The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  These developments coincided with the gradual spread of free-trade ideology. The late eighteenth and early nineteenth century witnessed a significant deregulation of the economic and labour market which has usually been taken to be a victory for the rising bourgeoisie. But the repeal of traditional legislation enforcing apprenticeships, fair markets and wage fixing was scarcely the trigger for the formation of an organized middle class. Many small employers, in fact, supported an unsuccessful attempt to revive the old apprenticeship system in 1813–14. More pointedly, the renewal of the charter of the East India Company and its alleged monopoly of trade to China in 1812–13 aroused the middling orders and provoked them to argue the case for free markets with the East. These vitally important economic issues in the early years of the nineteenth century indicated clearly that the middling orders were prepared to use political agitation to protect their economic interests.

  Many years ago, Asa Briggs set out four factors which encouraged ‘the development of a sense of class unity’ among the middling orders.32 Of the four factors which he singled out, two – the imposition of Pitt’s income tax in 1798 and the inequality of the tax burdens borne by the middling orders compared to the landed classes in wartime – appear to have had little more than a minor effect. It was the other two, the struggle for parliamentary reform and the Corn Law of 1815, which deserve closer attention. The campaign for parliamentary reform was not, of course, confined to the middling orders, but in 1807–12 and again in 1815–19 it generated massive anti-aristocratic propaganda which popularized the case against ‘old corruption’ in church and state and familiarized hundreds of thousands of people with the case for a more representative political system. The number of members of the mercantile and manufacturing middle classes in unenfranchized towns like Manchester and Sheffield active in, and often leading, the raising of petitions in favour of parliamentary reform should not be underestimated.

  More than any other factor, however, as Professor Perkin has argued,33 a sense of middle-class outrage was generated by the Corn Law of 1815. The Corn Law allowed the import of foreign corn free of duty when the price of wheat had risen to 80s. a quarter. The arguments on both sides of the case were well balanced. Clearly the interests of farmers, and of those they employed, demanded some measure of protection. Yet the Corn Law kept the price of bread up. More controversially, the selfishness of a landed Parliament in protecting the exclusive interests of agriculturalists disgusted the middling orders and gave rise to an indignant campaign against landed privilege, aristocratic self-interest and agricultural protectionism. But it was not merely the disgust and anger aroused by the Corn Law which deserves attention but the fact that it gave widespread credibility to the intellectual case against the aristocratic oligarchy. Indeed, the persistence of the post-war economic depression made the years 1815–21 of supreme significance in converting many sections of the middling orders into severe critics of the prevailing economic and political establishment. By 1820 the rhetoric of middle-class hostility to a corrupt oligarchy had certainly caught the mood of hundreds of thousands in the provincial and metropolitan mercantile communities. By then, many of them were ready to adopt the opinions of Jeremy Bentham and his friends. Bentham gave them a utilitarian, as opposed to a prescriptive, criterion against which to test the value of actions and the usefulness of institutions. At the social and economic level Ricardo taught them that the landlord class were profiteering parasites, while James Mill brought up to date Tom Paine’s attack on the theory and practice of hereditary, aristocratic government and his defence of universal suffrage.34.

  After the Corn Law of 1815 the middling orders, particularly in the provinces, were increasingly inclined to leap to the defence of their economic interests by attacking a distant and elitist government. Although it would be an exaggeration to regard every member off the middling orders as radical in politics, many of them became involved in the reform groups of 1815–20 and took an interest in the case of Queen Caroline. These agitations went far towards creating a self-consciousness within the middling ranks of society of their own interests and an awareness of their own separateness – from the ruling elite above and the labouring classes below – as a social group. There is even evidence of a growing recognition of the superiority of their own values, as against those of other sections of society. Yet perceptions, self-consciousness and a growing awareness of identity, while important in the evolution of a British middle class, are arguably less important than the experiences in which this class participated in the new and growing towns of the early nineteenth century.

  The process of urbanization was quickening towards the end of the long eighteenth century and was being increasingly driven by industrialization. As early as 1775 five of the largest ten towns were manufacturing towns: Leeds (24,000), Sheffield (27,000), Manchester (30,000), Norwich (38,000) and Birmingham (40,000). By 1801, four of the top five after London were industrialised; the fifth, Bristol, was partly industrialized. Manchester (with Salford) had a population of 89,000, Liverpool 83,000, Birmingham 74,000, Bristol 60,000 and Leeds 53,000. Indeed, so clearly was England distinct from her continental neighbours that on one estimate no less than 70 per cent of the urban growth of Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century took place in England.35 Further, at this stage of their development, the early industrial towns had not been overcome by congestion, smoke and disease. Their energy and wealth combined to effect genuine cultural growth, manifested in the Manchester Literary and Philosophic Society (1781) and the Lunar Society of Birmingham (1775). Such bodies brought together manufacturers and gentlemen, often of Dissenting faith, to share in philosophic and artistic pursuits. Other societies were more exclusively devoted to particular activities such as science and music, but these could adopt a remarkably wide definition of their activities. Yet others, such as the rapidly spreading Gentlemen’s Societies, were by definition notably catholic in their interests. Whatever the case, such societies tended to become larger and better organized as the long eighteenth century proceeded. Many, indeed, even acquired their own premises.

  It is not just the great industrializing towns which demand attention. In 1700 only one provincial town, Norwich, had a population over 25,000. By 1820 there were fifteen of them. In 1700 about 22–23 per cent of the inhabitants of England and Wales were town-dwellers. By 1800 the figure had increased to around 30 per cent and by 1820 perhaps to 35 per cent. Indeed, the most important agency of middle-class formation was not so much any dramatic political breakthrough at national level as a steady and almost unquestioned assertion of their influence over civic society in the provinces. At this level the middle classes were capable of manifesting a considerable degree of cohesion. Many of them were happy to act as local officers, aldermen and even mayors. Through the growth of taverns, clubs and lodges their commercial networking was enhanced by social intercourse. Their contribution to the life of local institutions such as schools, hospitals, prisons and, not least, societies for moral improvement was prodigious. They came to fashion the culture of the provincial towns of the industrial revolution. The huge increase in the number of civic, voluntary societies and groups of all kinds – political, religious, charitable, medical – acted as a vehicle for members of rising urban elites to assert their social eminence and political power over rapidly developing industrial communities. These elites frequently included members of the Nonconformist chapels, which themselves often acted as the organizational cores of such voluntary societies and local institutions. Several of them, the Poor Laws and the Sunday schools, for example, acted as means of disciplining and improving the behaviour of children of the working classes. Others, such as the Society for the Suppression of Vice, were less concerned with sexual licence than with curbing rude, rebellious and disorderly behaviour on the part of the lower classes more generally. The extent of poverty in a society with a rapidly increasing population could not be ignored by the middling orders. An act of 1723 legalized the establishment of workhouses
by parishes or groups of parishes, and within fifty years around 2,000 workhouses had been established. Not only did the workhouses offer a last resort to the starving, the infirm and the aged; they also set their standards sufficiently rigorously to deter the idle and to set them to work. Typically, the workhouses were to be profit-making concerns, but in practice very few of them actually made a profit and their activities had to be supplemented by countless acts of private and personal charity.

  The foundation of hospitals was also a popular site for charitable activity. The hospitals movement of the eighteenth century saw the foundation of many of the great London hospitals: the Westminster in 1720, St George’s in 1733, the London in 1740 and the Middlesex in 1745. These were all founded by public subscription, deriving over half their income from such sources. The provincial hospital movement gathered pace in the 1730s: between 1735 and 1760 twelve provincial hospitals were founded, followed by another twelve by 1783. Those who subscribed no doubt did so with a mixture of Christian morality and civic spirit, but they can hardly have been unaware of the privileges which their position conferred, including the right to nominate a certain number of patients and, of course, the right of treatment for themselves and their families. Given the development of medical specialization and – not least – the complexity of administering such lumbering giants, the second half of the century was to be a period of more specialized foundations, such as lying-in hospitals, smallpox hospitals, hospitals for venereal diseases and lunatic asylums. Even here, the provision of appropriate moral instruction and instructions concerning behaviour, meals and dress accompanied medical treatment.

  The organization of these forms of philanthropy is of the very greatest interest. They were based on the principle and practice of subscription, sometimes private but often public, through which a group of individuals could further some types of charitable activity, especially those which encouraged individuals to improve themselves. The organization of such charitable activity was open to all men (and women) regardless of social standing. It was a method of involving quite humble individuals in the administration of schools, hospitals and workhouses and, as a consequence, in the complex world of local systems of patronage. Significantly, the subscription lists were usually headed by local notables followed by merchants and their inferiors. The terms of such charitable bequests often included regulations as to behaviour, and even concerning dress, language and such contentious matters as the mixing of the sexes. The modern student is likely to leap to the conclusion that the principal motive of these involved must have been social control, but distinctions between charity, social control and ostentatious philanthropy are always difficult to draw. However, it would be churlish to assume that social control was always uppermost. In a society preoccupied with moral issues it would have been unthinkable for such charitable activity to have gone unaccompanied by some form of moral commitment. What assumes greater importance, however, by the end of the eighteenth century is the repeatedly declared social intention of those administering such institutions that they were working for a patriotic purpose and seeking to regenerate the nation. These worthy badges of middle-class endeavour became, therefore, less the signs of class warfare than the symbols of the peaceful incorporation into the patriotic community of the middling orders of Hanoverian Britain. In the end, it was a common patriotic political outlook rather than any common economic or social position which was serving to consolidate the growing cohesion of the middle class.

  A self-conscious working class

  The emergence of the English working class has been much more thoroughly investigated than that of the middle class, but the subject remains open to discussion because of the scale of the numbers involved and the problem of local variation. Here, of all places, it becomes difficult to reach precise definitions of ‘class’ and of what constitutes shared ‘class’ experience. Historians have long since moved away from a simple, economic version of the emergence of the working class (which locates economic interests such as capital and labour at the centre of class) towards a broader and more flexible concept which incorporates popular culture and religion and which admits something of the autonomy of political traditions and political experience. Modern accounts of the origins of the working class in Britain usually begin with an examination of traditional eighteenth-century popular culture that was imbued with the ethics of a ‘moral economy’, sensitive to abuses of the paternalist ideal and rooted in the common people’s gender, work and mentalities. Edward Thompson, and many of those who came after him, saw popular culture as the precursor to the emergence of a working class in Victorian Britain By the second half of the eighteenth century popular culture was increasingly distant from the upper- and middle-class cultures of the time, increasingly challenged by the forces of Evangelicalism, moral reform and organized political radicalism.. As the century advanced, according to this view, the state gradually abandoned the regulation of wages, prices and the quality of goods, all of which had been prominent features of economic organization in early modern England. Their abandonment left individuals increasingly vulnerable to market conditions. The seeds of class were not, then, to be found either in the early factories or in any possible identification of a person’s lifestyle with his place in the productive process, but in the social and economic tensions created by the abandonment of paternalism. ‘Class’, in this sense, then is a social reflex rather than a progressive social ideal, open to rural as much as to urban groups and arising within the skilled as much as within the unskilled occupational groups. (The isolation of such industrial communities as did exist in the eighteenth century, mining and fishing, for example, prevented the emergence of a nationally based class sentiment.)

  In his famous account of The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson located the effective origins of working-class thought and action in the 1790s, in the euphoria generated by the reception of the French Revolution in England and in the temporary popularity of reform societies, inspired by the ideas of Tom Paine. These early signs of working-class activity were reinforced by both state repression and economic hardship during wartime, by the fostering of an underground tradition of proletarian political, and by sometimes violent, activity. By 1815, according to Thompson, a coherent and identifiable working class had acquired its own ideology and organization and, not least, its own traditions, myths and martyrs with which to fire the imagination of a new generation of recruits in the bitter years after 1815.36

  No one could deny the existence of widespread and often very bitter social conflict and popular hardship in Britain in the 1790s, but it is not clear to what extent they should motivated ‘class’ activity leading to class conflict. Certainly, the combination of political repression, subsistence crisis and the general privations of wartime gave rise to a widespread sense of alienation from, at times even hostility to, the rulers and institutions of Hanoverian Britain which by 1815 had gone quite far, without the need to invoke the spectre of class warfare.37 Whereas in Ireland and, to a lesser extent, in Scotland such alienation had religious overtones and nationalist elements, in England and Wales such resentments were focused largely upon politicians and the political system. Only towards the end of the war, however, did such sentiments acquire powerful class overtones. The Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 could certainly be construed as an affront to labouring men; and, indeed, the grim economic conditions of the turn of the century, the hardship provoked by the Orders in Council and the never-ending hardships of the war all aggravated social tension. Further, the Luddite protests of 1811–12, coinciding with a subsistence crisis in many ways as severe as that of 1800–1, together with the government’s harsh response, marked a further stage in the emergence of a working-class self-consciousness. On top of all this, Parliament in 1814 deprived JPs of their powers to regulate wages to a just level, a significant gain for the forces of a free-market economy. This abandonment of regulation turned many artisans and labouring men against an economic system which had hitherto
offered them some protection. How quickly, and by what processes, this abandonment gave rise to class consciousness, however, still needs careful analysis.

  The emergence of class consciousness by 1815 was still incomplete and the processes involved in it intermittent. It is not enough to emphasize the factors working in its favour. Some trends worked against it. The voice of the working classes was dependent upon economic circumstances and upon the political leadership and social networks of men from higher social ranks, such as Burdett, Cartwright, Hunt and Cobbett. Furthermore, many factory workers, sometimes a majority, were woman and children whose labours were unlikely to feed directly into streams of class hostility. Much activity which, at one level, may be identified as ‘class’ activity may in fact have had a restraining effect on the emergence of class consciousness As Katrina Navicas observes, workers ‘had recourse to other means of collective expression and organization’.38 The early trade unions and friendly societies were moderate bodies who willingly worked within the existing economic structure and established habits of negotiation. Such men, usually craftsmen, who enjoyed the support of traditional organizations and practices, were conscious of their own status and skill. While they would jealously protect their standards of work and life, they did not yet conceive of themselves as members of a working class locked in combat with a middle class. If there was want and hardship in the war years there were, too, massive economic opportunities generated by wartime needs and demands. ‘Unprecedented mobilization acted as a safety valve against the full expression of the over-supply of labour, which was delayed until the immediate post-war years.’ The terrible hardship of the subsistence crisis of 1799–1800 persuaded JPs to treat law-breakers with sympathy. It also evoked an immense amount of local philanthropy which, as the most trenchant critic of the ruling orders has put it, ‘enabled the magistracy and the courts to retain some popular credibility ... permitting the ruling class to relegitimise itself’.39