many other reasons for the ordinary workers to rise up against the government in the 1830s. A new law of 1834, just three years before Queen Victoria was crowned, brought in very harsh treatment of the poor and set up the terrible workhouse system. The local flannel-making industry was in depression and new machinery had put many of the poorest out of work. The situation led to outbreaks of violence in many areas, with unrest in industrial towns and the burning of ricks in country districts.

One of the radical groups which had set up the national Chartist movement was the Birmingham Political Union. It was with their help that a Chartist branch was set up in Newtown in 1837 and held its first public meeting in April that year to protest against the Poor Law. Further Chartist groups were set up in Llanidloes and Welshpool in 1838, though the latter did not survive for long. In October 1838 the first Chartist demonstration in Wales was held in Mid-Wales. At this meeting the Chartist Petition was approved and Charles Jones of Welshpool was chosen as delegate to the Chartist National Convention. Jones had lived in Birmingham and been a member of the Birmingham Political Union prior to returning home to Welshpool. Another local leader was Thomas Powell[3], originally from Newtown but, after training in London as an ironmonger, had set up in business at Llanidloes. Both of these men and most of the Mid-Wales leaders were responsible reformers who supported peaceful methods to achieve their aims. Not so, however, Henry Hetherington[4], a Birmingham Chartist who came to Mid-Wales in 1839 and advocated the taking up of firearms for ‘self-defence’. Unfortunately Hetherington’s views appealed to the younger fanatics amongst the Mid-Wales Chartists who proceeded to arm themselves, obtaining guns from local farmers, drilling under an ex-militiaman, making pikes, grenades and bombs.

By early 1839, the local landowners, magistrates, members of the church and others who had all the power in the area were getting worried by rumours of an armed revolt against them. Normally there was just a night watchman and part-time unpaid constables on duty in the town, so the magistrates sent for reinforcements. Three police constables were sent to Llanidloes from London, and Thomas Marsh, who was one of the wealthy landowners from the district, formed a ‘private army’ of around three hundred local men armed with sticks. They were probably people who were his workers and tenants, and had to do as he said. Like almost all ordinary workers of the time they would have been paid very little and could lose their jobs and homes if they upset the powerful ruling class. They would probably have supported the Chartists if they were able to[5].

A Chartist meeting was being held in Llanidloes on April 30^th 1839 when three of their members were arrested by the policemen from London. They were taken to the Trewythen Arms in Great Oak Street, and when the crowd of Chartists found out what had happened to their supporters they all headed for the building... When the crowd of Chartist supporters arrived at the Trewythen Arms in the centre of Llanidloes they found it surrounded by the ‘private army’ of special constables. This enraged the crowd who stormed the building and set free the three Chartists who had been arrested by the London policemen. One of the policemen was badly beaten, but the other two escaped and hid, terrified of the mob. The inside of the building was wrecked but the authorities, scared of losing their power, claimed that there was a serious armed revolution going on. It appears, though, that most of the people involved in this affray were not Chartists but teenage labourers and other known troublemakers. Thomas Powell, the Chartist leader, was now in charge of the town of Llanidloes and he tried to act responsibly, being concerned to maintain the peace and appointing watchmen to ensure it.

T.E. Marsh, the Mayor of Llanidloes, however, was determined to take action and he again requested assistance from the Government, and this time they sent a contingent of the 14^th Light Infantry from Brecon plus a troop of around two hundred Yeomanry cavalry that arrived on Saturday 4^th May, 1839. The Chartists were not prepared to take on the army and fled, mostly to the South Wales ironworks where they considered they would be safe from apprehension. . The troops sealed off the town and arrested over thirty Chartists, including three women and Thomas Powell, and sent them to Montgomery jail. Although there was little resistance to be found in the town a military force stayed in the town until the following year. They were tried at Montgomery Assizes on 15^th July 1839 where they were defended by Hugh Williams, the Carmarthen Lawyer and radical. All were found guilty. Thomas Powell was sent to prison for twelve months and was charged to find sureties of £400 after his release to keep the peace for a further five years. James Morris was transported for fifteen years for stabbing with intent to do bodily harm; Abraham Owen and Lewis Humphreys were transported for seven years for drilling in the use of arms; John Evans (Tailor), John Lewis (Tatw) and John Lewis (Crippplegate) were each sent to prison for twelve months with hard labour; others were sent to prison for six months with or without hard labour; and others lesser sentences of imprisonment[6].

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[1] B. Bennett Rowlands History of Newport, Newport, 1914 contains some useful material on the early nineteenth century.

[2] E. R. Horsfall-Turner Municipal history of Llanidloes, Llanidloes, 1908 gives a municipal perspective on the events of 1839.

[3] A short biography of Thomas Powell can be found in J. E. Lloyd and R. T. Jenkins (eds.) The Dictionary of Welsh Biography down in 1940, University of Wales Press, 1959, pages 776-777. Powell was born in 1805 in Newtown, Wales. He moved to London youth as ironmonger’s assistant, worked for Hetherington and became bookseller himself. He was a Chartist missionary in Wales in the 1840s and took party of English ‘political’ emigrants to South America (San Salvador) via New York where he worked briefly. He died in 1850 in Trinidad. He contributed to possible Chartist influences on constitution of San Salvador.

[4] Ambrose G. Barker Henry Hetherington 1792-1849, London, 1938 remains the only modern biography. Shorter biographies can be found in J. Bellamy and J. Saville (eds.) Dictionary of Labour History, volume i, Macmillan, 1972, pages 167-172 and Joseph O. Baylen and Norbert J. Grossman (eds.) Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals since 1770, volume 2: 1830-1870, Brighton, 1984, pages 236-238.

[5] Humphrey Gwalchmai ‘Y Chartists yn Llanidloes’, Yr Athraw, Llanidloes, 1839 and Anon (George Thomas) History of the Chartists and the bloodless wars on Montgomeryshire, Welshpool, 1840 are the most detailed contemporary accounts. Edward Hamer The Chartist Outbreak in Llanidloes, Llanidloes, 1867 reprinted 1939 is a sound near-contemporary pamphlet.

[6] Valuable analysis of the disturbances can be found in J. E. Samuel ‘The Montgomeryshire Chartist riots’, Cymru Fu, volume ii, 1889; J.D. Spencer ‘The Chartist movement in Wales’, in O. M. Edwards (ed.) Wales, volume ii, London, 1895; and, T. I. Nicholas One hundred years ago: the story of the Montgomeryshire Chartists, Aberystwyth, 1939.

Aspects of Chartism: The West Country

This was an agricultural/rural area where there was a cloth trade and cottage industry elements. The development of technology meant some job losses, so poverty existed in many areas. Bath, an eighteenth century spa town, was the centre of a declining tourist industry.

In March 1834, the Tolpuddle Martyrs were convicted under the 1797 Illegal Oaths Act and were sentenced to seven years’ transportation. In August 1837, Samuel and George Morse-Bartlett and Anthony Phillips founded the Bath Working Men’s Association[1]. It advocated universal manhood suffrage and a secret ballot. In 1838, the Bath WMA adopted the Charter. In November 1839, a torch light meeting attended by 3,000 people was held in Trowbridge and on 1^st April 1840, Vincent addressed a large meeting at Devizes. The Charter and National Petition were adopted. Four thousand people attended, but a hostile group set upon the Chartists with stones and bludgeons. Vincent was knocked senseless and the anti-Chartist mob seized the Chartists’ banners. The Chartists barely escaped alive. This violence effectively put a stop to public meetings of Chartists in this area but some Chartists then armed themselves and rioting occurred: many Chartist leaders were arrested.

George Morse-Bartlett was a reporter, dogmatic speaker, convinced democrat, republican and mainly a moral force man. William Young, a Bath jeweller and pawnbroker; was a physical force man. John Moore was “as determined a Chartist as any in the West” and bridged the gulf between the physical and moral force elements. He was treasurer of the Trowbridge Working Men’s Association in 1838 and became sub-treasurer of the National Charter Association in April 1841.

During its ten years of activity, Chartism gained hardly any hold in the rural areas of Somerset and Wiltshire[2]. The amount of activity was limited because of a “deep suspicion of the urban mob by countrymen.” Where Chartism did exist, cloth was manufactured and a technological revolution was in progress that caused distress to some workers. Chartists were a very mixed bunch: farmers, lawyers, clerks, handloom weavers, and parsons. Chartism started in a phase of violence and depression but became more stable and highly organised later. Women attended early Chartist meetings and a Female Radical Association was set up in 1840. Many Chartist chapels were also set up in this part of the world. Vincent came to Bath and started a stamped Chartist newspaper, the National Vindicator.

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[1] R.S. Neale Bath 1650-1850: A Social History Routledge, 1981, pages 367-380 examines Chartism in the town.

[2] R.B. Pugh ‘Chartism in Somerset and Wiltshire’, in Asa Briggs (ed.) Chartism Studies, Macmillan, 1959, pages 174-219 examines developments in this area. Roger Wells ‘Southern Chartism’, Rural History 2, 1991 reprinted in John Rule and Roger Wells Crime, Protest and Popular Politics in Southern England 1740-1850, Hambledon, 1997, pages 127-152 is a valuable corrective.