Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  It was this homogeneity that allowed the 1832 Bill to serve as the basis for later extensions of voting rights in 1867 and 1884. None of the three reforms cut to the quick in the way demanded by the Chartist movement of the 1830s and 1840s, which would simply have rendered all adult males equal as voters. But the latter two developed the democratizing implications of the first Bill’s impersonal logic. The 1867 Bill kept the urban household as the basis for voting, but eliminated the distinction based on property value or rent, thus enfranchising large sections of the working class. The 1884 Bill applied the same standard to rural heads of households; at this point few adult males were left out (although the full principle of complete manhood suffrage was not given legislative embodiment until 1918). Meanwhile the secret ballot had been adopted in 1868. This had been a Chartist demand too, but a stronger reason for its success was that it fit in with what Richard Price calls the “more formal machinery of politics” that the first Reform Bill began to put in place, and to which we now need to attend.

  Here too it was the rationalization introduced in 1832 that pointed to the political future more than the specific changes in Parliamentary representation. Along with the Bill’s turn to uniform qualifications went measures to make elections more regular and orderly, beginning with standard procedures for registering voters and confirming their eligibility: none had existed before. Getting potential voters to register now became a concern of national leaders and their local supporters. Partisan struggles broke out immediately over who had the right to be on the roll, sometimes carried out in ways that replaced “old corruption” with newer kinds. But the lists provided the foundation on which national party organizations would later establish ongoing links to supporters in the districts, undermining the traditional position of local notables. The Ballot Act was seen in much the same light, intended less to protect voters’ privacy than to undercut bribery and “treating” by local bigwigs, practices which first came under the purview of the courts at the same time (earlier only Parliament itself had the authority to deal with these abuses).

  The overall effect of such measures was progressively to weaken the old political culture in which local and vertical social relations were dominant, in favor of one shaped by the horizontal ties that drew all voters into the national political system. Whether this structure made people more free or independent may be debated, but it lessened the personal influence of powerful superiors (Adam Smith had made a similar point about the development of distant markets). Outlines of this new political culture were already visible in the eighteenth century, for instance in the Wilksite movement, whose national network of clubs and other informal organizations of presumed equals, tied together by newspapers and “public opinion,” provided alternatives to the homegrown and personal hierarchies that dominated traditional politics. Such extended connections continued to develop in the 1820s and 1830s, notably in the “political unions” that served as mediating points through which local groups participated in the national campaign for reform. As these linkages underwent further development (we shall have more to say about them later on), they contributed to the situation whereby (as Price writes) “by the 1880s the world of politics was no longer bounded by the practices of social reciprocity and deference.”15 Because “class” politics implied the use of uniform and quantifiable criteria of participation in the political nation, it was part of the same logic that replaced local and directly personal relations of authority with the abstract and mediated ones that would be the ground for nationally organized parties.

  Class, nation, and the divine economy

  The way in which appeals to class were shaped at once by the need to operate in the widening political space where local identities were giving way to national ones, and by the opportunity such language offered to forge solidarities in the name of class for political purposes, can be seen in the cause with which middle-class identity was most closely involved in the period after the passage of the Reform Bill, the movement to repeal the Corn Laws (the duties on grain imposed at the end of the Napoleonic Wars) during the 1840s. The anti-Corn Law agitation carries an additional interest from the perspective I am seeking to develop here because some of the people involved in it exhibited a remarkable sense for the central place of distant connections in bourgeois life, a connection they understood in terms of great importance to people in their time, namely the tie between worldly activity and a religious understanding of the world.

  One reason why the anti-Corn Law campaign is revealing is that it came to the language of class after first employing the related but separate idiom of “interest,” turning to “class” instead in order to broaden its appeal. The notion of an “interest” was commonly employed in the eighteenth century in connection with attempts to influence Parliamentary action. An “interest” was both something of concern or importance to some person or persons, and a group organized on behalf of it (Adam Smith used the term in both senses). Some of these groups were “classes,” but chiefly in the fluid sense that allowed any social grouping to be one. There was a manufacturing interest, a trading interest, a “monied” interest, a landed interest, as well as many smaller ones. Because these interests were in some degree self-serving, a certain pejorative aura hung over the term, although efforts were made to dispel it by insisting that separate interests could live in harmony, or that they all shared a higher concern for social order and stability.16 The same was true of classes (which also had their “interests” to be sure), but the broader nature of class, and perhaps a certain link the term retained to ranks or orders, allowed classes to serve as the bearers of moral qualities thought to be beneficial to the nation as a whole. This had long been true of the aristocracy, often portrayed as the essential component of the nation on the grounds that its ownership of land gave it a permanent attachment to the country that holders of mere movable property lacked.17 As for the middle class, it too had sometimes been ascribed the virtue of stability, as we saw, to which the debates over Parliamentary reform added qualities of initiative, knowledge, and even cultivation.

  These features of the vocabulary of class and interest help us to understand the way the terms were employed by members of the Anti-Corn Law League, whose leaders in Manchester Asa Briggs describes as “perhaps the first men to think of themselves as a ‘class.’”18 It took them some time to come to this view, however. As one active member of the League who later wrote its history noted, when the group first organized in 1839 he and his fellows advocated eliminating the duties on grain on “the untenable and unpopular ground that it was necessary to have cheap bread in order to reduce the English rate of wages to the continental level.” This was the language of interest, narrowly conceived, and, as the same observer went on, “so long as they persisted in this blunder, the cause of free trade made but little progress.” Things changed as the Leaguers, seeking to appeal to a wide public, came to see and present their project in more broadly social and moral terms. The image of the middle class developed in the debates over Parliamentary reform, as representing both the dynamism of the modern nation and its best hope for achieving harmony and stability, became part of the case. In the rhetoric of the campaign that began at the end of the 1830s, the Corn Laws were portrayed as a barrier to progress, and damaging not just to manufacturers but to all who suffered from the high price of bread. The duties were an example of “class legislation” in a negative sense, shifting wealth to an unproductive oligarchy of landowners. Free trade, by contrast would benefit not just a “manufacturing interest,” but the nation as a whole. As Briggs puts it, “the promptings of a commercial shrewdness were gradually enlarged into enthusiasm for a far-reaching principle.” Class here had both a negative and a positive connotation, depending on the social group to which it applied, just as it later would for Marx.19

  It is simple enough to see this as an example of the emergence of a “class ideology,” and surely it was one: a policy originally pressed for the sake of personal advantage was now recomm
ended on general principles claimed to be beneficial to everyone. But the language of class was just as equivocal here as it had been in the reform campaign. The League’s claim to represent the middle class as a whole was simply false, since many people who clearly belonged to it were either lukewarm or cold toward the repealers’ goals and activities. This was notably true of businessmen and professionals in London, among whom the Leaguers found as much indifference or opposition as support. As a contemporary biographer of Richard Cobden, one of the League’s leaders, wrote, “In London there is no effective unity; interests are too varied and discursive; zeal loses its direction and edge amid the distracting play of so many miscellaneous social and intellectual elements.” In an election of 1843 a free trade candidate won in London, but only by a narrow margin and against much opposition. (Similar divisions had kept London from providing wholehearted support for Parliamentary reform in the previous decade.) That some of these features of London society and politics reflected the closer relations of bourgeois elements in the capital to the aristocracy was one thing that made it such a different place from Manchester, but even there the League hardly enjoyed general middle-class support. As Sidney Pollard reminds us, many cotton manufacturers were skeptical of free trade because they feared that exporting machinery would subject them to tougher foreign competition. The Manchester Guardian, already emerging as the organ of liberal opinion it has remained, was never friendly to the League; it objected to the group’s “dogmatic” adherence to its principle, and denied that its position represented “the community at large.” The paper supported anti-League candidates in local elections.20 Similar divisions existed in other towns throughout the country. For activists such as Cobden to present themselves as spokesmen both for the middle class as a whole and for the needs of the nation more broadly was indeed ideological, but their rhetoric was just as much aimed at gaining support in the section of society the League claimed to represent as in those that lay outside it. The close association between class analysis and a supposedly materialist and hard-nosed understanding of history makes it easy to miss the function of “class” as an “imagined community”: to propose some policy as essential or vital to it as a whole was to stamp all its members with a particular character or shape, constituting it mentally in a way that privileged certain claims to direct or lead it. What brought these claims to the fore, and with it the rhetoric of class through which they were urged, was precisely the attempt to make the campaign national, to project it outside the local context where the language of interest at first seemed so natural, and appeal to a wider range of middle-class people. That the appeal was never wholly successful underscores the very internal division inside the middle class that made it necessary in the first place.

  There was a second aspect to this rhetoric that made it characteristic of its time and place, and that could sometimes invoke the power of distant relationships in a different way, namely its easy turn to religious language. The Anti-Corn Law League often made its case in religious terms, sometimes presenting the tax on bread as an affront to “the revealed law of God.” As one minister wrote, the English as a “nation of Bible Christians … ought to realize that trade should be as free as the winds of Heaven.” Although disappointment with the narrowness of the franchise extension in 1832 fostered suspicion of bourgeois political projects among those left out, such notions (combined with the fact that cheaper bread was indeed desired by many) helped to draw numbers of nonconformist workers into alliance with the middle classes in a common agitation for reform.21 In this way religion served an ideological function too, encouraging people below the middle classes to accept bourgeois leadership. But religion was too important in the lives of many nineteenth-century people, of whatever social identity, to warrant viewing the appeals people made to it as primarily calculated or self-interested. We need to pause for a moment to consider some indications of how religious consciousness helped to develop a sense of identity in the middle classes.

  Whatever one thinks about Max Weber’s famous and much-debated thesis that a “Protestant ethic” of worldly activity and self-denial played a crucial role in injecting an entrepreneurial spirit into early modern society, there seems no doubt that the attitude he described was visible in the lives of many early nineteenth-century British entrepreneurs. As two eminent feminist historians have observed, nonconformist and evangelical varieties of religion fostered an image of manliness in which old codes of honor based on qualities useful in war or sport gave way to an emphasis on virtues such as diligence, honesty, and devotion to everyday duty.22 Such an ethic had many uses. An illuminating (and in many ways justifiably critical) study of entrepreneurs in the important wool-manufacturing center of Bradford reveals that the generation of people who fostered and managed the new industrial techniques there (as in other places) were largely newcomers, often small-town folk whose first experiences of the city might be exciting, but were also disorienting and confusing. What rescued them from anxiety and helped put them on the road toward success was “the puritan moral and religious legacy … inherited from their families.” They and their pastors were comforted by the notion that moral behavior and steady application to the task at hand could be taken as fruits of the “indwelling” of the spirit, evidences of being among God’s chosen.23

  But an even closer tie linked their relation to God with their place in the economy. As one Bradford minister put it, not even his own vocation was as conducive to virtuous living as was work that involved constant transactions with other people and with things exchanged in the market. Business “accustoms us to subordination,” because it imposes the need for a methodical attention to details and the external conditions that shape them; it makes us recognize our responsibility for our own fates, but also fosters awareness of the much more powerful forces that finally determine them: “It places our earthly lot so far within our own reach as to hold out an almost certain reward for diligence and frugality – and yet its issues are so far beyond our individual control … as to throw us most sensibly upon the over ruling providence of God.” The minister, Edward Miall, was here describing what it was like to confront opportunities and dangers created by market forces so extensive and intricate that their mysterious operations could be compared to divine providence. The analogy worked both ways: finding one’s way through worldly situations too broad and powerful for anyone to master the whole of them was good preparation for recognizing human dependency on the Almighty; at the same time religion’s insistence on personal responsibility within a world governed by transcendent and ultimately invisible forces provided a training ground for acting inside the vast network of connections where modern enterprise operated.

  Miall did not see this network only in economic terms. Like Gustav Freytag’s young hero in his near-contemporary novel Debit and Credit, whom we met in Chapter 4, the minister viewed market relations as part of the larger web of culture that links people to each other across great distances, creating a wide range of bonds and attachments: “Trade multiplies our relations with our fellow men … It creates countless grades of mutual dependence and necessitates mutual trust in all its stages … I can scarcely conceive of a high cultivation of spiritual life in this world … save by means and arrangements partaking very closely of the nature of trade.”24 Like Weber half a century later, Miall saw both the divine economy and the worldly one as objective frames that set limits to human action, even as they provided it with powers individuals could never possess on their own (a characteristic, as noted in Chapter 1, of networks of mean of all kinds). Unlike Weber, however, Miall did not see the web of connections humans created for their mutual interchange as having become so colossal and ponderous that it became an “iron cage,” threatening to stifle the energies whose release had promoted its construction. We noted earlier that a different species of economic pessimism was present in this period, the inherited conviction that nature imposed strict limits on what could be produced, reworked in their separate ways by Malthus a
nd Ricardo, and which earned for economics the label “the dismal science.” In the expanding northern cities, however, and among those who saw them in a positive light, the growing and partially mechanized economy encouraged a new kind of optimism, a vision of a productive system that would improve life by multiplying wealth and goods, and with them the kinds of connections Miall highlighted.