1. In the following pages I cannot hope to re-examine the thought of Owen or of the ‘labour economists’. My purpose is to illustrate at one or two points the way theory impinged upon working-class experience and the way the new ideas were selected or changed in the process; that is, my concern is more with the sociology of these ideas than with their identity. For Hodgskin see G. D. H. Cole’s edition of Labour Defended (1922) and E. Halévy, Thomas Hodgskin (1956, trans. A. J. Taylor). For a lucid and brief discussion of Owen and the labour economists, see H. L. Beales, The Early English Socialists (1933), chs. 4 and 5; and for a fuller summary, G. D. H. Cole, History of Socialist Thought, I, The Forerunners, and M. Beer, A History of British Socialism, Part III.
1. R. Owen A New View of Society and other writings (Everyman edn), pp. 74, 260.
1. Sherwin’s Political Register, 26 April, 9 August, 20 September 1817.
2. See Independent Whig, 24 August 1817. The only radical papers which appear to have given Owen a favourable hearing in 1817–19 were the short-lived People and the Independent Whig which sent a correspondent to New Lanark.
1. Examiner, 4 August 1816; see Works, VII, p. 97 et. seq.
1. See Owen, op. cit., pp. 148–55.
1. Sherwin’s Political Register, 20 September 1817.
2. See, however, Engels’ generous tribute to Owen in Anti-Dühring (1878; Lawrence & Wishart, 1936), pp. 287–92: ‘a man of almost sublimely child-like simplicity of character, and at the same time a born leader of men’.
1. Economist, 4 August, 20 and 27 October 1821 et passim. For the proclamation of the Millennium, I have used the account appended to Bronterre O’Brien’s edition of Buonarrotti’s History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy of Equals (1836), pp. 438–45.
1. Economist, 13 October 1821, 9 March 1822. See Armytage, op. cit., pp. 92–4 for a brief account of the Spa Fields experiment.
1. See ‘Report to the County of Lanark’ (1820), in Owen, op. cit., esp. pp. 261–2.
2. An attempt was made, as early as 1796, to form a British Fraternal Society, which was to unite the resources of the benefit societies with forms of organization derived from the Corresponding Society. It originated among the Spitalfields weavers, and it was proposed that old age and unemployed benefits should be paid, the Society should employ its own out-of-work members and the products of silk weavers, tailors, shoemakers, &c., should be exchanged with each other. See Andrew Larcher, A Remedy for Establishing Universal Peace and Happiness (Spitalfields, 1795) and Address to the British Fraternal Society (1796).
3. E.g., the Journeymen Tobacco Pipe Manufacturers who, after an eleven-week strike in the winter of 1818–19, commenced direct manufacture in the Maze, Borough – ‘a friend’ having ‘procured us a factory’. See Gorgon, 6 and 13 February 1819.
1. J. Nightingale, The Bazaar (1816). Particularly commended was the New Bazaar, 5 Soho Square, opened that year; a Beehive Bazaar in Holborn was also mentioned.
2. Cooperative Magazine (1827), pp. 230–31, cited in S. Pollard, ‘Nineteenth-Century Cooperation: from Community Building to Shopkeeping’, Essays in Labour History, p. 87.
1. Crisis, 30 June, 27 October, 8 and 15 December 1832.
2. Lancashire and Yorkshire Cooperator, No. 2. (date unidentified).
1. 6 March 1830; 26 November 1831. See A. E. Musson, ‘The Ideology of Early Cooperation in Lancashire and Cheshire’, Transactions Lancs. & Cheshire Antiq. Soc., LXVII, 1957.
2. S. Pollard, op. cit., p. 86.
3. Crisis, 27 October 1832.
1. J. H. Priestley, History of Ripponden Cooperative Society (Halifax, 1932), ch. 4. It is not clear whether these rules date from 1833 or 1839.
1. Common Sense, 11 December 1830.
2. See S. Pollard, Dr William King (Loughborough Cooperative College Papers,.6, 1959).
3. Trades Newspaper, 31 July 1825. For the quasi-cooperative corn mills founded as a result of the near-famine of 1795, see G. J. Holyoake, Self Help A Hundred Years Ago (1891), ch. 11, and J. A. Langford, A Century of Birmingham Life, II, pp. 157–60. In some MS ‘Notes and Observations on Cooperative Societies’ Lovett records that there were many societies, especially consumer groups, during the wars, and mentions the Spitalfields Weavers: Add. MSS., 27, 791 ff. 245, 258.
4. Ibid., 14 August 1825.
1. Trades Newspaper, 11 September 1825.
1. Hammonds, The Town Labourer, p. 312.
2. Report of the Proceedings of a Delegate Meeting of Cotton Spinners, &c. (Manchester, 1830).
3. Union Pilot and Cooperative Intelligence, 24 March 1832.
4. See Doherty’s Poor Man’s Advocate, 21 January 1832: ‘The management [of the Association] has passed into the hands of the spirited and intelligent operatives of Yorkshire, where we hope the same spirit of jealousy and faction which, in a great measure, neutralized the best influence of the Association here, will be avoided.’
5. See especially G. D. H. Cole, Attempts at General Union; Postgate The Builders’ Union, chs. 3 to 5; W. H. Warburton, History of T.U. Organization in the Potteries (1931), chs. 2 to 4. Some details of the ‘fatality’ which beset the N.A.P.L. are to be found in D. Caradog Morris, ‘The History of the Labour Movement in England, 1825–51’ (Ph.D. thesis, London, 1952).
1. For Thompson, see R. Pankhurst, William Thompson (1954). For accounts of the Labour Exchange, see R. Podmore, Robert Owen (1906), II; G. D. H. Cole, Life of Robert Owen (1930), pp. 260–66, and Lovett, op. cit., I, pp. 43 ff. Davenport’s account is in National Cooperative Leader, 15 March 1861.
1. See T. Fielden, An Exposition of the Fallacies and Absurdities of that Deluded Church generally known as Christian Israelites or ‘Johannas’… (1850), for details of the ‘mysteries’ of initiation and discipline at the hands of the pious sisterhood: ‘the woman takes the man by his privates while in his stooping attitude… she holds him by one hand, and gives him the stripes by the other…’
1. G. R. Balleine, Past Finding Out, ch. 11; ed. H. B. Hollingsworth, Zion’s Works (1899), I, pp. 300 ff.; Zion Ward, A Serious Call: or The Messiah’s Address to the People of England (1831).
1. P. G. Rogers, Battle in Bossenden Wood (1961), pp. 4, 96; An Account of the Desperate Affray in Blean Wood (Faversham, 1838); Essay on the Character of Sir William Courtenay (Canterbury, 1833); The Lion, 6 and 27 April 1833; Globe, 1 June, 10 August 1838.
1. See Armytage, op. cit., part III, ch. 7, ‘Liverpool: Gateway to Zion’; P. A. M. Taylor, Expectations Westward (1965).
1. Poor Man’s Guardian, 19 October 1833. See M. Morris, From Cobbett to the Chartists (1948), p. 87.
1. F. D. Maurice, The Kingdom of Christ, cited in Armytage, op. cit., p. 85.
2. Owen, op. cit., p. 269.
1. See Postgate, op. cit., pp. 72–3.
2. See S. Pollard, op. cit. p. 90.
3. Economist, 11 August 1821.
4. A. E. Musson, op. cit., p. 126.
1. Add. MSS. 27,791 f. 270.
1. Add. MSS 27,789. For an example of this facility in spontaneous organization, see Prentice, op. cit., pp. 408–10.
2. See Jephson, The Platform, II, ch. 15.
1. October 1831.
1. The Times, 1 December 1830, 27 October 1831; see Jephson, op. cit., II, pp. 69, 107. During the Bristol riots, the authorities were forced to call in the leaders of the Bristol Political Union to restore order. See Bristol Mercury, 1 November 1831; Prentice, op. cit., p. 401.
2. Cited in Jephson, op. cit., II, p. 111. The demonstration of the National Union was, in fact, pronounced seditious and prohibited. It was a risk too great to take.
3. Final Address, prefacing Black Dwarf, XII (1824).
1. Poor Man’s Guardian, 10 December 1831.
2. G. Edmonds, The English Revolution (1831), p. 5. Edmonds went on to play an active part in the Chartist movement.
1. See A. J. C. Rüter, ‘Benbow’s Grand National Holiday’, International Review of Social History (Leiden), I, 1936, pp. 217 et seq.
2. W. Carpenter, An Address to the Working Classes on the Reform Bill (October 1831). See also the ensuing controversy in the Poor Man’s Guardian.
3. Poor Man’s Guardian, 25 October 1832; see A. Briggs, The Age of Improvement, p. 258.
1. See J. R. M. Butler, The Passing of the Great Reform Bill (1914), pp. 292–3, 350; Add. MSS., 27,791 f. 51; Memorandum on ‘Measures to be taken to put an End to the Seditious Meetings at the Rotunda’, Wellington Despatches, second series (1878), VII, p. 353.
1. E. G. Wakefield, Householders in Danger from the Populace (n.d. October 1831?).
2. While Lovett and his circle believed in the maximum of pressure short of physical force (and maintained some relations with Place), others, including Benbow and Hibbert, were preparing for an armed struggle.
1. It is interesting to speculate upon how far Place’s frequent assertions as to the improvement in the manners and morals of the London populace expressed the truth, or merely the widening gulf between the artisans and unskilled, the narrowing of Place’s own circle of experience, and the pushing of poverty out of the City’s centre towards the east and the south. On the whole problem of metropolitan growth and demoralization (and its ‘biological’ foundation), see L. Chevalier, Classes Laborieuses et Classes Dangereuses à Paris Pendant La Première Moitié Du XIXème Siècle (Paris, 1958), which suggests many new lines of research into London conditions.
2. It is difficult to discount Oliver’s circumstantial account of Birmingham contracts (Narrative in H.O. 40.9). See also evidence in H.O. 40.3 and 6.
1. See Cobbett’s angry comment: ‘Do you imagine that the great manufacturers, and merchants, and bankers are crying for REFORM, because they have been converted to a love of popular rights! Bah!… [Financial causes] have made them raise their wages; these they cannot pay and pay tithes and taxes also…. Therefore, are they reformers; therefore, they throw their lusty arms around the waist of the Goddess’: Political Register, 17 October 1831.
2. Destructive, 2 February and 9 March 1833; A. Briggs, ‘The Background of the Parliamentary Reform Movement in Three English Cities’, Camb. Hist. Journal, 1952, p. 293, and The Age of Improvement, p. 247.
3. W. Brimelow, Political History of Bolton (1882), I, p. 111.
1. Poor Man’s Advocate, 21 January 1832.
2. Poor Man’s Guardian, 11 April 1832.
3. Add. MSS., 27, 795 ff. 26–7.
1. Butler, op. cit., p. 303.
2. See Gladstone’s comment: ‘I held forth to a working man… on the established text, reform was revolution… I said, “Why, look at the revolutions in foreign countries”, meaning of course France and Belgium. The man looked hard at me and said… “Damn all foreign countries, what has old England to do with foreign countries”; This is not the only time that I have received an important lesson from a humble source.’ J. Morley, Life of Gladstone (1908), I, p. 54.
3. See A. Briggs, ‘The Language of “Class” in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, op. cit., p. 56.
1. Bronterre’s National Reformer, 7 January 1837. O’Brien in fact was qualified in law at the Bar in Dublin.
2. Destructive, 9 March 1833.
3. O’Brien, op. cit., pp. xv, xx. For O’Brien, see G. D. H. Cole, Chartist Portraits (1941), ch. 9; T. Rothstein, From Chartism to Labourism (1929), pp. 93–123; Beer, op. cit., II, pp. 17–22.
1. Twopenny Despatch, 10 September 1836.
2. Destructive, 9 March, 24 August 1833; People’s Conservative; and Trade’s Union Gazette, 14 December 1833.
1. O’Brien himself came to regret the vehemence of his dismissal of the entire ‘middle class’, when an opportunity for alliance between the Chartists and elements from the middle class occurred in the 1840s: see Beer, op. cit., II, p. 126.
1. J. R. M. Butler, op. cit., pp. 262–5; Cracker, 8 December 1832. 2
2. Political Register, 24 November 1832. Cobbett was recalling the former Yorkshire county member, Wilberforce.
1. MS Letterbook of Ayrey (Leeds Reference Library).
1. Cracker, 8, 10, 21 December 1832. See also A. Briggs, ‘The Background of the Parliamentary Reform Movement in Three English Cities’, op. cit., pp. 311–14; E. Baines, Life, pp. 164–7; C. Driver, Tory Radical, pp. 197–202.
2. Speech of William Rider, Leeds stuff-weaver and later to be a prominent Chartist Leader, Leeds Times, 12 April 1834.
3. Leeds Times, 12, 17, 24 May 1834.
1. Working Man’s Friend and Political Magazine, 5 January 1833.
2. Report of the Proceedings of the Great Public Meeting &c., 20 May 1833.
1. ‘I.H.B.L.’, Ought Every Man to Vote? (1832).
2. G. Edmonds, The English Revolution (1831), pp. 5, 8.
1. See, e.g., Destructive, 7 December 1833.
2. Pioneer, 13 October 1833.
3. Man, 13 October 1833.
4. Man, 22 December 1833.
1. Pioneer, 31 May 1834.
1. Pioneer, 22 March 1834; see A. Briggs, ‘The Language of “Class” in Early Nineteenth Century England’, loc. cit., p. 68.