The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  Yet the experience of women in the long eighteenth century was very far from being uniformly fortunate. Many women, for example, were adversely affected – sometimes disastrously so – by developments in the labour market during the long eighteenth century. For talented women from the middle classes, careers in commerce had been possible in earlier periods: according to one estimate, in early-eighteenth-century London no fewer than a third of all women of property ran some sort of business.55 That figure declined quite steeply in subsequent decades. In the eighteenth century many of the increasingly specialized managerial skills associated with running a business came to be redefined. Increasingly, women were found to lack the professional training and other forms of specialized knowledge required, and, particularly after 1800, they took refuge in domesticity. Prospering merchants and retailers tended to move their homes away from their place of work, leaving their wives (and often their daughters) to play domestic roles. Lower down the social scale women fared no better. In the artisan trades, women did particularly badly. After the middle of the eighteenth century fewer women entered apprenticeships. From a maximum of around a third of all apprenticeships in early-modern England, female apprentices became quite rare by the end of the eighteenth century, surviving in any numbers only in occupations like bookbinding. Where mechanization led to changes in work practices, women were badly hit. As the century advanced the job prospects for women in the countryside, especially for full-time permanent work, sharply deteriorated because of improved farming methods and they migrated to the towns in enormous numbers. Moreover, demographic changes worked to the disadvantage of women. An increasing surplus of male labourers put pressure on women’s work. As a consequence, many women became domestic servants, where they remained subject to patriarchal control. Colquhoun estimated that there were 200,000 domestic servants in London in the early nineteenth century and 900,000 in the country as a whole, 800,000 of them women. By this time, domestic service was the most common form of female employment outside the home, many times more common than factory employment. However, while domestic service clearly redefined social relations, with its formalities, courtesies and, in larger households, intricate hierarchies, it did offer employment, respectability and some prospect of modest social mobility, especially for girls from charity schools, workhouses and orphanages. To these women their place was in the home, even if the home belonged to somebody else.56

  During the course of the long eighteenth century, then, there were few changes in the legal and formal structures of women’s lives. They remained inferior in a society dominated by men, their gender role based on domestic responsibilities and support. Honeyman has shown how changes in the home, in the work place and in production served to confirm, not to undermine gender roles.57 Nevertheless, it would be misleading to ignore the widening range of social and to some extent economic possibilities during this period that opened up to women of many social groups. There are certainly countless examples of women inhabiting the ‘public’ spheres of business and politics and using their moral and religious personae in many philanthropic and humanitarian reforms and improvements. These, especially for women from the middling orders, need to be acknowledged. Women certainly acquired a greater consciousness of their status and their potential. Furthermore, because of the endeavours of female writers and because of the Methodist and Evangelical movements, men at least came under greater pressure to respect women as people and to treat their wives and daughters less like servants and more like companions. It is surely significant that much of the literature of the century, particularly novels, focused upon the position of women in society and celebrated their virtues and their capabilities, arguably providing viable role models with which literate women, at least, could identify. Such literature both popularized and vindicated the importance of feminine values. Whether modern scholars choose to focus upon the intellectual nonconformity and political radicalism of Mary Wollstonecraft or the non-political feminism of Hannah More, the literary and social developments of the long eighteenth century enabled many women to become more clearly aware of their own situations, even if the real struggles towards greater equality lay in the future.

  NOTES

  1.L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (1992), p. 7.

  2.See above, pp. 105–6.

  3.J. Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 1793-1815 (1997). See also the interesting figures assembled by Professor B. Lenman, ‘Scotland and Ireland, 1742–89’, in J. Black (ed.), British Politics and Society from Walpole to Pitt (1990). Of new appointments to the rank of colonel between 1715 and 1739, only 19 out of 94 were Scots (20 per cent). Between 1739 and 1763, 47 out of 199 (24 per cent) were. In view of the strength of anti-Scottish and anti-Jacobite prejudices, these figures are remarkable.

  4.Colley, Britons, pp. 201, 218, 233.

  5.Colley, Britons, p. 370.

  6.Colley, Britons, p. 129.

  7.J. A. Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth Century England (1984), p. 21.

  8.J. Lucas, England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry, 1688–1900 (1990).

  9.And indeed, in England, there was ‘near unanimous support for coercion’ in America; J. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England (1986), p. 59.

  10.Colley, Britons, p. 123.

  11.H. Kearney, The British Isles: A History of the Four Nations (1989), p. 146.

  12.R. Houston, Scottish Literacy and Scottish Identity: Literacy and Society in Scotland and Northern England, 1600–1800 (1988), p. 257.

  13.J. Robertson, The Scottish Enlightenment and the Militia Issue (1985), p. 7.

  14.Henry Grattan (1746–1820), a lawyer, was elected to the Irish Parliament in 1775 and through his oratorical brilliance rapidly became the spokesman for the ‘Patriots’, advocating legislative independence and the liberalization of Irish trade. Henry Flood (1732–91) had been in the Irish Parliament since 1759, organizing and leading the opposition.

  15.M. Elliot, Partners in Revolution (1982), p. 72.

  16.See J. Smyth, Men of No Property (1992), p. 142.

  17.The table of population growth is taken from R. Brown, Society and Economy in Modern Britain, 1700–1850 (1991), p. 33.

  18.W. A. Cole, ‘Factors in Demand’, in R. Floud and D. McCloskey (eds), Economic History of England, I (1981), pp. 38–9; J. C. Rule, The Vital Century: England, Developing Economy, 1714–1815 (1992), pp. 38, 97.

  19.P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion, 1688–1914 (1993), pp. 88–9.

  20.P. O’Brien, ‘The Impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1793–1815 on the Long-term Growth of the British Economy’, Review (Fernand Braudel Centre), 12 (3) (1989), p. 381.

  21.J. G. Williamson has suggested that the need for government borrowing on such a massive scale crowded out investment in industry. Such an argument, however, rests on the dubious assumption that the increase in government debt of £954m which accumulated between 1789 and 1820 would have been otherwise directed into industry. Williamson, Did British Capitalism Breed Inequality? (1985); ‘Why Was British Growth So Slow During the Industrial Revolution?’, Economic History Review, 44 (1984).

  22.O’Brien, ‘The Impact of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars’, p. 379.

  23.I find it difficult to accept Harold Perkin’s argument that the divisions employed by King and Colquhoun ‘leads to broad horizontal layers which approximate to classes’ (The Origins of Modern English Society, p. 27). The examples he gives of Adam Smith’s ‘famous asides and forthright comments’ on the subject of class amount to little more than traditional anti-landlordism and fashionable hostility to the middling orders.

  24.N. Rogers, ‘The Middling Orders’, in H. Dickinson (ed.), A Companion to Eighteenth Century Britain (2006), p. 173.

  25.W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England 1714–60 (1977), p. 31.

  26.See e.g. E. P. Thompson, ‘Eighteenth Century English Society: Class Stru
ggle Without Class’, Social History, 3 (1978); P. Laslett, The World We Have Lost, 3rd edn (1983).

  27.M. Daunton, Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain, 1700–1850 (1995), p. 593. Furthermore, in one of the most remarkable and sustained rearguard actions in the history of the long eighteenth century, the landed interest successfully resisted any reassessment of the Land Tax burden.

  28.For a convenient overview of ‘the agricultural revolution’, see Daunton, Progress and Poverty, pp. 35–39, 49–50; J. Rule, The Vital Century (1992), ch. 3; E. Kerridge, The Agricultural Revolution (2013); M. Overton, The Agricultural Revolution in England, 1500-1850 (2000).

  29.See e.g. J. A. Yelling, Common Yield and Enclosure in England (1977); J. M. Neeson, Commoners: Common Right, Enclosure and Social Change in England, 1700–1820 (1993); M. E. Turner, Enclosures in Britain, 1750–1830 (1984).

  30.P. Harling, The Waning of ‘Old Corruption’: The Politics of Economical Reform 1777-1846 (1996); P. Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, in the 1830-52 (1990). There is an unjustly neglected chapter on this topic in H. Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society (The Revival of the Aristocratic Ideal), pp. 337–52.

  31.J. Raven, Judging New Wealth (1992), p. 257.

  32.Briggs, ‘The Language of Class in Early Nineteenth Century England’, in A. Briggs and J. Savile (eds), Essays in Labour History (1967).

  33.H. Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, pp. 165, 192, 214.

  34.For this literature see Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, chs 6 and 7.

  35.D. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class (1995), p. 403.

  36.E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963).

  37.See the discussions in W. Prest, Albion Ascendant, 257–70; H. Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, pp. 214–15.

  38.K. Navicas, Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire (2009), p. 20.

  39.R. Wells, Wretched Faces: Famine in War-time England, 1793–1803 (1988), pp. 323, 333.

  40.Notably L. Davidoff and C. Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (1992).

  41.L. Klein, ‘Liberty, Manners and Politeness in early Eighteenth Century England’ in Historical Journal, 32 (3) (1989), pp. 583–605. See also P. Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society: Britain 1660-1800 (2001).

  42.M. Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (1996), pp. 66, 74–5.

  43.P. Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580-1800: The Origins of an Associational World (2000), pp. 91, 122, 130–2, 198–204.

  44.K. Gleadle, British Women in the Nineteenth Century, p. 68.

  45.Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 1580-1800, pp. 96, 103–4.

  46.J. Rendall, Women in an Industrialising Society, England 1750-1880 (1990), pp. 83–4.

  47.Gleadle, British Women in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 73–5.

  48.Rogers, ‘The Middling Orders’, p. 222.

  49.Colley, Britons, p. 261.

  50.Sarah Trimmer had twelve children whom she educated herself, on the basis of which she proceeded to write popular works of educational theory, such as Reflections Upon the Education of Children in Charity Schools (1792) and The Economy of Charity (1801). Hannah More’s position is rarely understood. She did not believe that women were intellectually inferior to men but, in view of the different social roles they were called upon to play, that they required a different type of education.

  51.Colley, Britons, p. 278.

  52.F. Prochaske (ed.), Women in English Philanthropy, 1790–1830 (1974).

  53.B. Kanner (ed.), Women of England: Interpretive Biographical Essays (1980), p. 199.

  54.J. H. Plumb, ‘The New World of Children in Eighteenth Century England’, in N. McKendrick, J. Brewer and J. H. Plumb (eds), The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth Century England (1982), pp. 286–315. The medicalization of childbirth carried with it some negative features, not least the exclusion of women from obstetrics and the growing tendency for women to give birth in hospitals, in which disease might more easily be spread.

  55.P. Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class (1989), p. 173.

  56.J. Rule, The Labouring Classes in early Industrial England (1986), pp. 14, 177–8, 181.

  57.Honeyman, Gender and Industrialisation in England, 1700-1870 (2000).

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Renewal of the Regime, 1820–1832

  THE COMING OF REFORM, 1820–1830

  The Reform Crisis of 1828–32 was one of the greatest challenges to the Hanoverian political and religious order. Although there was less of a military threat than had been the case in 1715 and 1745, and while the international scene was less menacing than during the crisis of the 1790s, the sheer strength of reform sentiment, the dramatic loss of public confidence in the regime and the near collapse of its legitimacy should not be underestimated. The regime was in serious trouble, and it was fortunate to be able to extricate itself in the manner in which it eventually proved capable of doing. We should understand that the movement for the reform of Parliament, while of the first importance, and with which we shall be largely concerned in this chapter, was part of a wider movement for the reform of, inter alia, the old Poor Law, the system of local government and the movement for the abolition of slavery. Paradoxically, the ruling orders had been positively strengthening their power in the half century before the Reform Act of 1832. Why, then, did the British political and religious establishments experience a crisis of confidence towards the end of the 1820s? Jonathan Clark has written bitterly of ‘a final and sudden betrayal from within’ the regime when liberal politicians acquiesced in the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828) and the passage of Catholic emancipation (1829).1 For Clark it was not the ‘radical tide’ of enthusiasm for parliamentary reform which swept away the ancien régime but the inability of the ruling elite of that regime to stand up to its religious enemies. Critics have fastened on the idea of a ‘sudden betrayal’ and subjected Clark’s interpretation to severe criticism. They have tended to ignore his recognition that long-term factors did play an important part in undermining the foundations of the ancien régime. ‘What changed was not the theoretical validity or potential success of Anglicanism in an urban and industrial society, but the emergence of that society very largely beyond the pale of the traditional Anglican parochial structure.’2 It was not that the Anglican church became either unpopular or irrelevant or unacceptable; it was simply unable to establish hegemonic presence within the new industrial towns.

  Nevertheless, there are still some serious problems with this revisionist interpretation of the fall of the ancien régime which we may briefly notice. The first is the argument that the ancien régime was still as overwhelmingly monarchical, Anglican and aristocratic in the 1820s as it had been half a century earlier. As we have seen, the decline of monarchical authority and the wilting of Anglican supremacy were well under way by the early nineteenth century. The second is the judgement that those responsible for the legislation of 1828 and 1829 were involved in a ‘betrayal’ rather than a restructuring of the regime. As we shall see, those involved in the ‘betrayal’ were in fact endeavouring to save the regime, not to destroy it. The third problem is the argument that the demand for parliamentary reform was less a coherent campaign than a varied collection of popularist grievances that played on every prejudice – that it was not exclusively or rationally a parliamentary reform agitation. We shall certainly examine the agitation, but suggest that parliamentary reform was indeed the predominant aspiration of those involved. The fourth problem with the revisionist view is its neglect of divisions within the Tory Party after 1827 in enabling reform legislation to pass. For the Tories, the passage of reform was more an act of political suicide than an act of betrayal.

  In contrast to Clark’s revisionist interpretation, Professor Cannon ha
s advanced a socially based explanation. Cannon argues that ‘the old system came to be dismantled [because] the excluded grew stronger, better organised and less divided, while the conviction of the governing classes that those exclusions were justifiable grew correspondingly weaker’. The excluded groups he identifies are the Protestant Dissenters, the Roman Catholics, the lower classes and the middle classes. The root cause of the overthrow of the old order, according to Cannon, ‘seems to have been the growing political awareness of large sections of the nation’.3 The Reform Crisis was not the consequence of a collapse or a betrayal of the old order but one of the effects of a growth of powerful, external discontent with it. The old problems which the Revolution Settlement of the late seventeenth century had been designed to solve had been a revived Catholic threat and royal despotism, neither of them exactly imminent in the 1820s. The problems of the 1820s required different solutions and thus different political machinery.