IV. OWENISM

The publication of Labour Defended, and its reception in the Trades Newspaper, represents the first clear point of junction between the ‘labour economists’ or the Owenites and a part of the working-class movement.¹ But of course Owen had preceded him; and even if Owen, Gray, Pare and Thompson had not been writing, Hodgskin’s work was bound to lead on to the further question: if capital was largely parasitic upon labour, might not labour simply dispense with it or replace it by a new system. Moreover, by a curious twist it was possible for Utilitarianism to lead on to the same question: if the only criterion by which a social system might be judged was use, and if the greatest number in that society were toilers, clearly no veneration for custom or Gothic notions should prevent one from contriving the most useful possible plan by which the masses might exchange and enjoy their own products. Hence Owenite Socialism always contained two elements which never wholly fused: the philanthropy of the Enlightenment, devising ‘span-new systems’ according to principles of utility and benevolence: and the experience of those sections of workers who selected notions from the Owenite stock, and adapted or developed them to meet their particular context.

The story of Robert Owen of New Lanark is well known, even legendary. The model paternalist mill-owner and self-made man who canvassed the royalty, courtiers and governments of Europe with his philanthropic proposals; the growing exasperation of Owen’s tone as he met with polite applause and practical discouragement; his propaganda to all classes and his proclamation of the Millennium the growing interest in his ideas and promises among some working people; the rise and fall of the early experimental communities, notably Orbiston; Owen’s departure to America for more experiments in community-building (1824–29); the growing support for Owenism during his absence, the enriching of his theory by Thompson, Gray and others, and the adoption of a form of Owenism by some of the trade unionists; the initiative of Dr King at Brighton with his Cooperator (1828–30) and the widely scattered experiments in cooperative trading; the initiative of some London artisans, among whom Lovett was prominent, in promoting national propaganda in cooperative principles (the British Association for Promoting Cooperative Knowledge), in 1829–30; the swelling tide after Owen’s return, when he found himself almost despite himself at the head of a movement which led on to the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union.

It is an extraordinary story; and yet there is a sense in which parts of it had to be so. We may start at the point of entry, with the paternalist tradition. And we must see that the great experiments at New Lanark were instituted to meet the same difficulties of labour discipline, and the adaptation of the unruly Scottish labourers to new industrial work-patterns that we have already encountered in our discussion of Methodism and of Dr Ure. ‘At that time the lower classes in Scotland… had strong prejudices against strangers…’, ‘the persons employed at these works were therefore strongly prejudiced against the new director…’:

… they possessed almost all the vices and very few of the virtues of a social community. Theft and the receipt of stolen goods was their trade, idleness and drunkenness their habit, falsehood and deception their garb, dissensions, civil and religious, their daily practice; they united only in a zealous systematic opposition to their employers.

These passages, from A New View of Society (1813), are much the common run of the new mill-owner or iron-master’s experience. The problem was to indoctrinate the youth in ‘habits of attention, celerity, and order’. It is wholly to Owen’s credit that he chose neither the psychic terrors of Methodism nor the discipline of the overlooker and of fines to attain his ends. But we must see, all the time, that Owen’s later Socialism retained the marks of its origin. He was cast as the kindly Papa of Socialism: Mr Owen, the Philanthropist, who secured entrée to the Court and the Cabinet-room in the post-war years (until he committed his faux pas of dismissing, with kindly tolerance, all received religions whatsoever as mischievous irrationalism), merges without any sense of crisis into ‘the benevolent Mr Owen’ who was addressed by and issued addresses to the working classes. He was in one sense the ne plus ultra of Utilitarianism, planning society as a gigantic industrial panopticon; in another, and most admirable and kindly sense, he was an industrial Hanway, who thought a good deal about children, liked to see them happy, and really was outraged at their callous exploitation. But the notion of working-class advance, by its own self-activity towards its own goals, was alien to Owen, even though he was drawn, between 1829 and 1834, into exactly this kind of movement. This can be seen in the tone of all his writings. He wished (he said in 1817) to ‘remoralize the Lower Orders’. Next to ‘benevolent’ the words most commonly encountered in early Owenite writings are ‘provided for them’. Education should ‘impress on the young ideas and habits which shall contribute to the future happiness of the individual and the State; and this can be accomplished only by instructing them to become rational beings’:

Fourth, – What are the best arrangements under which these men and their families can be well and economically lodged, fed, clothed, trained, educated, employed, and governed?¹

This tone presented an almost insuperable barrier between Owen and the popular Radical as well as trade union movement. ‘The operatives and working classes were at this time strangers to me and to all my views and intentions,’ Owen noted (in his Autobiography) of the immediate post-war years. ‘Their democratic and much-mistaken leaders taught them that I was their enemy and that I desired to make slaves of them in these villages of unity and mutual cooperation.’ But in the circumstances this was scarcely surprising. The Philanthropist, Mr Owen, swam into their view during the desperate post-war depression years. Many of the gentry were themselves appalled at the extent of unemployment and distress, while they were also anxious as to the insurrectionary temper of the unemployed. More than this, the poor-rates had risen to over £6 millions at a time when agriculture had fallen from its war-time prosperity. The poor were unsightly, a source of guilt, a heavy charge on the country, and a danger. The columns of the reviews were full of discussions on the emendation of the Poor Laws, all of which had greater economy as their goal. Mr Owen (whose extensive properties at New Lanark became a fashionable addition to genteel tours) now came forward with a Plan, which really could not have been nicer. He proposed to put the poor into ‘Villages of Cooperation’, where – after an initial capital grant out of taxes – they would pay their own way, and become ‘useful’, ‘industrious’, ‘rational’, self-disciplined, and temperate as well. The Archbishop of Canterbury liked the idea, and Lord Sidmouth went over it quite closely with Mr Owen. ‘My Lord Sidmouth will forgive me,’ Owen wrote in one of his public letters on poor relief which appeared in the London press in the summer of 1817, ‘for he knows I intend no personal offence. His dispositions are known to be mild and amiable…’ This was published a fortnight after the Pentridge rising and the exposure of Oliver.

The Plan smelled of Malthus and of those rigorous experiments of magistrates (like the strangely named ‘Nottingham Reformers’) who were already working out the Chadwickian plan of economical workhouse relief. Even if Owen was himself (as some of the Radicals were willing to allow) deeply in earnest and dismayed by the distress of the people, his plan, if taken up by Government, would certainly be orientated in this way. Cobbett has been too easily accused of ‘prejudice’ in denouncing Owen’s ‘Villages of Cooperation’ as ‘parallelograms of paupers’. Not only did they savour to him of the ‘comforting system’ of patronage and charity which he loathed, but his instinct was probably right – that Owen’s ideas, if they had been taken up by the authorities in 1817, would probably have given rise to an extension of ‘productive employment’ within the workhouse system. But Cobbett was only voicing the general Radical response. His proposed institutions (wrote Sherwin) would be ‘prisons’, ‘a community of vassals’:

Mr Owen’s object appears to me to be to cover the face of the country with workhouses, to rear up a community of slaves, and consequently to render the labouring part of the People absolutely dependant upon the men of property.¹

When Owen attempted to interest the Radicals in his proposals, at a crowded meeting in the City of London Tavern, the Radical leaders, one after another – Cartwright, Wooler Alderman Waithman – opposed him in similar terms. When Gale Jones proposed that the plan at least deserved examination he was shouted down and accused of apostasy.²

The debate served only to display the weakness of both sides. On the one hand, Owen simply had a vacant place in his mind where most men have political responses. One part of the New View was dedicated to the Prince Regent, another to Wilberforce. Fifteen years later his paper, the Crisis sailed blandly through the waters of 1831 and 1832, carrying cargoes of reports on cooperative congresses and on trading stores at Slaithwaite, without noticing that the country was in fact in a state of revolutionary crisis. This vacancy had its endearing aspects: when it occurred to Mr Owen that the royalty was an irrational institution and that Bishops were a costly and unnecessary tribute to Gothic ignorance, he had no hesitation in pointing this out to the present incumbents, being sure that they would see that he intended ‘no personal offence’ and that they would duly liquidate themselves in submission to rational suasion. But this was scarcely endearing to the ‘old Radicals’ of 1817. Their weaknesses, on the other hand, consisted in a lack of any constructive social theory, whose place was taken by a rhetoric in which all ills were attributed to taxation and sinecures, which all could be remedied by Reform.

Hazlitt’s response to the New View was the most complex, and shows the bruised Jacobin in him struggling against the weight of Burke: ‘Why does Mr Owen put the word ‘New’, in black-letter at the head of the advertisement of his plan of reform?’ ‘The doctrine of Universal Benevolence, the belief in the Omnipotence of Truth, and in the Perfectibility of Human Nature, are not new, but “Old, old,” Master Robert Owen’:

Does not Mr Owen know that the same scheme, the same principles, the same philosophy of motives and actions… of virtue and happiness, were rife in the year 1793, were noised abroad then, were spoken on the house-tops, were whispered in secret, were published in quarto and duodecimo, in political treatises, in plays, poems, songs and romances – made their way to the bar, crept into the church, ascended the rostrum, thinned the classes of the universities… that these ‘New Views of Society’ got into the hearts of poets and the brains of metaphysicians, took possession of the fancies of boys and women, and turned the heads of almost the whole kingdom: but that there was one head which they never got possession of, that turned the heads of the whole kingdom round again…?

Thus repelled (Hazlitt mocked) it seems that philosophy was driven from the country,

and forced to take refuge and to lie snug for twenty years in the New Lanark mills, with the connivance of the worthy proprietor, among the tow and spindles; from whence he lets us understand that it is coming up again to Whitehall-stairs, like a spring-tide with the full of the moon, and floating on the blood that has flowed for the restoration of the Bourbons, under the patronage of the nobility, the gentry, Mr Wilberforce, and the Prince Regent, and all those who are governed, like those great personages, by no other principle than truth, and no other wish than the good of mankind! This puff will not take with us: we are old birds, not to be caught with chaff…

Hazlitt’s insight is extraordinarily acute. For Owen indeed was not the first of the modern Socialist theorists (Hodgskin was much closer to being that) but one of the last of the eighteenth-century rationalists – he was Godwin, now setting out from New Lanark to claim the Chairmanship of the Board of Directors of the Industrial Revolution. In his new disguise, as a practical and eminently successful man, he had entrée where the old philosophers were reviled and spurned. ‘A man that comes all the way from the banks of the Clyde acquires a projectile force that makes him irresistible’:

He has access, we understand, to the men in office, to the members of parliament, to lords and gentlemen. He comes… to batter down all their establishments, new or old, in church or state… and he quietly walks into their houses with his credentials in his pocket, and reconciles them to innumerable Houses of Industry he is about to erect on the site of their present sinecures…

‘We do not,’ continued Hazlitt, ‘wish him to alter his tone.’ But he prophesied, with uncanny accuracy, some of the consequences, if he did not:

His schemes thus far are tolerated, because they are remote, visionary, inapplicable. Neither the great world nor the world in general care any thing about New Lanark, nor trouble themselves whether the workmen there go to bed drunk or sober, or whether the wenches are got with child before or after the marriage ceremony. Lanark is distant, Lanark is insignificant. Our statesmen are not afraid of the perfect system of reform he talks of, and, in the meantime, his cant against reform in parliament… serves as a practical diversion in their favour. But let the good which Mr Owen says he has done in one poor village be in danger of becoming general… and his dreams of elevated patronage will vanish…. Let his ‘New View of Society’ but make as many disciples as the ‘Enquiry concerning Political Justice’, and we shall see how the tide will turn about… He will be marked as a Jacobin, a leveller, an incendiary, in all parts of the three kingdoms; he will be avoided by his friends, and become a bye-word to his enemies… and he will find out that it is not so easy or safe a task as to be imagined to… make mankind understand their own interests, or those who govern them care for any interest but their own.¹

The quality in Owen which his patrons discovered with consternation (and into which Hazlitt had some insight) was that of sheer propagandist zeal. He believed, equally with Carlile, in the multiplication of ‘reason’ by means of its diffusion. He spent a small fortune in posting his Addresses to men of influence throughout the country; and a larger fortune upon the experimental communities. By 1819 his patrons had grown weary of him, and he in turn was addressing himself more particularly to the working class. He had long held the view that working people were the creatures of circumstances; he deplored their ‘gross ferocity of character’ and one feels that (like Shaw) his chief reason for being a Socialist was the desire that they should be abolished. But here there comes a twist in his thought, productive of large consequences. If the workers were creatures of circumstances, so also – the thought may have occurred to him while walking in the park after an unsatisfactory interview – were Lord Sidmouth and the Archbishop. The thought was communicated in an Address to the Working Classes (1819):

From infancy, you… have been made to despise and hate those who differ from you in manners, language, and sentiments…. Those feelings of anger must be withdrawn before any being who has your real interest at heart can place power in your hands… You will then distinctly perceive that no rational ground for anger exists…. An endless multiplicity of circumstances, over which you had not the smallest control, placed you where you are…. In the same manner, others of your fellow-men have been formed by circumstances, equally uncontrollable by them, to become your enemies and grievous oppressors… Splendid as their exterior may be, this state of matters often causes them to suffer even more poignantly than you…. While you show by your conduct any desire violently to dispossess them of this power, these emoluments and privileges – is it not evident that they must continue to regard you with jealous and hostile feelings…?

‘The rich and the poor, the governors and the governed, have really but one interest’ – to form a new cooperative society. But the rich no less than the poor, being creatures of circumstance, were unable to see their true interests. (The ‘sudden admission of strong light’ from Owen’s writings was in danger of destroying their ‘infant powers of vision’). The workers (or those of them who had seen the light of reason) should disengage from class conflict. ‘This irrational and useless contest must cease’, and the avant garde (by establishing model communities and by propaganda) might blaze a path by means of which the working people could simply by-pass the property-rights and power of the rich.¹

However admirable Owen was as a man, he was a preposterous thinker, and, while he had the courage of the eccentric, he was a mischievous political leader. Of the theorists of Owenism, Thompson is more sane and challenging, while Gray, Pare, Dr King and others had a firmer sense of reality. There comes through his writings not the least sense of the dialectical processes of social change, of ‘revolutionizing practice’:

The materialist doctrine that men are products of circumstances and upbringing and that, therefore, changed men are products of other circumstances and changed upbringing, forgets that circumstances are changed precisely by men and that the educator must himself be educated. Hence this doctrine necessarily arrives at dividing society into two parts, of which one towers above society (in Robert Owen, for example) –

So ran Marx’s third thesis on Ludwig Feuerbach. If social character was (as Owen held) the involuntary product of ‘an endless multiplicity of circumstances,’ how was it to be changed? One answer lay in education, where one of the most creative influences of the Owenite tradition can be seen. But Owen knew that until ‘circumstances’ changed he could not gain access to the schooling of a generation. The answer must therefore lie in the sudden change of heart, the millenarial leap. The very rigour of his environmental and mechanical materialism meant that he must either despair or proclaim a secular chiliasm.

Mr Owen, the Philanthropist, threw the mantle of Joanna Southcott across his shoulders. The tone of the ranter was noted, not only by Hazlitt, but by others of his contemporaries. A writer in Sherwin’s Register compared him to Joanna, who—

deluded thousands for the moment, by telling them that a Shiloh was about to come into the world; a Prince of Peace, under whose standard all the nations of the earth were to unite; by telling them that… swords were to be converted into plough-shares.¹

It was also to be examined by Engels and by Marx, and the more recent promulgation of the discovery in academic circles is not original.² Owen was promising, in 1820, to ‘let prosperity loose on the country’, and in his communities he offered no less than ‘Paradise’. By 1820 an Owenite society was forming in the metropolis, and the hand-bill advertising its periodical, the Economist, declared:

Plenty will overspread the land! – Knowledge will increase! — Virtue will flourish! – Happiness will be recognized, secured, and enjoyed.

Owen frequently used analogies drawn from the great advance in productive techniques during the Industrial Revolution: some individuals ‘forget that it is a modern invention to enable one man, with the aid of a little steam, to perform the labour of 1,000 men’. Might not knowledge and moral improvement advance at the same pace? His followers took up the same imagery:

… the construction of a great social and moral machine, calculated to produce wealth, knowledge, and happiness, with unprecedented precision and rapidity…

A correspondent to the Economist noted that ‘the tone of joy and exultation which pervades your writings is really most infectious’.

The members of the London society were aware –

that their proceedings must be comparatively imperfect, whilst they remain in their present dwellings, remote… from one another.

With an enthusiasm reminiscent of the early Moravians, they acquired some new houses on Spa Fields (no longer to be a meeting-place), with a schoolroom and common eating-room. The pages of the Economist and other early journals were full of speculations as to how capital might be raised – if it were supposed (an odd supposition) that there were 50,000 families of the working classes in the metropolis, these would, if brought into association, have an average income of £50 p.a. or £2½ millions collectively. And so on. The communitarians at Orbiston were enrolled in a ‘Society of Divine Revelation’. By 1830 when Owen, returning from America, found himself at the head of a movement of the masses, this messianic tone had the force of a secular religion. On 1 May 1833, Owen delivered an Address at the National Equitable Labour Exchange ‘denouncing the Old System of the World and announcing the Commencement of the New’. Not only would the profit motive be displaced by cooperation, the vices of individualism by the virtues of mutuality, but all existing social arrangements would give way to the federations of mixed agricultural and industrial villages:

We… abandon all the arrangements to which [sectional] interests have given birth; such as large cities, towns, villages, and universities….

Courts of law and all the paraphernalia and folly of law… cannot be found in a rational state of society…

Hitherto the world had been ‘in gross darkness’. All ceremonial worship of an unknown Power was ‘much worse than useless’. Marriages will be recognized as a ‘union of affection only’. ‘Celibacy, in either sex, beyond the period designed by nature, will be no longer considered a virtue’, but ‘a crime against nature’. The new society would offer a balance between intellectual and physical labour, entertainment and the cultivation of the physical powers as in Greece and Rome. All citizens would abandon all ambition, envy, jealousy, and other named vices:

I therefore now proclaim to the world the commencement, on this day, of the promised millennium, founded on rational principles and consistent practice.¹

This proclamation might startle some Women’s Cooperative Guilds today. It also appears, at first sight, an unlikely ideology to be accepted by the working people, whose formative experiences have been the subject of this study. And yet, if we look more closely, we will find that it was not some psychic frenzy or ‘collective paranoia’ which gave rise to the rapid spread of Owenism. In the first place, Owenism from the late Twenties onwards, was a very different thing from the writings and proclamations of Robert Owen. It was the very imprecision of his theories, which offered, none the less, an image of an alternative system of society, and which made them adaptable to different groups of working people. From the writings of the Owenites, artisans, weavers and skilled workers selected those parts which most closely related to their own predicament and modified them through discussion and practice. If Cobbett’s writings can be seen as a relationship with his readers, Owen’s can be seen as ideological raw material diffused among working people, and worked up by them into different products.

The artisans are the clearest case. The editor of the Economist admitted, in 1821, that few of his readers were among the working classes. But we gain an idea of the first members of the London ‘Cooperative and Economical Society’ who set up the community on Spa Fields from a circular sent to the Nobility and Gentry, soliciting their patronage for their wares. They offered to execute carving and gilding, boot and shoe-making, hardware (including grates and stoves), cutlery, clothing, sewing and dress-making, cabinet-making, book-selling and bookbinding, drawings in water colours and on velvet, and Transparent Landscape Window Blinds. This suggests artisans and self-employed craftsmen, who abounded in two of the greatest cooperative centres – London and Birmingham. The spirit of these endeavours (of which there were a number, some antedating Owen) is expressed in a letter sent to the Economist:

… the working classes, if they will but exert themselves manfully, have no need to solicit the smallest assistance from any other class, but have within themselves… superabundant resources.¹

This is not Owen’s tone. But it is certainly the tone which we have met repeatedly when following the political Radicalism of the artisans. Individualism was only one part of their outlook; they were also inheritors of long traditions of mutuality – the benefit society, the trades club, and chapel, the reading or social club, the Corresponding Society or Political Union. Owen taught that the profit-motive was wrong and unnecessary: this keyed in with the craftsman’s sense of custom and the fair price. Owen endorsed the view, held also by Cobbett, Carlile and Hodgskin, that the capitalist was largely parasitic in his function: ‘that manual labour, properly directed, is the source of all wealth’: this keyed in with grievances of artisans or little craftsmen-masters against the contractors and middlemen. Owen taught that ‘the natural standard of human labour’ should be taken as ‘the practical standard of value’,¹ and that products ought to be exchanged according to the labour embodied in them: this keyed in with the outlook of the shoe-maker, cabinet-maker, and brushmaker, who lived in the same court and who did in any case on occasion exchange services.

Indeed, the germ of most of Owen’s ideas can be seen in practices which anticipate or occur independently of his writings.² Not only did the benefit societies on occasion extend their activities to the building of social clubs or alms-houses; there are also a number of instances of pre-Owenite trade unions when on strike, employing their own members and marketing the product.³ The artisan was only slowly losing his status as a self-employed man, or as a man who did work for several masters; and in doing this or that contract he might enlist the aid of other craftsmen with different skills. The covered market, or bazaar, with its hundreds of little stalls, was an old institution; but at the close of the Wars new bazaars were opened, which attracted attention in philanthropic and Owenite circles, where a section of counter was let (by the foot) for the week, the day, or even part of the day. Wares of every type were invited – even artists might exhibit – and one may suppose that the craftsmen and ‘garret-masters’ who were struggling for ‘an independence’ were the tenants.¹ By 1827 a new bazaar was in being, which acted as a centre for the exchange of products made by unemployed members of London trades – carpenters, tailors, shoemakers, and others who were put to work on materials bought out of trade union funds.²

Thus the Equitable Labour Exchanges, founded at London and Birmingham in 1832–3, with their labour notes and exchange of small products, were not conjured out of the air by paranoiac prophets. If we list the products which were brought for exchange to the Cooperative Congress in Liverpool in October 1832 we can also see the people. From Sheffield, cutlery and coffee-pots: from Leicester, stockings and lace: from Huddersfield, waistcoat pieces and shawls: from Rochdale, flannels. There were diapers from Barnsley, stuffs from Halifax, shoes and clogs from Kendal, and prints from Birkacre. A spokesman of the Birmingham Equitable Labour Exchange said that the people of his district ‘knew not what to do with their masses of iron, brass, steel and japan wares’: why should they not be exchanged for Lancashire cottons and Leicester stockings? The long list of trades who proposed to bring their wares to the Birmingham Exchange includes (in the ‘Bs’) blacking-makers, bell-ringers, birch broom makers, button and trimming makers, brace-makers, braziers, brush-makers, bakers, bellows-makers, bedstead-makers, basket-makers. In the ‘Ss’ we find straw hat and bonnet-makers, scale makers, stove grate makers, silkweavers, blacksmiths and whitesmiths, and stationers. There are not (and could scarcely be) boilermakers, blast furnace-men, or builders; shipwrights or cotton-spinners; miners or engineers.¹

The list includes not only the little masters and artisans but also outworkers. As their position (weavers and stockingers) was the most desperate, so Owenism was only one of the solutions at which they clutched in the Thirties. The appeal of the Labour Exchange was not so immediate in the vicinity of Huddersfield or Burnley, for the obvious reason that in districts where the staple product was weaving, and where hundreds were semi-employed or employed on starvation wages on the same products, there was no obvious mart. Hence the northerners were impelled, at the outset, to look towards a national plan of cooperation. ‘If our Birmingham friends will engage to appear in our fabrics,’ wrote a Halifax cooperator:

We will engage to cut our beef and pudding (when we can get any) with their knives and forks, and sup our broth and oatmeal porridge with their spoons; and if our London brethren will do so too, we will appear, as soon as possible, with their silk handkerchiefs round our necks.²

It was in Lancashire and Yorkshire that we find the most rapid development of a general theory of a new ‘system’, whereby on a national scale equitable exchange might take place, as well as some of the hardiest and most practical support for ‘utopian’ experiments in community building. The Manchester and Salford Association for the Promotion of Cooperative Knowledge, founded in 1830, gained immediate support. The weavers hoped to find in cooperation the strength to compete with the power-loom. A great cause of social evils, wrote the United Trades’ Cooperative Journal, was—

in the erroneous arrangement of our domestic, social and commercial affairs, by means of which machinery is made to compete with and against human labour instead of cooperating with him.

‘We can fairly trace that all the miseries which society suffers are mostly owing to the unfair distribution of wealth,’ wrote the Lancashire and Yorkshire Cooperator.¹ In these districts with their long traditions of trade unionism and mutual aid, cooperation offered a movement in which rationalists and Christians, Radicals and the politically neutral, could work together. The movement gathered up also the traditions of self-improvement and educational effort, providing reading-rooms, schools, and itinerant lecturers. By 1832 perhaps 500 cooperative societies were in existence in the whole country, with at least 20,000 members.²

While Owen (bruised somewhat, despite his optimism, by the failures at Orbiston and New Harmony) was awaiting large capital gifts before further experiments could be risked, the cooperators in scores of centres, from Brighton to Bacup, were impatient to raise themselves immediately by their own efforts. At the Liverpool Congress of 1832 the proceedings offer the contrast between long evangelistic harangues and such interventions as this:

Mr WILSON, a delegate from Halifax, stated that in May 1829, he and 8 other persons laid down a shilling each, and… commenced business in a small room in a back entry. Their numbers had increased; they… were now worth £240 and had begun to find labour for some of their members (Hear, hear.) ³

This juxtaposition of the little store and the millenarial plan is of the essence of the cooperative mood between 1829 and 1834. (It is found also in the diversity of particular grievances and organizations which held up for a brief while the edifice of the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union.)

In the neighbourhood of Huddersfield and Halifax, where cooperation spread among the weavers with such speed, one hope was that the store might purchase the warp and weft for the weaver and then sell the product, short-circuiting the employers. Cooperators might also, by a penny-a-week subscription, accumulate the capital to employ unemployed members. But most of these motives may be better expressed by quoting the rules of a society formed in 1832 in Ripponden, a weaving village in the Pennines:

From the astonishing changes which the course of a series of years have produced to the labouring classes… from competition and the increase of machinery which supersedes hand labour, combined with various other causes, over which, as yet, the labouring classes have no control – the minds of thinking men are lost in a labyrinth of suggestions what plan to adopt in order to better, if possible, their conditions….

By the increase of capital the working classes may better their condition, if they only unite and set their shoulder to the work; by uniting we do not mean strikes and turning out for wages, but like men of one family, strive to begin to work for ourselves….

The plan of cooperation which we are recommending to the public is not a visionary one but is acted upon in various parts of the Kingdom; we all live by the produce of the land, and exchange labour for labour, which is the object aimed at by all Cooperative Societies. We labourers do all the work and produce all the comforts of life; – why then should we not labour for ourselves and strive to improve our conditions?

Fundamental Principles

First. – That, labour is the source of all wealth; consequently the working classes have created all wealth.

Secondly. – That the working classes, although the producers of wealth, instead of being the richest, are the poorest of the community; hence, they cannot be receiving a just recompense for their labour.

The objects of the society included the mutual protection of all members against poverty and ‘the attainment of independence by means of a common capital’. The means of obtaining these objects included a weekly subscription into a common fund, the employment of the capital in trade, the employment of its members ‘as circumstances will permit’, and—

Lastly. – By living in community with each other, on the principles of mutual cooperation, united possessions, equality of exertions, and of the means of enjoyments.¹

This is not just a translation of Owen’s doctrines to the context of a weaving village. The ideas have been shaped laboriously, in terms of the weavers’ experience; the emphases have shifted; in place of the messianic stridency, there is the simple question: Why not? One of the small cooperative journals was aptly entitled Common Sense: its emphasis was on the ‘Trading Associations’:

The object of a Trading Association is briefly this: to furnish most of the articles of food in ordinary consumption to its members, and to accumulate a fund for the purpose of renting land for cultivation, and the formation thereon of a cooperative community.

A weekly sum from wages could be used for the wholesale purchase of tea, sugar, bread or oatmeal.¹ From Brighton Dr King’s Cooperator was advocating this in greater detail.² The idea keyed in with other needs; the need to escape from the ‘tommy shop’ or the profiteer; the need to buy staple foods cheap, and free from the criminal adulteration which was only too common – the flour mixed with ‘plaster of Paris, burnt bones, and an earthy substance… called Derbyshire White’.³

But this idea had also an appeal to the skilled and organized workers in the larger industries, whose approach to Owenism was more circumspect. The Trades Newspaper carried some notes on Orbiston in 1825, but Owen’s plans for communities were held to be ‘impracticable from the dislike that free-born, independent men, must have to be told what they must eat… and what they must do’.⁴ Moreover, the very notion of acquiring an economic independence, which appealed to some small craftsmen and outworkers, offered an objection to the shipwright or the worker in large-scale industry – what use a Village of Cooperation to him?

By the close of the Twenties, however, Gast had declared for Owenism. A more important adhesion was that of the Manchester Cotton Spinners after their six-month strike in 1829. Doherty pioneered, in 1830, the National Association for the Protection of Labour, whose organ, the United Trades Cooperative Journal soon became the Voice of the People. Soon after this another skilled body, the Builders’ Union, whose products could not possibly be taken to the Equitable Labour Exchange, set its course towards the greatest of all the experiments in cooperative direct action. What made the difference?

One answer may simply be that by the end of the Twenties one variant or another of cooperative and ‘labour’ economic theory had taken hold of the cadre of the working-class movement. Cobbett offered no coherent theory. Carlile’s individualism was repellent. Hodgskin, by implication, pointed towards mature socialist theory, but his analysis pulled up before that point, and was in any case compatible with co-operative theory as William Thompson showed. The rationalist propaganda of the previous decade had been effective; but it had also been narrow and negative, and had given rise to a thirst for a more positive moral doctrine which was met by Owen’s messianism. Owen’s imprecision of thought made it possible for different intellectual tendencies to coexist within the movement. And we must insist again that Owenism was both saner, and more strenuous in intellectual terms, than the thought of its master. For the skilled workers the movement which began to take shape in 1830 at last seemed to give body to their long-held aspiration – general national unionism. From the Philanthropic Hercules of 1818 to the Combination Acts lobby of 1825 there had been much reaching out for united action. Throughout the summer and autumn of 1825 the Trades Newspaper reported each stage of the Bradford wool-combers’ strike, and the support flowing in from all parts of the country. It declared emphatically: ‘It is all the workers of England against a few masters at Bradford.’¹ Doherty saw in the failure of the great spinners’ strike of 1829 another lesson: ‘It was then shown that no individual trade could stand against the combined efforts of the masters of that particular trade: it was therefore sought to combine all the trades.’¹ One result was the formation of the Operative Spinners of England, Ireland, and Scotland, whose first conference, on the Isle of Man in December 1829, showed an impressive attempt to surmount the organizational complexities of united organization in three disparate regions.² From this basis, the National Association for the Protection of Labour brought together, for a short time, wool textile workers, mechanics, potters, miners, builders, and many other trades; ‘but after it had extended about one hundred miles round this town (Manchester) a fatality came upon it that almost threatened its existence’.³ The ‘fatality’ came from divisions and jealousies within the Operative Spinners itself; excessive or premature demands upon the strike funds of the Association; and Doherty’s unwise attempt to move the office of the Voice of the People to London. But despite its failure, the National Association gave new notations to the idea of cooperation; and while the Manchester movement entered a phase of recriminations, the movement continued to flourish in the Potteries and in Yorkshire.⁴ Doherty may have attempted to take the movement forward too precipitately; but he rightly saw, in the growing popularity of Owenite ideas, a means of bringing the organized workers of the country into a common movement. Thenceforward, the history of Owenism and of general unionism must be taken together.⁵

The experimental communities failed, although one or two – like that at Ralahine – were partially successful. While the most ambitious ventures, like that of the builders, collapsed, some of the smaller cooperative ventures did in fact struggle on. Most of the societies and shops of the early Thirties collapsed, only to be re-born on the Rochdale model in a few years time. The Labour Exchange or Bazaar, in Gray’s Inn Road, was a spectacular muddle. And yet there is nothing wholly inexplicable in the Owenite ferment. We have seen the way in which artisans, outworkers, and trade unionists all have a place within it. Its most unstable millenarial elements came largely from two sources: the benevolent well-wishers and the very poor. For the first Owenism (since it professed not to be a doctrine of class conflict or expropriation) attracted to it in some numbers philanthropic gentlemen and clergy – Godwinians, Quakers, intellectual rebels, and cranks. Some of these, like. Dr King and, most notably, William Thompson, the Irish landowner and author of the Inquiry into, the Distribution of Wealth (1824), Labour Rewarded (1827), and (with Anna Wheeler) An Appeal of One-Half of the Human Race Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to retain them in Political and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery (1825), greatly enriched the movement. Others gave money without which its experiments could not have been undertaken. Nevertheless in most of the communities there is the figure of one or more cranky gentlemen, whose inexperience in the practice of any collective unit, and whose utopian experimentalism, drove the Owenite artisans to fury. To declare that men must make a new social system was one thing; to declare that men could make any kind of new system they liked was another. One artisan Socialist, Allen Davenport the former Spencean, left a somewhat sardonic picture of the London Labour Exchange:

The public mind was completely electrified by this new and extraordinary movement… The great assembly room, originally fitted up in the most elegant style… the ceiling was magnificently embossed, and the ornamental parts richly gilded with gold; and capacious enough to hold two thousand individuals. But this… was not sufficient to satisfy Mr Owen’s ideas of beauty. A splendid platform was raised, on which was placed a superb and majestic organ…. On festival nights… the avenues were brilliantly illuminated with… costly Grecian lamps. Ten or a dozen musical instruments were employed; and ladies and gentlemen sung to the sweetest airs….

The festivals were opened with a short lecture, on the subjects of social love, universal charity, and the advantages of cooperation…. The lecture was followed by a concert, and the concert by a ball….

Meantime every avenue to the Exchange, during the whole week, was literally blocked up by the crowds of people that constantly assembled – some attracted by the novelty of the institution; some to watch its progress…; some to make deposits and exchanges…. But alas! it was soon discovered that the beautiful labour notes… could not by any means be forced into general circulation, on which account the supply of provisions failed and a complete failure was the result of one of the most extraordinary movements that was ever attempted in this or in any other country. Still, the principles on which the system was founded remain unimpeachable, and ought to be cherished in the public mind…

The Owen of this account is the Owen whom Peacock ridiculed in Crotchet Castle. Too many of the Owenite ventures overshot themselves, and ended in this sort of muddle of waste, benevolence and bad planning. If Owen was the greatest propagandist of Owenism, he was also one of its worst enemies. If the Labour Exchange had been left in the hands of such men as Lovett, the outcome might have been different.¹

The other aspect of this millenarial instability came, more directly, out of the chiliasm of the poor. Just as at the time of the French Revolution, there is a revival of messianic movements during the excitement of the Reform Bill agitation and its aftermath. There remained many offshoots from the Southcottian movement, whose sects were now taking peculiar and perverted forms¹ which perhaps require more attention from the psychiatrist than the historian. But three examples of this continuing millenarial instability may be noted.

The first is the enormous following gained, between 1829 and 1836, by a crippled shoemaker, ‘Zion’ Ward, one of the inheritors of Joanna’s mantle. Ward, formerly a zealous Methodist, had convinced himself by allegorical acrobatics, that he was the ‘Shiloh’ whose birth the ageing Joanna had announced. Soon afterwards, he came to believe that he was Christ (and had formerly been Satan), and that the entire Bible was an allegorical prophecy of his annunciation. (The story in the New Testament of Christ’s life was a false report – if the Redeemer had come, ‘why is not man redeemed?’) What was unusual in Ward’s paranoia (apart from its surrealist solipsism) was, first, that he buttressed it with arguments derived from Carlile and the Deists; and, second, that he directed his messianic appeal towards the dynamic of Radicalism. His following grew up in Southwark, Hackney, Walworth; in Chatham, Nottingham, Birmingham, Derby, Chesterfield, Leeds – many of these old Southcottian strongholds. At Barnsley he called forth stormy applause when he launched an attack on all the clergy ‘who from the Archbishop to the least are perjured persons and the False Prophets mentioned in the Bible’. This became, more and more, the keynote of his prophecies: ‘Priestcraft detected! Its Overthrow projected!’ The King must ‘take away the enormous salaries of the bishops, and expend the money for the public good’. He launched a weekly periodical, The Judgement Seat of Christ – perhaps the only occasion in which Christ has been credited with the week-by-week editorial conduct of a popular journal. Throughout the summer of 1831 he drew enormous audiences for his lectures, often filling the 2,000 places in Carlile’s Rotunda:

N.B. The writings of the Messiah sold at the… Rotunda, Black-friars Road. Preaching at the Rotunda on Thursday evenings at 7.30 and on Sunday afternoons at 3.

Early in 1832 he was found guilty of blasphemy at Derby (‘The Bishops and Clergy are Religious Impostors, and as such by the Laws of England liable to Corporal Punishment’ – surely risky ground to argue upon?) and with a fellow prophet imprisoned for two years. Despite illness and partial paralysis, he continued his mission until his death in 1837.¹

The second example is that of the extraordinary ‘Sir William Courtenay’ (or J. N. Tom), who arrived in a startled Canterbury in 1832, wearing Eastern dress and accompanied by rumours of great wealth, received 400 freak votes in the General Election, and, after being sentenced for perjury, published his Lion, with the views of:

Sir William Courtenay… King of Jerusalem, Prince of Arabia, King of the Gypsies, Defender of his King and Country… now in the City Gaol, Canterbury.

Tom, who was a wine-merchant who originally came from Joanna Southcott’s West Country, had been for a short time a Spencean. His Lion denounced equally all infidels and clergy:

The Root of all Evil is in the Church.

Lucre! Lucre!! Lucre!!!

Heaven protect the Widow, Fatherless and Distressed.

Released from prison and lunatic asylum, he went to live in the homes of the peasantry in villages near Canterbury. In May 1838 he commenced moving around the villages, on horse-back and armed with pistols and a sword, at the head of fifty or a hundred labourers, armed with bludgeons. A loaf of bread was carried on a pole beneath a blue and white flag with a rampant lion, and Tom is supposed to have read to his followers from James, Chapter V:

Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you….

Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields, which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth:…

The women, in particular, believed that he had miraculous powers. A labourer said later, ‘he loved Sir William’ –

He talked in such a manner to them, and was always reading the Scripture, that they did not look upon him as a common man and would have cheerfuly died for his sake.

Like Oastler and Stephens in the north, he denounced the New Poor Law as a breach of divine law. Eventually a constable was sent to arrest him, whom Courtenay (or Tom) killed. But the labourers did not leave him. More than fifty of them retired with him to Blean Wood, where in the dense undergrowth they awaited the military. Tom exhibited the prints of nails in his hands and feet, and announced that if he should be killed he would rise again:

This is the day of judgement – this is the first day of the Millennium – and this day I will put the crown on my head. Behold, a greater than Sampson is with you!

To his followers he promised land – perhaps 50 acres each. As the soldiers approached, he sounded a trumpet and said it was heard at Jerusalem where 10,000 were ready to obey his command. At length the battle was joined – perhaps the most desperate on English soil since 1745. Against firearms and bayonets the Kentish labourers had only bludgeons: ‘I never witnessed more determination in my life,’ said one witness: ‘I never saw men more furious or mad-like in their attack upon us in my life.’ One officer was killed, as well as Courtenay and eleven or twelve of his followers. It was a higher death-roll than Pentridge or Peterloo.¹

The affair of Blean Wood belongs more to the older cultural patterns than the new. It was the last peasants’ revolt. It is interesting that the ‘ranting’ Bryanites, or Bible Christians, had one of their strongholds in Kent; and at a time when men’s psychic world was filled with violent images from hell-fire and Revelation, and their real world filled with poverty and oppression, it is surprising that such explosions were not more frequent. The third example, which takes us closer to Owenism, is that of the extraordinary success of the Mormon propaganda in industrial districts in England in the late 1830s and 1840s. Thousands of converts were baptized in a few years, and thousands of these ‘Latter-Day Saints’ set sail from Liverpool to the City of Zion. The first converts were ‘mainly manufacturers and other mechanics… extremely poor, most of them not having a change of clothes to be baptized in’. Many of them, who were aided with passage money, walked and pushed hand-carts all the way from Council Bluffs to Salt Lake City.¹

These examples all serve to emphasize that it is premature, in the 1830s, to think of the English working people as being wholly open to secular ideology. The Radical culture which we have examined was the culture of skilled men, artisans, and of some outworkers. Beneath this culture (or coexisting with it) there were more obscure levels of response, from which the charismatic leaders like Oastler and O’Connor drew some of their support. (In the Chartist movement, men like Lovett were never finally to find a common outlook and strategy with the ‘unshorn chins and fustian jackets’ of the north.) The instability was particularly to be found where the new rationalist and the older-style Methodist or Baptist patterns impinged upon each other, or were in conflict within the same mind. But, whereas Dissent and rationalism seem to have ordered and tamed the character of the southern artisan, in those parts where the Methodist pattern was dominant during the Wars, emotional energies seem to have been stored or repressed. Strike a spade into the working-class culture of the north at any time in the Thirties, and passion seems to spring from the ground.

Hence Owenism gathered up some of this passion also. With Owen and his lecturers prophesying that ‘prosperity would be let loose’, it was inevitable that they should gather around them the Children of Israel. The communitarian yearning revived, and the language of rationality was translated into that of brotherhood. As in all such phases of ferment, antinomianism also revived, with its mystical equivalents of the secular notions of sexual liberation held among some Owenite communitarians: ‘If you love one another,’ Zion Ward told young people in his ‘chapels’, ‘go together at any time without any law or ceremony.’ (Ward also had a scheme for a Land Colony, ‘where those who are willing to leave the world can live together as one family’.) Moreover, for the poor, Owenism touched one of their deepest responses – the dream that, somehow, by some miracle, they might once again have some stake in the land.

One feels that, in the 1830s, many English people felt that the structure of industrial capitalism had been only partly built, and the roof not yet set upon the structure. Owenism was only one of the gigantic, but ephemeral, impulses which caught the enthusiasm of the masses, presenting the vision of a quite different structure which might be built in a matter of years or months if only people were united and determined enough. A spirit of combination has grown up, Bronterre O’Brien wrote in 1833, whose object:

is the sublimest that can be conceived, namely – to establish for the productive classes a complete dominion over the fruits of their own industry…. An entire change in society – a change amounting to a complete subversion of the existing ‘order of the world’ – is contemplated by the working classes. They aspire to be at the top instead of at the bottom of society – or rather that there should be no bottom or top at all.¹

It is easy, in retrospect, to see this spirit as naïve or ‘utopian’. But there is nothing in it which entitles us to regard it with academic superiority. The poor were desperately poor, and the prospects of a community in which they might not only blend intellectual culture with the athletic pursuits of Greece and Rome, but also eat, were attractive. Moreover, there was this important difference between Owenism and earlier creeds which gathered millenarial impetus. With the Owenites the Millennium was not to arrive, it was to be made, by their own efforts.

And this is where we may gather all the lines of Owenism together: the artisans, with their dreams of short-circuiting the market-economy: the skilled workers, with their thrust towards general unionism: the philanthropic gentry, with their desire for a rational, planned society: the poor, with their dream of land or of Zion: the weavers, with their hopes of self-employment: and all of these, with their image of an equitable brotherly community, in which mutual aid would replace aggression and competition. Maurice wrote in 1838:

When the poor men say, ‘we, too, will acknowledge circumstances to be all in all, we will cast away any belief in that which is invisible, this world shall be the only home in which we will dwell’, the language may well appall all who hear…. Nevertheless… it is the ‘we will’… which imparts to the dry chips of Mr Owen’s theory the semblance of vitality.¹

This ‘we will’ is evidence that working people were approaching maturity, becoming conscious of their own interests and aspirations as a class. There was nothing irrational or messianic in their offering a critique of capitalism as a system, or in projecting ‘utopian’ ideas of an alternative and more rational system. It was not Owen who was ‘mad’, but, from the standpoint of the toilers, a social system in which steam and new machinery evidently displaced and degraded labourers, and in which the markets could be ‘glutted’ while the unshod weaver sat in his loom and the shoemaker sat in his workshop with no coat to his back. These men knew from their experience that Owen was sane when he said that:

… the present arrangement of society is the most anti-social, impolitic, and irrational that can be devised; that under its influence all the superior and valuable qualities of human nature are repressed from infancy, and that the most unnatural means are used to bring out the most injurious propensities…²

So far from being backward-looking in its outlook, Owenism was the first of the great social doctrines to grip the imagination of the masses in this period, which commenced with an acceptance of the enlarged productive powers of steam and the mill. What was at issue was not the machine so much as the profit-motive; not the size of the industrial enterprise but the control of the social capital behind it The building craftsmen and small masters, who resented control and the lion’s share of the profits passing to master-builders or contractors, did not suppose that the solution lay in a multitude of petty entrepreneurs.¹ Rather, they wished the cooperation of skills involved in building to be reflected in cooperative social control. It is ironic that a movement which is sometimes supposed to have drawn much of its strength from the ‘petit-bourgeois’ should have made more earnest attempts to pioneer new forms of community life than any in our history. ‘All the fervour and earnestness of the early Cooperative Societies,’ Holyoake wrote many years later, ‘was… about communistic life. The “Socialists”… hoped to found voluntary, self-supporting, self-controlled industrial cities, in which the wealth created was to be equitably shared by all those whose labour produced it.’² Those who see, in the failure of these experiments, only a proof of their folly may perhaps be too confident that ‘history’ has shown them to be a dead end.

What was irrational in Owenism (or ‘utopian’ in its common pejorative meaning) was the impatience of the propaganda, the faith in the multiplication of reason by lectures and tracts, the inadequate attention to the means. Above all, there was Owen’s fatal evasion of the realities of political power, and his attempt to by-pass the question of property-rights. Cooperative Socialism was simply to displace capitalism, painlessly and without any encounter, by example, by education, and by growing up within it from its own villages, workshops, and stores. Cooperation has no ‘levelling tendency’, the Economist was anxious to reassure its readers. Its purpose was to ‘elevate all’; its wealth would not be taken from existing possessors but would be ‘newly produced wealth’.³ ‘We… do not come here as levellers,’ declared a Warrington clergyman: ‘We do not come here to deprive any human being of any of his or her property.’⁴ In 1834, at the furthest point in the Owenite movement, a ‘Charter of the Rights of Humanity’ declared:

The present property of all individuals, acquired and possessed by the usages and practices of old society, to be held sacred until… it can no longer be of any use or exchangeable value…¹

This was the vitiating weakness of Owenism. Even the little group of Spencean Philanthropists, at the end of the Wars, could see that Socialism entailed the expropriation of the great landowners. ‘It is childish,’ Spence had written in his Restorer of Society to its Natural State (1800):

… to expect ever to see Small Farms again, or ever to see anything else than the utmost screwing and grinding of the poor, till you quite overturn the present system of Landed Property. For they have got more completely into the spirit and power of oppression now than was ever known before…. Therefore anything short of total Destruction of the power of these Samsons will not do… nothing less than the complete Extermination of the present system of holding Land… will ever bring the World again to a state worth living in.

It was this which aroused the particular fury of Britain’s rulers, who held the mild Thomas Evans, author of Christian Polity, without trial for a year, at a time when Lord Sidmouth was discussing the proposals of the enlightened Mr Owen. In that year one of the last Spenceans, a coloured tailor called Robert Wedderburn, promoted a little ill-printed journal; The ‘Forlorn Hope’:

Mr Owen… will find that the lower classes are pretty well convinced that he is a tool to the land-holders and Ministers…²

The Spenceans and old Radicals of 1817 proved to be wrong in their estimation of Owen; and Spence’s and Evans’s preoccupation with agrarian Socialism was inadequate for industrial England. But the Spenceans were at least willing to pose the problems of ownership and class power.

It was because Owen refused to look squarely at either that he was able to remain quite indifferent to political Radicalism, and to lead the movement frequently up illusory paths. For years the cooperative movement continued with this coexistence of philanthropists and working-class Radicals. By 1832. however, men like Hetherington, O’Brien, and James Watson had quite different emphases, and were rejecting Owen’s dismissal of all political means. Owenism was for them always a great and constructive influence. They had learned from it to see capitalism, not as a collection of discrete events, but as a system. They had learned to project an alternative, utopian system of mutuality. They had passed beyond Cobbett’s nostalgia for an older world and had acquired the confidence to plan the new. They had gained an understanding of the importance of education, and of the force of environmental conditioning. They had learned, from Thompson and Anna Wheeler, to assert new claims for the rights of women. Henceforward, nothing in capitalist society seemed given and inevitable, the product of ‘natural’ law. This is all expressed in the Last Will and Testament of Henry Hetherington:

These are my views and feelings in quitting an existence that has been chequered with the plagues and pleasures of a competitive, scrambling, selfish system; a system by which the moral and social aspirations of the noblest human beings are nullified by incessant toil and physical deprivations; by which, indeed, all men are trained to be either slaves, hypocrites, or criminals. Hence my ardent attachment to the principles of that great and good man – ROBERT OWEN.

V. ‘A SORT OF MACHINE’

‘The present mischief these two men [Owen and Hodgskin] have in some respects done is incalculable,’ noted Francis Place.¹ The ‘mischief’ is written across the years 1831–5. And at this point the limits of this study have been reached; for there is a sense in which the working class is no longer in the making, but has been made. To step over the threshold, from 1832 to 1833, is to step into a world in which the working-class presence can be felt in every county in England, and in most fields of life.

The new class consciousness of working people may be viewed from two aspects. On the one hand, there was a consciousness of the identity of interests between working men of the most diverse occupations and levels of attainment, which was embodied in many institutional forms, and which was expressed on an unprecedented scale in the general unionism of 1830–34. This consciousness and these institutions were only to be found in fragmentary form in the England of 1780.

On the other hand, there was a consciousness of the identity of the interests of the working class, or ‘productive classes’ as against those of other classes; and within this there was maturing the claim for an alternative system. But the final definition of this class consciousness was, in large part, the consequence of the response to working-class strength of the middle class. The line was drawn, with extreme care, in the franchise qualifications of 1832. It had been the peculiar feature of English development that, where we would expect to find a growing middle-class reform movement, with a working-class tail, only later succeeded by an independent agitation of the working class, in fact this process was reversed. The example of the French Revolution had initiated three simultaneous processes: a panic-struck counter-revolutionary response on the part of the landed and commercial aristocracy; a withdrawal on the part of the industrial bourgeoisie and an accommodation (on favourable terms) with the status quo; and a rapid radicalization of the popular reform movement until the Jacobin cadres who were tough enough to survive through the Wars were in the main little masters, artisans, stockingers and croppers, and other working men. The twenty-five years after 1795 may be seen as the years of the long counter-revolution, and in consequence the Radical movement remained largely working-class in character, with an advanced democratic populism as its theory. But the triumph of such a movement was scarcely to be welcomed by the mill-owners, iron-masters and manufacturers. Hence the peculiarly repressive and anti-egalitarian ideology of the English middle classes (Godwin giving way to Bentham, Bentham giving way to Malthus, M’Culloch, and Dr Ure, and these giving rise to Baines, Macaulay and Edwin Chadwick). Hence also the fact that the mildest measure of reform, to meet the evident irrationalities of Old Corruption, was actually delayed, by the resistance of the old order on the one hand, and the timidity of the manufacturers on the other.

The Reform Bill crisis of 1832 – or, to be more accurate, the successive crises from early in 1831 until the ‘days of May’ in 1832 – illustrates these theses at almost every point. The agitation arose from ‘the people’ and rapidly displayed the most astonishing consensus of opinion as to the imperative necessity for ‘reform’. Viewed from one aspect, England was without any doubt passing through a crisis in these twelve months in which revolution was possible. The rapidity with which the agitation extended indicates the degree to which experience in every type of constitutional and quasi-legal agitation was present among the people:

The systematic way in which the people proceeded, their steady perseverance, their activity and skill astounded the enemies of reform. Meetings of almost every description of persons were held in cities, towns, and parishes; by journeymen tradesmen in their clubs, and by common workmen who had no trade clubs or associations of any kind…

So Place wrote of the autumn of 1830, adding (of February 1831):

… yet there was not even the smallest communication between places in the same neighbourhood; each portion of the people appeared to understand what ought to be done…¹

‘The great majority’ of those who attended the swelling demonstrations, the King’s private Secretary complained in March 1831 to Grey, ‘are of the very lowest class.’ The enormous demonstrations, rising to above 100,000 in Birmingham and London in the autumn of 1831 and May 1832, were overwhelmingly composed of artisans and working men.²

‘We did not cause the excitement about reform,’ Grey wrote a little peevishly to the King, in March 1831: ‘We found it in full vigour when we came into office.’ And, viewed from another aspect, we can see why throughout these crisis months a revolution was in fact improbable. The reason is to be found in the very strength of the working-class Radical movement; the skill with which the middle-class leaders, Brougham, The Times, the Leeds Mercury both used this threat of working-class force, and negotiated a line of retreat acceptable to all but the most die-hard defenders of the ancien régime; and the awareness on the part of the Whigs and the least intransigent Tories that, while Brougham and Baines were only blackmailing them, nevertheless if a compromise was not come to, the middle-class reformers might no longer be able to hold in check the agitation at their backs.

The industrial bourgeoisie desired, with heart and soul, that a revolution should not take place, since they knew that on the very day of its commencement there would be a dramatic process of radicalization, in which Huntite, trade unionist, and Owenite leaders would command growing support in nearly all the manufacturing centres. ‘Threats of a “revolution” are employed by the middle classes and petty masters,’ wrote the Poor Man’s Guardian. But –

a violent revolution is not only beyond the means of those who threaten it, but is to them their greatest object of alarm; for they know that such a revolution can only be effected by the poor and despised millions, who, if excited to the step, might use it for their own advantage, as well as for that of themselves, who would thus… have their dear rights of property endangered: be assured that a violent revolution is their greatest dread…¹

The middle-class reformers fought skilfully on both fronts. On the one hand The Times came forward as the actual organizer of mass agitation: ‘We trust there is not a county, town, or village in the United Kingdom which will not meet and petition for a reform….’ It even urged upon the people ‘the solemn duty of forming themselves into political societies throughout the whole realm’. It supported – as did Edward Baines, before cheering throngs, at Leeds – measures of enforcement which led directly on towards revolution: the run on the Banks, refusal to pay taxes, and the arming of members of Political Unions. On the other hand, the riots at Nottingham, Derby and Bristol in October 1831 underlined the dual function of the Political Unions on the Birmingham model:

These Unions were to be for the promotion of the cause of reform, for the protection of life and property against the detailed but irregular outrages of the mob, as well as for the maintenance of other great interests against the systematic violences of an oligarchy…¹

These middle-class incendiaries carried in their knapsacks a special constable’s baton. There were occasions when the Tories themselves hoped to outwit them, by encouraging the independent working-class reform movement to display itself in a form so alarming that Brougham and Baines would run to Old Corruption for protection. When the National Union of the Working Classes proposed to call a demonstration in London for manhood suffrage, and in resistance to the Whig Reform Bill, the King himself wrote (4 November 1831):

His Majesty is by no means displeased that the measures contemplated by the meeting in question are so violent, and… objectionable, as he trusts that the manifestation of such intentions and such purposes may afford the opportunity… of checking the progress of the Political Unions…²

Throughout the country middle-class and working-class reformers manoeuvred for control of the movement. In the earliest stages, until the summer of 1831, the middle-class Radicals held the advantage. Seven years before Wooler had closed the Black Dwarf with a sadly disillusioned final Address. There was (in 1824) no ‘public devotedly attached to the cause of parliamentary reform’. Where hundreds and thousands had once clamoured for reform, it now seemed to him that they had only ‘clamoured for bread’; the orators and journalists of 1816–20 had only been ‘bubbles thrown up in the fermentation of society’.³ Many of the working-class leaders of the late 1820s shared his disillusion, and accepted the anti-political stance of their master, Owen. It was not until the summer of 1830, with the rural labourers’ ‘revolt’ and the July Revolution in France, that the tide of popular interest began to turn back to political agitation. And thenceforward the insanely stubborn last-ditch resistance of the die-hards (the Duke of Wellington, the Lords, the Bishops) to any measure of reform dictated a strategy (which was exploited to the full by the middle-class Radicals) by which popular agitation was brought to bear behind Grey and Russell, and in support of a Bill from which the majority had nothing to gain.

Thus the configuration of forces of 1816–20 (and, indeed, of 1791–4), in which the popular demand for Reform was identified with Major Cartwright’s platform of manhood suffrage, was broken up. ‘If any persons suppose that this Reform will lead to ulterior measures,’ Grey declared in the House in November 1831:

they are mistaken; for there is no one more decided against annual parliaments, universal suffrage, and the ballot, than I am. My object is not to favour, but to put an end to such hopes and projects.

This was clearly enough seen by the older Radicals, the majority of whose articulate spokesmen poured scorn on the Whig Bill until the final ‘days of May’. ‘It mattered not to him,’ declared a Macclesfield Radical, ‘whether he was governed by a boroughmonger, or a whoremonger, or a cheese-monger, if the system of monopoly and corruption was still to be upheld.’¹ Hunt, from his place as Member for Preston (1830–32), maintained the same propositions, in only slightly more decorous language. George Edmonds, the witty and courageous Radical schoolmaster, who had chaired Birmingham’s first great post-war demonstration on Newhall Hill (January 1817), declared:

I am not a house-holder. – I can, on a push, be a musket-holder. The nothing-but-the-Bill does not recognize George Edmonds as a citizen! – George Edmonds scorns the nothing-but-the-Bill, except as cut the first at the national robber.²

This was the position also of the élite of London’s Radical artisans, enrolled in the National Union of Working Classes and Others, whose weekly debates in the Rotunda in 1831 and 1832 were reported in Hetherington’s Poor Man’s Guardian – undoubtedly the finest working-class weekly which had (until that time) been published in Britain. The debates were attended by Hetherington himself (when not in prison), William Lovett, James Watson, John Gast, the brilliant and ill-fated Julian Hibbert, and old William Benbow (the former colleague of Bamford and of Mitchell), now pressing his proposal for a ‘Grand National Holiday’, or month’s general strike, in the course of which the productive classes would assume control of the nation’s government and resources.¹ The debates increasingly turned upon the definition of class. William Carpenter, who shared with Hetherington the honour of initiating the struggle for the ‘unstamped’ press, offered a dissentient opinion. The Whig Bill ought to be supported, as a ‘wedge’. He complained that the Poor Man’s Guardian used the words ‘middle men’ and ‘middle class’ as ‘convertible terms’, whereas the middle classes ‘are not only not a class of persons having interests different from your own. They are the same class; they are, generally speaking, working or labouring men.’² Throughout the entire crisis the controversy continued. After the Bill had passed, the Poor Man’s Guardian recorded its conclusion:

The promoters of the Reform Bill projected it, not with a view to subvert, or even remodel our aristocratic institutions, but to consolidate them by a reinforcement of sub-aristocracy from the middle-classes…. The only difference between the Whigs and the Tories is this – the Whigs would give the shadow to preserve the substance; the Tories would not give the shadow, because stupid as they are, the millions will not stop at shadows but proceed onwards to realities.³

It is problematical how far the militant Owenites of the Rotunda represented any massive body of working-class opinion. They commenced by representing only the intelligentsia of the artisans. But they gathered influence most rapidly; by October 1831 they were able to organize a massive demonstration, perhaps 70,000 strong, many wearing the white scarves emblematic of manhood suffrage; perhaps 100,000 joined their demonstrations against the National Fast in March 1832. Place regarded the Rotundists (many of whom he wrote off as ‘atrocious’) as constituting the greatest of threats to the middle-class strategy, and much of his manuscript history of the Reform Bill crisis (upon which historians have placed too much reliance) is devoted to the unscrupulous manoeuvres by which he sought to limit their influence, and displace it by that of his rival National Political Union. The Duke of Wellington himself saw the contest as one between the Establishment and the Rotunda, which he compared to two armies ‘en présence’. It confused his military mind very much to reflect that he could place no river between the armies, with adequate sentinels and posts on the bridges. The enemy was installed at sensitive points within his own camp.¹

The procession of October 1831, however, was mainly composed (it seems) of ‘shopkeepers and superior artisans’. And while the numbers called out were impressive, they compare poorly with the even greater demonstrations at Birmingham, drawn from a smaller population. It would seem that, while the London artisans had at last succeeded in building a cohesive and highly articulate leadership, there remained a wide gulf between them and the mass of London labourers, and workers in the dishonourable trades. (This problem was to recur time and again in the history of London Chartism.) The position was caricatured in the pages of a scurrilous and alarmist pamphlet by Edward Gibbon Wakefield. He saw the Rotundists as ‘Desperadoes’ and idealists, whose danger lay in the fact that they might unleash the destructive energies of the criminal classes, ‘the helots of society’, who were crammed in the lanes and alleys off Orchard Street, Westminster, or Whitechapel. Here were the thousands of unpolitical (but dangerous) ‘costermongers, drovers, slaughterers of cattle, knackers, dealers in dead bodies and dogs’ meat, cads, brick-makers, chimneysweepers, nightmen, scavengers, &c.’ His attitude to the Owenite Socialists of the Rotunda was ambiguous. On the one hand, they were mostly ‘sober men, who maintain themselves by industry’ – men plainly marked off by superior talents from the dangerous classes. On the other hand, many were ‘loose single men living here and there in lodgings, who might set fire to London without anxiety for helpless beings at home’:

In manner they are rather gentle than rough; but touch one of them on his tender point; – only say that you think the stimulus of competition indispensable to the production of wealth; – and he will either turn from you in scorn, or… tell you, with flashing eyes, that you are paid by the Government to talk nonsense. Any thing like a compromise is what annoys them even more than decided opposition.

Many, he said (with some truth), ‘are provided with arms’:

If an insurrection of the London populace should take place, they will be found at the most dangerous posts, leading the thieves and rabble, pointing out the most effectual measures, and dying, if the lot fall on them, with cries of defiance.

‘These will be the fighting men of our revolution, if we must have one.’¹

The picture is overdrawn; but it is not wholly without truth.² The danger, from the point of view of authority (whether Whig or Tory), lay in a possible conjunction between the artisan Socialists and the ‘criminal classes’. But the unskilled masses in London inhabited another world from that of the artisans – a world of extreme hardship, illiteracy, very widespread demoralization, and disease, which was dramatized by the cholera outbreak of the winter of 1831–2. Here we have all the classic problems, the hand-to-mouth insecurity, of a metropolitan city swollen with immigrants in a period of rapid population-growth.¹

The unskilled had no spokesmen and no organizations (apart from friendly societies). They were as likely to have followed the lead of a gentleman as of an artisan. And yet the severity of the political crisis which commenced in October 1831 was sufficient to crack the crust of fatalism, deference, and need, within which their lives were enclosed. The riots of that month in Derby, the sacking of Nottingham Castle, the extensive riots at Bristol – all were indicative of a deep disturbance at the foundations of society, which observers anxiously expected to be followed by the uprising of London’s East End.

The Birmingham Political Union was an acceptable model, which The Times itself could commend, because the local industrial context favoured a reform movement of the masses which still remained firmly under middle-class control. The history of Birmingham Radicalism is significantly different from that of the north Midlands and the north. There was no basis in its small-scale industries for Luddism, and the ‘father’ of the Political Unions, Thomas Attwood, first gained public prominence when he led, in 1812, a united agitation of the masters and artisans against the Orders in Council. There were undoubtedly groups of ‘physical force’ Radicals in the Black Country in 1817–20, but – whether by good fortune or good judgement – they were never exposed by any abortive movement like the Pentridge and Grange Moor affairs.² As Professor Briggs has shown, Thomas Attwood was able in 1830 to ‘harmonize and unite’ the diverse ‘materials of discontent’ because the Industrial Revolution in Birmingham had ‘multiplied the number of producing units rather than added to the scale of existing enterprises’. There had been little displacement of skilled labour by machinery; the numberless small workshops meant that the social gradients shelved more gently, and the artisan might still rise to the status of a small master; in times of economic recession masters and journeymen were afflicted alike.¹ Hence, class antagonism was more muted than in Manchester, Newcastle, and Leeds. Throughout the Reform Bill crisis, Attwood controlled the Birmingham Union with ‘such a show of good-nature’ (O’Brien later recalled) ‘that the Brummagem operatives seemed really to believe that they would be virtually, though not actually, represented in the ‘reformed’ parliament’. And, in a tribute impressive from so stern a critic, O’Brien added:

To this body, more than to any other, is confessedly due the triumph (such as it was) of the Reform Bill. Its well-ordered proceedings, extended organization, and immense assemblages of people, at critical periods of its progress, rendered the measure irresistible.²

In such centres as Leeds, Manchester, and Nottingham the position of the middle-class reformers was very much more uneasy. At Manchester (as in London) rival political Unions coexisted, and from October 1831 onwards the manhood suffrage Union made the running. At Bolton in the same month the rejection of the Bill by the House of Lords resulted in a split in the Political Union, the largest (manhood suffrage) section organizing a demonstration, 6,000 strong, behind the banners: ‘Down with the Bishops!’, ‘No Peers.’³ In the Midlands and the north such incidents were repeated dozens of times. ‘Walk into any lane or public-house, where a number of operatives are congregated together,’ wrote Doherty in January 1832:

and listen, for ten minutes, to the conversation… In at least seven out of every ten cases, the subjects of debate will be found to bear upon the appalling question of whether it would be more advantageous to attack the lives or the property of the rich?¹

Indeed in the winter of 1831–2 the ridicule poured upon the Bill and upon its attendant proceedings in the Poor Man’s Guardian takes on a somewhat academic air. No doubt the Rotundists were right to designate the Bill as a trap (and as a betrayal of the Radical movement). But the well-nigh neolithic obstinacy with which Old Corruption resisted any reform led on to a situation in which the nation stepped, swiftly and without premeditation, on to the threshold of revolution. Belatedly, the Poor Man’s Guardian adjusted its tactics, publishing as a special supplement extracts from Colonel Macerone’s Defensive Instructions for the People (a manual in street-fighting).² Throughout the ‘eleven days of England’s apprehension and turmoil’ which preceded the final passage of the Bill through the Lords in May, Francis Place held his breath. On the evening of the day when it passed, he returned home and noted:

We were within a moment of general rebellion, and had it been possible for the Duke of Wellington to have formed an administration the Thing and the people would have been at issue.

There would have been ‘Barricadoes of the principal towns – stopping circulation of paper money’; if a revolution had commenced, it ‘would have been the act of the whole people to a greater extent than any which had ever before been accomplished’.³

In the autumn of 1831 and in the ‘days of May’ Britain was within an ace of a revolution which, once commenced, might well (if we consider the simultaneous advance in cooperative and trade union theory) have prefigured, in its rapid radicalization, the revolutions of 1848 and the Paris Commune. J. R.M. Butler’s The Passing of the Great Reform Bill gives us some sense of the magnitude of the crisis; but his study is weakened by an insufficient awareness of the potential openness of the whole situation, evinced in such comments as this (upon the National Union of the Working Classes):

… it disgusted sensible people… by its arrogant silliness, as when the Bethnal Green branch petitioned the King to abolish the House of Lords, or the Finsbury section urged the Commons to confiscate the estates of the 199 peers…¹

Some assessment less complacent than this is required. The fact that revolution did not occur was due, in part, to the deep constitutionalism of that part of the Radical tradition² of which Cobbett (urging the acceptance of half a loaf) was the spokesman; and in part to the skill of the middle-class Radicals in offering exactly that compromise which might, not weaken, but strengthen both the State and property-rights against the working-class threat.

The Whig leaders saw their rôle as being that of finding the means to ‘attach numbers to property and good order’. ‘It is of the utmost importance,’ Grey said, ‘to associate the middle with the higher orders of society in the love and support of the institutions and government of the country.’³ The extreme care with which this line was drawn is evinced by a survey undertaken by Baines in 1831, to discover ‘the numbers and respectability of the £10 householders in Leeds’. The results were communicated to Lord John Russell in a letter which should be taken as one of the classic documents of the Reform Bill crisis. Baines’s pioneering psephological canvassers –

stated unanimously, that the £10 qualification did not admit to the exercise of the elective franchise a single person who might not safely and wisely be enfranchised: that they were surprised to find how comparatively few would be allowed to vote.

In answer to Russell’s enquiry as to the proportion which £10 householders bore to the rest of the population, the canvassers reported:

… in the parts occupied chiefly by the working classes, not one householder in fifty would have a vote. In the streets principally occupied by shops, almost every householder had a vote…. In the township of Holbeck, containing 11,000 inhabitants, chiefly of the working classes, but containing several mills, dye-houses, public-houses, and respectable dwellings, there are only 150 voters…. Out of 140 householders, heads of families, working in the mill of Messrs Marshall and Co, there are only two who will have votes…. Out of 160 or 170 householders in the mill of Messrs O. Willan and Sons, Holbeck, there is not one vote. Out of about 100 householders in the employment of Messrs Taylor and Wordsworth, machine-makers, – the highest class of mechanics, – only one has a vote. It appeared that of the working classes not more than one in fifty would be enfranchised by the Bill.

Even this estimate would appear to have been excessive. Returns made to the Government in May 1832 showed that in Leeds (population, 124,000) 355 ‘workmen’ would be admitted to the franchise, of whom 143 ‘are clerks, warehousemen, over-lookers, &c.’ The remaining 212 were in a privileged status, earning between 30s. and 40s. a week.¹

Such surveys no doubt reassured the Cabinet, which had meditated raising the £10 franchise qualification to £15. ‘The great body of the people,’ Place wrote, ‘were self-assured that either the Reform Bills would be passed by Parliament, or that they should, by their own physical force, obtain much more than they contained, if they were rejected…’² It is the threat of this ‘much more’ which hung over both Tories and Whigs in 1832, and which enabled that accommodation to be made, between landed and industrial wealth, between privilege and money, which has been an enduring configuration of English society. Upon the banners of Baines and Cobden were not égalité and liberté (still less fraternité) but ‘Free Trade’ and ‘Retrenchment’. The rhetoric of Brougham was that of property, security, interest. ‘If there is a mob,’ Brougham said in his speech on the second reading of the Reform Bill,

there is the people also. I speak now of the middle classes – of those hundreds of thousands of respectable persons – the most numerous and by far the most wealthy order in the community, for if all your Lordships’ castles, manors, rights of warren and rights of chase, with all your broad acres, were brought to the hammer, and sold at fifty years’ purchase, the price would fly up and kick the beam when counterpoised by the vast and solid riches of those middle classes, who are also the genuine depositaries of sober, rational, intelligent, and honest English feeling…. Rouse not, I beseech you, a peace-loving, but a resolute people…. As your friend, as the friend of my order, as the friend of my country, as the faithful servant of my sovereign, I counsel you to assist with your uttermost efforts in preserving the peace, and upholding and perpetuating the Constitution…¹

Divested of its rhetoric, the demands of the middle-class Radicals were voiced by Baines, when the Bill had been passed:

The fruits of Reform are to be gathered. Vast commercial and agricultural monopolies are to be abolished. The Church is to be reformed…. Close corporations are to be thrown open. Retrenchment and economy are to be enforced. The shackles of the Slave are to be broken.²

The demands of working-class Radicalism were less clearly formulated. A minimum political programme may be cited from the manifesto of Hetherington’s Republican:

Extirpation of the Fiend Aristocracy; Establishment of a Republic, viz. Democracy by Representatives elected by Universal Suffrage; Extinction of hereditary offices, titles and distinctions; Abolition of the… law of primogeniture;… Cheap and rapid administration of justice; Abolition of the Game Laws; Repeal of the diabolical imposts on Newspapers…; emancipation of our fellow-citizens the Jews; Introduction of Poor Laws into Ireland; Abolition of the Punishment of Death for offences against property; Appropriation of the Revenues of the ‘Fathers in God’, the Bishops, towards maintenance of the Poor; Abolition of Tithes; Payment of every Priest or Minister by his Sect; The ‘National Debt’ not the debt of the Nation; Discharge of the Machinery of Despotism, the Soldiers; Establishment of a National Guard.

This is the old programme of Jacobinism, with little development from the 1790s. (The first principle of a declaration of the National Union, drawn up by Lovett and James Watson, in November 1831, was: ‘All property (honestly acquired) to be sacred and inviolable.’) ¹ But around this ‘much more’ other demands accrued, according to the grievances foremost in different districts and industries. In Lancashire, Doherty and his supporters argued that ‘universal suffrage means nothing more than a power given to every man to protect his own labour from being devoured by others’.² The Owenites, the factory reformers, and ‘physical force’ revolutionaries like the irrepressible William Benbow were pressing still further demands. But, in the event, the terms of the contest were successfully confined within the limits desired by Brougham and Baines. It was (as Shelley had foreseen in 1822) a contest between ‘blood and gold’; and in its outcome, blood compromised with gold to keep out the claims of égalité. For the years between the French Revolution and the Reform Bill had seen the formation of a middle-class ‘class consciousness’, more conservative, more wary of the large idealist causes (except, perhaps, those of other nations), more narrowly self-interested than in any other industrialized nation. Henceforward, in Victorian England, the middle-class Radical and the idealist intellectual were forced to take sides between the ‘two nations’. It is a matter of honour that there were many individuals who preferred to be known as Chartists or Republicans rather than as special constables. But such men – Wakley, Frost of Newport, Duncombe, Oastler, Ernest Jones, John Fielden, W. P. Roberts, and on to Ruskin and William Morris – were always disaffected individuals or intellectual ‘voices’. They represent in no sense the ideology of the middle class.

What Edward Baines had done, in his correspondence with Russell, was to offer a definition of class of almost arithmetical exactitude. In 1832 the line was drawn in social consciousness by the franchise qualifications, with the crudity of an indelible pencil. Moreover, these years found also a theorist of stature to define the working-class predicament. It appears almost inevitable that he should have been an Irish intellectual, uniting in himself a hatred of the English Whigs with the experience of English ultra-Radicalism and Owenite Socialism. James ‘Bronterre’ O’Brien (1805–64), the son of an Irish wine merchant, and a distinguished graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, arrived in London in 1829 ‘to study Law and Radical Reform’:

My friends sent me to study law; I took to radical reform on my own account… While I have made no progress at all in law, I have made immense progress in radical reform. So much so, that were a professorship of radical reform to be instituted tomorrow in King’s College (no very probable event by the way), I think I would stand candidate… I feel as though every drop of blood in my veins was radical blood…¹

After editing the Midlands Representative during the Reform Bill crisis, he moved to London and assumed the editorship of the Poor Man’s Guardian.

‘We foresaw,’ he wrote of the Reform Bill, ‘that its effect would be to detach from the working classes a large portion of the middle ranks, who were then more inclined to act with the people than with the aristocracy that excluded them.’² And in his Introduction to Buonarotti’s history of the Conspiracy of Equals, he drew a parallel: ‘The Girondists would extend the franchise to the small middlemen (just as our English Whigs did by the Reform Bill) in order the more effectively to keep down the working classes.’ ‘Of all governments, a government of the middle classes is the most grinding and remorseless.’³

It was a theme to which he often returned. His anger was refreshed by each new action of the Whig administration – the Irish Coercion Bill, the rejection of the 10 Hour Bill, the attack on the trades unions, the Poor Law Amendment Act. ‘Previously to the passing of the Reform Bill,’ he wrote in 1836:

the middle orders were supposed to have some community of feeling with the labourers. That delusion has passed away. It barely survived the Irish Coercion Bill, it vanished completely with the enactment of the Starvation Law. No working man will ever again expect justice, morals or mercy at the hands of a profit-mongering legislature.¹

A refugee from a middle-class culture himself, he took especial pleasure in writing of his own class in terms which imitated its own drawing-room small-talk about the servant classes: ‘The pursuits and habits [of the middle classes] are essentially debasing. Their life is necessarily a life of low cunning and speculation…’:

These two classes never had, and never will have, any community of interest. It is the workman’s interest to do as little work, and to get as much for it as possible. It is the middleman’s interest to get as much work as he can out of the man, and to give as little for it. Here then are their respective interests as directly opposed to each other as two fighting bulls.

And he sought, with considerable genius, to twist together the tradition of ultra-Radicalism with that of Owenism, into a revolutionary Socialism, whose goals were political revolution, the expropriation of the propertied classes, and a network of Owenite communities:

We must have what Southey calls ‘a revolution of revolutions’; such an one as Robespierre and St Just projected in France in the beginning of 1794; that is to say, a complete subversion of the institutions by which wealth is distributed…. Property – property – this is the thing we must be at. Without a change in the institution of property, no improvement can take place.

Such a revolution (he hoped) would come, without violence, in the immediate aftermath of the attainment of manhood suffrage: ‘From the laws of the few have the existing inequalities sprung; by the laws of the many shall they be destroyed.’²

Historians today would certainly not accept O’Brien’s over-crude assimilation of the post-Reform Whig administration to the interests of the ‘middle class’.¹ (Old Corruption had more vitality than that, as the protracted struggle for the repeal of the Corn Laws was to show.) Nor is it proper to select this one theorist (middle-class in his own origins) as expressive of the new consciousness of the working class. But at the same time, O’Brien was very far from being an eccentric at the edges of the movement. As editor of the Poor Man’s Guardian and other journals he commanded a large, and growing, working-class audience; he was later to earn the title of the ‘Schoolmaster’ of Chartism. His writings are a central thread through the abundant agitations of the early 1830s, providing a nexus for the old democratic claims, the social agitations (against the New Poor Law and for Factory Reform), the Owenite communitarian experiments, and the syndicalist struggles of the trade unions. O’Brien was, as much as Cobbett and Wooler in the post-war years, an authentic voice of his times.

For most working men, of course, disillusion in the Reform Bill came in less theoretical forms. The proof of the pudding was in the eating. We may see the eating in microcosm in a few of the incidents at one of the contests in the ensuing General Election – at Leeds. Here Baines, who had already used his influence to instate Brougham as the Yorkshire member, brought forward in the Whig interest Marshall, one of the largest employers in Leeds, and Macaulay (or ‘Mr Mackholy’ as one of the tail of Whig shopkeepers noted in his diary). Macaulay was one of the most complacent of the ideologists of the Reform Bill settlement, translating into new terms the Tory doctrine of ‘virtual representation’:

The higher and middling orders are the natural representatives of the human race. Their interest may be opposed, in some things, to that of their proper contemporaries, but it is identical with that of the innumerable generations which are to follow.

‘The inequality with which wealth is distributed forces itself on everybody’s notice,’ he lamented, while ‘the reasons which irrefragably proved this inequality to be necessary to the well-being of all classes are not equally obvious.’ Mr Marshall was not equal to him as a theorist; but, if a Radical election sheet is to be believed, he was of the view that 12s. a week was a good wage for a man with a family, he considered that the working classes might better their conditions by emigration, and:

In Mr Marshall’s mill, a boy of 9 years of age was stripped to the skin, bound to an iron pillar, and mercilessly beaten with straps, until he fainted.¹

The Tory candidate, on the other hand, was Sadler, leading parliamentary spokesman of the 10 Hour Movement. Oastler had launched, with the Short-Time Committees, his passionate campaign against child labour two years before. The amazing ‘Pilgrimage to York’ had taken place in the previous April; and the 10 Hour agitation (like the Owenite agitation) continued without pause during the Reform Bill crisis months. In such a contest, therefore, Oastler could be counted upon to side with Sadler against Baines, who had conducted a mealy-mouthed defence of the mill-owners in the Leeds Mercury. Cobbett could be counted upon to do the same. Indeed, he gave a reference for Baines which reminds us of the latitude of the libel laws of the time:

This great LYING PUFFER of Brougham… who has always taken care to have one member, at least, to do more mischief to public liberty than any other fifty members in the House of Commons; this swelled-up, greedy, and unprincipled puffer, who has been the deluder of Yorkshire for twenty years past…²

A Tory-Radical alliance was therefore inevitable behind Sadler. It was also inevitable that the greater part of the Nonconformist ‘shopocrat’ vote would go to ‘Mr Marshall Our Townsman and Mr Mackholy the Scotchman’ (as our diarist put it):

… as to Sadler he never has done any good nor he never will do… for he has always been inventing something that has tended to injure the inhabitants of the Town of Leeds… he was the first promoter of the Improvement Act and that has cost the Inhabitants a manny thousands and the Burthen has cheefly fallen upon Shopkeepers and what I call the Middling Class of People… its true he is one of our Magestrate Party but he is not better for that…¹

The working-class Radicals in Leeds, maintained their independent press and organization. The men of Leeds (they declared) who ‘have assembled in evil report and good report;… been instant in season and out of season’, had now been betrayed by the men who, in the days of May, had addressed their great assemblies and promised Reform or barricades:

Messrs Marshall and Macaulay may… be very friendly to Reforms of all sorts and sizes, both in church and state; they may also be in favour of the abolition of all monopolies except their own, those of mill-men and placemen; but the operatives of Leeds remember that if they support them, they do what they can to put Legislative power into the hands of their enemies.

Moreover, the Radicals declared that the old forms of electoral bribery and influence employed by the aristocratic interest were now finding insidious new forms in the service of the manufacturing interest. Although the workers did not have votes, great efforts were made to offset the effects of 10 Hour demonstrations in favour of Sadler by compelling factory-hands to declare for Marshall and Macaulay at the hustings:

We could name more than a dozen mills, all the hands of which have received positive orders to be in the Yard on Monday, and to hold up their hands for the Orange candidates… on pain of instant privation of employment…. They have each their stations assigned in the yard, where they are to be penned like flocks of sheep, surrounded on all sides by overlookers, clerks and other understrappers, for the purpose of enforcing the high mandate of the counting-house.

In the event, the scene on the hustings turned into riot, where Oastler and the 10 Hour men ‘rang matins on the thick skulls of the flying oranges’. When Sadler was defeated at the poll, Marshall and Macaulay were burned in effigy in the same city centre where Paine had been burnt by the loyalists in 1792.¹

This Leeds election of 1832 was of more than local significance. It had focused the attention of factory reformers throughout the country, drawing addresses in Sadler’s favour from thousands of signatories in northern towns. There is no mistaking the new tone after 1832. In every manufacturing district a hundred experiences confirmed the new consciousness of class which the Bill had, by its own provisions, so carefully defined. It was the ‘reformed’ House of Commons which sanctioned the transportation of the Dorchester labourers in 1834 (‘a blow directed at the whole body of united operatives’),² and who launched, with ‘the document’ and the lock-out, the struggle to break the trade unions, whose intensity and whose significance (in both political and economic terms) is still too little understood. Against the manifesto of the masters, the Yorkshire Trades Union issued its own:

The war cry of the masters has not only been sounded, but the havoc of war; war against freedom; war against opinion; war against justice; and war without justifying cause…

‘The very men,’ declared one Leeds trade unionist, ‘who had pampered Political Unions, when they could be made subservient to their own purposes, were now endeavouring to crush the Trades Unions’:

It was but the other day that the operatives were led in great numbers to the West Riding meeting at Wakefield, for the purpose of carrying the Reform Bill. At that time, the very individuals who were now attempting to put down trades’ unions, were arraying them to carry by the force of numbers, a political reform which he was sure would not otherwise have been obtained from the aristocracy of this country. That reform which had thus been obtained appeared to him to have been the ultimate means of strengthening the hands of corruption and oppression.³

The line from 1832 to Chartism is not a haphazard pendulum alternation of ‘political’ and ‘economic’ agitations but a direct progression, in which simultaneous and related movements converge towards a single point. This point was the vote. There is a sense in which the Chartist movement commenced, not in 1838 with the promulgation of the ‘Six Points’, but at the moment when the Reform Bill received Royal Assent. Many of the provincial Political Unions never disbanded, but commenced at once to agitate against the ‘shopocrat’ franchise. In January 1833 the Working Man’s Friend was able to announce that the fortress of middle-class Radicalism had been stormed: ‘… in spite of all the opposition and chicanery of a RAG MERCHANT MONARCHY, the Midland Union of the Working Classes was formed by the brave, but, till then, misled people of that country’.¹ The characteristic ideology of Birmingham Radicalism, which united employers and journeymen in opposition to the aristocracy, the Banks, the National Debt, and the ‘paper-money system’, was beginning to fall apart. For a time Attwood himself was carried with the new current, partly through loyalty to the regiments to which he had made large promises before. Once again, a monster demonstration gathered on Newhall Hill (May 1833), at which an attendance of 180,000 was claimed, and at which there was expressed –

… a sentiment of common hatred to the parties whom, having been mainly instrumental in forcing into power, they now assembled to express their disgust of the… treachery which they had manifested.

The attendance was swelled by colliers from Walsall, iron-workers from Wolverhampton, outworkers from Dudley. The process of radicalization which was to make Birmingham a Chartist metropolis had begun.²

But the content of this renewed agitation was such that the vote itself implied ‘much more’, and that is why it had to be denied. (The Birmingham of 1833 was not the Birmingham of 1831: it was now the home of an Equitable Labour Exchange, it was the headquarters of the socialist Builders’ Union, it housed the editorial office of the Pioneer.) The vote, for the workers of this and the next decade, was a symbol whose importance it is difficult for us to appreciate, our eyes dimmed by more than a century of the smog of ‘two-party parliamentary politics’. It implied, first, égalité: equality of citizenship, personal dignity, worth. ‘Instead of bricks, mortar, and dirt, MAN ought to be represented,’ wrote one pamphleteer, lamenting the lot of ‘the miserable, so-called “free-born” Englishman, excluded from the most valuable right that man can enjoy in political society.’¹ ‘Be we, of the working millions,’ wrote George Edmonds –

never more seen at baby-shows, Lord Mayor penny-peeps, and gingerbread Coronations – be not present as accomplices in such national fooleries. Let the tawdry actors have all the fun to themselves.

‘Like the wild Irish of old, the British millions have been too long insolently placed without the pale of social governments’:

I now speak the thoughts of my unrepresented fellow millions, the Wild English, the free-born slaves of the nineteenth century.²

But in the context of the Owenite and Chartist years, the claim for the vote implied also further claims: a new way of reaching out by the working people for social control over their conditions of life and labour. At first, and inevitably, the exclusion of the working class provoked a contrary rejection, by the working class, of all forms of political action. Owen had long prepared the ground for this, with his indifference to political Radicalism. But in the post-1832 swing to general unionism, this anti-political bias was not quietist but embattled, militant, and even revolutionary. To examine the richness of the political thought of these years would take us further into the history of general unionism – and, indeed, into the early years of Chartism – than we intend to go. They are years in which Benbow canvassed his notion of the ‘Grand National Holiday’ in the industrial districts; in which the printing-worker, John Francis Bray, carried forward Hodgskin’s ideas, in lectures to Leeds artisans, later published as Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedies; in which the Builders’ Union and the Grand National Consolidated Trades Union rose and fell; and in which Doherty and Fielden founded the ‘Society for National Regeneration’ with its remedy of the General Strike for the Eight-Hour Day. The Owenite communitarians were fertile with notions and experiments prefiguring advances in the care of children, the relations between the sexes, education, housing, and social policy. Nor were these ideas canvassed among a limited intelligentsia only; building workers, potters, weavers, and artisans were willing, for a while, to risk their livelihood to put experiments to the test. The swarming variety of journals, many of which made exacting demands upon the readers, were addressed to an authentic working-class audience. In the silk mills of the Colden Valley, isolated on the Pennines between Yorkshire and Lancashire, the Owenite journals were read.

Two themes only may be mentioned of those which arose again and again in these years. The first is that of internationalism. This was, to be sure, part of the old Jacobin heritage; and one which the Radicals had never forgotten. When Oliver tramped with the Leeds cropper, James Mann, and another revolutionary, to the rendezvous at Thornhill Lees (in 1817) he found, from their discourse, that ‘the recent news from the Brazils seemed to cheer them with greater hopes than ever’.¹ Cobbett could always find time to add a stop-press to his journals:

I have just room to tell you, that the people of BELGIUM, the common people, have beaten the Dutch armies, who were marched against them to compel them to pay enormous taxes. This is excellent news.²

The French Revolution of 1830 had a profound impact upon the people, electrifying not only the London Radicals but working-class reformers in distant industrial villages. The struggle for Polish independence was followed anxiously in the working-class press; while Julian Hibbert, in the Rotunda, carried a vote of sympathy with the Lyons weavers, in their ill-fated insurrection, likening them to the weavers of Spitalfields. In the Owenite movement this political tradition was extended to embrace social and class solidarities. In 1833 a ‘Manifesto of the Productive Classes of Great Britain and Ireland’ was addressed to ‘the Governments and People of the Continents of Europe and of North and South America’, commencing: ‘Men of the Great Family of Mankind…’ By the end of the same year, the question of some common alliance between the trade unionists of England, France, and Germany had already come under discussion.¹

The other theme was that of industrial syndicalism. When Marx was still in his teens, the battle for the minds of English trade unionists, between a capitalist and a socialist political economy, had been (at least temporarily) won. The winners were Hodgskin, Thompson, James Morrison and O’Brien; the losers were James Mill and Place. ‘What is capital?’ asked a writer in the Pioneer. ‘It is reserved labour!’ cries M’Culloch. ‘… From whom and what was it reserved? From the clothing and food of the wretched.’ ² Hence the workers who had been ‘insolently placed without the pale of social government’ developed, stage by stage, a theory of syndicalism, or of ‘Inverted Masonry’.³ ‘The Trades Unions will not only strike for less work, and more wages,’ wrote ‘A Member of the Builder’s Union’,

but they will ultimately ABOLISH WAGES, become their own masters, and work for each other; labour and capital will no longer be separate but they will be indissolubly joined together in the hands of the workmen and work-women.

The unions themselves could solve the problem of political power; a ‘Parliament’ of the industrious classes could be formed, delegated directly from workshops and mills: ‘the Lodges send Delegates from local to district, and from district to National Assemblies. Here are Universal Suffrage, Annual Election, and No Property Qualification, instanter.’⁴ The idea was developed (in the Pioneer) of such a House of Trades:

which must supply the place of the present House of Commons, and direct the commercial affairs of the country, according to the will of the trades which compose associations of the industry. This is the ascendancy scale by which we arrive to universal suffrage. It will begin in our lodges, extend to our general union, embrace the management of trade, and finally swallow up the whole political power.¹

This vision was lost, almost as soon as it had been found, in the terrible defeats of 1834 and 1835. And, when they had recovered their wind, the workers returned to the vote, as the more practical key to political power. Something was lost: but Chartism never entirely forgot this preoccupation with social control, to the attainment of which the vote was seen as a means. These years reveal a passing beyond the characteristic outlook of the artisan, with his desire for an independent livelihood ‘by the sweat of his brow’, to a newer outlook, more reconciled to the new means of production, but seeking to exert the collective power of the class to humanize the environment: – by this community or that cooperative society, by this check on the blind operation of the market-economy, this legal enactment, that measure of relief for the poor. And implicit, if not always explicit, in their outlook was the dangerous tenet: production must be, not for profit, but for use.

This collective self-consciousness was indeed the great spiritual gain of the Industrial Revolution, against which the disruption of an older and in many ways more humanly comprehensible way of life must be set. It was perhaps a unique formation, this British working class of 1832. The slow, piecemeal accretions of capital accumulation had meant that the preliminaries to the Industrial Revolution stretched backwards for hundreds of years. From Tudor times onwards this artisan culture had grown more complex with each phase of technical and social change. Delaney, Dekker and Nashe: Winstanley and Lilburne: Bunyan and Defoe – all had at times addressed themselves to it. Enriched by the experiences of the seventeenth century, carrying through the eighteenth century the intellectual and libertarian traditions which we have described, forming their own traditions of mutuality in the friendly society and trades club, these men did not pass, in one generation, from the peasantry to the new industrial town. They suffered the experience of the Industrial Revolution as articulate, free-born Englishmen. Those who were sent to gaol might know the Bible better than those on the Bench, and those who were transported to Van Diemen’s Land might ask their relatives to send Cobbett’s Register after them.

This was, perhaps, the most distinguished popular culture England has known. It contained the massive diversity of skills, of the workers in metal, wood, textiles and ceramics, without whose inherited ‘mysteries’ and superb ingenuity with primitive tools the inventions of the Industrial Revolution could scarcely have got further than the drawing-board. From this culture of the craftsman and the self-taught there came scores of inventors, organizers, journalists and political theorists of impressive quality. It is easy enough to say that this culture was backward-looking or conservative. True enough, one direction of the great agitations of the artisans and outworkers, continued over fifty years, was to resist being turned into a proletariat. When they knew that this cause was lost, yet they reached out again, in the Thirties and Forties, and sought to achieve new and only imagined forms of social control. During all this time they were, as a class, repressed and segregated in their own communities. But what the counter-revolution sought to repress grew only more determined in the quasi-legal institutions of the underground. Whenever the pressure of the rulers relaxed, men came from the petty workshops or the weavers’ hamlets and asserted new claims. They were told that they had no rights, but they knew that they were born free. The Yeomanry rode down their meeting, and the right of public meeting was gained. The pamphleteers were gaoled, and from the gaols they edited pamphlets. The trade unionists were imprisoned, and they were attended to prison by processions with bands and union banners.

Segregated in this way, their institutions acquired a peculiar toughness and resilience. Class also acquired a peculiar resonance in English life: everything, from their schools to their shops, their chapels to their amusements, was turned into a battleground of class. The marks of this remain, but by the outsider they are not always understood. If we have in our social life little of the tradition of égalité, yet the class-consciousness of the working man has little in it of deference. ‘Orphans we are, and bastards of society,’ wrote James Morrison in 1834.¹ The tone is not one of resignation but of pride.

Again and again in these years working men expressed it thus: ‘they wish to make us tools’, or ‘implements’, or ‘machines’. A witness before the parliamentary committee enquiring into the hand-loom weavers (1835) was asked to state the view of his fellows on the Reform Bill:

Q. Are the working classes better satisfied with the institutions of the country since the change has taken place?

A. I do not think they are. They viewed the Reform Bill as a measure calculated to join the middle and upper classes to Government, and leave them in the hands of Government as a sort of machine to work according to the pleasure of Government.

Such men met Utilitarianism in their daily lives, and they sought to throw it back, not blindly, but with intelligence and moral passion. They fought, not the machine, but the exploitive and oppressive relationships intrinsic to industrial capitalism. In these same years, the great Romantic criticism of Utilitarianism was running its parallel but altogether separate course. After William Blake, no mind was at home in both cultures, nor had the genius to interpret the two traditions to each other. It was a muddled Mr Owen who offered to disclose the ‘new moral world’, while Wordsworth and Coleridge had withdrawn behind their own ramparts of disenchantment. Hence these years appear at times to display, not a revolutionary challenge, but a resistance movement, in which both the Romantics and the Radical craftsmen opposed the annunciation of Acquisitive Man. In the failure of the two traditions to come to a point of junction, something was lost. How much we cannot be sure, for we are among the losers.

Yet the working people should not be seen only as the lost myriads of eternity. They had also nourished, for fifty years, and with incomparable fortitude, the Liberty Tree. We may thank them for these years of heroic culture.