1. Mayhew, op. cit., I, p. 22.
1. See esp. Mayhew, op. cit., I, p. 252 ff.
1. W. E. Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom (1903), I, p. 164.
2. See especially R. K. Webb, The British Working Class Reader, 1790–1848 (1955), the same author’s article, ‘Working-Class Readers in Early Victorian England’, English Hist. Rev., LXV (1950); R. D. Altick, The English Common Reader (Chicago, 1957), esp. chs. 4, 7, 11; and J. F. C. Harrison, Learning and Living (1961), Part One.
3. Political Observer, 19 December 1819.
1. Another letter (‘Eliza Ludd’ to Rev. W. R. Hay, 1 May 1812) commences: ‘Sir, Doubtless you are well acquainted with the Political His tory of America’; both in H.O. 40.1.
2. H.O. 42.121.
1. H.O. 42.163; Blanketteer, 20 November 1819.
2. R. Fynes, The Miners of Northumberland and Durham (1923 edn), p. 21
3. Sherwin’s Political Register, 17 May 1817.
1. H.O. 42.172. These correspondents, who were impatiently awaiting release from detention, knew that their mail was read by the prison governor, and were therefore especially prone to insert references to forgiveness, grace, and improving reading.
1. See J. Stanhope, op. cit., pp. 161–7.
2. Some of the earliest trade union correspondence which survives – that of the framework-knitters in the Nottingham City Archives – shows a widespread diffusion of literary attainment. See above, pp. 585–90.
3. First Report… on Artizans and Machinery (1824), p. 25.
1. Catnach’s ‘Trial of Thurtell’, 500,000 (1823): ‘Confession and Execution of Corder’, 1,166,000 (1828).
2. H.O. 40.1.
1. For Radical reading-rooms, see A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press (1949), pp. 25–8, 395–6; Wearmouth, op. cit., pp. 24–5, 88–9, 97–8, 111–12. For Dunning, ‘Reminiscences’ (ed., W. H. Chaloner), Trans. Lancs. & Cheshire Antiq. Soc., LIX, 1947, p. 97. For Stockport, see Blanketteer, 27 November 1819, and D. Read, op. cit., p. 48 f. For Blackburn, W. W. Kinsey, ‘Some Aspects of Lancashire Radicalism’, (M. A. Thesis, Manchester 1927), pp. 667.
2. In 1822 the circulation of the leading daily, The Times, was 5,730; the Observer (weekly), 6,860.
1. For the attempts to replace the radical press with safe and improving matter, see R. K. Webb, op. cit., chs. 2, 3, 4 and J. F. C. Harrison, op. cit., chs. 1 and 2.
1. His account, covering the period 1817–32 is mainly concerned with the first phase of the battle – the right of publication – particularly associated with Richard Carlile. The second phase, the struggle of the ‘Great Unstamped’ (1830–35), associated particularly with the names of Carpenter, Hetherington, Watson, Cleave and Hobson, has not yet found its historian, although see C. D. Collett, History of the Taxes on Knowledge (1933 edn), ch. 2, and A. G. Barker, Henry Hetherington (n.d.).
1. Wickwar, op. cit., p. 315. See also ibid, pp. 38–9 for the peculiarly unfair form of persecution, the ex officio information, which virtually permitted imprisonment without trial.
2. The Two Trials of T. J. Wooler (1817).
1. Second Trial of William Hone (1818), pp. 17, 45; Proceedings at the Public Meeting to form a subscription for Hone (1818); F. W. Hack-wood, William Hone (1912), chs. 9–11; Wickwar, op. cit., pp. 58–9. An old patterer told Mayhew (I, p. 252) that despite the acquittals, it remained difficult to ‘work’ Hone’s parodies in the streets: ‘there was plenty of officers and constables ready to pull the fellows up, and… a beak that wanted to please the high dons, would find some way of stopping them…’
1. Hazlitt, Works, VII, pp. 176 ff. ‘Instead of applying for an injunction against Wat Tyler,’ Hazlitt opined, ‘Mr Southey would do well to apply for an injunction against Mr Coleridge, who has undertaken his defence in The Courier.’
2. Sherwin’s Republican, 29 March 1817; Carlile’s Republican, 30 May 1823.
1. In these three years there were 115 prosecutions and 45 ex officio informations.
1. Wickwar, op. cit., p. 231.
1. Keats to his brother George, 17 September 1819, Works (1901), V, p. 108. The letter continues: ‘This makes the business of Carlile the bookseller of great moment in my mind. He has been selling deistical pamphlets, republished Tom Paine, and many other works held in superstitious horror…. After all, they are afraid to prosecute. They are afraid of his defence; it would be published in all the papers all over the empire. They shudder at this. The trials would light a flame they could not extinguish. Do you not think this of great import?’
2. W. J. Linton, James Watson, (Manchester 1880), p. 19.
1. In 1830 these taxes amounted to a 4d. stamp on each newspaper or weekly periodical, a duty of 3s. 6d. on each advertisement, a small paper duty, and a large surety against action for libel.
1. Abel Heywood, the Manchester bookseller, claimed the figure to be 750.
2. Societies for the Diffusion of ‘Really Useful Knowledge’ were formed to assist the ‘unstamped’. See Working Man’s Friend, 18 May 1833.
3. See Wickwar, op. cit., pp. 40, 103–14; Second Trial of William Hone (1818), p. 19; for the case of Robert Swindells, confined in Chester castle, while his wife and baby died from neglect, and his remaining child was placed in the poorhouse; Sherwin’s Political Register, 14 March 1818, for the cases of Mellor and Pilling of Warrington, held for nineteen weeks chained to felons in Preston Gaol, sent for trial at the Court of King’s Bench in London – the 200 miles to which they had to walk – the trial removed to Lancaster (200 miles back) – and then discharged.
1. Most of Carlile’s shopmen were provided with long written defences by Carlile, and this was probably so in her case.
1. See Wickwar, op. cit., pp. 222–3; Trial of Mrs Susannah Wright (1822), pp. 8, 44, 56; New Times, 16 November 1822.
1. Wickwar, op. cit., pp. 105–7; Independent Whig, 16 January 1820; Cobbett’s Political Register, 17 August 1822; Poor Man’s Guardian, 12 November 1831; A. G. Barker, Henry Hetherington, pp. 12–13.
1. See Wickwar, op. cit., p. 214.
1. The counties of Lancaster, Chester, the West Riding, Warwick, Stafford, Derby, Leicester, Nottingham, Cumberland, Westmorland, Northumberland, Durham, the city of Coventry, and the country boroughs of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and Nottingham.
2. W. E. Adams, op. cit., p. 169. I am indebted to Mr A. J. Brown for information about Ipswich. See also Chartist Studies, ed. A. Briggs, for Chartism in Somerset and East Anglia
3. J. F. C. Harrison’s admirable account in Learning and Living tends to underestimate the vigour of radical culture before 1832. The best first-hand accounts are in William Lovett’s autobiography and (for Chartist times) Thomas Frost, Forty Years Recollections (1880).
1. Thomas Wood, Autobiography (1822–80) (Leeds, 1956). See also An Old Potter, When I Was a Child 1903), ch. 1.
2. M. L. Pearl, William Cobbett (1953), pp. 105–7. There were also many pirated editions.
1. Philanthropist, 22 June 1795.
2. T. A. Ward, op. cit., p. 196. See also the Nottingham example, above p. 516.
3. See H.O. 119.3/4 for the accusations and counter-accusations passing between Covent Garden and Drury Lane, on the one hand, and the ‘illegitimate’ little theatres on the other, 1812–18.
1. H.O. 65.1.
2. Trades Newspaper, 31 July, 21 August 1825 et seq. The Editor felt called upon to apologize for carrying news of prize-fighting and animal-baiting; but the paper was governed by a committee of London trades unions, and the members’ wishes had to be met.
1. Some notion of the complexity of this output can be gained from Dr Dorothy George’s very learned Catalogues of Political and Personal Satire in the British Museum, volumes 7, 8, and 9 and 10. See also Blanchard Jerrold, George Cruikshank (1894), ch. 4.
1. See above, p. 401.
1. Thomas Dick, On the Improvement of Society by the Diffusion of Knowledge (Glasgow, 1833), p. 175. See also p. 213, where it is argued that ‘arithmetic, algebra, geometry, conic sections, and other departments of mathematics’ are particularly godly studies since they ‘contain truths that are eternal and unchangeable’.
1. H.O. 40.4.
2. Political Register, 13 January 1821. The Temperance Movement can be traced to this post-war campaign of abstinence.
3. See Wickwar, op. cit., p. 68.
1. Cf. T. Frost, Forty Years’ Recollections, p. 20 (of the anti-Owenite propaganda of the Thirties): ‘It was a very common device for complainants and witnesses to say of a person charged with larceny, wife desertion, or almost any other offence, ‘He is a Socialist’; and reports of all such cases had the side-head, ‘Effect of Owenism’…’
2. See, for example, William Hodson in the Social Pioneer, 20 April 1839 (et passim): ‘Allow me, Sir, to state… my views upon the [Marriage] Question… neither man nor woman can be happy, until they have equal rights; to marry each other for a home, as is often the case now, is the buying of human flesh; it is slave dealing of the worst description…. I contend that all unions ought to be solely from affection – to continue the unions when that affection ceases to exist is perfect… prostitution.’
1. See Wallas, op. cit., pp. 166–72; N. Himes, ‘J. S. Mill’s Attitude toward Neo-Malthusianism’, Econ. Journal (Supplement), 1926–9, I, pp. 459–62; M. Stopes, Contraception (1923); N. Himes, ‘The Birth Control Handbills of 1823’, The Lancet, 6 August 1927; M. St. J. Packe, Life of John Stuart Mill (1954), pp. 56–9. See also below, p. 855.
1. See J. F. C. Harrison, op. cit., pp. 43 et. seq.
1. See Wickwar, op. cit., p. 147; and Place’s comment, ‘Well done, hypocrite; you who are not a Christian yourself.’
1. See especially J. F. C. Harrison, op. cit., pp. 57–88, 173–8; Mechanic’s Magazine, 11 and 18 October 1823; T. Kelly, George Birkbeck (Liverpool, 1957), chs. 5 and 6; E. Halévy, Thomas Hodgskin (1956), pp. 87–91; Chester New, op. cit., ch 17; Trades Newspaper, 17 July 1825; F. B. Lott, Story of the Leicester Mechanic’s Institute (1935); M. Tylecote, The Mechanic’s Institutes of Lancashire and Yorkshire before 1851 (Manchester, 1957).
1. Political Register, 27 January 1820.
1. ‘What is the People?’, from Political Essays (1819), in Works, VII, p. 263.
2. Hone said in his advertisement: ‘The Publisher conscientiously affirms, that there is more Original and just Thinking, luminously expressed in this Volume, than in any other Work of a living Author.’
1. Cf. Cobbett’s ‘Seigneurs of the Twist, Sovereigns of the Spinning Jenny, great Yeomen of the Yarn.’
1. ‘Address to the Journeymen and Labourers’, Political Register, 2 November 1816.
2. Ibid., 27 January 1820.
1. The loyalist press delighted in publishing lists of Cobbett’s self-contradictions. So also, from an opposite standpoint, did his ultra-Radical opponents: see Gale Jones’ damaging Vindication of the Press, against the Aspersions of William Cobbett, including a Retrospect of his Political Life and Opinions (1823).
1. Political Register, 1 September 1830. See G. D. H. and M. Cole, The Opinions of William Cobbett, pp. 253–4.
1. See above, p. 687.
1. Political Register, June 1817, 11 April 1818, 2 October 1819: Rural Rides, passim; Bamford, op. cit., p. 21; Hazlitt, Table Talk (1821).
1. W. J. Linton, James Watson, p. 17. Cf. T. Frost, op. cit., p. 6: ‘the only books I ever saw in my father’s house, besides the bible and a few old school books… were some odd numbers of Cobbett’s Register.’
2. Hone’s Reformist’s Register, 5 April 1817, on Cobbett’s departure to America. See, however, Wooler’s angry rejoinder: ‘We are almost inclined to wish that Mr Cobbett had confined himself to writing… upon such subjects, that he might have… deceived none but kitchen maids and scullions.’ Black Dwarf, 9 April 1817.
1. Political Register, 2 February 1822.
1. Political Register, 27 January 1820.
1. Political Register, 30 January 1832. See also R. Williams, Culture and Society (Pelican edn), pp. 32–4.
1. Twopenny Trash, 1 October 1830.
1. Political Register, 28 February 1835.
2. See Asa Briggs, ‘The Welfare State in Historical Perspective’, Archiv. Europ. Sociol., II (1961), p. 235.
1. Tour of Scotland (1833), cited in W. Reitzel (ed.), The Autobiography of William Cobbett, pp. 224–5.
1. R. Carlile, An Effort to set at rest… the Reformers of Leeds (1821), p. 7.
1. Republican, 19 January 1821. Carlile also republished Sexby’s ‘Killing No Murder’.
1. Republican, 4 October 1820, 26 April 1822; see Wickwar, op. cit., pp. 213–15.
1. Republican, 23 August 1822.
1. See Wickwar, op. cit., p. 272.
1. Republican, 11 July 1823; Devil’s Pulpit, 4 and 18 March 1831; Prompter, 30 August, 31 September, 15 October 1831; Radical, 24 September 1831; H.O. 40.25.
1. Gorgon, 24 April 1819. Shelley, writing Prometheus Unbound in 1818–19 gave to the obscure revolutionary god the name ‘Demogorgon’: one wonders if there was any association of ideas?
1. See above, p. 283. It is not clear whether Wade accepted Place’s notes as they came in, or took editorial liberties with them. Although Place assisted the Gorgon, he never met Wade, and the paper ‘was not altogether such a publication as I should have preferred’. See Wallas, op. cit., pp. 204–5.
1. Gorgon, 20 June, 18 July, 22 August 1818.
1. Gorgon, 8 August 1818, and The Extraordinary Black Book (1831 edn), pp. 217–18. See also A. Briggs, ‘The Language of Class in early nineteenth-century Britain’, Essays in Labour History, p. 50.
1. Ricardo is cited in Gorgon, 26 September 1818.
2. Ibid., 12 September 1818. For the origins of the labour theory of value, touched upon briefly and inexpertly in this chapter, see G. D. H. Cole, History of Socialist Thought, The Forerunners (1953), A. Menger, The Right to the Whole Produce of Labour (1898); R. N. Meek, Studies in the Labour Theory of Value (1956).
1. For some of its findings, see above, p. 280.
2. Ibid., 21 November 1818.
3. Place informed the Select Committee on Artizans and Machinery (First Report (1824), p. 46): ‘no principle of political economy [is] better established than this of wages: increase of wages must come from profits’.
1. Trades Newspaper, 31 July 1825.
2. See the Hammonds, The Town Labourer, pp. 138–40.
3. Ibid., p. 311; Webbs, History of Trade Unionism, pp. 85–5; Wallas op. cit., p. 189; G. D. H. Cole, Attempts at General Union, pp. 81–2.
4. Hunt’s Address to the Radical Reformers, 9 December 1822.
5. The paper was planned by ‘those Town and Country Representatives of Trades who had assembled in London to watch the progress of the late Inquiry respecting the Combination Laws’. £1,000 was subscribed by the trades themselves to found the paper, and apart from the shipwrights, the sawyers, coopers, carpenters, ladies’ shoemakers, caulkers, and silk weavers appear to have been directly involved. The paper was governed by a committee of the trades.
1. See above, p. 264.
2. See the controversy on population, commencing on 12 November 1823, and continuing through successive issues. Mr P. M. Jackson informs me that he has found evidence (in the Place collection) which identify he Malthusian correspondent ‘A.M.’ as John Stuart Mill.
3. There is a legend abroad that ‘unemployment’ was outside the semantic frame of the 1820s. Perhaps it stems from an unwise statement in G. M. Young, Victorian England (Oxford, 1936), p. 27, that ‘unemployment was beyond the scope of any idea which Early Victorian reformers had at their command, largely because they had no word for it’: to which is added the authority of a footnote: ‘I have not observed it earlier than the sixties.’ In fact (as is often the case with these semantic ‘datings’) the statement is wrong. (Cuckoos generally arrive in these islands some weeks before they are announced in The Times.) ‘Unemployed’, ‘the unemployed’, and (less frequently) ‘unemployment’ are all to be found in trade union and Radical or Owenite writing of the 1820s and 1830s: the inhibitions of ‘Early Victorian reformers’ must be explained in some other way.
1. Black Dwarf, 3 and 31 December 1823.
2. Dr Iorwerth Prothero has drawn my attention to evidence which suggests that J. C. Robertson wrote the early editorial articles in the paper (which he edited until March 1826) rather than Gast (to whom I attributed them in the first edition of this book). But Gast, as chairman of the committee of controlling trades, undoubtedly had great influence upon the paper’s policy and conduct.
1. See F. Place, Illustrations and Proofs of the Principle of Population (1822). Also see above, p. 816 n. 1.
2. Trades Newspaper, 17, 24, 31 July, 11 September 1825. Place appears to have given assistance to an unsuccessful rival to the Trades Newspaper, the Artizan’s London and Provincial Chronicle (1825).
1. Trades Newspaper, 21 and 28 August 1825 et. seq.