A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  One ex-radical, John Cam Hobhouse, then an anxious government minister working at the India Office in the ghostly centre of the capital, mostly deserted except for green-ribboned demonstrators, was worried about being separated from his family at such a critical moment. The front door of his London house had been ‘chalked’ by the Chartists, identifying him as a declared Enemy of the People. ‘I sat down to office business not expecting, but thinking it by no means improbable, that I should hear discharges of musketry or cannon from the other side of the river. Indeed the slamming of doors made me start twice.’

  He need not have been quite so anxious. Given this overwhelming display of force, O’Connor had the same decision to make that faced all the leaders of European marches and demonstrations in the springtime of 1848: whether to force the issue by attacking the soldiers head-on and hoping for defections, or to opt for a tactical stand-off or even retreat. And here, perhaps as he knew, the geography of rebellion was not on the Chartists’ side. In Paris, Berlin, Budapest, Prague and Vienna the foot soldiers of liberty were local artisans and workers who barricaded themselves in their quarters, hoisted the flags of revolution and defied government troops to come and get them. They could legitimately appear to be defending hearth and home. But Londoners en masse were not so unified in hatred of the government, still less of their rose-queen. It was the rank-and-file Chartists from the provinces, some with Irish, Scottish or Welsh leaders, who had been cast as the occupying army. Besides, O’Connor looked at the logistical odds should he choose to force a bloody confrontation and realized that his Chartists could never win. At Kennington, speaking through repeaters standing on platforms dispersed through the huge crowd, surrounded by his Irish praetorian guard gathered beneath a huge green flag decorated with the harp, O’Connor announced that his orders were not to provoke any kind of incident with the soldiers and police, however greatly the demonstrators were goaded. A pretext for slaughter was just what the authorities wanted. The trouble was that he himself, and certainly Harney, had raised the stakes very high. Some of the banners hanging from the petition wagon had rashly proclaimed that there would be ‘No Surrender’ or ‘No Way Back’. Predictably, then, some of the younger men were not in the mood to hear the voice of the turtle dove. There were shouts and scuffles. On Blackfriars Bridge on the way back, faced with a solid wall of truncheon-wielding police, there was heaving and stone-throwing, charges and counter-charges. Arrests were made, and then the prisoners were rescued by the crowds. Heads bled along with disappointed hearts.

  But O’Connor really had no choice. The bloody days of June in Paris, when the provisional government of the Second French Republic turned its guns on the workers’ barricades, would show just how resolute the ‘forces of order’ could be when faced with ongoing popular strikes and insurrection. What good would a similarly futile and tragic scenario have done the cause of popular democracy in Britain? A glance at the photograph of the meeting at Kennington speaks volumes about the Chartist tradition handed down from the 17th and 18th centuries: it shows a disciplined, Sunday-best dressed ‘respectable’ protest by workers always anxious to give the lie to their demonization as a drunken, semi-criminal rabble.

  After the immediate threat was over, not everyone was cackling with glee at the fake names said to have padded the numbers on the petition – all those ‘Mr Punches’ and ‘Queen Victorias’. Those canards – faithfully repeated in the textbooks I grew up with, which treated a 19th-century revolution in Britain as though it were a biological impossibility – formed part of the self-congratulatory mythology of the governing class. At the time, opinion was often much more sober and uncertain. The London Illustrated News – certainly happy that ‘the mountain has laboured: the mouse has been born’ – still admonished those who had belittled the petition in parliament, or greeted it ‘amidst great laughter’, stating that it ill became those who derived ‘their only real power from the people’ to ridicule a document which, if ‘a hundredth or even a five hundredth part of the signatures are bona fide … it is a petition which the Legislature of England ought to receive with seriousness’.

  The jitteriness with which he had handled 10 April spelled, indisputably, the end of Feargus O’Connor as a credible political leader of a mass movement. But it was certainly not the end of Chartism as a militant working-class crusade. Some of its stalwarts became early trade union leaders; others, like the fictional, traumatized John Barton, turned to desperate acts of terrorism. Just three months after Kennington, all the sniggering went suddenly silent when 50,000 demonstrators showed up at the newly built Trafalgar Square. On Whit Monday, at Bonners’ Fields, London, another huge crowd appeared carrying tricolour republican flags and calling for ‘More Pigs, Less Parsons’ and ‘England Free or a Desert’ before colliding with a solid wall of police. Fitful rebellion still rumbled on in Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire. The ‘Wat Tyler of Bradford’, Isaac Jefferson, organized more skirmishes, went on the run, was arrested (although his wrists were too big to be handcuffed), was sprung from captivity and managed to keep thousands of soldiers busy before the town finally calmed down at the end of the year.

  If democratic agitation was not going to put bread on the table, perhaps quieter, less confrontational means might do better. A single cottage at Great Dodford in Worcestershire is all that survives of one of those peaceful schemes of working-class self-improvement, the Chartist Land Company. The company had been established by O’Connor in 1845 in fulfilment of a dream inherited from the 17th-century communes and more recently from Irish reformers. Its aim was to take back to the rural world from which they or their forebears had come those workers – often handloom weavers or stocking frame knitters made redundant by the new power machinery – who had been stranded in the slums of industrial Britain. (The vast majority of factory workers were still, in fact, first-generation immigrants from the countryside.) Those able to put down a little money would be given a plot of a few acres on which food could be grown and a few animals kept: this was the resurrection of the strips and back lots they had lost to enclosure and engrossment.

  The Land Company was a classically British combination of dreamy utopianism and solid business sense. It tapped into the already active instincts of working men – and especially working women – to save. Enough money was raised to buy property including the land at Great Dodford. Subscribers were sold shares corresponding to their investment, and the first settlers chosen by lottery; then, when lotteries were made illegal, by auction or by the placing of direct deposits.

  ‘Do or die’ was the motto of the newcomers at Great Dodford, and their work was certainly no picnic. Boulder-strewn land had to be cleared, roads and paths laid out, hedges planted, all with no certain outcome. But some of the settlers did make a go of it. Ann Wood, for example, was an Edinburgh charlady who had had enough Scottish thrift to save £150, a sum impressive enough to give her the pick of the lots at Great Dodford. After settling at number 36, along with her two daughters, Ann did well enough to lead a long life in the village, dying at 86.

  The conspicuous presence of women in the Chartist Land Company village may be another indicator that, once the worst of the hard times were over, working families might be prepared to settle for a home rather than a revolution; a world in which the Great Exhibition, rather than Marx’s Communist Manifesto (1848), pointed the way to the future. And although it is true that the propertied, political classes, having survived Chartism, would be in no mood to introduce a fuller democracy for another generation, it would be a patronizing mistake to write off the will to build domestic security as some sort of defeatist placebo. Arguably it was precisely the quieter, constructive strategies of the 1850s and early 1860s – cooperatives; friendly societies; peaceful unionism; the profile of a self-improving, responsible, labouring and lodging class – that made it possible for both Tories and Liberals to embrace household male suffrage in the second Reform Act of 1867, without fearing (although some inevitably did) that they were inst
igating a revolution by the back door.

  The family may have been the great mid-Victorian fetish. But the boom economy of the decade and a half between 1848 and the ‘Cotton Famine’ of the mid-1860s did make it possible to stitch back together some of the fabric of domestic life that had been so badly ripped up in the first phase of the 19th-century Industrial Revolution. The militants of the ‘hungry forties’ had been, typically, surplus-to-requirement craftsmen and artisans, especially cotton spinners and handloom weavers, who had been put out of work while women and children (the ‘tenters’ of the mills, hired for menial but dangerous work like crawling under moving machinery to clean cotton fluff) formed a disproportionately large part of the factory labour force. Elizabeth Gaskell’s portrait in Mary Barton of despondent, demoralized and finally desperate men looking for some way to express their fury was based on a good deal of social truth. In 1851, for instance, 255,000 men and 272,000 women struggled for a living in cotton mills. But the 1850s did, in fact, make good on many of the promises made by the manufacturers and money men of Manchester, Salford, Bradford and Halifax. Rising export-led demand for manufactured cloth generated nearly full employment. The real value of wages rose. Savings were possible. And for the first time men became integrated in large numbers into the manufacturing labour force. Working the new steam-driven mules, they were given, as foremen, the right to hire and organize both men and women (and sometimes children), thus reinstating, in ways incalculably important for the restoration of morale, some of their lost domestic self-respect. Weaving – the last of the textile sectors to become mechanized – now developed its own technology, which could be manned by a male, as well as a female, labour force. In some other industries – especially coal mining – it was, on the other hand, the legislated removal of women and children from work in the pit (where sweltering conditions dictated virtual or actual nakedness as well as brutal physical labour) that, although taxing the domestic economy, actually restored to mining community homes a semblance of matriarchal domestic order.

  The prosperous years of the mid-century made for a less confrontational labour force. Women powerloom weavers in Lancashire and Clydeside formed their own unions. But they seldom needed to strike. In the 1860s legal trade unions became more like welfare associations and less like training camps for the class war. Union leaders themselves stressed that the strike would be the weapon of last resort. Dealing with a less confrontational labour force in turn allowed employers to rethink their paternalism. Where once, in return for compliance with wage cuts, they had offered what they claimed were benefits, like the provision of food, now they made room for unions, friendly societies and cooperatives to organize, collaboratively, more of their own independent culture. The 1850s were the decade when works brass bands appeared, sometimes with an initial investment by the owner; when annual works outings to the country, the seaside and the Crystal Palace, re-erected at Sydenham, south London, after the Great Exhibition closed, were organized. Of course, many of those occasions were custom-designed to show off the benevolence of the new industrial squirarchy: the summer tea party at the turreted rose-brick, Gothic Revival mansion on the hill where the full complement of servants (many of them from the same families as the factory hands) would be serving cakes and lemonade; the cricket match between owners (the sons just down from one of the ‘new’ public schools, such as Marlborough and Tonbridge) and the ‘men’.

  Reginald Richardson, ex-physical force Salford Chartist and gaolbird, was himself one of those working men who, in the less abrasively confrontational climate of the mid-Victorian boom, reserved his campaign energies for quite different battles. In the mid-1850s he took on the ‘slink’ trade, accused of slaughtering diseased cattle and ‘dressing’ them so they could be passed off as food. He campaigned for public rights of way on ancient footpaths in the countryside between Cheadle and Altrincham. In 1854 he waxed lyrical in the Salford Evening Weekly, while lamenting industrial pollution: ‘How many thousands yet living remember the beautiful walk from Oldham Lane and down the Adelphi across Bank Mill Yard and along the southern side of the river, with its fine green bank shelving down to the pure stream overshadowed by tall poplars. … Along the river bank to Springfield … every inch of this has been absorbed – to use a mild term – by the rapacity of those who have built works along the river side.’ The old warrior for working men’s democracy had become – in advance of the invention of the term – an ecologist. The British revolution had been put out to grass.

  CHAPTER

  4

  WIVES, DAUGHTERS,

  WIDOWS

  PHOTOGRAPHING QUEEN VICTORIA, the results make clear, was seldom an opportunity for a sunny grin. But then smiling seemed beside the point for most 19th-century photographers and their subjects. They were after grander things; in the case of the royal family, a fine balance between majesty and familiarity. Being summoned to take photographs of Albert, Victoria and the children must have been daunting for Roger Fenton and John Edwin Mayall; but also perhaps exhilarating. Who else got to tell a sovereign to sit perfectly still, even in the most respectful style of address? Lady Day, about whom little is known, went to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight in the summer of 1859 and managed to capture just the slight degree of informality that the prince and the queen had allowed themselves: a country bonnet and an easy lean against a creamy wall. It helped, of course, that the royals were such enthusiasts of the new art. A darkroom had been built and stocked at Windsor. Whenever painters came to do a portrait in oils, the first thing Victoria did was to press on them a photograph as a way of indicating her expectations. This put them on the spot. Were they really supposed to record, with the camera’s unblinking faithfulness to the truth, the podgy cheeks, the rather alarming eyes and the excessively compact royal form?

  Plainly, the queen was not vain. But the queen was also not stupid. She and Albert knew precisely what they were doing when they commissioned photographs. The thousands of prints made between the late 1850s and the end of the reign transformed the relationship between crown and people more thoroughly than anything since the Civil War. Lady Day’s photographs of the Osborne summer were engraved for public circulation; but 14 of the plates from a series made a year later by Mayall were specifically chosen for publication as cartes-de-visite. Invented by the French photographer André Disdéri, these were multiple (usually eight) exposures that could be taken from a single plate, and were originally meant, as their name implied, as trade or artistic advertisements to be exchanged between photographers themselves, either amateur or professional. In Britain, however, they were circulated – so the authority on royal photographs, Helmut Gernsheim, claims – in hundreds of thousands. Escaping from the rarefied circles of photography into the public domain of the middle class, the cards were prized, collected and traded as cherished objects. Family albums, specially designed with windows into which cartes-de-visite could be slipped without the need for gum, meant that for the first time the image of the royal family could appear on the drawing-room tables of the British middle classes.

  That image, carefully designed by Albert and Victoria themselves, was itself an extraordinary departure from tradition. ‘They say no Sovereign was ever more loved than I am (I am bold enough to say)’, the queen had written to her uncle, King Leopold, in 1858 in a rush of pardonable self-congratulation. And she had no doubt why. It was ‘because of our domestic home; the good example it sets’. So none of the Mayall, Day or Fenton photographs of the royal couple showed Albert and Victoria in anything remotely approaching a ceremonial role, or in military finery, swagged with the tiers of medals and ropes of epaulettes favoured by European autocrats. It would have been unthinkable, of course, for Victoria to have donned a uniform, and Albert had specifically declined the Duke of Wellington’s proposal, in 1850, that he should serve as commander-in-chief of the army. So the prince filled his frock coat as majestically and martially as he could, while little Victoria, plumping out to the pudding shape that would be her
enduring image, ballooned in satin crinoline. It was the rituals of the bourgeois calendar that were most on show – the holidays in the Highlands and on the Isle of Wight; the stroll with the dogs in the park; carol-singing around the Christmas tree; Albert playing Mendelssohn at the organ; Victoria adoringly cross-stitching. There was even a white-haired, bonneted granny to round out the scene since a chastened Duchess of Kent, far removed from her dynastic adventurism, had been welcomed back into the family fold. Never mind that the holiday homes were palatial; the park was Windsor and mostly off limits to the public; and that none of these activities was exactly comparable to the annual round of a Tunbridge Wells solicitor, much less a Solihull grocer; the artfully conveyed impression was of a reassuringly solid, unpretentious and, above all, Christian–patriotic way of life. Reciprocal visits in 1855 of the Emperor Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie to Britain, and of Victoria and Albert to Paris, only reinforced the image of the queen as wholesomely innocent of glamour (although not of gaiety). Sniggering criticism of her fashion sense, or lack of it, was provoked not so much by dowdiness as by unfortunate gaudiness; typical (it was insinuated in Paris) of the bourgeoise trying a little too hard to be cheerful. The black and white collotypes of the 1850s do little to suggest the brilliant stripes and checks loved by Victoria, along with parasols of clashing colours. Parrot-green was apparently a favourite.