by Simon Heffer
Inspired by Carlyle, middle-class writers sought to alert their peers to the plight of the poor through what became known as the ‘Condition of England’ novel. Elizabeth Gaskell described the squalor of working-class life in Mary Barton, published in 1848. ‘As they passed, women from their doors tossed household slops of every description into the gutter; they ran into the next pool, which overflowed and stagnated. Heaps of ashes were the stepping-stones, on which the passer-by, who cared in the least for cleanliness, took care not to put his foot. . . . you went down one step even from the foul area into the cellar in which a family of human beings lived.’24 Charles Kingsley, a clergyman, novelist and Christian Socialist, writing a few years later, picked up the theme. ‘Foul vapours rose from cowsheds and slaughter houses, and the doorways of undrained alleys, where the inhabitants carried the filth out on their shoes from the back-yard into the court, and from the court up into the main street; while above, hanging like cliffs over the streets – those narrow, brawling torrents of filth, and poverty, and sin, the houses with their teeming load of life were piled up into the dingy, choking night.’25 Charles Dickens, the pre-eminent novelist of the age, described London in Little Dorrit as a city of darkness, misery and squalor. ‘Melancholy streets in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows in dire despondency.’26
IV
By mid-July 1842 sporadic disturbances were breaking out in Staffordshire and elsewhere, and Graham sent in the militia. There was an unsuccessful attempt by radical MPs to shorten the parliamentary recess, forcing the Lords and Commons to sit in October. This was not so much to deal with the riots, as to make provision for the winter and avoid ‘calamities’ that bad weather would heap on top of poverty.27 The government refused to consider this, or to pledge that if things worsened Parliament would be recalled: Graham said such a promise would be ‘unconstitutional’.28 There was talk in the north of revolution: part of this was rabble-rousing by agitators from the Anti-Corn Law League and by Chartists, but part was simple statement of fact. On 15 July the council of the League prepared a declaration stating that ‘the country was on the eve of a revolution, and that the wheels of Government should be arrested’, which would be among the pronouncements that would later cause its opponents to accuse it of ‘treasonable’ activity.29
At the Chartist Convention Council in Manchester one of the leaders, Dr Peter McDouall, a surgeon from south London, formally called for a general strike. McDouall repeated the call on 26 July at Deptford, and was arrested after speaking for fifteen minutes in the middle of Deptford Broadway. The police dispersed the meeting, which outraged the radicals. The policeman told him that ‘you are holding an unlawful and illegal meeting, and using exciting language.’ He had referred to ‘the tyrant aristocracy of the country, who are trampling on the rights of the poor’. McDouall had form: he had been arrested for sedition in 1839, and was still on recognisance of £500.
By August ‘long-continued unemployment had driven many of the men to leave their homes and go round the countryside in large bands, ostensibly begging for charity but overawing the neighbourhoods through which they passed by their mere appearance and numbers.’30 Many men were on short time, or on strike. Eventually, calls for a general strike until the Charter was enforced became widespread. In Lancashire, Cheshire and Staffordshire pits, mills and factories were besieged and closed down by huge bands of men; and the unrest soon spread. It was not merely the unemployed. Those still in work had had their wages reduced.
Charles Greville, a courtier and diarist, wrote that the riots were ‘sufficiently alarming but for the railroads, which enabled the Government to pour troops into the disturbed districts, and extinguish the conflagration at once.’ Greville wrote a month after the uprisings: and reflected that ‘the immediate danger is over, but those who are best informed look with great anxiety and apprehension to the future, and only consider what has recently happened as the beginning of a series of disorders.’31 Much of the agitation had nothing to do with Chartist attempts to coordinate political action: but Peel and Graham saw lethal danger if the two forces met and fed off each other.
Fearing a riot on 16 August, on the anniversary of Peterloo – when in 1819 a cavalry charge on a reform demonstration in Manchester killed fifteen people and injured at least 400 others – Peel sent a battalion of Guards to Manchester and issued a Royal Proclamation warning people not to attend potentially violent public meetings. The railways delivered reinforcements to the north quickly: order was soon restored. In London, attempts to hold Chartist meetings were thwarted by swift action by the police and soldiery: Graham sent out orders to arrest the ringleaders and disperse the crowd. As things turned ugly in Staffordshire, Peel sent arms and ammunition for the defence of Drayton Manor, his country seat there. The preparations for class war, or possibly for the resistance against revolution, were in place.
Greville wrote on 2 November 1842 that he had met Lord Wharncliffe, the Lord Privy Seal, and James Kay-Shuttleworth, the Permanent Secretary of the Education Office of the Privy Council, ‘who are both come from the north, [and] have given me an account of the state of the country and of the people which is perfectly appalling.’32 He continued: ‘There is an immense and continually increasing population, deep distress and privation, no adequate demand for labour, no demand for anything, no confidence, but a universal alarm, disquietude and discontent . . . Kay says that nobody can conceive the state of demoralisation of the people, of the masses, and that the only thing that restrains them from acts of violence against property is a sort of instinctive consciousness that, bad as things are, their own existence depends upon the security of property in the long run.’ Although Greville seems typical of his class in apparently having little clue what to do about this, he also, typically, shares its fear and despair at the situation.
I have never seen, in the course of my life, so serious a state of things as that which now stares us in the face; and this after thirty years of uninterrupted peace, and the most ample scope afforded for the development of all our resources, when we have been altering, amending, and improving, wherever we could find anything to work upon, and being, according to our own ideas, not only the most free and powerful, but the most moral and the wisest people in the world . . . One remarkable feature in the present condition of affairs is that nobody can account for it, and nobody pretends to be able to point out any remedy; for those who clamour for the repeal of the Corn Laws, at least those who know anything of the matter, do not really believe that repeal would supply a cure for our distempers. It is certainly a very dismal matter for reflexion, and well worthy the consideration of the profoundest political philosophers, that the possession of such a Constitution, all our wealth, industry, ingenuity, peace, and that superiority in wisdom and virtue which we so confidently claim, are not sufficient to prevent the existence of a huge mountain of human misery, of one stratum in society in the most deplorable state, both moral and physical, to which mankind can be reduced, and that all our advantages to not secure us against occurrence of evils and mischiefs so great as to threaten a mighty social and political convulsion.33
In December 1842 the Quarterly Review devoted much space to a review by John Wilson Croker of ‘a few specimens of the ephemeral spawn of incendiary tracts, advertisements, and placards with which the Anti-Corn-Law Associations inundate the country’ (it added ‘they scarcely deserve to be considered as literature’).34 Croker, a former MP for Dublin University and close friend of Wellington, was famed for his animosities and hatreds and also for his adherence to lost causes. He had left the Commons in 1832, pledging never to sit in a reformed parliament. He had contributed to the Quarterly since its foundation, and his approach to any issue relied on abuse of its partisans rather than on evidence-based argument. He was the model for the slimy and scruple-free placeman Rigby in Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Coningsby, a comparison that does him no favours. In this article the tone of his s
trictures moves from the simply aggressively partisan towards the hysterical and irrational. The publications of the League, he said, brought ‘to the tribunal of public opinion the foulest, the most selfish, and altogether perhaps the most dangerous combination of recent times’, worse even than the Jacobin of the French Revolution, who ‘avowed his real designs, and was therefore more easily dealt with than these hypocritical associations, which “grown, like Satan, wiser than of yore”, assume more cautious forms and more plausible pretences in pursuit of the same ultimate object.’
He said that the ‘war cry’ of ‘cheap bread’ had replaced that of the ‘rights of man’, but was ‘equally deceptive’. He claimed that the uprisings of the previous summer had shocked even the League, whose members (he asserted) had hoped the rioters would do their dirty work for them: but the rioters had felt no great common cause with them. What really upset Croker was the determination by the League to raise another £50,000 to continue its ‘lawless crusade’ that ‘pollutes and perverts the most sacred topics into incentives to pillage and bloodshed.’ He thought that raising money ‘for the avowed purpose of forcing the legislature to alter the law of the land’ was, if not ‘criminally punishable’, then ‘illegal and in the highest degree unconstitutional’. Anyone who gave money to this cause, he added, would effectively be an accessory to evil; and he ridiculed the claim, made strongly by the League, that protectionism encouraged violence such as had been seen all over northern England a few months earlier.
Croker accused the late Whig ministry in general, and Lord John Russell in particular, of having engineered in industrial towns the appointment of magistrates sympathetic to its policy of repeal, who would then go easy on agitation and agitators. These were, he said, magistrates who ‘had many positive disqualifications – who were unfit from station and character for any such trust – who were factious and turbulent when they should have been quiet, and were pusillanimous or torpid when they should have been active.’35 There is a tone of de haut en bas outrage in the article, not just that a government not run by Tories should have appointed its own placemen to the magistracy – something no Tory would, of course, have ever done – but that the opponents of protection should be upset at what they called ‘the unjust refusal of the House of Commons to hear evidence at the bar of Parliament’, or at the ‘misgovernment of a rich and powerful aristocracy’.
He was yet more disgusted that some elements of the aristocracy had lent their names to the activities of the League. The Countess of Ducie and the Countess of Radnor were among its patronesses. He mocked the League for not knowing how to refer correctly to a pair of earl’s daughters who had also lent their names, and thundered a rebuke to those who ‘should have chosen to exhibit their wives and daughters in the character of political agitators’, as if those women were private property.36
By the time Croker’s Quarterly article appeared, with its scaremongering about insurrection and revolution, and its dire predictions of the consequences of conspiracy between Leaguers and Chartists, prosecutions of agitators had wrong-footed the latter group and, to an extent, the former. However, the Provost of Paisley told Peel that the relief operation there had run out of money and that 10,000 people faced a choice between starvation and crime.37 This same Provost, taken perfectly seriously by Peel, was derided by Croker for having publicly stated his refusal to order troops to fire on rioters if an insurrection broke out.38 Croker refused to accept the desperate conditions in the industrial districts, and showed contempt for those who described them. Given the article’s lack of direct observation it is worthless as journalism, but valuable in what it shows of a cast of mind that, had it been more widespread, would have precipitated the very revolution it savaged the agitators for discussing.
Croker exaggerated the menace to public order: but mocked a claim made by the League in June 1842 about ‘public peace in danger from starvation in Manchester’, which turned out to be rather nearer the truth than Croker (who made no mention of having visited the distressed districts) would have conceded.39 It was easy for him, with the varied mass of League propaganda at his disposal, to find extremists among the Leaguers: to find mavericks talking of assassinating Peel, or claiming that ‘a callous-hearted aristocracy were determined to goad the people to rebellion, in order to govern by the sword’.40 He also regarded as seditious the calls for strikes, mocking the notion of ‘a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work’. His underlying motivation is, by the end, however, quite clear; fear that the League was gaining support; fear that supporters were in some cases donating large amounts of money; fear that some of the well-to-do and the aristocracy were being seduced by the League; and fear, in the end, that the arguments the League advanced, especially when advocated by the likes of Richard Cobden, the radical MP and leader of the League – ‘the spoiled child of agitation’ – would prevail in the end.41 Croker’s largely ad hominem attack on Cobden reveals no understanding of the man, or of his motivations.
The government was still at a loss to know how to solve the problems that had, during 1842, brought the country to the verge of anarchy. Once the new session of Parliament opened in February 1843 there was a five-day debate in the Commons that reflected the agitation of the political class at what was perceived by Lord Howick, who opened the debate, to be the lack of government action. ‘The absence of all announcement of remedial measures’, Howick observed, should cause the House ‘to consider whether things can be safely left in this situation . . . I believe the situation of the country to be one of the most serious danger.’42 As well as describing the shocking condition of the industrial districts, he also outlined the suffering of the agricultural worker, as a lack of disposable income had driven down demand for food and therefore for his labour. He said the coal trade would be retaining fewer men on lower wages. The same was true for shipbuilders and shipping companies. The knock-on effects were already serious: forty or fifty shops in Sunderland’s High Street were unoccupied. The national excise revenue was down by a quarter; the cost of the workhouse in Sunderland had more than doubled in five years. He feared a new insurrection: ‘I cannot help reminding the House that it has already had a warning upon this subject in the disturbances of last summer.’43
His suggested remedy caused uproar on the Tory benches: the dropping of tariffs and the application of the principles of free trade, to stimulate industry. He told them they had nothing to fear: ‘a large increase in your imports would be attended by a great increase in your exports, and in your manufacturing industry.’44 To Peel’s distress William Ewart Gladstone, the vice-president of the Board of Trade, sought to calm matters by calling the Corn Laws ‘temporary’. This unnerved Peel and upset many Tories, but by 20 December 1843 Gladstone was noting in his diary that ‘Sir R. Peel expressed obiter a strong opinion that the next change in the Corn Laws would be total repeal.’45 Richard Cobden, who would lead the fight for repeal, was prompted to observe that ‘an aristocracy cannot maintain its station on wealth moistened with the orphans’ and the widows’ tears, and taken from the crust of the peasant.’46 In a prophetic passage that looked forward to the realignment of the parties three years later, he added that ‘it is time, then, to give up bandying the terms Whig and Tory about from one side of the House to the other, and engage in a serious inquiry into the present condition of the country.’47
The despair of the ruling class was exacerbated by their perception that the problem of poverty was growing unchecked. Lord Ripon, the President of the Board of Trade, had said that ‘the name of pauper by no means implies, as seems to have been supposed, a man unable or unwilling to work—one whose infirmity or whose idleness would disqualify him from becoming an useful settler. On the contrary, the whole of the married labourers in many of the parishes of the south of England may be correctly described as paupers, inasmuch as the want of employment has depressed wages to a rate at which it is impossible for a man, however industrious, to maintain a family without receiving parochial relief.’48 Ho
wever, Sir James Graham, Ripon’s Cabinet colleague, maintained a hard line that ensured the concerns of the more liberal-minded went unanswered. He believed that ‘the whole policy of the Poor-law has been improved by the alterations effected by the measure which passed in 1834; and if its Christianity be looked at, I say that the great precepts of Christianity—namely, to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, to visit the sick—are practically carried into effect under the operation of this measure . . . In no Christian community in the civilized world is there a law which provides so humanely, so charitably, so largely, for the sick, the needy and the destitute, in their hours of affliction and suffering.’49
This was nonsense, not least because of the failure of the law that Graham praised to make the vital Victorian distinction between the deserving and the undeserving poor. His caustic and haughty personality and his perceived heartlessness had already made him unpopular in the Commons, and interventions such as this made him more so. Since joining the Tories in 1835 he had become attached to social conservatism in a way that would have made him comfortable in Liverpool’s government. Peel and he became close; and Peel invited him to be Home Secretary on taking office in 1841. The rank and file of the party continued to dislike him. His complete absence of sympathy with radicalism and the aspirations of the working classes made him a problematical man to have as Home Secretary during the era of Chartism. Those seeking further reform soon cast him as a hate-figure. When Lord Ashley, who would become the noted philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury, wrote to Peel on 20 November 1842 to thank him for meeting representatives of the operatives, he said that ‘the delegations from the factory districts were much pleased by their conferences with you; they entertain, I think unjustly, very different feelings towards Sir James Graham.’50