I. THE RADICAL CULTURE
WHEN contrasted with the Radical years which preceded and the Chartist years which succeeded it, the decade of the 1820s seems strangely quiet – a mildly prosperous plateau of social peace. But many years later a London costermonger warned Mayhew:
People fancy that when all’s quiet that all’s stagnating. Propagandism is going on for all that. It’s when all’s quiet that the seed’s a-growing, Republicans and Socialists are pressing their doctrines.1
These quiet years were the years of Richard Carlile’s contest for the liberty of the press; of growing trade union strength and the repeal of the Combination Acts; of the growth of free thought, cooperative experiment, and Owenite theory. They are years in which individuals and groups sought to render into theory the twin experiences which we have described – the experience of the Industrial Revolution, and the experience of popular Radicalism insurgent and in defeat. And at the end of the decade, when there came the climactic contest between Old Corruption and Reform, it is possible to speak in a new way of the working people’s consciousness of their interests and of their predicament as a class.
There is a sense in which we may describe popular Radicalism in these years as an intellectual culture. The articulate consciousness of the self-taught was above all a political consciousness. For the first half of the nineteenth century, when the formal education of a great part of the people entailed little more than instruction in the Three R’s, was by no means a period of intellectual atrophy. The towns, and even the villages, hummed with the energy of the autodidact. Given the elementary techniques of literacy, labourers, artisans, shopkeepers and clerks and schoolmasters, proceeded to instruct themselves, severally or in groups. And the books or instructors were very often those sanctioned by reforming opinion. A shoemaker, who had been taught his letters in the Old Testament, would labour through the Age of Reason; a schoolmaster, whose education had taken him little further than worthy religious homilies, would attempt Voltaire, Gibbon, Ricardo; here and there local Radical leaders, weavers, booksellers, tailors, would amass shelves of Radical periodicals and learn how to use parliamentary Blue Books; illiterate labourers would, nevertheless, go each week to a pub where Cobbett’s editorial letter was read aloud and discussed.
Thus working men formed a picture of the organization of society, out of their own experience and with the help of their hard-won and erratic education, which was above all a political picture. They learned to see their own lives as part of a general history of conflict between the loosely defined ‘industrious classes’ on the one hand, and the unreformed House of Commons on the other. From 1830 onwards a more clearly defined class consciousness, in the customary Marxist sense, was maturing, in which working people were aware of continuing both old and new battles on their own.
It is difficult to generalize as to the diffusion of literacy in the early years of the century. The ‘industrious classes’ touched, at one pole, the million or more who were illiterate, or whose literacy amounted to little more than the ability to spell out a few words or write their names. At the other pole there were men of considerable intellectual attainment. Illiteracy (we should remember) by no means excluded men from political discourse. In Mayhew’s England the ballad-singers and ‘patterers’ still had a thriving occupation, with their pavement farces and street-corner parodies, following the popular mood and giving a Radical or anti-Papal twist to their satirical monologues or chaunts, according to the state of the market.’1 The illiterate worker might tramp miles to hear a Radical orator, just as the same man (or another) might tramp to taste a sermon. In times of political ferment the illiterate would get their workmates to read aloud from the periodicals; while at Houses of Call the news was read, and at political meetings a prodigious time was spent in reading addresses and passing long strings of resolutions. The earnest Radical might even attach a talismanic virtue to the possession of favoured works which he was unable, by his own efforts, to read. A Cheltenham shoemaker who called punctually each Sunday on W. E. Adams to have ‘Feargus’s letter’ read to him, nevertheless was the proud owner of several of Cobbett’s books, carefully preserved in wash leather cases.1
Recent studies have thrown much light on the predicament of the working-class reader in these years.2 To simplify a difficult discussion, we may say that something like two out of every three working men were able to read after some fashion in the early part of the century, although rather fewer could write. As the effect of the Sunday schools and day schools increasingly became felt, as well as the drive for self-improvement among working people themselves, so the number of the illiterate fell, although in the worst child labour areas the fall was delayed. But the ability to read was only the elementary technique. The ability to handle abstract and consecutive argument was by no means inborn; it had to be discovered against almost overwhelming difficulties – the lack of leisure, the cost of candles (or of spectacles), as well as educational deprivation. Ideas and terms were sometimes employed in the early Radical movement which, it is evident, had for some ardent followers a fetishistic rather than rational value. Some of the Pentridge rebels thought that a ‘Provisional Government’ would ensure a more plentiful supply of ‘provisions’; while, in one account of the pitmen of the north-east in 1819, ‘Universal Suffrage is understood by many of them to mean universal suffering… “if one member suffers, all must suffer”.’3
Such evidence as survives as to the literary accomplishment of working men in the first two decades of the century serves only to illustrate the folly of generalization. In the Luddite times (when few but working men would have supported their actions) anonymous messages vary from self-conscious apostrophes to ‘Liberty with her Smiling Attributes’ to scarcely decipherable chalking on walls. We may take examples of both kinds. In 1812 the Salford Coroner, who had returned a verdict of ‘Justifiable Homicide’ upon the body of a man shot while attacking Burton’s mill was warned:
… know thou cursed insinuates, if Burton’s infamous action was ‘justifiable’, the Laws of Tyrants are Reasons Dictates. – Beware, Beware! A month’s bathing in the Stygian Lake would not wash this sanguinary deed from our minds, it but augments the heritable cause, that stirs us up in indignation.1
The letter concludes, ‘Ludd finis est’ – a reminder that Manchester boasted a grammar school (which .Bamford himself for a short time attended) as well as private schools where the sons of artisans might obtain Latin enough for this. The other paper was found in Chesterfield Market. It is much to the same purpose but (despite the educational disadvantages of the writer) it somehow carries a greater conviction:
I Ham going to inform you that there is Six Thousand men coming to you in Apral and then We Will go and Blow Parlement house up and Blow up all afour hus/labring Peple Cant Stand it No Longer/dam all Such Roges as England governes but Never mind Ned lud when general nody and his harmey Comes We Will soon bring about the greate Revelution then all these greate mens heads gose of.
Others of the promised benefits of ‘general nody’ were: ‘We Will Nock doon the Prisions and the Judge we Will murde whan he is aslepe.’2
The difference (the critics will tell us) is not only a matter of style: it is also one of sensibility. The first we might suppose to be written by a bespectacled, greying, artisan – a cobbler (or hatter or instrument-maker) with Voltaire, Volney and Paine on his shelf, and a taste for the great tragedians. Among the State prisoners of 1817 there were other men of this order from Lancashire: the seventy-year-old William Ogden, a letter-press printer, who wrote to his wife from prison: ‘though I am in Irons, I will face my enemies like the Great Caractacus when in the same situation’; Joseph Mitchell, another printing worker, whose daughters were called Mirtilla, Carolina and Cordelia, and who – when another daughter was born while he was in prison – wrote in haste to his wife proposing that the baby be called Portia: or Samuel Bamford himself, whose instructions to his wife were more specific: ‘a Reformers Wife ought to be an heroine’.1 The second letter (we can be almost sure) is the work of a collier or a village stockinger. It is of much the same order as the more playful letter left by a pitman in the north-east coalfield in the house of a colliery viewer in 1831, into which he and some mates had broken during a strike riot:
I was at yor hoose last neet, and meyd mysel very comfortable. Ye hey nee family, and yor just won man on the colliery, I see ye hev a greet lot of rooms, and big cellars, and plenty wine and beer in them, which I got ma share on. Noo I naw some at wor colliery that has three or fower lads and lesses, and they live in won room not half as gude as yor cellar. I don’t pretend to naw very much, but I naw there shudn’t be that much difference. The only place we can gan to o the week ends is the yel hoose and hev a pint. I dinna pretend to be a profit, but I naw this, and lots o ma marrows na’s te, that wer not tret as we owt to be, and a great filosopher says, to get noledge is to naw wer ignerent. But weve just begun to find that oot, and ye maisters and owners may luk oot, for yor not gan to get se much o yor own way, wer gan to hev some o wors now…2
‘If the Bible Societies, and the Sunday School societies have been attended by no other good,’ Sherwin noted, ‘they have at least produced one beneficial effect; – they have been the means of teaching many thousands of children to read.’3 The letters of Brandreth and his wife, of Cato Street conspirators, and of other State prisoners, give us some insight into that great area between the attainments of the skilled artisan and those of the barely literate. Somewhere in the middle we may place Mrs Johnston, addressing her husband (‘My Dear Johnston’), who was a journeyman tailor, in prison:
… believe me my Dear if thare is not a day nor a hour in the day but what my mind is less or more engage about you. I can appeal to the almighty that it is true and when I retire to rest I pray God to forgive all my enimies and change thare heart…
Beside this we may set the letter of the Sheffield joiner, Wolstenholme, to his wife:
Our Minaster hath lent me four vollams of the Missionary Register witch give me grat satisfaction to se ou the Lord is carin on is work of grais in distant contres.
The writing of this letter was attended with difficulties, since ‘Have broke my spettacles’.1 Such letters were written in unaccustomed leisure. We can almost see Wolstenholme laboriously spelling out his words, and stopping to consult a more ‘well-lettered’ prisoner when he came to the hurdle of ‘satisfaction’. Mrs Johnston may have consulted (but probably did not) one of the ‘professional’ letter-writers to be found in most towns and villages, who wrote the appropriate form of letter at 1d. a time. For, even among the literate, letter-writing was an unusual pursuit. The cost of postage alone prohibited it except at infrequent intervals. For a letter to pass between the north and London might cost 1s. 10d., and we know that both Mrs Johnston and Mrs Wolstenholme were suffering privations in the absence of their husbands – Mrs Johnston’s shoes were full of water and she had been able to buy no more since her husband was taken up.
All the Cato Street prisoners, it seems, could write after some fashion. Brunt, the shoemaker, salted some sardonic verses with French, while James Wilson wrote:
the Cause wich nerved a Brutus arm
to strike a Tirant with alarm
the cause for wich brave Hamden died
for wich the Galant Tell defied
a Tirants insolence and pride.
Richard Tidd, another shoemaker, on the other hand, could only muster: ‘Sir I Ham a very Bad Hand at Righting’.1 We cannot, of course, take such men as a ‘sample’, since their involvement in political activity indicates that they belonged to the more conscious minority who followed the Radical press. But they may serve to warn us against understating the diffusion of effective literacy.2 The artisans are a special case – the intellectual élite of the class. But there were, scattered throughout all parts of England, an abundance of educational institutions for working people, even if ‘institution’ is too formal a word for the dame school, the penny-a-week evening school run by a factory cripple or injured pitman, or the Sunday school itself. In the Pennine valleys, where the weavers’ children were too poor to pay for slates or paper, they were taught their letters by drawing them with their fingers in a sand-table. If thousands lost these elementary attainments when they reached adult life, on the other hand the work of the Nonconformist Churches, of friendly societies and trade unions, and the needs of industry itself, all demanded that such learning be consolidated and advanced. ‘I have found,’ Alexander Galloway, the master-engineer, reported in 1824,
from the mode of managing my business, by drawings and written descriptions, a man is not of much use to me unless he can read and write; if a man applies for work, and says he cannot read and write, he is asked no more questions…3
In most artisan trades the journeymen and petty masters found some reading and work with figures an occupational necessity.
Not only the ballad-singer but also the ‘number man’ or ‘calendar man’ went round the working-class districts, hawking chap-books,1 almanacs, dying speeches and (between 1816 and 1820, and at intervals thereafter) Radical periodicals. (One such ‘calendar man’, who travelled for Cowdrey and Black, the ‘seditious [i.e. Whig] printers in Manchester’, was taken up by the magistrates in 1812 because it was found that on his catalogues was written: ‘No blind king – Ned Ludd for ever.’2) One of the most impressive features of post-war Radicalism was its sustained effort to extend these attainments and to raise the level of political awareness. At Barnsley as early as January 1816 a penny-a-month club of weavers was formed, for the purpose of buying Radical newspapers and periodicals. The Hampden Clubs and Political Unions took great pains to build up ‘Reading Societies’ and in the larger centres they opened permanent newsrooms or reading-rooms, such as that at Hanley in the Potteries. This room was open from 8 a.m. till 10 p.m. There were penalties for swearing, for the use of indecent language and for drunkenness. Each evening the London papers were to be ‘publicly read’. At the rooms of the Stockport Union in 1818, according to Joseph Mitchell, there was a meeting of class leaders on Monday nights; on Tuesday, ‘moral and political readings’; on Wednesdays, ‘a conversation or debate’; on Thursdays, ‘Grammar, Arithmetic, &c’ was taught; Saturday was a social evening; while Sunday was school day for adults and children alike. In Blackburn the members of the Female Reform Society pledged themselves ‘to use our utmost endeavour to instil into the minds of our children a deep and rooted hatred of our corrupt and tyrannical rulers.’ One means was the use of ‘The Bad Alphabet for the use of the Children of Female Reformers’: B was for Bible, Bishop, and Bigotry; K for King, King’s evil, Knave and Kidnapper; W for Whig, Weakness, Wavering, and Wicked.
Despite the repression after 1819, the tradition of providing such newsrooms (sometimes attached to the shop of a Radical bookseller) continued through the 1820s. In London after the war there was a boom in coffee-houses, many of which served this double function. By 1833, at John Doherty’s famous ‘Coffee and Newsroom’ attached to his Manchester bookshop, no fewer than ninety-six newspapers were taken every week, including the illegal ‘unstamped’. In the smaller towns and villages the reading-groups were less formal but no less important. Sometimes they met at inns, ‘hush-shops’, or private houses; sometimes the periodical was read and discussed in the workshop. The high cost of periodicals during the time of the heaviest ‘taxes on knowledge’ led to thousands of ad hoc arrangements by which small groups clubbed together to buy their chosen paper. During the Reform Bill agitation Thomas Dunning, a Nantwich shoemaker, joined with his shopmates and ‘our Unitarian minister… in subscribing to the Weekly Dispatch, price 8½d., the stamp duty being 4d. It was too expensive for one ill-paid crispin…’1
The circulation of the Radical press fluctuated violently. Cobbett’s 2d. Register at its meridian, between October 1816 and February 1817, was running at something between 40,000 and 60,000 each week, a figure many times in excess of any competitor of any sort.2 The Black Dwarf ran at about 12,000 in 1819, although this figure was probably exceeded after Peterloo. Thereafter the stamp tax (and the recession of the movement) severely curtailed circulation, although Carlile’s periodicals ran in the thousands through much of the Twenties. With the Reform Bill agitation, the Radical press broke through to a larger circulation once more: Doherty’s Voice of the People, and The Pioneer all had circulations above ten thousand, Carlile’s Gauntlet, Hetherington’s Poor Man’s Guardian, while a dozen smaller periodicals, like the Destructive, ran to some thousands. The slump in the sale of costly weekly periodicals (at anything from 7d. to 1s.) during the stamp tax decade was to great degree made up by the growth in the sales of cheap books and individual pamphlets, ranging from The Political House that Jack Built (100,000) to Cobbett’s Cottage Economy (50,000, 1822–8), History of the Protestant ‘Reformation’, and Sermons (211,000, 1821–8). In the same period, in most of the great centres there were one or more (and in London a dozen) dailies or weeklies which, while not being avowedly ‘Radical’, nevertheless catered for this large Radical public. And the growth in this very large petit-bourgeois and working-class reading public was recognized by those influential agencies – notably the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge – which made prodigious and lavishly subsidized efforts to divert the readers to more wholesome and improving matter.1
This was the culture – with its eager disputations around the booksellers’ stalls, in the taverns, workshops, and coffee-houses – which Shelley saluted in his ‘Song to the Men of England’ and within which the genius of Dickens matured. But it is a mistake to see it as a single, undifferentiated ‘reading public’. We may say that there were several different ‘publics’ impinging upon and overlapping each other, but nevertheless organized according to different principles. Among the more important were the commercial public, pure and simple, which might be exploited at times of Radical excitement (the trials of Brandreth or of Thistlewood were as marketable as other ‘dying confessions’), but which was followed according to the simple criteria of profitability; the various more or less organized publics, around the Churches or the Mechanics’ Institutes; the passive public which the improving societies sought to get at and redeem; and the active, Radical public, which organized itself in the face of the Six Acts and the taxes on knowledge.
The struggle to build and hold this last public has been admirably told in W. D. Wickwar’s The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press.1 There is perhaps no country in the world in which the contest for the rights of the press was so sharp, so emphatically victorious, and so peculiarly identified with the cause of the artisans and labourers. If Peterloo established (by a parodox of feeling) the right of public demonstration, the rights of a ‘free press’ were won in a campaign extending over fifteen or more years which has no comparison for its pigheaded, bloody-minded, and indomitable audacity. Carlile (a tinsmith who had nevertheless received a year or two of grammar school education at Ashburton in Devon) rightly saw that the repression of 1819 made the rights of the press the fulcrum of the Radical movement. But, unlike Cobbett and Wooler, who modified their tone to meet the Six Acts in the hope of living to fight another day (and who lost circulation accordingly), Carlile hoisted the black ensign of unqualified defiance and, like a pirate cock-boat, sailed straight into the middle of the combined fleets of the State and Church. As, in the aftermath of Peterloo, he came up for trial (for publishing the Works of Paine), the entire Radical press saluted his courage, but gave him up for lost. When he finally emerged, after years of imprisonment, the combined fleets were scattered beyond the horizon in disarray. He had exhausted the ammunition of the Government, and turned its ex officio informations and special juries into laughing-stocks. He had plainly sunk the private prosecuting societies, the Constitutional Association (or ‘Bridge-Street Gang’) and the Vice Society, which were supported by the patronage and the subscriptions of the nobility, bishops and Wilberforce.
Carlile did not, of course, achieve this triumph on his own. The first round of the battle was fought in 1817, when there were twenty-six prosecutions for seditious and blasphemous libel and sixteen ex officio informations filed by the law officers of the Crown.1 The laurels of victory, in this year, went to Wooler and Hone, and to the London juries which refused to convict. Wooler conducted his own defence; he was a capable speaker, with some experience of the courts, and defended himself with ability in the grandiloquent libertarian manner. The result of his two trials (5 June 1817) was one verdict of ‘Not Guilty’ and one muddled verdict of ‘Guilty’ (from which three jurymen demurred) which was later upset in the Court of King’s Bench.2 The three trials of William Hone in December 1817 are some of the most hilarious legal proceedings on record. Hone, a poor bookseller and former member of the L.C.S., was indicted for publishing blasphemous libels, in the form of parodies upon the Catechism, Litany, and Creed. Hone, in fact, was only a particularly witty exponent of a form of political squib long established among the newsvendors and patterers, and practised in more sophisticated form by men of all parties, from Wilkes to the writers in the Anti-Jacobin. Hone, indeed, had not thought his parodies worth risking liberty for. When the repression of February 1817 commenced, he had sought to withdraw them; and it was Carlile, by republishing them, who had forced the Government’s hand. Here is a sample:
Our Lord who art in the Treasury, whatsoever be thy name, thy power be prolonged, thy will be done throughout the empire, as it is in each session. Give us our usual sops, and forgive us our occasional absences on divisions; as we promise not to forgive those that divide against thee. Turn us not out of our places; but keep us in the House of Commons, the land of Pensions and Plenty; and deliver us from the People. Amen.
Hone was held in prison, in poor health, from May until December, because he was unable to find £1,000 bail. Not much was expected when it was learned that he intended to conduct his own defence. But Hone had been improving the time in prison by collecting examples, from the past and present, of other parodists; and in his first trial before Justice Abbott he secured an acquittal. In the next two days the old, ill and testy Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough himself presided over the trials. Page after page of the record is filled with Ellenborough’s interruptions, Hone’s unruffled reproofs to the Chief Justice on his conduct, the reading of ludicrous parodies culled from various sources, and threats by the Sheriff to arrest ‘the first man I see laugh’. Despite Ellenborough’s unqualified charge (‘… in obedience to his conscience and his God, he pronounced this to be a most impious and profane libel’) the jury returned two further verdicts of ‘Not Guilty’, with the consequence (it is said) that Ellenborough retired to his sick-room never to return. From that time forward – even in 1819 and 1820 – all parodies and squibs were immune from prosecution.1
Persecution cannot easily stand up in the face of ridicule. Indeed, there are two things that strike one about the press battles of these years. The first is, not the solemnity but the delight with which Hone, Cruikshank, Carlile, Davison, Benbow and others baited authority. (This tradition was continued by Hetherington, who for weeks passed under the noses of the constables, in his business as editor of the unstamped Poor Man’s Guardian, in the highly unlikely disguise of a Quaker.) Imprisonment as a Radical publisher brought, not odium, but honour. Once the publishers had decided that they were ready to go to prison, they outdid each other with new expedients to exhibit their opponents in the most ludicrous light. Radical England was delighted (and no one more than Hazlitt) at the resurrection by Sherwin of Wat Tyler – the republican indiscretion of Southey’s youth. Southey, now Poet Laureate, was foremost in the clamour to curb the seditious licence of the press, and sought an injunction against Sherwin for infringement of copyright Lord Eldon refused the injunction: the Court could not take notice of property in the ‘unhallowed profits of libellous publications’. ‘Is it not a little strange,’ Hazlitt inquired, ‘that while this gentleman is getting an injunction against himself as the author of Wat Tyler, he is recommending gagging bills against us, and thus making up by force for his deficiency in argument?’1 On the other hand, Carlile (who had taken over Sherwin’s business) was more than pleased that the injunction was refused – for the sales of the poem were a staple source of profit in his difficult period at the start of business. ‘Glory be to thee, O Southey!’, he wrote six years later: ‘Wat Tyler continued to be a source of profit when every other political publication failed. The world does not know what it may yet owe to Southey.’2
The incidents of the pirating of Queen Mab and the Vision of Judgement were part of the same ebullient strategy. No British monarch has ever been portrayed in more ridiculous postures nor in more odious terms than George IV during the Queen Caroline agitation, and notably in Hone and Cruikshank’s Right Divine of Kings to Govern Wrong, The Queen’s Matrimonial Ladder, Non Mi Ricordo, and The Man in the Moon. The same author’s Slap at Slop and the Bridge-Street Gang (1822) appeared in the format of the Government-subsidized New Times, complete with a mock newspaper-stamp with the design of a cat’s paw and the motto: ‘On Every Thing He Claps His Claw’, and with mock advertisements and mock lists of births and deaths:
MARRIAGE
His Imperial Majesty Prince Despotism, in a consumption, to Her Supreme Antiquity, The IGNORANCE of Eighteen Centuries, in a decline. The bridal dresses were most superb.
While Carlile fought on from prison, the satirists raked his prosecutors with fire.
The second point is the real toughness of the libertarian and constitutional tradition, notwithstanding the Government’s assault. It is not only a question of support in unexpected places – Hone’s subscription list was headed by donations from a Whig duke, a marquis, and two earls – which indicates an uneasiness in the ruling class itself. What is apparent from the reports of the law officers of the Crown, in all political trials, is the caution with which they proceeded. In particular they were aware of the unreliability (for their purposes) of the jury system. By Fox’s Libel Act of 1792 the jury were judges of the libel as well as of the fact of publishing; and however judges might seek to set this aside, this meant in effect that twelve Englishmen had to decide whether they thought the ‘libel’ dangerous enough to merit imprisonment or not. One State prosecution which failed was a blow at the morale of authority which could only be repaired by three which succeeded. Even in 1819–21 when the Government and the prosecuting societies carried almost every case1 (in part as a result of their better deployment of legal resources and their influence upon juries, in part because Carlile was at his most provocative and had shifted the battlefield from sedition to blasphemy), it still is not possible to speak of ‘totalitarian’ or ‘Asiatic’ despotism. Reports of the trials were widely circulated, containing the very passages – sometimes, indeed, whole books read by the defendants in court – for which the accused were sentenced. Carlile continued imperturbably to edit the Republican from gaol; some of his shopmen, indeed, undertook in prison the editing of another journal, as a means of self-improvement. If Wooler’s Black Dwarf failed in 1824, Cobbett remained in the field. He was, it is true, much subdued in the early Twenties. He did not like Carlile’s Republicanism and Deism, nor their hold on the artisans of the great centres; and he turned increasingly back to the countryside and distanced himself from the working-class movement. (In 1821 he undertook the first of his Rural Rides, in which his genius seems at last to have found its inevitable form and matter.) But, even at this distance, the Political Register was always there, with its columns – like those of the Republican – open to expose any case of persecution, from Bodmin to Berwick.
The honours of this contest did not belong to a single class. John Hunt and Thelwall (now firmly among the middle-class moderates) were among those pestered by the ‘Bridge-Street Gang’; Sir Charles Wolseley, Burdett, the Reverend Joseph Harrison, were among those imprisoned for sedition. But Carlile and his shopmen were those who pressed defiance to its furthest point. The main battle was over by 1823, although there were renewed prosecutions in the late Twenties and early Thirties, and blasphemy cases trickled on into Victorian times. Carlile’s greatest offence was to proceed with the unabashed publication of the Political Works, and then the Theological Works, of Tom Paine – works which, while circulating surreptitiously in the enclaves of ‘old Jacks’ in the cities, had been banned ever since Paine’s trial in absentia in 1792, and Daniel Isaac Eaton’s successive trials during the Wars. To this he added many further offences as the struggle wore on, and as he himself moved from Deism to Atheism, and as he threw in provocations – such as the advocacy of assassination – which in any view of the case were incitements to prosecution. He was an indomitable man, but he was scarcely loveable, and his years of imprisonment did not improve him. His strength lay in two things. First, he would not even admit of the possibility of defeat. And second, he had at his back the culture of the artisans.
The first point is not as evident as it appears. Determined men have often (as in the 1790s) been silenced or defeated. It is true that Carlile’s brand of determination (‘THE SHOP IN FLEET STREET WILL NOT BE CLOSED AS A MATTER OF COURSE’) was peculiarly difficult for the authorities to meet. No matter how much law they had on their side, they must always incur odium by prosecutions. But they had provided themselves, under the Six Acts, with the power to banish the authors of sedition for offences far less than those which Carlile both committed and proudly admitted. It is testimony to the delicate equilibrium of the time, and to the limits imposed upon power by the consensus of constitutional opinion, that even in 1820 this provision of the Act was not employed. Banishment apart, Carlile could not be silenced, unless he were to be beheaded, or, more possibly, placed in solitary confinement. But there are two reasons why the Government did not proceed to extreme measures: first, already by 1821 it seemed to them less necessary, for the increased stamp duties were taking effect. Second, it was apparent after the first encounters that if Carlile were to be silenced, half a dozen new Carliles would step into his place. The first two who did so were, in fact, Carliles: his wife and his sister. Thereafter the ‘shopmen’ came forward. By one count, before the battle had ended Carlile had received the help of 150 volunteers, who – shopmen, printers, newsvendors – had between them served 200 years of imprisonment. The volunteers were advertised for in the Republican – men ‘who were free, able, and willing to serve in General Carlile’s Corps’:
it is most distinctly to be understood that a love of propagating the principles, and a sacrifice of liberty to that end… AND NOT GAIN, must be the motive to call forth such volunteers; for – though R. Carlile pledges himself to… give such men the best support in his power – should any great number be imprisoned, he is not so situated as to property or prospects as to be able to promise any particular sum weekly…1
From that time forward the ‘Temple of Reason’ off Fleet Street was scarcely left untenanted for more than a day. The men and women who came forward were, in nearly every case, entirely unknown to Carlile. They simply came out of London; or arrived on the coach from Lincolnshire, Dorset, Liverpool and Leeds. They came out of a culture.
It was not the ‘working-class’ culture of the weavers or Tyneside pitmen. The people most prominent in the fight included clerks, shop assistants, a farmer’s son; Benbow, the shoemaker turned bookseller; James Watson, the Leeds warehouseman who ‘had the charge of a saddlehorse’ at a dry-salter’s; James Mann, the cropper turned bookseller (also of Leeds). The intellectual tradition was in part derived from the Jacobin years, the circle which had once moved around Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, or the members of the L.C.S., the last authentic spokesman of which – John Gale Jones – was one of Carlile’s most constant supporters. In part it was a new tradition, owing something to Bentham’s growing influence and something to the ‘free-thinking Christians’ and Unitarians, such as Benjamin Flower and W. J. Fox. It touched that vigorous sub-culture of the ‘editors of Sunday newspapers and lecturers at the Surrey Institute’ which Blackwood’s and the literary Establishment so scorned – schoolmasters, poor medical students, or civil servants who read Byron and Shelley and the Examiner, and among whom, not Whig or Tory, but ‘right and wrong considered by each man abstractedly, is the fashion’.1
It is scarcely helpful to label this culture bourgeois or petit-bourgeois, although Carlile had more than his share of the individualism which (it is generally supposed) characterizes the latter. It would seem to be closer to the truth that the impulse of rational enlightenment which (in the years of the wars) had been largely confined to the Radical intelligentsia was now seized upon by the artisans and some of the skilled workers (such as many cotton-spinners) with an evangelistic zeal to carry it to ‘numbers unlimited’ – a propagandist zeal scarcely to be found in Bentham, James Mill or Keats. The subscription lists for Carlile’s campaign drew heavily upon London; and, next, upon Manchester and Leeds. The artisan culture was, above all, that of the self-taught. ‘During this twelve-month,’ Watson recalled of his imprisonment, ‘I read with deep interest and much profit Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Hume’s History of England, and… Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History.’2 The artisans, who formed the nuclei of Carlile’s supporting ‘Zetetic Societies’ (as well as of the later Rotunda) were profoundly suspicious of an established culture which had excluded them from power and knowledge and which had answered their protests with homilies and tracts. The works of the Enlightenment came to them with the force of revelation.
In this way a reading public which was increasingly working class in character was forced to organize itself. The war and immediate post-war years had seen a ‘kept’ press, on the one hand, and a Radical press on the other. In the Twenties much of the middle-class press freed itself from direct Government influence, and made some use of the advantages which Cobbett and Carlile had gained. The Times and Lord Brougham, who disliked the ‘pauper press’ perhaps as much as Lord Eldon (although for different reasons), gave to the term ‘Radicalism’ a quite different meaning – free trade, cheap government, and utilitarian reform. To some degree (although by no means entirely) they carried the Radical middle-class with them – the schoolmasters, surgeons, and shopkeepers, some of whom had once supported Cobbett and Wooler – so that by 1832 there were two Radical publics: the middle-class, which looked forward to the Anti-Corn Law League, and the working-class, whose journalists (Hetherington, Watson, Cleave, Lovett, Benbow, O’Brien) were already maturing the Chartist movement. Throughout the Twenties the working-class press struggled under the crushing weight of the stamp duties,1 while Cobbett remained loosely and temperamentally affiliated to the plebeian rather than to the middle-class movement. The dividing-line came to be, increasingly, not alternative ‘reform’ strategies (for middle-class reformers could on occasion be as revolutionary in their tone as their working-class counterparts) but alternative notions of political economy. The touchstone can be seen during the field labourer’s ‘revolt’ in 1830, when The Times (Cobbett’s ‘BLOODY OLD TIMES’) led the demand for salutary examples to be made of the rioters, while both Cobbett and Carlile were prosecuted once again on charges of inflammatory writing.
In 1830 and 1831 the black ensign of defiance was hoisted once again. Cobbett found a loophole in the law, and recommenced his Twopenny Trash. But this time it was Hetherington, a printing worker, who led the frontal attack. His Poor Man’s Guardian carried the emblem of a hand-press, the motto ‘Knowledge is Power’, and the heading: ‘Published contrary to “Law” to try the power of “Might” against “Right”.’ His opening address, quoted clause by clause the laws he intended to defy:
… the Poor Man’s Guardian… will contain ‘news, intelligence and occurrences,’ and ‘remarks and observations thereon,’ and ‘upon matters of Church and State tending,’ decidedly, ‘to excite hatred and contempt of the Government and Constitution of… this country, as BY LAW established,’ and also, ‘to vilify the ABUSES of Religion’…
It would also defy every clause of the stamp tax legislation,
or any other acts whatsoever and despite the ‘laws’ or the will and pleasure of any tyrant or body of tyrants whatsoever, any thing herein-before, or any-where-else… to the contrary notwithstanding.
His fourth number carried the advertisement, ‘WANTED’: ‘Some hundreds of POOR MEN out of employ who have NOTHING TO RISK… to sell to the poor and ignorant’ this paper. Not only were the volunteers found, but a score of other unstamped papers sprang up, notably Carlile’s Gauntlet, and Joshua Hobson’s Voice of the West Riding. By 1836 the struggle was substantially over, and the way had been opened for the Chartist press.
But the ‘great unstamped’ was emphatically a working-class press. The Poor Man’s Guardian and the Working Man’s Friend were in effect, organs of the National Union of the Working Classes; Doherty’s Poor Man’s Advocate was an organ of the Factory Movement; Joshua Hobson was a former hand-loom weaver, who had built a wooden hand-press by his own labour; Bronterre O’Brien’s Destructive consciously sought to develop working-class Radical theory. These small, closely printed, weeklies carried news of the great struggle for General Unionism in these years, the lock-outs of 1834 and the protests at the Tolpuddle case, or searching debate and exposition of Socialist and trade union theory. An examination of this period would take us beyond the limits of this study, to a time when the working class was no longer in the making but (in its Chartist form) already made. The point we must note is the degree to which the fight for press liberties was a central formative influence upon the shaping movement. Perhaps 500 people were prosecuted for the production and sale of the ‘unstamped’.1 From 1816 (indeed, from 1792) until 1836 the contest involved, not only the editors, booksellers, and printers, but also many hundreds of newsvendors, hawkers, and voluntary agents.2
Year after year the annals of persecution continue. In 1817 two men selling Cobbett’s pamphlets in Shropshire, whom a clerical magistrate ‘caused… to be apprehended under the Vagrant Act… and had well flogged at the whipping-post’; in the same year hawkers in Plymouth, Exeter, the Black Country, Oxford, the north; in 1819 even a peep-show huckster, who showed a print of Peterloo in a Devon village. The imprisonments were rarely for more than a year (often newsvendors were committed to prison for a few weeks and then released without trial) but they could be more serious in their effects upon the victims than the more widely publicized imprisonments of editors. Men were thrown into verminous ‘Houses of Correction’; often chained and fettered; often without knowledge of the law or means of defence. Unless their cases were noted by Cobbett, Carlile or some section of the Radicals, their families were left without any income and might be forced into the workhouse.3 It was, indeed, in the smaller centres that the contest for freedom was most hard-fought. Manchester or Nottingham or Leeds had Radical enclaves and meeting-places, and were ready to support the victimized. In the market town or industrial village the cobbler or teacher who took in Cobbett or Carlile in the Twenties might expect to be watched and to suffer persecution in indirect forms. (Often Cobbett’s parcels of Registers to country subscribers simply failed to arrive – they were ‘lost’ in the mail.) A whole pattern of distribution, with its own folklore, grew up around the militant press. Hawkers (Mayhew was told), in order to avoid ‘selling’ the Republican, sold straws instead, and then gave the paper to their customers. In the Spen Valley, in the days of the ‘unstamped’, a penny was dropped through a grating and the paper would ‘appear’. In other parts, men would slip down alleys or across fields at night to the known rendezvous. More than once the ‘unstamped’ were transported under the noses of the authorities in a coffin and with a godly cortège of free-thinkers.
We may take two examples of the shopmen and vendors. The first, a shopwoman, serves to remind us that, in these rationalist and Owenite circles, the claim for women’s rights (almost silent since the 1790s) was once again being made, and was slowly extending from the intelligentsia to the artisans. Carlile’s womenfolk, who underwent trial and imprisonment, did so more out of loyalty than out of conviction. Very different was Mrs Wright, a Nottingham lace-mender, who was one of Carlile’s volunteers and who was prosecuted for selling one of his Addresses containing opinions in his characteristic manner:
A Representative System of Government would soon see the propriety of turning our Churches and Chapels into Temples of Science and… cherishing the Philosopher instead of the Priest. Kingcraft and Priestcraft I hold to be the bane of Society…. Those two evils operate jointly against the welfare both of the body and mind, and to palliate our miseries in this life, the latter endeavour to bamboozle us with a hope of eternal happiness.
She conducted her long defence herself1 and was rarely interrupted. Towards the end of her defence,
Mrs Wright requested permission to retire and suckle her infant child that was crying. This was granted, and she was absent from the Court twenty minutes. In passing to and fro, to the Castle Coffee House, she was applauded and loudly cheered by assembled thousands, all encouraging her to be of good cheer and to persevere.
Some time later she was thrown into Newgate, on a November night, with her six-months’ baby and nothing to lie on but a mat. Such women as Mrs Wright (and Mrs Mann of Leeds) had to meet not only the customary prosecutions, but also the abuse and insinuations of an outraged loyalist press. ‘This wretched and shameless woman,’ wrote the New Times, was attended by ‘several females. Are not these circumstances enough to shock every reflecting mind?’ She was an ‘abandoned creature’ (the conventional epithet for prostitutes) ‘who has cast off all the distinctive shame and fear and decency of her sex’. By her ‘horrid example’ she had depraved the minds of other mothers: ‘these monsters in female form stand forward, with hardened visages, in the face of day, to give their public countenance and support – for the first time in the history of the Christian world – to gross, vulgar, horrid blasphemy’. She was a woman, wrote Carlile, ‘of very delicate health, and truly all spirit and no matter’.1
The longest sentences endured by a newsvendor were probably those served by Joseph Swann, a hat-maker of Macclesfield. He was arrested in 1819 for selling pamphlets and a seditious poem:
Off with your fetters; spurn the slavish yoke;
Now, now, or never, can your chain be broke;
Swift then rise and give the fatal stroke.
Shunted from gaol to gaol, and chained with felons, he was eventually sentenced to two years imprisonment for seditious conspiracy, two years for blasphemous libel, and a further six months for seditious libel to run consecutively. When these monstrous sentences had been passed, Swann held up his white hat and enquired of the magistrate: ‘Han ye done? Is that all? Why I thowt ye’d got a bit of hemp for me, and hung me.’ His wife also was briefly arrested (for continuing the sale of pamphlets); she and her four children survived on a parish allowance of 9s. a week, with some help from Carlile and Cobbett. Cobbett, indeed, interested himself particularly in the case of Swann, and when Castlereagh committed suicide it was to Swann that Cobbett addressed his triumphant obituary obloquies: ‘CASTLEREAGH HAS CUT HIS OWN THROAT AND IS DEAD! Let that sound reach you in the depth of your dungeon… and carry consolation to your suffering soul.’ After serving his four and a half years, Swann ‘passed the gate of Chester Castle… in mind as stubborn as ever’, and resumed his trade as a hatter. But he had not yet been discharged from service. In November 1831 the Poor Man’s Guardian reported proceedings at the Stockport magistrate’s court, where Joseph Swann was charged with selling the ‘unstamped’. The Chairman of the Bench, Captain Clarke, asked him what he had to say in his defence:
Defendant. – Well, Sir, I have been out of employment for some time; neither can I obtain work; my family are all starving…. And for another reason, the weightiest of all; I sell them for the good of my fellow countrymen; to let them see how they are misrepresented in Parliament… I wish to let the people know how they are humbugged…
Bench. – Hold your tongue a moment.
Defendant. – I shall not! for I wish every man to read these publications…
Bench. – You are very insolent, therefore you are committed to three months’ imprisonment in Knutsford House of Correction, to hard labour.
Defendant. – I’ve nothing to thank you for; and whenever I come out, I’ll hawk them again. And mind you [looking at Captain Clark] the first that I hawk shall be to your house…
Joseph Swann was then forcibly removed from the dock.1
In the twentieth-century rhetoric of democracy most of these men and women have been forgotten, because they were impudent, vulgar, over-earnest, or ‘fanatical’. In their wake the subsidized vehicles of ‘improvement’, the Penny Magazine and the Saturday Magazine (whose vendors no one prosecuted) moved in; and afterwards the commercial press, with its much larger resources, although it did not really begin to capture the Radical reading public until the Forties and the Fifties. (Even then the popular press – the publications of Cleave, Howitt, Chambers, Reynolds, and Lloyd – came from this Radical background.) Two consequences of the contest may be particularly noticed. The first (and most obvious) is that the working-class ideology which matured in the Thirties (and which has endured, through various translations, ever since) put an exceptionally high value upon the rights of the press, of speech, of meeting and of personal liberty. The tradition of the ‘free-born Englishman’ is of course far older. But the notion to be found in some late ‘Marxist’ interpretations, by which these claims appear as a heritage of ‘bourgeois individualism’ will scarcely do. In the contest between 1792 and 1836 the artisans and workers made this tradition peculiarly their own, adding to the claim for free speech and thought their own claim for the untrammelled propagation, in the cheapest possible form, of the products of this thought.
In this, it is true, they shared a characteristic illusion of the epoch, applying it with force to the context of working-class struggle. All the enlighteners and improvers of the time thought that the only limit imposed to the diffusion of reason and knowledge was that imposed by the inadequacy of the means. The analogies which were drawn were frequently mechanical. The educational method of Lancaster and Bell, with its attempt at the cheap multiplication of learning by child monitors, was called (by Bell) the ‘STEAM ENGINE of the MORAL WORLD’. Peacock aimed with deadly accuracy when he called Brougham’s Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge the ‘Steam Intellect Society’. Carlile was supremely confident that ‘pamphlet-reading is destined to work the great necessary moral and political changes among mankind’:
The Printing-press may be strictly denominated a Multiplication Table as applicable to the mind of man. The art of Printing is a multiplication of mind…. Pamphlet-vendors are the most important springs in the machinery of Reform.1
Owen contemplated the institution, by means of propaganda, of the NEW MORAL WORLD with messianic, but mechanical, optimism.
But if this was, in part, the rationalist illusion, we must remember the second – and more immediate – consequence: between 1816 and 1836 this ‘multiplication’ seemed to work. For the Radical and unstamped journalists were seizing the multiplying-machine on behalf of the working class; and in every part of the country the experiences of the previous quarter-century had prepared men’s minds for what they now could read. The importance of the propaganda can be seen in the steady extension of Radical organization from the great towns and manufacturing areas into the small boroughs and market towns. One of the Six Acts of 1819 (that authorizing the search for weapons) was specificially confined only to designated ‘disturbed districts’ of the Midlands and the north.1 By 1832 – and on into Chartist times – there is a Radical nucleus to be found in every county, in the smallest market towns and even in the larger rural villages, and in nearly every case it is based on the local artisans. In such centres as Croydon, Colchester and Ipswich, Tiverton and Taunton, Nantwich or Cheltenham, there were hardy and militant Radical or Chartist bodies. In Ipswich we find weavers, saddlers, harness-makers, tailors, shoemakers; in Cheltenham shoemakers, tailors, stonemasons, cabinet-makers, gardeners, a plasterer and a blacksmith – ‘earnest and reputable people – much above the average in intelligence’.2 These are the people whom Cobbett, Carlile, Hetherington and their newsvendors had ‘multiplied’.
‘Ernest and reputable people…’ – this autodidact culture has never been adequately analysed.3 The majority of these people had received some elementary education, although its inadequacy is testified from many sources:
I well remember the first half-time school in Bingley. It was a cottage at the entrance to the mill-yard. The teacher, a poor old man who had done odd jobs of a simple kind for about 12s. a week, was set to teach the half-timers. Lest, however, he should teach too much or the process be too costly, he had to stamp washers out of cloth with a heavy wooden mallet on a large block of wood during school hours.1
This is, perhaps, the ‘schooling’ of the early 1830s at its worst. Better village schools, or cheap fee-paying schools patronized by artisans, could be found in the Twenties. By this time, also, the Sunday schools were liberating themselves (although slowly) from the taboo upon the teaching of writing, while the first British and National schools (for all their inadequacies) were beginning to have some effect. But, for any secondary education, the artisans, weavers, or spinners had to teach themselves. The extent to which they were doing this is attested by the sales of Cobbett’s educational writings, and notably of his Grammar of the English Language, published in 1818, selling 13,000 within six months, and a further 100,000 in the next fifteen years.2 And we must remember that in translating sales (or the circulation of periodicals) into estimates of readership, the same book or paper was loaned, read aloud and passed through many hands.
But the ‘secondary education’ of the workers took many forms, of which private study in solitude was only one. The artisans, in particular, were not as rooted in benighted communities as it is easy to assume. They tramped freely about the country in search of work; apart from the enforced travels of the Wars, many mechanics travelled abroad, and the relative facility with which thousands upon thousands emigrated to America and the colonies (driven not only by poverty but also by the desire for opportunity or political freedom) suggests a general fluency of social life. In the cities a vigorous and bawdy plebeian culture coexisted with more polite traditions among the artisans. Many collections of early nineteenth-century ballads testify to the fervour with which the battle between Loyalists and Radicals was carried into song. Perhaps it was the melodramatic popular theatre which accorded best with the gusto of the Jacobins and of the ‘old Radicals’ of 1816–20. From the early 1790s the theatre, especially in provincial centres, was a forum in which the opposed factions confronted each other, and provoked each other by ‘calling the tunes’ in the intervals. A ‘Jacobin Revolutionist and Leveller’ described a visit to the theatre, in 1795, in a northern port:
… and as the theatre is generally the field in which the Volunteer Officers fight their Campaigns, these military heroes… called for the tune of God Save the King, and ordered the audience to stand uncovered… I sat covered in defiance of the military.1
It was in the years of repression that this song (with its denunciation of the ‘knavish tricks’ of the Jacobins) replaced ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’ as a ‘national anthem’. But as the Wars dragged on, the audience often proved itself to be less easily cowed by ‘Church and King’ bullies than later generations. A riot in Sheffield in 1812 commenced when ‘the South Devon officers insist on having “God Save the King” sung, and the mobility in the gallery insist on its not being sung…. A disturber has been sent to prison.’2
Most early nineteenth-century theatre-riots had some Radical tinge to them, even if they only expressed the simple antagonism between the stalls and the gods. The jealousy of the monopolistic Patent Theatres to their little rivals, with their ‘burlettas’ and their shows ‘disgraced… by the introduction of Horses, Elephants, Monkeys, Dogs, Fencers, Tumblers, and Rope Dancers’,3 was reinforced by the dislike felt by employers for the dangerous ebullience of the audience. In 1798 the ‘opulent Merchants, Shipbuilders, Ropemakers’ and other employers around London Docks memorialized the Government, complaining that the performances at the Royalty Theatre, near the Tower, encouraged ‘habits of dissipation and profligacy’ among ‘their numerous Manufacturers, Workmen, Servants, &c.’1 (The complaint had been going on for more than two hundred years.) In 1819 disorder raged through central London, night after night, and week after week, in the notorious ‘O.P.’ riots, when the prices were raised at Drury Lane. It was Authority’s particular dislike of the theatre’s blend of disorder and sedition which enabled the Patent Theatres to preserve at least the forms of their monopoly until as late as 1843.
The vitality of the plebeian theatre was not matched by its artistic merit. The most positive influence upon the sensibility of the Radicals came less from the little theatres than from the Shakespearian revival – not only Hazlitt, but also Wooler, Bamford, Cooper, and a score of self-taught Radical and Chartist journalists were wont to cap their arguments with Shakespearian quotations. Wooler’s apprenticeship had been in dramatic criticism; while the strictly trades unionist Trades Newspaper commenced, in 1825, with a theatre critic as well as a sporting column (covering prize-fighting and the contest between ‘the Lion Nero and Six Dogs’).2 But there was one popular art which, in the years between 1780 and 1830, attained to a peak of complexity and excellence – the political print.
This was the age, first, of Gillray and of Rowlandson, and then of George Cruikshank, as well as of scores of other caricaturists, some competent, some atrociously crude. Theirs was, above all, a metropolitan art. The models for the cartoonists drove in their coaches past the print-shops where their political (or personal) sins were mercilessly lampooned. No holds whatsoever were barred, on either side. Thelwall or Burdett or Hunt would be portrayed by the loyalists as savage incendiaries, a flaming torch in one hand, a pistol in the other, and with belts crammed with butchers’ knives; while Cruikshank portrayed the King (in 1820) lolling blind drunk in his throne, surrounded by broken bottles and in front of a screen decorated with satyrs and large-breasted trollops. (The Bishops fared no better.) The popular print was by no means an art for the illiterate, as the balloons full of minute print, issuing from the mouths of the figures, testify. But the illiterate also could participate in this culture, standing by the hour in front of the print-shop window and deciphering the intricate visual minutiae in the latest Gillray or Cruikshank: at Knight’s in Sweeting’s Alley, Fairburn’s off Ludgate Hill, or Hone’s in Fleet Street (Thackeray recalled), ‘there used to be a crowd… of grinning, good-natured mechanics, who spelt the songs, and spoke them out for the benefit of the company, and who received the points of humour with a general sympathizing roar’. On occasions, the impact was sensational; Fleet Street would be blocked by the crowds; Cruikshank believed that his ‘Bank Restriction Note’ (1818) resulted in the abolition of the death-penalty for passing forged money. In the 1790s the Government actually suborned Gillray into anti-Jacobin service. During the Wars the mainstream of prints was patriotic and anti-Gallican (John Bull took on his classic shape in these years), but on domestic issues the prints were savagely polemical and frequently Burdettite in sympathy. After the Wars a flood of Radical prints was unloosed, which remained immune from prosecution, even during the Queen Caroline agitation, because prosecution would have incurred greater ridicule. Through all its transformations (and despite the crudities of many practitioners) it remained a highly sophisticated city art: it could be acutely witty, or cruelly blunt and obscene, but in either case it depended upon a frame of reference of shared gossip and of intimate knowledge of the manners and foibles of even minor participants in public affairs – a patina of intricate allusiveness.1
The culture of the theatre and the print-shop was popular in a wider sense than the literary culture of the Radical artisans. For the keynote of the autodidact culture of the Twenties and early Thirties was moral sobriety. It is customary to attribute this to the influence of Methodism, and undoubtedly, both directly and indirectly, this influence can be felt. The Puritan character-structure underlies the moral earnestness and self-discipline which enabled men to work on by candle-light after a day of labour. But we have to make two important reservations. The first is that Methodism was a strongly anti-intellectual influence, from which British popular culture has never wholly recovered. The circle to which Wesley would have confined the reading of Methodists (Southey noted) ‘was narrow enough; his own works, and his own series of abridgements, would have constituted the main part of a Methodist’s library’.1 In the early nineteenth century local preachers and class leaders were encouraged to read more: reprints of Baxter, the hagiography of the movement, or ‘vollams of the Missionary Register’. But poetry was suspect, and philosophy, biblical criticism, or political theory taboo. The whole weight of Methodist teaching fell upon the blessedness of the ‘pure in heart’, no matter what their rank or accomplishments. This gave to the Church its egalitarian spiritual appeal. But it also fed (sometimes to gargantuan proportions) the philistine defences of the scarcely-literate. ‘It is carte blanche for ignorance and folly,’ Hazlitt exploded:
Those… who are either unable or unwilling to think connectedly or rationally on any subject, are at once released from every obligation of the kind, by being told that faith and reason are opposed to one another.2
From the successive shocks of Paine, Cobbett, Carlile, the Methodist ministers defended their flocks: the evidence was abundant that unmonitored literacy was the ‘snare of the devil’.
Some of the off-shoots from the main Methodist stem – the Methodist Unitarians (an odd conjunction) and notably the New Connexion – were more intellectual in inclination, and their congregations resemble the older Dissenting Churches. But the main Methodist tradition responded to the thirst for enlightenment in a different way. We have already noted1 the submerged affinities between Methodism and middle-class Utilitarianism. Strange as it may seem, when we think of Bentham and his hatred of ‘juggical’ superstition, the spirit of the times was working for a conjunction of the two traditions. If intellectual enquiry was discouraged by the Methodists, the acquistion of useful knowledge could be seen as godly and full of merit. The emphasis, of course, was upon the use. Work-discipline alone was not enough, it was necessary for the labour force to advance towards more sophisticated levels of attaintment. The old opportunist Baconian argument – that there could be no evil in the study of nature, which is the visible evidence of God’s laws – had now been assimilated within Christian apologetics. Hence arose that peculiar phenomenon of early Victorian culture, the Nonconformist minister with his hand on the Old Testament and his eye on a microscope.
The effects of this conjunction can already be felt within the working-class culture of the Twenties. Science – botany, biology, geology, chemistry, mathematics, and, in particular, the applied sciences – the Methodists looked upon with favour, provided that these pursuits were not intermixed with politics or speculative philosophy. The solid, statistical, intellectual world which the Utilitarians were building was congenial also to the Methodist Conference. They also compiled their statistical tables of Sunday school attendances, and Bunting (one feels) would have been happy if he could have calculated degrees of spiritual grace with the accuracy that Chadwick calculated the minimum diet that might keep a pauper in strength to work. Hence came that alliance between Nonconformists and Utilitarians in educational endeavour, and in the dissemination of ‘improving’ knowledge alongside godly exhortation. Already in the Twenties this kind of literature is well established, in which moral admonishments (and accounts of the drunken orgies of Tom Paine on his unvisited deathbed) appear side by side with little notes on the flora of Venezuela, statistics of the death-roll in the Lisbon earthquake, recipes for boiled vegetables, and notes on hydraulics:
Every species… requires a different kind of food… Linnaeus has remarked, that the cow eats 276 species of plants and rejects 218; the goat eats 449 and rejects 126; the sheep eats 387 and rejects 141; the horse eats 262 and rejects 212; and the hog, more nice in its taste than any of those, eats but 72 plants and rejects all the rest. Yet such is the unbounded munificence of the Creator, that all these countless myriads of sentient beings are amply provided for and nourished by his bounty! ‘The eyes of all these look unto Him, and he openeth his hand and satisfieth the desire of every living being.’ 1
And already in the Twenties, Political Economy can be seen as a third partner alongside Morality and Useful Knowledge, in the shape of homilies upon the God-given and immutable laws of supply and demand. Capital, even nicer in its taste than the hog, would select only the industrious and obedient worker and reject all others.
Thus Methodism and Evangelicism contributed few active intellectual ingredients to the articulate culture of the working people, although they can be said to have added an earnestness to the pursuit of information. (Arnold was later to see the Nonconformist tradition as deeply philistine, and indifferent to ‘sweetness and light’.) And there is a second reservation to be made, when the sobriety of the artisan’s world is attributed to this source. Moral sobriety was in fact demonstrably a product of the Radical and rationalist agitation itself; and owed much to the old Dissenting and Jacobin traditions. This is not to say that there were no drunken Radicals nor disorderly demonstrations. Wooler was only one of the Radical leaders who, it was said, was too fond of the bottle; while we have seen that the London taverns and Lancashire hush-shops were important meeting-places. But the Radicals sought to rescue the people from the imputation of being a ‘mob’; and their leaders sought continually to present an image of sobriety.
Moreover, there were other motives for this emphasis. One of the Rules of the Bath Union Society for Parliamentary Reform (established in January 1817) is characteristic:
It is earnestly recommended to every Member not to spend his Money at public houses, because half of the said Money goes in Taxes, to feed the Maggots of Corruption.1
In the post-war years Hunt and Cobbett made much of the call for abstinence from all taxed articles, and in particular of the virtues of water over spirits or beer. The sobriety of the Methodists was the one (and only) attribute of their ‘sect’ which Cobbett found it possible to praise: ‘I look upon drunkenness as the root of much more than half the mischief, misery and crimes with which society is afflicted.’ 2 This was not always Cobbett’s tone; on other occasions he could lament the price, for the labourer, of beer. But a general moral primness is to be found in most quarters. It was, particularly, the ideology of the artisan or of the skilled worker who had held his position in the face of the boisterous unskilled tide. It is to be found in Carlile’s account of his early manhood:
I was a regular, active, and industrious man, working early and late… and when out of the workshop never so happy anywhere as at home with my wife and two children. The alehouse I always detested… I had a notion that a man… was a fool not to make a right application of every shilling.3
Many a day he had missed out a meal, and ‘carried home some sixpenny publication to read at night’. It is to be found, in its most admirable and moving form, in William Lovett’s Life and Struggles…in Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, a title which, in itself, condenses all that we are seeking to describe.
It was a disposition strengthened, among the republicans and free-thinkers, by the character of the attacks upon them. Denounced in loyalist lampoons and from Church pulpits as disreputable exemplars of every vice, they sought to exhibit themselves as bearing, alongside their unorthodox opinions, an irreproachable character. They struggled against the loyalist legends of revolutionary France, which was presented as a sanguinary thieves’ kitchen, whose Temples of Reason were brothels. They were particularly sensitive to any accusation of sexual impropriety, of financial misconduct, or of lack of attachment to the familial virtues.1 Carlile published in 1830 a little book of homilies, The Moralist, while Cobbett’s Advice to Young Men was only a more hearty and readable essay upon the same themes of industry, perseverance, independence. The rationalists, of course, were especially anxious to counter the accusation that the rejection of the Christian faith must inevitably entail the dissolution of all moral restraints. Alongside Volney’s influential Ruins of Empire there was translated, and circulated as a tract, his Law of Nature, which served to argue – in the form of a dialogue – that the respectable virtues must all be adhered to according to the laws of social utility:
Q. Why do you say that conjugal love is a virtue?
A. Because the concord and union which are the consequence of the affection subsisting between married persons, establish in the bosom of their family a multitude of habits which contribute to its prosperity and conservation…
So on for the greater part of a page. And so, through chapters on Knowledge, Continence, Temperance, Cleanliness, the Domestic Virtues, which read like a prospectus for the Victorian age. Where heterodoxy appeared on matters of sexual relations, as it did among the Owenite communitarians, it generally did so with a zeal characteristic of the Puritan temperament.2 The very small group of neo-Malthusians who with considerable courage propagated among the working people, in the early Twenties, knowledge of the means of contraception did so out of the conviction that the only way in which the ‘industrious classes’ could raise their physical and cultural standards was by limiting their own numbers. Place and his companions would have been utterly shocked if it had been suggested that these means contributed to sexual or personal freedom.1
Levity or hedonism was as alien to the Radical or rationalist disposition as it was to the Methodist, and we are reminded of how much the Jacobins and Deists owed to the traditions of old Dissent. But it is possible to judge too much from the written record, and the public image of the orator. In the actual movement, cheerfulness keeps breaking in, not only with Hone, but, increasingly, with Hetherington, Lovett and their circle, who were softer, more humorous, more responsive to the people, less didactic, but not less determined, than their master, Carlile. It is tempting to offer the paradox that the rationalist artisans on Carlile’s or Volney’s model exhibited the same behaviour-patterns as their Methodist analogues; whereas in one case sobriety and cleanliness were recommended in obedience to God and to Authority, in the other case they were requisite virtues in those who made up the army which would overthrow Priestcraft and Kingcraft To an observer who did not know the language the moral attributes of both might have appeared indistinguishable. But this is only partly so. For Volney’s chapter-headings continue, ‘Of the Social Virtues, and of Justice’. There was a profound difference between disciplines recommended for the salvation of one’s own soul, and the same disciplines recommended as means to the salvation of a class. The Radical and free-thinking artisan was at his most earnest in his belief in the active duties of citizenship.
Moreover, together with this sobriety, the artisan culture nurtured the values of intellectual enquiry and of mutuality. We have seen much of the first quality, displayed in the fight for press freedom. The autodidact had often an uneven, laboured, understanding, but it was his own. Since he had been forced to find his intellectual way, he took little on trust: his mind did not move within the established ruts of a formal education. Many of his ideas challenged authority, and authority had tried to suppress them. He was willing, therefore, to give a hearing to any new anti-authoritarian ideas. This was one cause for the instability of the working-class movement, especially in the years between 1825 and 1835; it also helps us to understand the rapidity with which Owenism spread, and the readiness of men to swing from one to another of the utopian and communitarian schemes which were put forward. (This artisan culture can be seen, also, as a leaven still at work in Victorian times, as the self-made men or the children of artisans of the Twenties contributed to the vigour and diversity of its intellectual life.) By mutuality we mean the tradition of mutual study, disputation, and improvement. We have seen something of this in the days of the L.C.S. The custom of reading aloud the Radical periodicals, for the benefit of the illiterate, also entailed – as a necessary consequence – that each reading devolved into an ad hoc group discussion: Cobbett had set out his arguments, as plainly as he could, and now the weavers, stockingers, or shoemakers, debated them.
A cousin of this kind of group was the mutual improvement society, whether formal or informal, which met week by week with the intention of acquiring knowledge, generally under the leadership of one of its own members.1 Here, and in the Mechanics’ Institutes, there was some coming-together of the traditions of the chapel and of the Radicals. But the coexistence was uneasy, and not always peaceful. The early history of the Mechanics’ Institutes, from the formation of the London Institute in 1823 until the 1830s, is a story of ideological conflict. From the standpoint of the Radical artisan or trade unionist, the enthusiasm of Dr Birkbeck and of some Dissenting clergy and Benthamite professional men to assist them to establish centres for the promotion of knowledge was very much to be welcomed. But they certainly were not prepared to have this help on any terms. If Brougham appears in some recent writing as a great, but opportunist, Radical, this was not at all how he was viewed by the ‘old Radicals’ of 1823. They had seen him provide apologies for the spy system in 1817 (in a speech which Cobbett raked up again and again); and they were to see him stand up in the House at the climax of Carlile’s campaign and declare that he ‘rejoiced at the result of some recent trials’ and regarded the prisoners as having published ‘a mass of the grossest and most criminal matter’.1 Brougham’s zeal for the Institutes was enough to make them suspect at the outset; and Place’s attempts to act as go-between between Brougham (whom he secretly despised) and the London trades unionists (who less secretly suspected him) were not likely to dispel this. The crucial conflicts took place on the questions of control, of financial independence, and on whether or not the Institutes should debate political economy (and, if so, whose political economy). Thomas Hodgskin was defeated in the latter conflict by Place and Brougham. In the former conflicts Birkbeck, in his zeal to raise money to expand the facilities of the Institute, overruled the advice of Robertson, Hodgskin and John Gast that – if the matter was undertaken less ambitiously – the artisans themselves could raise the necessary funds, and own and control the whole.
These two defeats, and the inauguration of Brougham’s lectures on political economy (1825), meant that control passed to the middle-class supporters, whose ideology also dominated the political economy of the syllabus. By 1825 the Trades Newspaper regarded the London Institute as a lost cause, which was dependent upon ‘the great and wealthy’:
When it was founded, there was such a strong and general feeling excited on its behalf among the Mechanics of the Metropolis, that we felt perfectly convinced, had not that feeling been damped… the Mechanics themselves might and would have furnished all the means requisite for ensuring it the most splendid success…
In the provinces the history of the Mechanics’ Institutes is more chequered. In Leeds (as Dr Harrison has shown) the Institute was from the outset controlled by sponsors from the middle class, and notably by Nonconformist manufacturers; in Bradford and in Huddersfield it was, for a period, controlled by Radical artisans. After the mid-Twenties the tendency was general for the custom of artisans to give way to that of the lower middle class, and for orthodox political economy to come into the syllabus. But still in 1830 the movement looked unorthodox enough (by reason of its galaxy of Utilitarian and Unitarian sponsors) for many Anglican and Wesleyan clergy to hold aloof. A Yorkshire vicar, in 1826, saw the Institutes as agencies of universal suffrage and ‘universal free-thinking’, which would ‘in time degenerate into Jacobin clubs, and become nurseries of disaffection’. In the early 1830s a curate attacked the management of the Leicester Mechanics’ Institute for perverting it into a school ‘for the diffusion of infidel, republican, and levelling principles’. Among the papers taken by its library was Carlile’s Gauntlet.1
We have spoken of the artisan culture of the Twenties. It is the most accurate term to hand, and yet it is not more than approximate. We have seen that ‘petit-bourgeois’ (with its usual pejorative associations) will not do; while to speak of a ‘working-class’ culture would be premature. But by artisan we should understand a milieu which touched the London shipwrights and Manchester factory operatives at one side, and the degraded artisans, the outworkers, at the other. To Cobbett these comprised the ‘journeymen and labourers’, or, more briefly, ‘the people’. ‘I am of opinion,’ he wrote to the Bishop of Llandaff in 1820, ‘that your Lordship is very much deceived in supposing the People, or the vulgar, as you were pleased to call them, to be incapable of comprehending argument’:
The people do not, I assure your Lordship, at all relish little simple tales. Neither do they delight in declamatory language, or in loose assertion, their minds have, within the last ten years, undergone a very great revolution….
Give me leave… to say that… these classes are, to my certain knowledge, at this time, more enlightened than the other classes of the community…. They see further into the future than the Parliament and the Ministers. – There is this advantage attending their pursuit of knowledge. – They have no particular interest to answer; and, therefore, their judgement is unclouded by prejudice and selfishness. Besides which, their communication with each other is perfectly free. The thoughts of one man produce other thoughts in another man. Notions are canvassed without the restraint imposed upon suspicion, by false pride, or false delicacy. And hence the truth is speedily arrived at.1
Which argument, which truths?
II. WILLIAM COBBETT
Cobbett throws his influence across the years from the end of the Wars until the passing of the Reform Bill. To say that he was in no sense a systematic thinker is not to say that his was not a serious intellectual influence. It was Cobbett who created this Radical intellectual culture, not because he offered its most original ideas, but in the sense that he found the tone, the style, and the arguments which could bring the weaver, the schoolmaster, and the shipwright, into a common discourse. Out of the diversity of grievances and interests he brought a Radical consensus. His Political Registers were like a circulating medium which provided a common means of exchange between the experiences of men of widely differing attainments.
We can see this if we look, less at his ideas, than at his tone. And one way to do this is to contrast his manner with that of Hazlitt, the most ‘Jacobin’ of the middle-class Radicals and the one who – over a long period of years – came closest to the same movement as that of the artisans. Hazlitt is using his knife on the fund-holders and sinecurists:
Legitimate Governments (flatter them as we will) are not another Heathen mythology. They are neither so cheap nor so splendid as the Delphin edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. They are indeed ‘Gods to punish,’ but in other respects ‘men of our infirmity.’ They do not feed on ambrosia or drink nectar; but live on the common fruits of the earth, of which they get the largest share, and the best. The wine they drink is made of grapes: the blood they shed is that of their subjects: the laws they make are not against themselves: the taxes they vote, they afterwards devour. They have the same wants that we have: and, having the option, very naturally help themselves first, out of the common stock, without thinking that others are to come after them…. Our State-paupers have their hands in every man’s dish, and fare sumptuously every day. They live in palaces, and loll in coaches. In spite of Mr Malthus, their studs of horses consume the produce of our fields, their dog-kennels are glutted with the food that would maintain the children of the poor. They cost us so much a year in dress and furniture, so much in stars and garters, blue ribbons, and grand crosses, – so much in dinners, breakfasts, and suppers, and so much in suppers, breakfasts, and dinners. These heroes of the Income-tax, Worthies of the Civil List, Saints of the Court calendar (compagnons du lys), have their naturals and non-naturals, like the rest of the world, but at a dearer rate…. You will find it easier to keep them a week than a month; and at the end of that time, waking from the sweet dream of Legitimacy, you may say with Caliban. ‘Why, what a fool was I to take this drunken monster for a God.’ 1
Hazlitt’s was a complex and admirable sensibility. He was one of the few intellectuals who received the full shock of the experience of the French Revolution, and, while rejecting the naïveties of the Enlightenment, reaffirmed the traditions of liberté and égalité. His style reveals, at every point, not only that he was measuring himself against Burke, Coleridge, and Wordsworth (and, more immediately, against Blackwood’s and the Quarterly Review), but that he was aware of the strength of some of their positions, and shared some of their responses. Even in his most engaged Radical journalism (of which this is an example) he aimed his polemic, not towards the popular, but towards the polite culture of his time. His Political Essays might be published by Hone,2 but, when writing them, he will have thought less of Hone’s audience than of the hope that he might make Southey squirm, make the Quarterly apoplectic, or even stop Coleridge short in mid-sentence.
This is in no sense a criticism. Hazlitt had a width of reference and a sense of commitment to a European conflict of historical significance which makes the plebeian Radicals appear provincial both in space and time. It is a question of rôles. Cobbett could never have written a sentence of this passage. He could not admit (even as a figure of speech) that we might will to flatter Legitimacy; he could not have accepted the norms of ‘the world’, which Hazlitt assumes, if only to punish; he could not have written ‘our State-paupers’, since his every sinew was strained to make his audience see the stock-jobbers and placemen as them; and, as a corollary, he could not have written, with this sense of distance, of ‘the children of the poor,’ – he would either have said (to his audience) ‘your children’ or he would have given a particular example. He is not likely to have said ‘they cost us so much a year’; he would have put down a definite figure, even if it was at hazard. ‘These heroes of the Income-tax’ is closer to Cobbett’s trick of naming;1 but with Hazlitt there is still the drawl of the patrician Friend of the People (like Wilkes or Burdett, a pinch of snuff just at the moment when poised in the House for the most deadly thrust); with Cobbett there is no ironic pretence of ceremony – out come the names, Parson Malthus, Bolton Fletcher, the Thing, with a bluntness which made even Shelley blench (‘Cobbett’s snuff, revenge’).
It is a matter of tone; and yet, in tone, will be found at least one half of Cobbett’s political meaning. Hazlitt’s style, with its sustained and controlled rhythms, and its antithetical movement, belongs to the polite culture of the essayist. Despite Rural Rides, one cannot easily think of Cobbett as an essayist. Indeed, Hazlitt’s fertile allusiveness and studied manner, since it belonged to a culture which was not available to the artisans, might well arouse their hostility. When Cobbett wrote about sinecures it was in some such terms as this:
There are of these places and pensions all sizes, from twenty pounds to thirty thousands and nearly forty thousand pounds a year!… There are several individual placemen, the profits of each of which would maintain a thousand families…. Mr PRESTON… who is a Member of Parliament and has a large estate, says, upon this subject, ‘Every family, even of the poorest labourers, consisting of five persons, may be considered as paying in indirect taxes, at least ten pounds a year, or more than half his wages at seven shillings a week!’ And yet the insolent hirelings call you the mob, the rabble, the swinish multitude, and say, that your voice is nothing…1
Everything here is solid, and related, not to a literary culture, but to commonly available experience. Even Mr Preston is placed. Cobbett brought the rhythms of speech back into prose; but of strenuously argumentative, emphatic speech.
Observe him writing on the familiar theme that the clergy should be judged, not by their professions, but their actions:
There is something unfortunate, to say the least of it, in this perfect union of action between the Church and the Methodist Convocation. Religion is not an abstract idea. It is not something metaphysical. It is to produce effect upon men’s conduct, or it is good for nothing. It is to have an effect upon the actions of men. It is to have a good influence in the affairs and on the condition of men. Now, if the Church religion…2
Cobbett’s relationship to his audience in such passages as this (and the example falls from the first Register which comes to hand – almost any Register would provide the same) is so palpable that one might reach out one’s hand and touch it. It is an argument. There is a proposition. Cobbett writes ‘metaphysical’, looks up at his audience, and wonders whether the word communicates. He explains the relevance of the term. He repeats his explanation in the plainest language. He repeats it again, but this time he enlarges the definition to carry wider social and political implications. Then, these short sentences finished with, he commences exposition once more. In the word ‘Now’ we feel is implied: ‘if all of you have taken my point, let us proceed together…’
It is not difficult to show that Cobbett had some very stupid and contradictory ideas, and sometimes bludgeoned his readers with specious arguments.1 But such demonstrations are beside the point unless the profound, the truly profound, democratic influence of Cobbett’s attitude to his audience is understood. Paine anticipates the tone; but Cobbett, for thirty years, talked to his audience like this, until men were talking and arguing like Cobbett all over the land. He assumed, as a matter scarcely in need of demonstration, that every citizen whatsoever had the power of reason, and that it was by argument addressed to the common understanding that matters should be settled. During the past ten years (he wrote in 1820) –
I have addressed nothing to [the people] which did not rely, for success, upon fact, and upon the best arguments which I was able to produce. My subjects have been generally of the most intricate nature…. I have made use of no means to attract curiosity or to humour the fancy. All has been an appeal to the understanding, the discernment and the justice of the reader.
It is not, of course, true that Cobbett employed no devices to ‘attract curiosity’. If he treated his readers as equals he treated Ministers, Bishops, and Lords as something less. (‘Wilberforce,’ one of his open letters began: ‘I have you before me in a canting pamphlet.’) To this we should add two other devices. The first is the homely, practical analogy, most commonly taken from rural life. In this he had an unerring sense of the experience available to the whole body of his readers. Such figures, with him, were not decorative in function, or passing allusions. They were taken up, held in the hand, turned over, deliberately deployed to advance the argument, and then set down. We may take the example of Cobbett’s famous description of Brougham and the moderate reformers as scarecrows or SHOY-HOYS – ‘and now I will tell you why’:
A shoy-hoy is a sham man or woman, made of straw or other stuff, twisted round a stake, stuck into the ground… with a stick or gun put into his hand. These shoy-hoys are set up for the purpose of driving birds from injuring the corn or the seeds, and sometimes to frighten them from cherries, or other fruit. The people want a reform of the parliament, and there has for a long time… been a little band, who have professed the desire to get parliamentary reform. They have made motions and speeches and divisions, with a view of keeping the hopes of the people alive, and have thereby been able to keep them quiet from time to time. They have never desired to succeed, because success would put an end to their hopes of emolument; but they have amused the people. The great body of the factions, knowing the reality of their views, have been highly diverted by their sham efforts, which have never interrupted them in the smallest degree in their enjoyment of the general plunder. Just as it happens with the birds and the shoy-hoys in the fields or gardens. At first, the birds take the shoy-hoys for a real man or woman; and, so long as they do this, they abstain from their work of plunder; but after having for some little while watched the shoy-hoy with their quick and piercing eyes, and perceived that it never moves hand or foot, they totally disregard it, and are no more obstructed by it than if it were a post. Just so it is with these political shoy-hoys; but… they do mischief…. I remember an instance… which very aptly illustrates the functions of these political deceivers. The birds were committing great ravages upon some turnip-seed that I had at Botley. ‘Stick up a shoy-hoy,’ said I to my bailiff. ‘That will do no good, sir,’… he replied… telling me, that he had, that morning, in the garden of his neighbour MORELL… actually seen a sparrow settled, with a pod, upon the shoy-hoy’s hat, and there, as upon a dining-table, actually pecking out the peas and eating them, which he could do with greater security there where he could look about him and see the approach of an enemy, than he could have done upon the ground, where he might have been taken by surprise. Just exactly such are the functions of our political shoy-hoys. The agricultural… shoy-hoys deceive the depredating birds but a very short time; but they continue to deceive those who stick them up and rely upon them, who, instead of rousing in the morning, and sallying upon the depredators with powder and shot, trust to the miserable shoy-hoys, and thus lose their corn and their seeds. Just thus it is with the people, who are the dupes of all political shoy-hoys. In Suffolk, and other eastern counties, they call them mawkses…1
What is one to make of such writing? From one aspect it is imaginative writing of genius. The analogy commences a little stiffly; politics and agriculture run on converging lines, but we feel the image to be far-fetched. Then – at ‘quick and piercing eyes’ – the two arguments are fused, with an uprush of polemical delight. Cobbett is half in jest, the image grows to surrealist proportions – Brougham with a sparrow on his hat, the reformers with powder and shot, turnip-seed and neighbour MORELL (who will probably never make his appearance again). From another aspect, what an extraordinary thing it is, this part of the English political tradition! This is more than polemic: it is also political theory. Cobbett has defined, in terms that a labourer or artisan could well understand, the function of a very English form of reformist accommodation. More than this, he illuminates, across more than a century, the mawkses of other parties and other times.
The other device, which we have already noted,1 is the personalization of political issues – a personalization centred upon Cobbett of Botley himself. But if Cobbett was his own subject, he handled this subject with unusual objectivity. His egotism transcended itself to the point where the reader is aware, not of Cobbett’s ego, but of a plain-spoken, matter-of-fact, observant sensibility, with which he is encouraged to identify himself. He is asked to look, not at Cobbett, but with him. The triumph of this manner can be seen in his Rural Rides, where not only his contemporaries but successive generations have felt his palpable presence as he talked with labourers in the fields, rode through the villages, and stopped to bait his horses. The force of his indignation is all the more compelling because of his delight at anything which pleased him. At Tenterden—
the afternoon was very fine, and, just as I rose the hill and entered the street, the people had come out of church and were moving along towards their houses. It was a very fine sight. Shabbily-dressed people do not go to church. I saw, in short, drawn out before me, the dress and beauty of the town; and a great many very, very pretty girls I saw; and saw them, too, in their best attire. I remember the girls in the Pays de Caux, and, really, I think those of Tenterden resemble them. I do not know why they should not; for there is the Pays de Caux only just over the water, just opposite this very place.
Or, in a village in Surrey, the absence of poverty is made into a telling point against its general incidence:
As I came along between Upwaltham and Eastdean, I called to me a young man, who, along with other turnip-hoers, was sitting under the shelter of a hedge at breakfast. He came running to me with his victuals in his hand; and I was glad to see that his food consisted of a good lump of household bread and not a very small piece of bacon…. In parting with him, I said, ‘You do get some bacon then?’ ‘Oh, yes! Sir,’ said he, and with an emphasis and a swag of the head which seemed to say, ‘We must and will have that.’ I saw, and with great delight, a pig at almost every labourer’s house. The houses are good and warm; and the gardens some of the very best that I have seen in England. What a difference, good God! what a difference between this country and the neighbourhood of those corrupt places Great Bedwin and Cricklade. What sort of breakfast would this man have had in a mess of cold potatoes? Could he have worked, and worked in the wet, too, with such food? Monstrous! No society ought to exist where the labourers live in a hog-like sort of way.
‘There is the Pays de Caux… just opposite this very place’, ‘this country’, ‘this man’ – wherever he was, Cobbett always compelled his readers, by the immediacy of his vision, the confusion of reflection and description, the solidity of detail, and the physical sense of place, to identify themselves with his own standpoint. And ‘standpoint’ is the proper word, for Cobbet placed himself firmly in some physical setting – on his farm at Botley or on the road into Tenterden – and then led outwards from the evidence of his senses to his general conclusions. Even during his American exile (1817–19) it was important for him to convey this sense of place:
From one side of my room I look out into a farm yard, full of fodder and of cattle, sheep, hogs, and multitudes of poultry, while, at a few paces, beyond the yard, runs the river Susquehannah, which is wider than the Thames and has innumerable islands lying in it, from a quarter of an acre to five or six acres in extent. From the other side of my room I look into an Orchard of Apples and Peaches of forty acres, lying in a narrow valley, which runs up between two mountains, about a quarter of a mile high, formed precisely like the ridge of a house, the gable ends being towards the river. Last night it rained: it froze before morning, and the frost caught the drops hanging upon the trees; so that the sun, which is now shining as bright as in England in the month of May, exhibits these icicles in countless millions of sparkling diamonds.
But this setting was turned to effect to dramatize the more strongly his feelings (expressed in a letter to Hunt) inspired by the news of the execution of Brandreth and his fellows:
I have, my dear Hunt, the little thatched cottages of Waltham Chase and of Botley Common now full in my mind’s eye, and I feel at this day, with more force than ever, that passion, which would make me prefer the occupation of the meanest of those most humble abodes, accompanied with the character of Englishman, to the mastership over, and the actual possession of, all that I have above described, unaccompanied, with that character. As I said, when I left England, so I still say, that I never can like any people so well as I like the people of England.
If Cobbett made, from the struggle of the reform movement, something of a martyrology and demonology, he was himself the central figure of the myth. But we should hesitate before we accuse him too far of personal vanity. For the myth demanded also that William Cobbett be seen as a plain Englishman, unusually belligerent and persevering, but not especially talented – such a man as the reader might think himself to be, or the labourer in the turnip-field, or (given this or that turn of circumstance) as the landlady’s son in a small inn in a Sussex village might become:
The landlady sent her son to get me some cream, and he was just such a chap as I was at his age, and dressed just in the same sort of way, his main garment being a blue smock-frock, faded from wear, and mended with pieces of new stuff…. The sight of this smock-frock brought to my recollection many things very dear to me. This boy will, I dare say, perform his part at Billingshurst, or at some place not far from it. If accident had not taken me from a similar scene, how many villains and fools, who have been well teazed and tormented, would have slept in peace at night, and have fearlessly swaggered about by day!
His compassion for the poor always had this quality: ‘there, but for the grace of God, goes Will Cobbett’. His affectation was to appear to be more ‘normal’ than he was. He never allowed his readers to forget that he had once followed the plough, and that he served as a common soldier. As he prospered, so he affected the dress, not of a journalist (which he pretended not to be), but of an old-fashioned gentleman-farmer. In Hazlitt’s description, he wore ‘a scarlet broadcloth waistcoat with the flaps of the pockets hanging down, as was the custom for gentleman-farmers in the last century’; in Bamford’s, ‘dressed in a blue coat, yellow swansdown waistcoat, drab jersey small-clothes, and top boots… he was the perfect representation of what he always wished to be – an English gentleman-farmer’. It is Hazlitt who gives the justest character to Cobbett on the score of vanity:
His egotism is delightful, for there is no affectation in it. He does not talk of himself for lack of something to write about, but because some circumstance that has happened to himself is the best possible illustration of the subject, and he is not the man to shrink from giving the best possible illustration of the subject from a squeamish delicacy. He likes both himself and his subject too well. He does not put himself before it, and say, ‘Admire me first’, but places us in the same situation with himself, and makes us see all that he does. There is no… abstract, senseless self-complacency, no smuggled admiration of his own person by proxy: it is all plain and above-board. He writes himself plain William Cobbett, strips himself quite as naked as anybody could wish – in a word, his egotism is full of individuality and has room for very little vanity in it.1
This is a generous literary judgement. But a political judgement must be more qualified. The great change in the tone and style of popular Radicalism, exemplified in the contrast between Paine and Cobbett, was (once again) first defined by Hazlitt:
Paine affected to reduce things to first principles, to announce self-evident truths. Cobbett troubles himself about little but the details and local circumstances…. Paine’s writings are a sort of introduction to political arithmetic on a new plan: Cobbett keeps a day-book, and makes an entry at full of all the occurrences and troublesome questions that start up throughout the year.
The personalization of politics – this labourer in his cottage-garden, this speech in the House of Commons, that example of persecution – was well adapted to the pragmatic approach of an audience only awakening to political consciousness. It also had an opportunist value, in that, by fixing attention upon circumstantial ephemera and particular grievances, and by eschewing theoretical absolutes, it enabled royalists and republicans, Deists and Churchmen, to engage in a common movement. But the argument can be taken too far. Paine’s Rights of Man had found an equal response in an audience no more literate, and had encouraged a more principled theory of popular rights; while the contemporaneous success of more theoretical journals proves the existence of a large working-class public which could take its politics neat. Cobbett, in fact, helped to create and nourish the anti-intellectualism, and the theoretical opportunism (masked as ‘practical’ empiricism) which remained an important characteristic of the British labour movement.
‘I remembered my mother being in the habit of reading Cobbett’s Register, and saying she wondered people spoke so much against it; she saw nothing bad in it, but she saw a great many good things in it.’1 James Watson’s mother was a domestic servant in a clergyman’s house, and a Sunday School teacher. ‘Mr Cobbett’s Weekly Political Pamphlets,’ wrote Hone, in 1817,
should be bound up, and be on the same shelf with the History of England, the Pilgrim’s Progress, Robinson Crusoe, and the Young Man’s Book of Knowledge. Every cottage and kitchen library in the kingdom is incomplete without it…
It should be ‘as common and familiar’ as the Housekeeper’s Instructor and Buchan’s Domestic Medicine.2 This was, in fact, to be much what happened. Wooler or Carlile might, with their more sophisticated and intellectual manner, have given expression to the Radicalism of the city artisans; but only Cobbett could have succeeded, in 1816, in bringing stockingers and weavers into the same dialogue.
The curious way in which he had graduated from Toryism to Radicalism entailed a certain opportunism in his position. He had been able to side-step the anti-Gallican and anti-Jacobin prejudices of the war years. He was able to disown the French Revolution and Tom Paine as things in whose defence he had had no part. Eventually (as he himself acknowledged in generous terms) he came to accept many of Paine’s arguments. But he always ducked away from the intransigent Jacobin rejection of the hereditary principle in any form, and thus was able to present himself both as a radical reformer and as a constitutionalist. In the ‘Address to Journeymen and Labourers’ he warned against men who ‘would persuade you, that, because things have been perverted from their true ends, there is nothing good in our constitution and laws. For what, then, did Hampden die in the field, and Sydney on the scaffold?’ The Americans, in seceding from Britain, had taken care to preserve ‘Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus’ and the body of the Common Law:
We want great alteration, but we want nothing new. Alteration, modification to suit the times and circumstances; but the great principles ought to be and must be, the same, or else confusion will follow.
Even when (in the last year of his life) he urged the people to resist the New Poor Law with force, he did so in the name of constitutional rights and the sanctities of custom. His attitude to the rationalists showed the same blend of Radicalism and traditionalism. He defended with force their right to publish arguments against the Christian religion. But when Carlile went further and committed what was (in Cobbett’s eyes) offensive blaspemy by dating the Republican ‘in the year 1822 of the Carpenter’s wife’s son’ he appealed to mob law. If this had been done in America (he roared) –
You would… be instantly dressed in a coat of tar and feathers, and… be ridden bare-rumped upon a rail, till you dropped off by the side of some wood or swamp, where you would be left to ruminate on the wisdom (to say nothing of the modesty) of setting up for a maker of span-new governments and religions.1
There can scarcely have been another writer in our history who has written so many and such telling attacks upon the Anglican clergy (and, in particular, the rural clergy) as Cobbett. And yet, for no reason which was ever seriously advanced, he frequently announced his attachment, not only to the Throne (which he nearly brought down in the Queen Caroline agitation) and the Constitution (which his followers all but slew in 1819 and 1832) but also to the Established Church. He was even capable of writing, on occasion, of ‘our duty to hold in abhorrence Turks and Jews’, because Christianity was ‘part and parcel of the law’.
Such opportunism made impossible the development of any systematic political theory out of Cobbettism. And his economic prejudices were of a piece with this kind of evasion. Just as he developed, not a critique of a political system, nor even of ‘Legitimacy’, but an invective against ‘Old Corruption’, so he reduced economic analysis to a polemic against the parasitism of certain vested interests. He could not allow a critique which centred on ownership; therefore he expounded (with much repetition) a demonology, in which the people’s evils were caused by taxation, the National Debt, and the paper-money system, and by the hordes of parasites – fund-holders, placemen, brokers and tax-collectors – who had battened upon these three. This is not to say that this critique was baseless – there was fuel enough for Cobbett’s fire, in the grossly exploitive pattern of taxation, and in the parasitic activities of the East India Company and the Banks. But, characteristically, Cobbett’s prejudices keyed in with the grievances of the small producers, shopkeepers, artisans, small farmers, and consumers. Attention was diverted from the landowner or industrial capitalist and focussed upon the middleman – the factor or broker who cornered markets, profited from the people’s shortages, or lived, in any way not closely attached to land or industry, upon unearned income. The arguments were moral as much as economic. Men were entitled to wealth, but only if they could be seen to be hard at work. Next to sinecurists Cobbett hated Quaker speculators.
Deficient in theory he was also sometimes plainly mischievous in his immediate influence upon political strategy, while he was by no means always as straightforward in personal and public dealings as he asked other men to be. For his failings as a political leader he was not fully responsible. He was a journalist, and not a political leader or organizer, and it was only the accident of the context (the outlawing of effective political organization) which forced him into the other rôle. But, if he did not choose to be a political leader, he was (like other men in this predicament) reluctant to see the movement go in any way but the way which he prescribed. When all these – and other – failings are accounted, it is easy to underestimate him, as a nostalgic romantic or a bully.
But the commonplace judgement so often met with, that Cobbett was ‘really a Tory’, is unhelpful. One reason we have sufficiently examined: the democratic character of his tone. His relationship with his audience was peculiarly intimate: we must remember that he was continually talking with his readers. He addressed them at reform meetings. He made lecture-tours’. Even when he was in America, his post-bag was heavy, and deputations of Scottish mechanics and émigré reformers waited upon him on the banks of the Susquehannah. He rode into the countryside to find out how men were thinking and talking. Hence Cobbett’s ideas can be seen less as a one-way propagandist flow than as the incandescence of an alternating current, between his readers and himself. ‘I always say that I have derived from the people… ten times the light that I have communicated to them’:
A writer engaged in the instruction of such a people, is constantly upheld, not only by the applause that he receives from them, and by perceiving that his labours are attended with effect; but also by the aid which he is continually deriving from those new thoughts which his thoughts produce in their minds. It is the flint and the steel meeting that brings forth the fire.1
How moving is this insight into the dialectical nature of the very process by which his own ideas were formed! Few writers can be found who were so much the ‘voice’ of their own audience. It is possible to follow Cobbett’s genius as an indicator of the movement for which he spoke. At times of crisis there is this bright incandescence. At times when the movement flagged, he becomes most cranky and idiosyncratic: his style glows only dully. And this is true until his very last years; as his audience changed, so he changed with it.
This is what Raymond Williams has well described as Cobbett’s ‘extraordinary sureness of instinct’. And yet, instinct for what? In the first place it was an instinct which disclosed the real nature of changing relationships of production, which he judged, in part, against an idealized patriarchal past, and in part against an assertion of the worth of every individual labourer which is, in no sense, backward-looking. In the second place, Cobbett was the ‘free-born Englishman’ incarnate. He gathered up all the vigour of the eighteenth-century tradition and took it forward, with new emphasis, into the nineteenth. His outlook approximated most closely to the ideology of the small producers. The values which he endorsed with his whole being (and he wrote at his best when he gave his prejudices full rein) were those of sturdy individualism and independence. He lamented the passing of small farmers; of small tradesmen; the drawing of the resources of the country into ‘great heaps’; the loss by the weavers of ‘the frank and bold character formed in the days of their independence’.1 The small farmer who resented the great estate of the brewer or absentee Lord; the small clothier who petitioned against the growth of the factory system; the small tailor or bootmaker who found that middlemen were receiving Government contracts or creaming the market – these were among his natural audience. They also felt the same diffuse hostility to ‘speculation’ and the ‘commercial system’; but (like Cobbett) they stopped short before any radical critique of property-rights.
If this had been all, Cobbett might have remained as the political spokesman of the little bourgeoisie. But his audience – the Radical movement itself – took him further. ‘We are daily advancing to the state in which there are but two classes of men, masters, and abject dependants.’ When Cobbett considered the position of the artisan or the cotton-spinner, he extrapolated from the experience of the small masters who were being forced down into the working class. He saw the factory proletariat of Manchester less as new-fangled men than as little producers who had lost their independence and rights. As such, the work-discipline of the mills was an outrage upon their dignity. They were right to rebel, as he would rebel in the same position. As for child labour, it was simply ‘unnatural’.
His attitude to the field labourers was somewhat different. Although he struggled to understand a commercial and manufacturing society, the essential model of political economy in his mind was drawn from agriculture. And here he accepted a social structure in which the landowner, the good tenant, the petty land-holder, and the labourer all had their part, provided that productive and social relationships were governed by certain mutual obligations and sanctions. Defending his own conduct as a landlord, he cited the case of an old cottager, living in retirement on the farm at Botley when he took it up:
The old man paid me no rent; when he died I had a headstone put to his grave to record, that he had been an honest, skilful, and industrious labouring man; and I gave his widow a shilling a week as long as I was at Botley.1
Here he is indistinguishable from the better kind of squire whose passing he so often lamented. But this is not all. There is also that uncomfortable sentence: ‘No society ought to exist where the labourers live in a hog-like sort of way.’ No society ought to exist – the very touchstone of his social criticism is the condition of the labouring man. When, as at the time of the labourers’ revolt or the New Poor Law, he judged this condition to be unendurable, then he was willing to challenge the received social order:
God gave them life upon this land; they have as much right to be upon it as you have; they have a clear right to a maintenance out of the land, in exchange for their labour; and, if you cannot so manage your lands yourselves as to take labour from them, in exchange for a living, give the land up to them…1
This was written less than six months before he died.
This is why Cobbett (and John Fielden, his friend and fellow Member for Oldham after 1832) came so close to being spokesmen of the working class. Once the real condition of the working people – for Cobbett, the labourer, for Fielden, the factory child – is made, not one, but the test of all other political expedients, then we are close to revolutionary conclusions. Concealed within the seemingly ‘nostalgic’ notion of the ‘historic rights of the poor’, which, in different ways, was voiced by Cobbett, Oastler and Carlile, there were also new claims maturing, for the community to succour the needy and the helpless, not out of charity, but as of right.2 Cobbett loathed the ‘comforting system’ of charity and moral rescue, and, in his History of the Protestant ‘Reformation’, he was chiefly intent upon giving historical backing to his notion of social rights. The lands of the medieval Church had been held in trust for the poor. Wrongfully misappropriated or dispersed, nevertheless the poor still had a claim upon them, which (in Cobbett’s eyes) was recognized through the mediation of the old Poor Laws. The repeal of those laws constituted the last act in a shameful series of robberies by which the poor had been cheated of their rights:
Among these rights was, the right to live in the country of our birth; the right to have a living out of the land of our birth in exchange for our labour duly and honestly performed; the right, in case we fell into distress, to have our wants sufficiently relieved out of the produce of the land, whether that distress arose from sickness, from decrepitude, from old age, or from inability to find employment… For a thousand years, necessity was relieved out of the produce of the Tithes. When the Tithes were taken away by the aristocracy, and by them kept to themselves, or given wholly to the parsons, provision was made out of the land, as compensation for what had been taken away. That compensation was given in the rates as settled by the poor-law. The taking away those rates was to violate the agreement, which gave as much right to receive in case of need, relief out of the land, as it left the landowner a right to his rent.1
This historical myth, which assumes some medieval social compact between the Church and the gentry, on one hand, and the labourers, on the other, was employed to justify claims to new social rights in much the same way as the theory of Alfred’s free constitution and of the Norman yoke had been used to justify the claim to new political rights. According to this view, the landowners’ tenure of their land was not of absolute right, but was dependent upon their fulfilling their social obligations. Neither Cobbett nor Fielden started from the assumption that the working people had any right to expropriate landed property or capital; but both accepted that if the existing property-relations violated, for the labourer or his child, essential claims to human realization, then any remedy, however drastic, was open to discussion. (For Fielden it meant that he – the third greatest ‘Seigneur of the Twist’ in Lancashire – was willing to work with John Doherty in pursuit of a General Strike for the eight-hour day.)
Cobbett’s touchstone was at the same time an insurmountable barrier between his kind of political theory and the ideology of the middle-class Utilitarians. If Malthus’s conclusions led to the preaching of emigration or of restraints upon the marriage of the poor, then they were faulted by this touchstone. If the ‘Scotch feelosofers’ and Brougham could do no more than destroy the poor man’s rights under the old Poor Law, leave the weavers to starve, and sanction the labour of little children in the mills, then this touchstone proclaimed them to be designing rogues. It is sometimes less an argument than an affirmation, an imprecation, a leap of feeling. But it was enough. Cobbett did more than any other writer to preserve the Radicals and Chartists from becoming the camp-followers of Utilitarians or of Anti-Corn Law League. He nourished the culture of a class, whose wrongs he felt, but whose remedies he could not understand.
III. CARLILE, WADE AND GAST
Yet we must not forget the inconsistencies, the bullying, the anti-intellectualism, the professions of loyalty to Throne and Church, the theoretical opportunism, the turns and twists of Cobbett’s ephemeral political writing. These weaknesses were more than evident to the more articulate Radicals. Already in 1817 he was under sharp fire from other periodicals. By 1820 many Radical artisans had ceased to take Cobbett seriously as a thinker, although they had not ceased to enjoy his gargantuan polemics. They continued to read him, but they began to read some other journal as well. Among these lesser journals, between 1817 and 1832, there was much original and demanding thought, which was to give shape to the political consciousness of the class after 1832. We may select from this four tendencies: the Paine-Carlile tradition: the working-class Utilitarians and the Gorgon; the trade unionists around the Trades Newspaper of John Gast: and the variety of tendencies associated with Owenism.
We have already examined the main stock of ideas of the first, in Rights of Man, and its most important contribution in Carlile’s fight for the free press. The derivation from Paine is explicit. It is not only the acknowledgement of a debt, but the assertion of a doctrinal orthodoxy:
The writings of Thomas Paine, alone, form a standard for anything worthy of being called Radical Reform. They are not Radical Reformers who do not come up to the whole of the political principles of Thomas Paine…. There can be no Radical Reform short of… a Republican form of Government.1
We get a sense of the force and loyalty with which this doctrine was held from an account of a meeting of the Cheltenham Chartist branch, whose Chairman was an old blacksmith:
One night… somebody spoke of Tom Paine. Up jumped the chairman. ‘I will not sit in the chair,’ he cried in great wrath, ‘and hear that great man reviled. Bear in mind he was not a prize-fighter. There is no such person as Tom Paine. Mister Thomas Paine, if you please.’1
Uncompromising hostility to the hereditary principle and to ‘Gothic’ superstition and survivals, defiant affirmation of the rights of the private citizen – these are among its virtues. But in England, at least by the later Twenties, the Paine-Carlile tradition had acquired a certain stridency and air of unreality. The cry, à bas les aristos, has less force when we consider the real structure of power in England as the Industrial Revolution advanced, the complex interpenetration of aristocratic privilege and commercial and industrial wealth. The rationalist lampoons upon the ‘priesthood’, as the hired apologists of privilege and the emissaries of an ignorance designed to hold the people in thrall, are somehow just wide of the mark; they might touch the fox-hunting rural rector or the clerical magistrate, but they flew past the ear of the Evangelicals and the Nonconformist ministers who were already active with British and National schools. The polemic tends to disperse itself in abstractions; it does not grip and engage, as Cobbett’s nearly always does. Carlile’s ‘priest’ was depicted as busy with ‘Kneeling, tenths, pilgrimages, exorcisms, sprinkling, crosses, sacraments, ablutions, circumcision, and gibberish’ in the intervals of ‘lasciviousness… and drunkenness.’2 Although Carlile knew more of English gaols than any other Radical he continued to confuse them with the Bastille. If George IV had been strangled in the entrails of the Bishop of Llandaff it would have been a triumph, but not the triumph which he supposed. He would still have had to deal with the last city alderman and the last local preacher.
As is characteristic of the doctrinaire, at times he tried to manipulate reality so that it might confirm his doctrines. He fed his persecutors with fresh provocations:
As I consider that the majority of the present Ministers are tyrants and enemies to the interests and welfare of the people of this country, so also am I bold to confess that, if any man that has suffered unjustly under their administration, should be so indifferent about his own life as to slay any one or more of them, I would tune my lyre to sing his praises.
But such a tyrannicide would show ‘a want of virtue’ if he sought companions to perform the act; he should have the resolution to do it single-handed: ‘I condemn an association for such purposes.’1 And the passage leads us to others of his weaknesses. There is, first, the irresponsibility of his individualism. This is an incitement which he could publish (as he published others) simply as an incitement, without thought of the consequences. Like other men who have codified ideas into an orthodoxy, it is not true that he simply passed on the notions of his master. He ossified them by turning them into doctrine; he took one part of Paine’s ideas (the doctrine of individual rights), and neglected others. And the part which he adopted he pushed to its extremity, the ne plus ultra of individualism.
Every citizen owed no deference to authority and should act as if it did not exist. This he did himself, and was ready to take the consequences. But he held that the citizen owed only a duty to his own reason; he was not bound to consult others, even of his own party, nor to submit to their judgement. Indeed, the notion of party was offensive. The power of reason was the only organizer which he admitted, and the press the only multiplier:
When the political principles laid down by Thomas Paine are well understood by the great body of the people, everything that is necessary to put them in practice will suggest itself, and then plots and delegate meetings will be wholly unnecessary…. In the present state of this country the people have no other real duty than to make themselves individually well acquainted with what constitutes their political rights…. In the interim, each individual ought to prepare and hold himself ready, as an armed individual, without relation to or consulting with his neighbours, in case circumstances should ever require him to take up arms, to preserve what liberty and property he may already possess against any tyrannical attempts to lessen them…. Let each do his duty, and that openly, without reference to what his neighbour does…
The power of popular knowledge he called the ‘zetetic principle’:
Let us then endeavour to progress in knowledge, since knowledge is demonstrably proved to be power. It is the power of knowledge that checks the crimes of cabinets and courts; it is the power of knowledge that must put a stop to bloody wars and the direful effects of devastating armies.1
The first passage was written in the dark year, 1820, and Carlile was in part anxious to protect Radicals from the kind of organization so easily penetrated by provocateurs. But here is this absence of the concrete – ‘liberty’, ‘knowledge’, ‘bloody wars’, and ‘cabinets and courts’. And here also is this serious misunderstanding of his audience: ‘Let each do his duty… without reference to what his neighbour does…’ Did he not know that the essence of the working-class Radical movement consisted in each man ‘consulting with his neighbours’? Without this consultation, his shopmen would not have come forward, his country agents would not have held to their posts. The key to his blindness lies perhaps in the phrase: ‘to preserve what liberty and property he may already possess against any tyrannical attempts…’ For this is not only Paine, it is also Locke.
Once again the term arises in the mind: ‘petit-bourgeois individualism’. And, if we make the difficult effort to discard some of the pejorative associations of the term, we can see that, in the case of Carlile, it is helpful. The model in the back of his mind is perhaps that of the little master, the hatter, the brushmaker, the bookseller; we can see, in Carlile, not only the limitations of the little bourgeoisie, but also, in this insurgent time, their strengths. Bewick, if he had been a somewhat younger man, might have read the Republican. What Carlile was doing was taking the bourgeois jealousy of the power of the Crown, in defence of their political and property rights, and extending it td the Shoreditch hatter or the Birmingham toymaker and his artisans.
In terms of rights of press and speech, the results were as dramatic as was Cobbett’s democratic tone. But in terms of political and economic theory, the position was either barren or delusive. The strength of the Lockeian ideology lay in the fact that the bourgeois were men of large property; the demand for an end to State control or interference was (for them) a liberating demand. But the hatter had little property and his artisans still less. To demand an absence of State regulation meant simply giving their larger competitors (or ‘market forces’) fuller rein. And this was so evident that Carlile, no less than Cobbett, was forced to make a demonology of sinecurists, placemen, and tax-eaters. The great evil afflicting the little masters must be seen to be taxation. There must be as little Government as possible, and that little must be cheap.
This was close to anarchism, but only at its most negative and defensive sense. Every man must be free to think, to write, to trade, or to carry a gun. The first two were his main preoccupation, to the point where the freedom of the press was no longer a means but, in itself, an end. The vista of social proposals opened up in the second part of Rights of Man was that part of the master’s work which touched him least. He had the self-made man’s contempt of the feckless, and the autodidact’s impatience with those who did not take up the opportunities of self-improvement which were offered. He served imprisonment to open the gates of Reason: and if the workers did not flock through that was their own fault: ‘The Alehouse, I know, has charms insuperable to the great body of mechanics.’1 He was a minority-minded man.
His rationalism, like his political theory, was made up of negations. He took pleasure in exposing biblical absurdities, and in publishing passages of obscenity to be found in the Bible. When he offered a primer of positive virtues, in the Moralist, it was (as we have seen) a tepid rationalist apologia for the virtues of a bourgeois family man. In his attitude to poetry (or towards any imaginative attributes) he showed a ‘single-vision’ as narrow as that of Bentham. Although he pirated Cain and The Vision of Judgement he was at pains to point out that he did this ‘not from any admiration of the works, but because I saw them menaced by my enemies’. The half-dozen Cantos of Don Juan which he had read were ‘in my opinion mere slip-slop, good for nothing useful to mankind’. (He does not appear to have noticed that any of them were witty):
I am not a poet, nor an admirer of poetry beyond those qualities which it might have in common with prose – the power of instrucing mankind in useful knowledge.1
‘In my opinion…’ – this reminds us that the culture of the autodidact can also be philistine. The democracy of intellect was in danger of becoming a sort of Bartholomew Fair. Here everyone might set out his stall, anyone’s opinions were as good as anyone else’s, the strangest sideshows – headless women and poor old dancing bears – might all be on offer. The artisans strayed in and paid their pennies; they were encouraged at once to set up stall for themselves, to argue and debate before they had served any apprenticeship to the trade. The more strenuous minds who offered their work in the same market – Hodgskin or Thompson, O’Brien or Bray – must have many a time cursed the opinionated hucksters bawling all around them.
Nevertheless, when all these criticisms have been made – and they are many, and they go far to explain the stridency of the militant rationalist tradition in the nineteenth century – when all this has been said, it was Carlile who set up the market. Nor is this a figure of speech. His publications were one market – it was he who published Paine, Volney, Palmer, Holbach and many others. But he also set up the market for spoken debate. In 1830 he founded the Rotunda in which the formative debates of the London working-class movement took place. Its proceedings were published regularly in his Prompter. The journal might have been better entitled the Promoter, for this is what, in effect, Carlile had become. He was the Showman of Free Thought, and no one had more right to the situation. He cast around for star performers who would draw in the crowds. John Gale Jones, the veteran Jacobin surgeon, still commanded a following. But his greatest success was the promotion of the Reverend Robert Taylor, an apostate Anglican and former chaplain to the King, who preached – in full canonicals – atheistic sermons attacking the ‘selfish and wicked priesthood’. Taylor was an earnest and scholarly man, who also served his turn in prison, and who did something to bring ‘her Divine Majesty, the IGNORANCE of Eighteen Centuries’ into a further decline. But his sermons, copiously illustrated with linguistic criticism of the hebraic text, were, for the audience, something rich and strange: a headless woman. So also was another of the Rotunda showpieces, Zion Ward, an inheritor of the Southcottian mantle, who spellbound audiences with stupefying harangues upon Revelation and Reform. Despite such attractions, Carlile reported a sad falling-off in the attendances at the weekly religious debates (August 1831). The Rotunda was now being used on Wednesday evenings by a new tenant, the National Union of the Working Classes. Carlile (once again in prison) was a little irritated that this Union was proposing to organize the next round in the fight for press liberties, the ‘unstamped’. ‘I have nothing to do with any association,’ he wrote, ‘and do not seek… assistance from anything of the kind.’ Like other individualists, his egotism had engrossed the cause, and he resented the idea that others might make it theirs. ‘Beware of Political Clubs,’ he wrote a month later. He had the strongest feeling against clubs, societies and even trade unions or benefit clubs. ‘Almost every horror of the first French Revolution sprung out of political clubs…. I pronounce them all to be dastardly associations, contemptible, frivolous, paltry nothings.’ As the contest for the Reform Bill became week by week more critical, he published information about barricades, hand-grenades, and burning acids: ‘LET EVERY MAN ORGANIZE HIMSELF.’ But the National Union continued to meet in the Rotunda, and many of its most impressive leaders Watson, Hetherington, Lovett, Cleave, Hibbert – were men nurtured in the tradition of Carlile, who had long left him behind while still holding fast to his first principle: ‘Free Discussion is the only necessary Constitution – the only necessary Law to the Constitution.’1
Twenty years of homilies from Hannah More and the Bishop of Llandaff, Wilberforce and the Methodist Conference, had built up a head of anti-clerical pressure among the Radicals. The Gorgon could write as a matter of course of ‘the meek and gentle Moses, who led the scabby and mangy Israelites out of Egypt’:
We will not say that Moses was as subtle and as great an impostor as Mahomet. We will not say that Aaron, the high priest, was as necessary to Moses, as Perigord Talleyrand once was to Buonaparte. We will not say that Joshua was as great a military ruffian as old Blucher or Suvaroff: and that the cruelties and butcheries committed in Canaan were ten times more atrocious than any committed during the twenty-five years of revolutionary warfare…1
Nevertheless, this is what the Gorgon managed to say. This is one point where it touches the Carlile tradition; and the two are related, also, by their affinities to Utilitarianism. In Carlile this is implicit; even poetry must be useful and impart knowledge. The Gorgon’s intellectual history is more exciting. It was an explicit attempt to effect a junction between Benthamism and working-class experience. It was not (as Place might have made it if he had captured it) an attempt simply to relay the ideas of the middle-class Utilitarians to a working-class audience. John Wade, the former journeyman wool-sorter who edited it (in 1818–19), was a man of originality and great application, who did not take his ideas on trust. In the result, the Gorgon seems not so much to accept these ideas as to wrestle with them: the enquiry is being made – can Utilitarianism in the context of working-class experience be put to use?
The influence of Place was important, and we must come nearer to understanding the man. We have kept a watchful eye upon him throughout this study because, as an archivist and historian (of the L.C.S., of Westminster Radicalism, of the repeal of the Combination Acts) his bias has been gravely misleading. He has risen from being a journeyman breeches-maker into a prosperous shopkeeper and employer, the close confidant of Bentham and the Mills, and the adviser of M.P.s. From the early 1800s his emphasis has been upon the building of bridges between the artisans and the middle class; he has lent his support to the Lancastrian schools movement and the Mechanics’ Institute; his concern has been with the sober, respectable artisan and his efforts at self-improvement. But because he was so obviously a founding father of the Fabian tradition (and was taken uncritically as such by Graham Wallas) we should not see him just as a ‘captive’ of the middle class, nor should we suppose that he was incapable of taking up the most intransigent positions. On matters of free thought and expression he was still half a Jacobin; he had helped to publish the first edition in England of the Age of Reason, and even though he came to regard Carlile as a ‘fanatic’ he gave him a great deal of assistance in his earlier struggles. We have seen his fury at the repression of 1817 and 1819, and the enormous application with which he was to work for trade union rights, even though his zeal for the cause of the unionists was curiously compounded with the political economy of M’Culloch. In intellectual terms, by 1818 he really was a captive of Bentham: he learned the doctrines of Bentham and the elder Mill rather than inquiring into them, and in his own writing he added almost nothing to them except the illustrative facts which he collected with such industry. But in political terms he was a force in his own right; he gave to the Utilitarians, not just a seat at Westminster which was within his manipulation, but a point of contact with the world of the Radical tradesmen and artisans. The very fact that such a man could perform this rôle, both ideologically and politically, is a new phenomenon.
Place’s main contribution to the Gorgon was the collection of factual material on the London trades (notably the tailors).1 John Wade set the tone and emphases of the periodical. Wade was (beside Place) the most impressive fact-finder among the Radicals. His Black Book is greatly superior to any other Radical investigation of the kind. One can see that he was attracted to the Benthamites by their solidity of research, and their concern for the practical particulars of reform – in the law, the prisons, education. From the outset the Gorgon expressed irritation at the prevailing rhetoric of popular Radicalism. On the one hand, it struck hard at the specious arguments of constitutional antiquity – most frequently to be found in the Black Dwarf, where Major Cartwright was still writing of witenagemots and perpetuating the theory of the Norman yoke:
We really think we cannot better advance the cause of Reform than by excluding from the consideration of the subject, all allusions to a former state of society…
Arguments derived from the ‘good old times’, Wade pointed out, came strangely from the mouths of working-class reformers. Much of the ‘ancient lore that has been raked together’ was part and parcel of severely repressive legislation against the labourers. Can the reformers’ leaders (he asked),
bring nothing to bear against the old rotten borough-mongering system but musty parchment, black letter and latin quotations? Is there nothing in the situation of our finances, in our belated paper system, in the number of paupers –
for comment and indictment? But if he rejected the specious appeal to precedent, he also rejected Paine’s confidence in the claims of ‘natural rights’. If it was argued that all men had a natural right to the vote, then how could one gainsay the same right in women? For Wade (as for Cobbett) this was the reductio ad absurdum. Lunatics and workhouse inmates were (just like women) denied the vote for evident reasons of social utility; and this seemed the soundest basis upon which working-class Radicals (or at least the male half of them) might rest their claims:
GENERAL UTILITY is the sole and ultimate object of society; and we shall never consider either sacred or valuable any natural or prescriptive claims that may be opposed to it.1
It was not difficult to justify a claim to the vote upon such a basis. But here came the rub. Wade was refreshingly preoccupied with social reform and trade union organization. If Utilitarianism was to be extended as an ideology of the working class, it was necessary to have some theory of social structure and of political economy. How was the good of the greatest number to be determined, and might it be that what was useful to employers might be oppressive to working people? Wade’s theory of social structure was impressionistic and derivative, but at least he offered more than Cobbett’s ‘Old Corruption’ or the rhetoric of the ‘borough-mongering system’. He divided society into the parasitic and the productive classes. In the first group were (a) the upper classes, including the dignitaries of the Church and the Law, and the nobility, and (b) the ‘middling classes’ – loyal parsons, Commissioners of Taxes, officials in the departments of Revenue. These he identified with Corruption. In the second group were the ‘productive classes’: the term was wide enough to include professional men and employers, but the emphasis was upon ‘those who, by their labours, increase the funds of the community, as husbandmen, mechanics, labourers, &c.’ Below this group he placed the nondescripts, such as paupers and State creditors:
The industrious orders may be compared to the soil, out of which everything is evolved and produced; the other classes to the trees, tares, weeds and vegetables, drawing their nutriment… on its surface…
When mankind attained to a state of ‘greater perfectibility’, then the industrious classes alone ought to exist. ‘The other classes have mostly originated in our vices and ignorance… having no employment, their name and office will cease in the social state.’1
At this point Wade enlisted the help of Place, and the Gorgon began to feature material every week on the state of the working classes. It is not clear whose hand is most influential. On the one hand, there is a strong emphasis upon labour as the source of value, an emphasis perhaps strengthened by Ricardo’s Principles of Economics, published in the previous year.1 ‘Labour is the superabundant product of this country,’ wrote the Gorgon, ‘and is the chief commodity we export’:
Of the four staple manufactures, namely, cotton, linen, cloth, and iron, perhaps, on an average, the raw material does not constitute one-tenth of their value, the remaining nine-tenths being created by the labours of the weaver, spinner, dyer, smith, cutler, and fifty others…. The labours of these men form the chief article of traffic in this country. It is by trading in the blood and bones of the journeymen and labourers of England that our merchants have derived their riches, and the country its glory…
The statement is emotive rather than exact. It reminds us that the notion of labour as the source of all value was found, not only in Thelwall’s Rights of Nature, but also in an emphatic tone in Cobbett’s ‘Address to the Journeymen and Labourers’ of 1816. Cobbett, one feels, had in his mind’s eye, while writing, his own farm, and the labourers busy with the stock, at the plough, repairing buildings. Wade (or Place) had in his eye the craftsman and outworker, the wool-sorter or tailor, who was given raw material in some form and, by his labour or skill, processed the material. To the raw material, one-tenth; to the labour and skill the rest.2
But the same article in the Gorgon at once commenced to instruct trade unionists in the platitudes of political economy. The reward for labour was regulated by demand and supply. ‘An increase in the wages of journeymen is attended with a proportionate decrease in the profits of masters’ – the wages fund. When the price of labour advances it has ‘a tendency to force capital out of that branch of industry’. And (very much in the language of the Place who assisted in the repeal of the Statute of Artificers) –
Both masters and journeymen, ought in all cases to act individually, not collectively. When either party has recourse to unnatural or artificial expedients, they produce unnatural effects.
The theory of natural laws or rights, shut out by Wade at the front door, has been invited in at the back. For, by this time, it is scarcely possible to think of middle-class Utilitarianism without thinking also of Malthus and of orthodox political economy: the doctrine of utility could only be interpreted in the light of the ‘laws’ of population and those of supply and demand. If Utilitarianism was to enter working-class ideology it would make it captive to the employing class.
And yet the matter was not to be settled so easily. Through September, October and November 1818 the Gorgon carried detailed examinations of the position of some of the London trades: tailors, type-founders, opticians, compositors.1 At the same time it conducted a defence of the Manchester cotton-spinners, whose strike was attracting the bitterest attacks in both the loyalist and the new-style middle-class Radical press (notably The Times). The comparison of wage-rates over the previous twenty years in organized and unorganized trades led to an inescapable conclusion. Whether ‘natural’ or ‘artificial’, combination worked:
… we had always thought that the prosperity of masters and workmen were simultaneous and inseparable. But the fact is not so, and we have no hesitation in saying that the cause of the deterioration in the circumstances of workmen generally, and the different degrees of deterioration among different classes of journeymen, depends entirely on the degree of perfection that prevails among them, which the law has pronounced a crime – namely, COMBINATION. The circumstances of the workmen do not in the least depend on the prosperity or profits of the masters, but on the power of the workmen to command – nay to extort a high price for their labour…2
This can scarcely be Place, in view of the arguments which he is known to have adopted in 1814 and 1824.3 But if the author was Wade, he did not long hold to this position. Subsequently he adopted the ideology of the middle-class Utilitarians, and his popular History of the Middle and Working Classes (1835) has this characteristic blend of the Radical politics and orthodox economics, together with industrious compilation of fact. It is, however, a disappointing work to have come from the author of the Black Book and the editor of the Gorgon.
Gast’s history is different. He was, with Gravener Henson and John Doherty, one of the three truly impressive trade union leaders who emerged in these early years. Each came from industries undergoing greatly different experiences, and the characteristic contribution of each was for this reason different. Henson exemplifies the struggle of the outworkers, touching the fringes of Luddism, organizing their illegal union, sharing their advanced political Radicalism, and attempting until 1824 to enforce or enact protective legislation in their favour. Doherty of the cotton-spinners was able to place more emphasis upon the workers’ own power to improve their conditions, or to change the entire system, by the force of combination; he was, by 1830, at the heart of the great movements of the northern workers for general unionism, factory reform, cooperative organization, and ‘national regeneration’. Gast, coming from a smaller but highly organized skilled trade, was constantly concerned with problems of the organization and mutual support of the London and national trades.
Gast was a shipwright, who served his apprenticeship in Bristol (where he had been born in 1772), and came to London around 1790. Of his ‘thirty or forty’ years on the Thames (he said in 1825) twenty-eight had been spent in one Deptford yard, in which he was the ‘leading hand’, with sixteen or so men under his charge: ‘I there assisted in building not less than from twenty to thirty sail of men-of-war… exclusive of merchant ships.’ In 1793 the shipwrights had been organized in the St Helena Benefit Society-there were ‘not ten men in the river who were not members’. The society failed, but in 1812 there was a shipwright’s strike and the Hearts of Oak Benefit Society was formed in which Gast took a leading part. The society was so successful that it not only provided the usual benefits, for sickness, death, and accident, but also erected from its funds thirteen alms-houses for retired shipwrights. When the Thames Shipwrights Provident Union was founded in August 1824, Gast was its first Secretary. He must by this time have been in his mid-fifties.1
After the repeal of the Combination Acts the shipwrights were involved in a particularly bitter struggle with their employers, who led the lobby pressing for new anti-trade union legislation in 1825.2 Thus Gast and his union were thrown into prominence. But long before this he had won respect in London trade union circles. We have seen that he was associated with the Gorgon, while he was prominent at the same time in the attempts (in Manchester and London) to form the ‘Philanthropic Hercules’, the first General Union of all trades.3 It is clear that by 1818 Gast was the leading figure in more than one committee of London ‘trades’. Moreover, an interesting translation took place in London working-class Radicalism between 1819 and 1822. In the former year, Hunt’s triumphal entry into London after Peterloo had been prepared by a committee in which such men as Dr Watson, Gale Jones, Evans and Thistlewood, were prominent – in the main old Jacobins, professional men, small masters, and a few artisans. When Hunt was released from Ilchester Gaol at the end of 1822 he was welcomed to London by John Gast, on behalf of ‘The Committee of the Useful Classes’.4 From this time forwards London working-class Radicalism acquires a new cogency: it is more easy to see from which industries its strength is drawn. In Gast’s committee it is possible to see an incipent ‘trades council’. In 1825, with the repeal of the Combination Acts, and with the threat of their reimposition, the trades felt strong enough to found their own weekly Trades Newspaper.5
The Trades Newspaper, with its motto, ‘They helped every one his neighbour’, is important not only because it throws a flood of light upon the strength of trade unionism which, until this time, one must follow through the shadows of the Courts and the Home Office papers.1 It also indicates a point of complete rupture between middle-class Utilitarianism, on one hand, and emergent ‘trade union theory’ on the other. The conflict was quite explicit. It is as if the orthodox parts of the Gorgon had gone on with Place and Wade, while the unorthodox claims for the value of combination became the basis for Gast’s new venture. Some of the polemics were aimed specifically at Place, and in a manner both unfortunate and unfair; and this may help to explain why Gast and the London trades feature so little in Place’s own account of these years. The controversy had in fact been opened in the previous year, in the pages of Wooler’s Black Dwarf, now in the last year of its life.2 It was provoked by the wedding which had been solemnized, in the pages of James Mill, between Malthusianism and political economy. Baldly stated, this proposed that the problem of unemployment 3 was a natural, rather than artificial, one, arising from the ‘surplus’ of population; as such it was insoluble; being insoluble, it was the underlying determinant of wage-rates, since – however much skilled groups might attain to a privileged position by means of restricting entry into their craft – the mass of the workers would find that the natural laws of supply-and-demand would cheapen the value of a service which was in excess supply.
To this Cobbett had long given a passionate and explosive negative (‘PARSON Malthus! Scotch feelosofers!’). The ‘Black Dwarf’ offered more strenuous arguments. ‘The quantity of employment is unlimited,’ he wrote:
I have seen men and women without stockings in this great manufacturing country, which furnishes stockings to all quarters of the world…. If every one in these islands alone were as well clothed as they could wish to be, the home consumption would be ten times as extensive as it is.
‘It is not by diminishing their numbers,’ he concluded (in replying to objections from Place), ‘but by sharpening their intellects, that the condition of the human race is to be bettered.’1
The argument was resumed in the first number of the Trades Newspaper, whose first editor was the advanced Radical, J. C. Robertson, the pioneer of the London Mechanics’ Institute and colleague of Thomas Hodgskin.2 The editorial took issue with M’Culloch for adopting Malthusian theory and advising the workers: ‘Restrict your numbers so as not to overstock the demand for labourers.’ ‘This,’ the editorial commented, ‘is to conspire against nature, against morality, and against happiness.’ The available means for such restriction were either abstinence from marriage, or from the enjoyment of marriage, or else the use of contraceptives. Now Place had firmly endorsed the Malthusian position, and had taken it upon himself to propagate it amongst the working class; but, having no confidence in their capacity for sexual abstinence, he had further assisted in the covert dissemination of handbills providing information as to the means of birth control.1 Place now attempted to defend M’Culloch in the columns of the Trades Newspaper.
If Place had taken part in a courageous action for the most wrong-headed of Utilitarian reasons, the Trades Newspaper attacked him bitterly on both counts. On the one hand, it was insinuated that Place was associated with a ‘nameless’ and immoral advocacy, too disgusting to be described. (We should remember that this response to contraception was shared on every side, and there is no reason to suppose that Gast was not genuinely shocked.) On the other hand, he opened a critique which was of far greater significance:
If Messrs Malthus, M’Culloch, Place & Co are to be believed, the working classes have only to consider how they can most effectually restrict their numbers, in order to arrive at a complete solution of all their difficulties… Malthus & Co… would reduce the whole matter to a question between Mechanics and their sweethearts and wives [rather than] a question between the employed and their employers – between the Mechanic and the corn-grower and monopolist – between the tax-payer and the tax-inflictor.2
The note is quite clear. Gast and Robertson had rejected the model of a ‘natural’ and self-adjusting political economy, which, left unrestrained, would operate to the benefit of employers and employed alike. An essential antagonism of interests is assumed, and its resolution or adjustment must be a matter of force. What might be of utility to capital might well be oppressive to labour. And for this shaping working-class theory there came important intellectual reinforcements. There was published in 1825 Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital (over the pseudonym ‘A Labourer’) by Thomas Hodgskin, a retired naval lieutenant on half-pay. Gast, Robertson, and Hodgskin had already been associated in the Mechanics’ Institute, for which the latter lectured in political economy. In the second half of 1825 the greater part of Labour Defended was published in extracts in the Trades Newspaper, and a series of editorial articles gave to it a warm, but not uncritical, welcome, selecting from Hodgskin’s work, with particular approval, the elements of the labour theory of value: ‘the only thing which can be said to be stored up is the skill of the labourer’:
All the capitalists of Europe, with all their circulating capital, cannot of themselves supply a single week’s food and clothing…1
Hodgskin’s primitive socialist theory was particularly well adapted to the experience of the London trades – and from this experience his theory was in great part derived. In the face of renewed threats of legislation, he defended trade unionism with strong and common-sense arguments: ‘Combination is of itself no crime; on the contrary, it is the principle on which societies are held together.’ His particular fire was directed against the capitalist in his rôle as entrepreneur or middleman:
Betwixt him who produces food and him who produces clothing, betwixt him who makes instruments and him who uses them, in steps the capitalist, who neither makes nor uses them and appropriates to himself the produce of both…. Gradually and successively has he insinuated himself betwixt them, expanding in bulk as he has been nourished by their increasingly productive labours, and separating them so widely from each other that neither can see whence that supply is drawn which each receives through the capitalist. While he despoils both, so completely does he exclude one from the view of the other that both believe they are indebted to him for subsistence.
In his active technical or managerial rôle, the capitalist was seen as productive; in this rôle he also was a labourer, and should be rewarded as such. But as a middleman or speculator he was merely parasitic:
The most successful and widest-spread possible combination to obtain an augmentation of wages would have no other injurious effect than to reduce the incomes of those who live on profit and interest, and who have no just claim but custom to any share of the national produce.
Hodgskin did not offer an alternative system (unless it was the supersession of all systems in a Godwinian sense) and there is a sense in which he side-stepped the question of property-rights. What he sanctioned was a mounting organized pressure, by all the strength and intellectual and moral resources of the working class, to confiscate the gross wealth of the capitalist interloper. This war of capital and labour, between ‘honest industry’ and ‘idle profligacy’, would not end until the workers received the full product of their own labour, and ‘till man shall be held more in honour than the clod he treads on or the machine he guides.’