Middle-class urban culture?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A leisured class?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reforming or re-forming leisure?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oxford Bibliographies: Chartism

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

Popular culture: Case Study 3: The ‘opium eaters’

The importance and impact of drug taking across social boundaries in the nineteenth century has only recently become a subject of serious historical study. [1] Opium or opiate compounds were used widely in the first half of the nineteenth century and, though the main features of addiction and withdrawal had been known since the 1750s, most doctors still thought of opium not as dangerous or threatening but central to effective medicine. Until Pharmacy Act 1868 opium was on open sale and could be bought in any grocer’s or druggist’s shop. Regular ‘opium eaters’ were accepted in their communities and rarely the subject of medical attention. They were certainly not seen as ‘sick’, deviant or diseased as they were to be by 1900. Lack of access to orthodox medical care, the suspicion of the medical profession and positive hostility to professional medical treatment ensured the position opium held in popular culture as a major form of self-medication. [2] Society generally used opium for sleeplessness, headache or depression and these shaded imperceptibly into non-medical or ‘recreational’ uses.

Opium consumption was particularly high in the Fens in the nineteenth century and, according to an analysis made in 1862, more opium was sold in Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire and Manchester than in other parts of the country. The Fens were an unhealthy, marshy area where medical assistance, especially for the poor, was severely limited and where many of the working-classes were prone to ague, rheumatism and neuralgia. The habit was limited to the low-lying areas centring on the Isle of Ely and south Lincolnshire. [3] The largest consumers were the labourers who came from the outlying fens rather than village or town dwellers.

Opium smokers in the East End of London: Illustrated London News, 1 August 1874

Why was opium of such importance in the Fens? There was a tradition of self-medication with opium being used to treat both people and animals. The introduction of new methods of exploiting the land resulted in declining standards of child care and an increasing in the doping of young babies with opiates: infant mortality in Wisbech was 206 per thousand in the 1850s, higher than urban centres like Sheffield. Doping young babies was essential as women could be away from home for long periods of time working on the itinerant ‘gangs’ that became a more source of employment after 1830. Opiates may have been used to dispose of unwanted children, though this was not peculiar to the Fens. Opium could be used as an escape from the perceived reduction of status for the agricultural labourer that resulted from enclosure and drainage. Certainly use for euphoric purposes was not uncommon in the Fens. Dr Rayleigh Vicars wrote in the 1890s:

...their colourless lives are temporarily brightened by the passing dreamland vision afforded them by the baneful poppy.[4]

It is very difficult to estimate the effect opiate use had in the Fens though there may be a connection between it and the high general death rate. In the 1850s, it stood at 22 per thousand in southern Lincolnshire, a figure as high as the environmentally less agreeable industrial areas of Huddersfield and Keighley in Yorkshire.

Reaction to opium eating in the fens, with its population apparently able to control and moderate its consumption was markedly different from the concern expressed about the urban problem. The ‘stimulant’ use of drugs by the urban working-classes was perceived as a threat to public order in a way that did not apply in the Fens. This is indicative of the way in which views of opiate use were coloured by the social and class setting. The use of opium for child doping was attacked in the 1830s. Behind this was a desire to remould popular culture into a more acceptable form and a critique of the basic pattern of child rearing by the working-classes. Using opium as a scapegoat led to criticism of its use being diverted away from the realities of the urban environment to the individual failings of working mothers. The uses of opium by adults and for children in the rest of society went unremarked or were viewed more tolerantly. The writings of Thomas De Quincey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, both frequent users, attracted a great deal of attention after 1830 and by drawing attention to the habit may have led to a gradual change towards a harsher, more restrictive attitude. [5]

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[1] See in particular Berridge, V., and Edwards, G., Opium and the People: Opiate Use in Nineteenth Century England, (Yale University Press), 1987, revised ed., (Free Association), 1999, and Foxcroft, Louise, The making of addiction: the ‘use and abuse’ of opium in nineteenth-century Britain, (Ashgate), 2007.

[2] Milligan, Barry, ‘The opium den in Victorian London’, in Gilman, Sander L., and Zhou, Xun, (eds.), Smoke: a global history of smoking, (Reaktion), 2004, pp. 118-125.

[3] High opium consumption may have characterised areas like this: there is evidence, for instance, of similar practices among the poor in the Romney Marshes in Kent. See, Beveridge, Valerie, ‘Opium in the Fens in Nineteenth-century England’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, Vol. 34, (1979), pp. 293-313.

[4] Vicars, G. Rayleigh, `Laudanum drinking in Lincolnshire’, St George’s Hospital Gazette, Vol. 1, (1893), p. 24.

[5] See, Morrison, Robert, ‘Opium-eaters and magazine wars: De Quincey and Coleridge in 1821’, Victorian Periodicals Review, Vol. 30, (1997), pp. 27-40.

Popular Culture: Case Study 2: Temperance

In the early-nineteenth century ale, wine and spirits were cheap and consumed in large quantities. [1] With the dangers of disease from untreated water it was natural for town-dwellers to rely increasingly on alcohol and on water that had been boiled with tea and coffee. People did not believe that local water would ever be safe to drink, as Chadwick’s inspectors found out from London slum-dwellers in the 1840s. The scarcity of drinking water even created the profession of water-carrier. There were alternatives to alcohol: milk, though this was considered a dangerous drink even when fresh; soda-water was not made commercially until 1790 and ginger-beer was not sold in London until 1822. Tea [2] had become a virtual necessity among the working-classes by 1830 and per capital coffee consumption increased faster than tea between 1820 and 1850. [3] But alcohol was more than just a thirst-quencher; it was thought to impart physical stamina, extra energy and confidence. Agricultural labourers, for example, believed that it was impossible to get in the harvest without their ‘harvest beer’. Alcohol was regarded as a painkiller: it assisted dentists and surgeons before the use of anaesthetics, quietened babies and gave protection against infection. It also relieved psychological strain, moderating the sense of social isolation and gloom, and enhanced festivity; drinking places provided a focus for the community. [4]

Before 1800, drinking was not rigidly segregated by rank. Squires, for instance, often drank with their social inferiors. However, by 1830 a measure of social segregation had developed and by 1860 no respectable urban Englishman entered an ordinary public house. [5] Private, as opposed to public, drinking was becoming the mark of respectability. Drinking was also a predominantly male preserve and encouraged men to enjoy better living standards than their wives. On paydays drinking houses were often besieged by wives anxious to get money to feed and clothe their children before it was drunk away.

The drinks trade comprised a large complex of different interests. [6] Of particular importance was the powerful landed interest that helps to explain the regional variations in support for the temperance movement. The barley crop was most important to farmers and without the distillers’ demands for poor-quality grain, lighting lands in Scotland and Ireland might not have been cultivated. Politically the drinks trade drew its prestige from the reliance government placed on drink taxes for national revenue. Attitudes to alcohol were deeply ingrained in British society. Abandoning drinking was, for the working-classes, more than simply not going to public houses. It isolated workers from much popular culture and from a whole complex of recreational activities.

The Reformation Societies that emerged in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were enthusiastic about temperance but the main platform of their movement was the suppression of vice. The temperance movement that emerged in the 1830s differed from them in its concentration on the single issue of spirits, their belief in total abstinence and their repudiation until after 1850 of legislative support. [7] The anti-spirits movement that developed in the 1830s was not a planned movement, at least initially and arose independently at the same time in different places. Why did it develop? It was one of several attempts to propagate a middle-class style of life and arose at a time when drunkenness was already becoming unfashionable. Sobriety received the support of influential groups. Medical opinion, since the 1790s, had increasingly attacked its physical and psychological effects. Evangelicals saw excessive drinking as a sin. Radicals attacked alcohol for its effects on the standard of living of the working-classes and coffee trades wished to popularise their product. The movement would not have made such an impact in the 1830s without the techniques of agitation and mass persuasion used by evangelical humanitarians, especially the anti-slavery campaign. Though any clear link between industrialisation and temperance is difficult to establish, the earliest anti-spirits societies originated in textile manufacturing areas in Ulster and Glasgow and spread to England though the textile centres of Preston, Leeds and Bradford. Some employers welcomed the more reliable workforce that temperance encouraged. Money not spent on drink could, of course, be spent on home-produced goods and some industrialists welcomed the movement as a means of accelerating economic growth and educating people on where to spend their wages.

Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, a debate within the temperance movement raged between those whose attack was focused on spirits while advocating moderation elsewhere and those who believed in total abstinence. But while these approaches gained support among those sections of the working population for whom respectability was an objective, the appeal of temperance and abstinence from alcohol was of more limited appeal for the poor, for whom it still provided temporary escape. [8] Representing the ideals of self-control and self-denial, the temperance movement epitomised middle-class Victorian values. Its values were shaped by the Evangelical movement that was concerned with salvation and the Utilitarian movement that was concerned with efficiency and valued self-control and self-denial. Joseph Kidd, a late-Victorian journalist for the Contemporary Review wrote:

To be able to rule self and transmit to children an organisation (society) accustomed to self-restraint and moderation in all things is one of the chief delights and aspirations to the moral nature of a true man. [9]

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[1] Burnett, John, Liquid pleasures: a social history of drinks in modern Britain, (Routledge), 1999, provides an excellent overview.

[2] Fromer, Julie E., A necessary luxury: tea in Victorian England, (Ohio University Press), 2008, and the broader Griffiths, John, Tea: the drink that changed the world, (André Deutsch), 2007.

[3] Bramah, Edward, Tea and coffee: a modern view of three hundred years of tradition, (Hutchinson), 1972.

[4] Holt, Mack P., (ed.), Alcohol: a social and cultural history, (Berg), 2006 provides an overview.

[5] Jennings, Paul, The local: a history of the English pub, (Tempus), 2007, Haydon, Peter, The English pub: a history, (Hale), 1994, and Kneale, James, ‘‘A problem of supervision’: moral geographies of the nineteenth-century British public house’, Journal of Historical Geography, Vol. 25, (1999), pp. 333-348.

[6] Gourvish, T. R., and Wilson, R. G., The British brewing industry, 1830-1980, (Cambridge University Press), 1994.

[7] Greenaway, J. R., Drink and British politics since 1830: a study in policy-making, (Palgrave Macmillan), 2003, and Nicholls, James, The Politics of Alcohol: A History of the Drinks Question in England, (Manchester University Press), 2009

[8] Ibid, Harrison, B., Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815-1872, and ibid, Lambert, W. R., Drink and Sobriety in Victorian Wales, provide the best analysis on the issue of temperance and take the story forward into the second half of the nineteenth century.

[9] Kidd, Joseph, ‘Temperance and Its Boundaries,’ Contemporary Review, Vol. 34, (1879), p. 353.

Popular culture: Case Study 1: Cruelty to animals

The emergence of ‘respectability’ as the defining characteristic of acceptable forms of behaviour was a major feature of the changed attitudes to traditional forms of social behaviour. This can be seen in the cases of cruelty to animals, temperance and the growing problem of drug addiction. These three examples of changing attitudes to popular culture illustrate the importance of pressure, either voluntary or through legislation, to control and modify aspects of people’s lives. To those, from all sections of society, who argued for change the issue was one of improving the quality of economic and social life, enhancing respectable attitudes and removing potential tensions and disorder. To those affected, reform attacked what they maintained was their traditional right to enjoy themselves and to escape -- if momentarily -- from their social conditions.

The staging of contests between animals was still one of the most common and popular forms of recreation in England in the early nineteenth century. [1] Cock fighting was the normal feature at fairs and race meetings involving the mingling of all social groups, though only men, and accompanied by heavy betting and often local and regional rivalries. [2] Hunting and hawking were widespread. Small children were notorious for amusing themselves in torturing living creatures but they were merely reflecting the standards of the adult world. This was largely what Keith Thomas calls ‘the cruelty of indifference’ as animals were outside the terms of their moral reference. [3]

During the eighteenth century the feelings of animals became a matter of very great concern and led to agitation in the early nineteenth century culminating in the formation in 1824 of the Society (later Royal Society) for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the passage of legislation against cruelty to horses and cattle in 1822, to dogs in 1839 and 1854 and against animal baiting and cock-fighting in 1835 and 1849. There are various reasons why this changed occurred. There had long been a tradition that unnecessary cruelty to animals was wrong not because of any moral concern with animals but because of its brutalising effects on human character. [4] It did not go unnoticed that the poisoner William Palmer hanged in 1856 had conducted cruel experiments on animals as a boy.

In the early-nineteenth century there was a move away from this point of view towards one that regarded cruelty to animals as morally wrong whether it had human consequences or not. At a less philosophical level animal sports were associated with noise, gambling and disorder. Hunting proved to be a more difficult issue and there is something in the contemporary argument that in the long war against blood sports it was the most plebeian activities that were criminalised and those sports with gentry and upper-class support that survived.

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[1] Ritvo, H., The Animal Estate: the English and other creatures in the Victorian Age, (Penguin), 1990, and Harrison, B., ‘Animals and the State in Nineteenth Century England’, English Historical Review, Vol. 88 (1973), pp. 786-820, reprinted in his Peaceable Kingdoms:  Stability and Change in Modern Britain, (Oxford University Press), 1982, on cruelty to animals.

[2] Jobey, George, ‘Cock-fighting in Northumberland and Durham during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, Archaeologia Aeliana, 5^th ser., Vol. 20, (1992), pp. 1-25, is a good local study.

[3] Thomas, Keith, Man and the natural world: changing attitudes in England 1500-1800, (Allen Lane), 1983, p. 148.

[4] Li, C. H., ‘A union of Christianity, humanity, and philanthropy: the Christian tradition and the prevention of cruelty to animals in nineteenth-century England’, Society & Animals, Vol. 8, (2000), pp. 265-285.

Why did women want the vote?

This is an extract from my forthcoming book: Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain, 1830-1918

The prolonged demise of Chartism during the 1850s sapped working-class calls for the franchise and the fragmented nature of party politics in the 1850s meant that the issue of parliamentary reform and calls for women’s suffrage, never a vocal force, died away. [1] A concerted campaign for women’s suffrage did not emerge until the mid-1860s. Although votes for women was an obvious area of feminist concern, it was by no means an overriding consideration and before 1914 proved one of the areas of least success for the movement. The constant denial of the parliamentary franchise to women when feminist campaigns were enjoying success in many other areas sets it apart not as their dominant concern but as the demand that successive governments were not willing to concede.

The emergence of the suffrage movement coincided with important changes in the relationship between the state and society. In 1860, a division between the public tasks of government and the private worlds of work, family, religion and property was still largely accepted. By the late 1890s. the expansion of social policies and social responsibilities had transformed and extended the local and national role of the state and the boundaries between what was public and what was private had been significantly blurred as the state increasingly interfered in areas of life previously regarded as private. Enthusiastic and radical local elites established a dominant niche in the enhanced and in some cases elective administration of education, poor relief, public health and in improving the urban environment within the policies and monitoring of the central state. Socially and ideologically, Britain was, or at least gave the impression of being, a more collectively organised country in 1900 than it had been in 1860. [2]

Women approached their demand for parliamentary suffrage from different directions. Their specifically political arguments centred on the issues of equality and representation while ethical arguments ranged from a simple declaration of justice to a belief in woman’s moral superiority and fitness. Suffragists recognised the force of contemporary opinion that potential voters should be demonstrably fit to exercise the franchise freely and intelligently, particularly when presenting the case to Parliament. [3] The transformation of the local and national state called into question the traditional view of citizenship. In 1860, it was assumed that the vote was not a natural right but a historic privilege grounded in an ancient, possible Anglo-Saxon constitution. [4] It was based on the independent man as head of the household and was used to justify the exclusion of women from the franchise. [5]

When Georgian men claimed to be ‘independent, they were drawing upon a political culture that privileged freedom from obligation, self-ownership, patriotism, straightforward manliness and constitutional balance. [6]

When the reforming Whigs legislatively defined the citizen as being an ‘independent man’ in 1832, it opened the door to generations of radical working men who, as breadwinners in their households, claimed that they too met this standard. Although property qualification retained their importance in the debates about electoral reform in the 1860s, Liberals and Radicals began to broaden their definition of property qualification to include the recognition of men’s property in their skills and sought to enfranchise skilled, respectable workers on this basis. The question was whether women were entitled to the vote on the same terms as men, an argument that gained credence as single women were given the municipal vote. Married women, who could not own property of their own before 1882, could not qualify. [7] Equality could simply mean the vote for single women and widows, who might own or rent property and pay their own taxes. Frances Cobbe Power argued that enfranchising a limited group of women might restore:

…the just balance in favour of an educated constituency against the weight of the illiterate male voters now entrusted with the franchise. [8]

After the Reform Act of 1867, which was gradually to extend the franchise to approximately 60 per cent of adult men, including virtually all urban householders, this could include all women who paid rates. After John Stuart Mill unsuccessfully attempted to amend the Reform Bill in 1867 to include women, Lydia Becker led a vigorous campaign for women who paid rates to be placed on the parliamentary register giving them the right to vote in the election of 1868. She suggested that in medieval and early-modern England, property had given women as heads of household the right to exercise the vote or to send deputies to vote on their behalf. She also argued on a legal technicality that the 1867 Act by using the term ‘man’ rather than ‘male person’ had generically included ‘women’. The basis of her campaign was ‘no taxation without representation’ and Becker organised a large number of potential voters in the Manchester area and elsewhere to register as voters. However, presiding barristers were unconvinced by either the historical or linguistic arguments and although a few claims to registration succeeded, they were rejected in a higher court and many feminists were unhappy at the conservative implications of limiting enfranchisement only to single women.

For many women, this approach led them to a surprisingly uncritical acceptance of the property terms of the Victorian male franchise arguing that acceptance of a restricted franchise was a matter of expediency rather than of principle. [9] For instance, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, later leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) recognised existing social and political conditions and maintained that voting was a right granted only to those whose proof of good citizenship or ‘fitness to vote’ could be weighed by the contents of their purse or the amount of their property. This was no more than equality with men, within the existing arrangements. Fawcett was not concerned with the merits or otherwise of the system, but more with its lack of logic: if propertied men could vote, why not propertied women? Feminists who accepted this position were asserting their rights as a female propertied class as distinct from their gender rights. Conservative women, in particular, focused on the contrast between the exclusion of middle-class women and the gradual extension of voting rights to working-class men. Feminists of all political views were unhappy with the performance of successive governments, not merely about women’s questions but in their attitude to a host of social and economic problems. Their analysis of those inadequacies rested on the unbalanced nature of representation that denied the vote to outsiders, women and the propertyless poor. The argument that women’s representation would force Parliament to consider matters previously neglected was as common a rationale as the broader moral reasoning based on a simple notion of equal justice. Not only was an unrepresentative government ‘despotic’ but it would also inevitably ignore the problems of the unrepresented.

The second case for enfranchising all women and men was based on grounds of their equal humanity and natural rights. Many feminists shared the views of the liberal John Stuart Mill, who in his works On Liberty (1859) and The Subjection of Women (1869) had written of citizenship as a means of self-development, offering the freedom to develop the individual’s fullest potential whether male or female. [10] Mill stressed the role of the intelligent, rational and educated citizen, man or woman, in a developed western civilisation. He feared, however, the destructive effects of democracy, a ‘collective mediocrity’ as he called it, arguing for educational qualifications and for forms of representation that safeguarded the power of the educated. Some middle-class suffragists, whether married or single, from the liberal elite, found Mill's ideal of citizenship one which offered them ways of expressing their own need for fulfilment in an active and committed life. For Barbara Leigh Bodichon, the most important effect of women’s suffrage was in increasing patriotism and establishing an ‘unselfish’ public spirit in which feminists could cast themselves as guardians of the national character. This was a less restricted view of citizenship since it did not necessarily exclude married women and was not incompatible with the sexual division of labour. These arguments could rest, explicitly or implicitly, upon the exclusion of others, whether the uneducated poor, or those still termed ‘uncivilised’, beyond the western world. White British women claiming suffrage could use the language of contrast, comparing their own progress and moral character to the drudgery and oppression of women in the rest of the world, a progress that could be carried even further if they were allowed their rightful place.

Others drew on the language of ‘separate spheres’, maintaining that the different qualities that women possessed, and the concerns which arose out of domestic and philanthropic responsibilities, for children, for public health, and for the poor, were needed in public life, locally and nationally. This was a language frequently heard, as women were gradually admitted into some areas of local government, though it also rested on the existence, and the implicit exclusion, of those such as the poor and married working-class women, on whose behalf such responsibilities were claimed. Independence and self-development also featured in their arguments. Political participation would release women’s potential to the full. The grounds on which women from different feminist organisations demanded the vote did not differ radically. Their arguments tended to cluster round these considerations; their clashes occurred far more commonly over tactics, over means rather than ends. All the suffrage bodies founded during the period before the Suffragettes used similar methods of persuasion but differed in how extensive a franchise they were prepared to ask for in the first instance.

Feminist societies largely maintained some distance from direct support for mainstream politics, whether Liberal or Conservative, and criticised both for their entrenched attitudes to women. A growing number of Conservatives began to support women’s suffrage, usually because they believed they would benefit from votes for propertied women. The Conservative argument placed less emphasis on rights and more on the duties of the citizen to the state. Nor was this emphasis confined to the right wing. It was increasingly a feature of both Liberal and Labour suffragism and of feminist propaganda. Many feminists professed political beliefs that coloured their feminist inclinations, but for the most part women of differing political opinions worked together. The various grounds on which women claimed their right to the parliamentary vote represented the entire spectrum of political opinion and reflected contradictions between the reality of women’s powerlessness and prevailing political ideologies.

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[1] Saunders, Robert, Democracy and the Vote in British Politics, 1848-1867: The Making of the Second Reform Act, (Ashgate), 2011, pp. 1-26.

[2] The extension of the role of the state can be approached through Corrigan, P., and Sayer, D., The Great Arch: English State Formation as Cultural Revolution, (Basil Blackwell), 1985, Harling, Philip, ‘The powers of the Victorian state’, in Mandler, Peter, (ed.), Liberty and Authority in Victorian Britain, (Oxford University Press), 2006, pp. 25-50, and Harling Philip, The Modern British State: An Historical Introduction, (Polity), 2001.

[3] Bolt, Christine, ‘The ideas of British suffragism’ in ibid, Purvis, June, and Holton, Sandra Stanley, (eds.), Votes for Women, pp. 34-57, and Rendall, Jane, ‘Citizenship, culture and civilisation: The languages of British suffragists, 1866-1874’, in Daley, Caroline, and Noland, Melanie, (eds.), Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives, (New York University Press), 1994, pp. 127-150.

[4] Hill, Christopher ‘The Norman Yoke’, in his Puritanism and Revolution, (Secker & Warburg), 1958, pp. 50-112, considers this issue. Le joug normand: La conquête normande et son interprétation dans l’historiographie et la pensée politique anglaises, (Université de Caen), 2004, pp. 15-55, provides a more recent perspective.

[5] On the development of the notion of the ‘independent man’ see, McCormack, Matthew, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England, (Manchester University Press), 2011, especially pp. 187-200.

[6] Ibid, p. 201.

[7] On the reform of married women’s property law, see pp. 164-166.

[8] Power, Frances Cobbe, Why Women Desire the Franchise, (National Society for Women’s Suffrage), nd, p. 1.

[9] A similar view was expressed in the 1830s and 1840s by some radicals who saw the development of male household suffrage as a first step towards universal manhood suffrage. It too led to considerable disagreement within radicalism.

[10] Annas, Julia, ‘Mill and the Subjection of Women’, Philosophy, Vol. 52, (1977), pp. 179-194, and Smith, Elizabeth S., ‘John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women: A Re-examination’, Polity, Vol. 34, (2001), pp. 181-203. See also, Rendall, Jane, ‘The citizenship of women and the Reform Act of 1867’, in Hall, Catherine, McClelland, Keith, and Rendall, Jane, (eds.), Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867, (Cambridge University Press), 2000, pp. 119-178.

Rebellion in Canada: 1837-1885

In less than fifty years Canada experienced six major rebellions: in Lower and Upper Canada in late 1837 and 1838, the Fenian rebellions of 1866 and 1870 and Louis Riel’s resistance at Red River in 1869-1870 and his rebellion fifteen years later.

This book originated in my trilogy of studies on colonial rebellion and develops material from those books on rebellion in Canada. This allows me to examine the significance of rebellion in the development of the Canadian state as it evolved from a colonial organisation through responsible government and finally to its continental federal form after Confederation in 1867.
Chapter 1 examines the development of the two Canadas between the end of French Canada in 1760 and the turn of the century. Chapter 2 considers the economic, social, political, ideological and cultural tensions that evolved from the 1790s and the largely unsuccessful attempts by the colonial state and politicians in London to find acceptable and sustainable solutions to populist demands for greater autonomy. Chapter 3 looks in detail at the rebellions in 1837 and 1838 and at their immediate aftermath. Chapter 4 examines the ways in which Canadian politics developed in the newly united Province of Canada in the years between 1841 and the creation of Confederation in 1867. Chapter 5 considers at the ways in which Irish nationalism maintained a strong political presence in the United States and Canada from the beginning of the nineteenth century and the emergence of the Fenian Brotherhood in New York in 1858. The political impact of this movement was both enhanced and restricted by the American Civil War between 1861 and 1865 yet the Fenians emerged in April 1865 as a powerful, if increasingly divided, force with concrete plans for the liberation of Ireland. Chapter 6 explores in detail at the three Irish-American Fenian incursions into Canada in 1866, 1870 and briefly and debatably in 1871, the impact that they had on Canadian and American politics and how this led to changes in Irish nationalism in the 1870s. Chapters 7 and 8 extend the story geographically beyond Quebec and Ontario across the continent to the unchartered and largely unsettled prairies of the North-West and considers the two rebellions associated with Louis Riel.

Although much of the book has already been drafted, the need for further research means that the book will not be available on Amazon Kindle until early 2013.

Sex, Work and Politics: Women in Britain, 1830-1918

The book focuses on the key areas necessary to explain the development of women’s role in nineteenth and early-twentieth century British society and develops themes explored in the Nineteenth Century British Society series.

The first chapter considers the relationship between different approaches that have evolved to explain the role of women in history. This is followed by a chapter that looks at the ways in which women were represented in the nineteenth century in terms of the female body, sexuality and the notion of ‘separate spheres’. Chapter 3 explores the relationship between women and work and how that relationship developed. Although women’s suffrage has had a symbolic importance for generations of feminists, the campaign for the vote has obscured the broader agitations for women’s rights during the nineteenth century and was, in terms of its impact before 1914, far less significant. Before the 1880s, the focus was not on winning the vote and the demand for parliamentary suffrage was only one of a range of campaigns. These are explored in Chapter 4.
The following two chapters look at the ways in which women actively sought access to the public sphere through political activity and demands for suffrage reform. Women’s interest in securing access to political rights was not limited to the campaign for parliamentary suffrage. Women, from working- and middle-classes were involved in political protest such as the Chartist movement and in campaigns against slavery and the Corn Laws. The growing powers given to various levels of local government also attracted their keen interest and in the arena of local party politics women were to play a prominent role as early as the 1870s.
It was not until the first decade of the twentieth century that the suffrage movement achieved widespread national recognition largely through the activities of the militant Suffragettes. The nature of the suffrage campaign is considered in Chapter 7 while reactions to this from anti-suffragists, political parties and different social groups form the core of Chapter 8. The impact of the First World War on women generally and the suffrage campaign in particular is discussed in Chapter 9. The book ends with an examination of the notion of ‘borderlands’ as a conceptual framework for discussing women in nineteenth century Britain and the ways in which their personal, ideological, economic, legal and political status developed and changed.

This book will be published in print media in the middle of 2012 and this will shortly be followed by a Kindle version.

What was popular culture in 1830?

In 1830, popular culture was public, robust and gregarious, largely masculine and involved spectacle and gambling with an undercurrent of disorder and physical violence. The distinction between high and popular culture, between opera and drama on the one hand and spectacle, circus and showmanship on the other had broken down: Shakespeare, melodrama and performing animals not merely co-existed but intermingled.

The eighteenth century pleasure fairs had played a major role in this process and many major actors started their careers in their theatrical booths. English theatre and opera was produced not only for the cultivated and informed but for mass audiences for whom melodrama, lavish stage sets and live animals were essential and whom managers and actors bored at their peril. Expanding audiences funded the extensive rebuilding of Covent Garden, Drury Lane and Sadler’s Wells as well as theatres outside the West End and entrepreneurs gave melodrama a legitimate place on the stage as well as developing the modern pantomime. Provincial theatres followed the example of London. [1] By 1830, however, there had been some decline in theatre going among the provincial bourgeoisie, the result as much of the rougher audiences frightening them away as the impact of evangelicalism.

Developments in sport showed the same commercialism and capacity to survive in the face of the hostility of authority. [2] Shooting and hunting were the only sports to remain exclusively elitist. Until 1831 shooting was legally restricted to owners of land worth more than £100 and the Games Laws ensured that poaching was severely punished. [3] While shooting demonstrated a horizontal cleavage in rural society, foxhunting had a far greater community interest. Though dominated by the landed aristocracy and country gentlemen, it was open to urban gentry and professionals and the poorer sections of the community followed the spectacle on foot. Some hunts were the property of single great landowners but were expensive to maintain and subscription hunts became more common: there were 69 packs of hounds in Britain in 1812, 91 by 1825. [4]

Horseracing was the sport of both the rich and poor. It could not maintain its exclusiveness though different prices charged for the stands, the paddocks and the ordinary enclosures were as much an expression of social hierarchy as different class of railway travel. Horseracing combined two obsessions: the love of horses and gambling. Professional bookmakers appeared around 1800; by 1815, the ‘classic’ races, the Derby, the Oaks, the One Thousand and Two Thousand Guineas, the St Leger and the Ascot Gold Cup, were all established and by 1837, there were 150 places in Britain where race meetings were held. [5] By 1850, off-course betting had been established, further broadening participation.[6]

Pugilism or prize fighting began as a sport of the labouring population and attracted aristocratic patronage by 1800. Like horseracing it was increasingly commercialised and its champions such as Tom Spring, [7] Tom Crib and Dutch Sam were full-time professionals. Both flourished as industries with their own specialist newspapers yet they were also evocative of an older, perhaps imaginary, culture where sporting squires and labourers rubbed shoulders in a common appreciation of animals and physical prowess. Upper-class support for prize fighting waned after 1830 but it retained its popularity among the working population and its real decline did not occur until after 1860.[8] Other sports like cricket, rowing and pedestrianism had similar characteristics to horse-racing and prize fighting.[9] They became more organised and professional, more dependent on attracting spectators and accompanied by extensive gambling. Cricket originated as an activity of the labouring population in southern England and was then take up by the aristocratic elite.[10] Pedestrianism and rowing also began as popular sports before moving up the social scale late in the nineteenth century. [11]

Many traditional customs continued until well after 1850. There is evidence for the large unchanged New Year mumming festivals in northern England until the 1870s. Guy Fawkes’ Night was still celebrated despite attempts by various authorities to suppress bonfires and the burning of effigies. [12] Changes to traditional customs were not easily enforced even in areas, like Lancashire, where factory discipline was most firmly established. The Lancashire Wakes Weeks, traditionally the most important event of the recreational year, were forced on mill-owners rather than freely given. [13] It was not simply employers who attacked wakes and fairs. Moral reformers, the magistracy, and later the police recognised that these acted as a focus for criminal activity, could potentially lead to violence and threatened public order. That they continued until the late-nineteenth century was due not to lack of opposition but to disagreement about what action to take.

By 1830, a clear distinction was apparent between the nature of much popular recreation and the dominant intellectual movements of the day, rational liberalism and evangelicalism with their argument for a self-conscious and moralistic cultivation of respectability. This produced much of the impetus for reform. From the formation of the Proclamation Society in 1787, the campaign for reform gathered momentum. By the 1830s, there were societies for preventing cruelty to animals, the Lord’s Day Observance Society founded in 1831 and the British and Foreign Temperance Society. Parliamentary reform in 1832 gave such societies slightly more influence over Parliament and as the police force extended they gained the means to enforce legislation. Betting was an early and obvious target for reform but lotteries were not made illegal until 1823 and 1825 and further measures to discourage gambling had to wait until the 1840s and 1850s. [14] Reform was not achieved easily, quickly or completely. Neither was it the prerogative, nor was it dictated by the interests, of any one social group. It traversed class boundaries, dividing all groups, especially the working-classes, internally.[15]

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[1] Borsay, Peter, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660-1770, (Oxford University Press), 1991, pp. 117-149.

[2] Ibid, Borsay, Peter, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town 1660-1770, pp. 173-196.

[3] Munsche, P. B., Gentlemen and poachers: the English game laws 1671-1831, (Cambridge University Press), 1981.

[4] On this issue see Carr, Raymond, English Fox Hunting: A History, (Weidenfeld), 1976, and Itzkowitz, David C., Peculiar privilege: a social history of English foxhunting, 1753-1885, (Harvester Press), 1977.

[5] Church, Michael, The Derby Stakes: the complete history 1780-2006, (Raceform Ltd), 2006, Seth-Smith, Michael, and Mortimer, Roger, Derby 200: the official story of the blue riband of the turf, (Guinness Superlatives), 1979, Tolson, John, and Vamplew, Wray, ‘Facilitation Not Revolution: Railways and British Flat Racing 1830-1914’, Sport in History, Vol. 23, (2003), pp. 89-106, and Huggins, Mike Flat racing and British society, 1790-1914: a social and economic history, (Cass), 2000.

[6] See, Clapson, Mark, A bit of a flutter: popular gambling in England, c.1820-1961, (Manchester University Press), 1992.

[7] Hurley, Jon, Tom Spring: bare-knuckle Champion of All England, (Stadia), 2007.

[8] See, Anderson, Jack, ‘The Legal Response to Prize Fighting in Nineteenth Century England and America’, Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly, Vol. 57, (2006), pp. 265-287, and Sheard, K. G., ‘“Brutal and degrading”: the medical profession and boxing, 1838-1984’, International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 15, (3), (1998), pp. 74-102.

[9] Wigglesworth, Neil, A social history of English rowing, (Routledge), 1992, pp. 1-91, and Halladay, Eric, Rowing in England: a social history: the amateur debate, (Manchester University Press), 1990

[10] See Underdown, David, ‘The History of Cricket’, History Compass, Vol. 4, (1), (2006), pp. 43-53, and Birley, Derek, A Social History of English Cricket, (Aurum Press), 1999.

[11] Lile, Emma, ‘Professional Pedestrianism in South Wales during the Nineteenth Century’, The Sports Historian, Vol. 20, (2000), pp. 94-105.

[12] Sharpe, J.A., Remember, remember the fifth of November: Guy Fawkes and the gunpowder plot, (Profile), 2005, looks at remembrance.

[13] Poole, Robert, ‘Lancashire wakes week’, History Today, Vol. 34, (8), (1984), pp. 22-29.

[14] Munting, R., ‘Social opposition to gambling in Britain: an historical overview’, International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 10, (1993), pp. 295-312, Raven, James, ‘The abolition of the English state lotteries’, Historical Journal, Vol. 34, (1991), 371-389, and Woodhall, Robert, ‘The British state lotteries’, History Today, Vol. 14, (7), (1964), pp. 497-504.

[15] Itzkowitz, David C., ‘Victorian bookmakers and their customers’, Victorian Studies, Vol. 32, (1988), pp. 7-30.

Attacking cultural experience

The late-eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century saw two major changes in the cultural experience of English society. [1] First, there was erosion of the older popular culture as a result of the withdrawal of patronage by the governing elite, the gradual dismantling of the agrarian social and economic frameworks that gave it justification by widespread industrialisation and the attacks on its public expression by a combination of religious evangelicalism and a secular desire to promote work discipline. By contrast, secondly, a more commercial culture developed, entrepreneurial, market-led and largely urban and bourgeois. This involved modification of both the content and transmission of high culture and, in the nineteenth century, the promotion of popular cultural products like circuses, prize and cock-fights for profit. Cultural experiences, like economic and social ones, were adaptable.

The attack on popular culture was part of the assault on the life-styles and recreations of the labouring population that had been gathering pace since the sixteenth century. [2] It had two linked thrusts: a religious belief that popular culture was profane, irreligious and immoral and a secular concern that it was detrimental to economic efficiency and public order. The desire to turn people into sober, virtuous and godly citizens motivated by an interest in work and social discipline is generally held to have been resolved by the mid-Victorian turn to recreation and sport, ‘justifying God to the people’ through the ‘soft-hearted benevolence’ of cricket, cycling and football.

Bair-baiting in the seventeenth century: engraving, 1796

However, Dominic Erdozain argues that the problem of pleasure was inflamed by the ecclesiastical remedy. Just as the early Victorians came to identify sin with ‘vice’, their successors came to associate salvation with an increasingly social and physical sense of ‘virtue’. The problem of overdrawn boundaries between church and world gave way to a new and subtle confusion of gospel and culture resulting in a sense of cultural crisis, a challenge to the hegemony that called for moral regeneration and stricter disciplining of the lives of the labouring population. Historians have praised the mood of engagement and adaptation but the costs were profound. Sport came as an invigorating tonic but it could neither sustain its new patrons nor fulfil their missionary task. Instead, it became the perfect vehicle for that humanistic, ‘unmystical’ morality that defines the secularity of the twentieth century. [3]

Attacks on popular culture after 1830 can therefore be seen as a response to pressures on existing forms of social control, of demographic and urban growth and the consequent erosion of paternalism. Evangelicalism played a major role in this critique of popular culture and succeeded in obtaining some agreement across the governing elite to its central moral tenets through groups such as the Society for the Reformation of Manners and the Society for the Suppression of Vice. [4] Its views had their greatest success with the mercantile, commercial and professional groups, who looked with both economic and social distaste at the irrational and sinful nature of much popular culture and were appalled by the gratuitous cruelty to animals this involved. Methodism had greater impact on the working population and on artisans and small shopkeepers through its incessant attacks on the worldliness and sensuality of popular culture. Distaste for present pleasures was also a characteristics of secular radicalism. For articulate radicals, popular culture was too closely linked to the paternalistic social order. It offended their emphasis on reason and their stress on moral and intellectual self-improvement; books, education and debating rather than bear baiting, races and circuses. Secular radicals, no less than evangelicals, sought to redeem the working population.

This ideological attack was combined with what Thomas Carlyle’s ‘abdication on the part of the governors’. The aristocracy and gentry gradually withdrew from participation in popular culture and no longer championed it against reformers. Society was becoming less face-to-face, except on special occasions, with social groups confined to their own cultural worlds. The layout of country houses and gardens demonstrated a move towards domestic privacy. This was more than just symbolic and reflected a much broader ‘cutting-off’ of the lives of aristocracy and gentry from the lives of the labouring population. Rural sports, customary holidays and apprenticeship rituals came to be seen not as socially desirable but as wasteful distractions from work and threats to social order.

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[1] Easton, S., Howkins, A., Laing, S., Merrick L., and Walker, H., Disorder and Discipline: Popular Culture from 1550 to the Present, (Temple Smith), 1988, and Borsay, Peter, A History of Leisure: The British Experience since 1500, (Palgrave), 2006, are good general surveys. Golby J. M., and Purdue, A.,W., The Civilization of the Crowd, (Batsford), 1984, Malcolmson, R.,W., Popular Recreation in English Society 1700-1850, (Cambridge University Press), 1973, Cunningham, H., Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, (Allen and Unwin), 1980, provide perspectives on the issue of custom and leisure.   Bailey, P., Leisure and Class in Victorian England: rational recreation and the contest for control 1830-1885, (Routledge), 1978, and Walvin, James, Leisure and Society 1830-1950, (Longman), 1979, take the arguments forward into the late-nineteenth century. Holt, R., Sport and the British: A Modern History, (Oxford University Press), 1989, and Tranter, N., Sport, Economy and Society in Britain, 1750-1914, (Cambridge University Press), 1998, are the best introduction to this area of leisure.

[2] Ibid, Brown Richard, Society and Economy in Modern Britain 1700-1850, pp. 435-440.

[3] On this issue see, Erdozain, Dominic, The Problem of Pleasure: Sport, Recreation and the Crisis of Victorian Religion, (Boydell Press), 2010.

[4] See, Harrison, Brian, ‘Religion and recreation in nineteenth-century England’, Past & Present, Vol. 38, (1967), pp. 98-125.

Society under Pressure: Britain 1830-1914

Nineteenth Century British Society is a series of five e-books that seek to explain the major social developments that occurred during the nineteenth and early-twentieth century. It extends the ideas and chronological scope that I originally put forward in my studies of Britain’s social and economic development originally published in 1987, 1991 and 1992.[1] It also develops information contained in my blog: http://richardjohnbr.wordpress.com/. Nineteenth Century British Society consists of five volumes:

Volume 1: Economy, Population and Transport

Volume 2: Work, Health and Poverty

Volume 3: Education, Crime and Leisure

Volume 4: Class

Volume 5: Religion and Government

As a cheaper alternative for those who do not wish to buy the series as separate e-books, this volume brings together the five volumes into a single composite volume enabling readers to purchase a single e-book. The opening chapters provide the economic context for the book especially the character of economic change and continuity. This is followed by three chapters that consider demographic, agricultural and industrial and communication developments during the nineteenth century. The next tranche of chapters examine the social problems created by changes in towns, the public’s health, housing, poverty, the nature of work, education and crime and leisure and the ways in which government sought to regulate these activities. Chapter 17 draws on these chapters and provides an overview of the nature of government in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century as it grappled with the practicalities of social reform. Religion is the subject of Chapters 18 and 19 while Chapters 20-23 consider the nature of class in the nineteenth century. The book ends with a chapter on the end of the nineteenth century.

Religion and Government published

The fifth and final volume of Nineteenth Century British Society has now been published on Amazon Kindle: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Religion-Government-Nineteenth-Century-ebook/dp/B006TI5OO4/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1325717478&sr=1-2

This volume looks at the effects that economic changes had on people’s attitude to religion and how the character of government underwent a revolution in organisation and ideology. It explores the pressures experienced by Anglicanism, Nonconformity and Roman Catholicism in the decades leading up to the Religious Census of 1851 and particularly the state of working-class religious attitudes. It then examines the extent to which religion was in decline after 1851 and asks whether there was a ‘crisis of faith’. Finally, the nature of government and especially how and why it responded to pressures for a national approach to the development of social reform with the shift from a laissez faire approach to one in which there was a more collectivist response.

The book is divided into three chapters:

1. Churches under pressure

2. Religion in Decline?

3. Government

Further Reading identifies the most valuable books on these subjects while the detailed notes provide a guide for further research