A Radical History Of Britain
Page 60
37 Epstein, Radical Expression, p. 189.
38 A. J. Cross, ‘“What a world we make the oppressor and the oppressed”: George Cruickshank, Percy Shelley and the gendering of revolution in 1819’, English Literary History, 71 (2004), 167–204, at 186.
39 For this image see D. Donald, ‘The power of print: graphic images of Peterloo’, Manchester Region History Review, 3 (1989), 21–9.
40 Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, p. 156.
41 Cross, ‘Cruikshank’, p. 168.
42 Quoted in Bush, ‘Women at Peterloo’, 222.
43 Ibid., 174–5; Bamford, Passages, p. 154.
44 Epstein, Radical Expression, p. 96.
45 M. Levene, Introduction to M. Levene and P. Roberts, eds, The Massacre in History (Oxford, 1999), p. 9.
46 Thompson, TMEWC, p. 754. There is also the possibility that some of the violence was motivated by sectarian hatred. The yeomanry had connections with the British Grand Orange Lodge (based in Manchester). Thompson believed that there was little involvement in Peterloo of the Manchester Irish, but Bush’s research shows that ninety-seven of the casualties claimed Irish descent: Bush, Casualties of Peterloo, p. 29. See also D. MacRaild, Faith, Fraternity and Fighting: The Orange Order and Irish Migrants (Liverpool, 2005), p. 39.
47 Bush, Casualties of Peterloo, p. 138.
48 Thompson, TMEWC, pp. 751, 768.
49 Ibid., p. 81.
50 Ibid., pp. 53–4.
51 Ibid., pp. 55–6.
52 Ibid., p. 157.
53 On Hunt’s ‘sufferings’ in gaol see M. C. Finn, ‘Henry Hunt’s Peep into Prison: the radical discontinuities of imprisonment for debt’, in Burgess and Festenstein, English Radicalism, pp. 190–217, at pp. 201–2. These pleasures were eventually removed from Hunt as a result of investigations by the former prison taskmaster Daniel Lake, who alleged, among other things, that the gaoler’s wife, Mrs Bridle, had been offering sexual favours to the prisoners.
54 Here I cannot agree with Belchem’s assessment that the ‘authorities were quite confounded by the nature of the radical challenge’. ‘Peterloo’ was quite easily accommodated into dominant narratives of the unruliness of the people. Belchem, ‘Orator’ Hunt, p. 109.
55 ‘Manchester Aug. 26th’, The Times, 28 August 1819.
56 J. Wroe, Part One: The Peter Loo Massacre! (Manchester, 1819), p. 9.
57 Quoted in M. Wainwright, ‘Battle for the memory of Peterloo’, Guardian, 13 August 2007.
58 ‘Salford sessions – libel, Manchester Jan 27 1820’, The Times, 29 January 1820.
59 Figure quoted in R. Holmes, Shelley: The Pursuit (rev. edn, London, 1994), p. 540.
60 National Archives, MPI 1/134, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/human-rights/1815-1848/doc-peterloo-image.htm, accessed on 14 May 2008.
61 Quoted in Cross, ‘Cruikshank’, 187.
62 W. Keach, ‘The Political Poet’, in T. Morton, ed., Cambridge Companion to Shelley (Cambridge, 2006), ch. 7, at p. 131.
63 Introduction, in ibid., p. 1.
64 For these references see McElligott, ‘William Hone’, pp. 6–9.
65 Dinwiddy, From Luddism to the First Reform Bill, p. 34.
CHAPTER 14
1 Bush, ‘Women at Peterloo’, p. 223.
2 ‘High Treason: Preston, Dec. 4’, The Times, 7 December 1819.
3 D. Johnson, Regency Revolution: The Case of Arthur Thistlewood (Salisbury, 1974), p. 109.
4 Quoted in Thompson, TMEWC, pp. 73–4.
5 See M. Chase, ‘Cato Street Conspirators’, ODNB; Johnson, Regency Revolution, for the Cato Street Conspiracy.
6 P. Berreford Ellis, ‘John Baird’, ODNB.
7 Thompson, TMEWC, p. 775–6.
8 Dinwiddy, From Luddism to the First Reform Bill, p. 38.
9 Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, p. 171.
10 Clark, Scandal, pp. 106–7
11 Ibid., p. 196.
12 Quoted in Epstein, Radical Expression, p. 119.
13 Dinwiddy, From Luddism to the First Reform Bill, p. 8.
14 Quoted in P. Schofield, ‘Jeremy Bentham, the French Revolution and Political Radicalism’, in F. Rosen, ed., Jeremy Bentham (Farnham, 2007), ch. 22, at p. 544.
15 F. Rosen, ‘Jeremy Bentham’s Radicalism’, in Burgess and Festenstein, eds, English Radicalism, ch. 9, pp. 230–2.
16 J. R. Dinwiddy, ‘Bentham’s Transition to Political Radicalism, 1809–1810’, in his Radicalism and Reform in Britain, 1780–1850 (London, 1992), ch. 15, p. 288.
17 Dinwiddy, From Luddism to the First Reform Bill, p. 33.
18 Rosen, ‘Bentham’s Radicalism’, p. 228.
19 Dinwiddy, From Luddism to the First Reform Bill, p. 17.
20 Ibid., p. 18.
21 Ibid., p. 14.
22 Ibid., p. 28.
23 Thompson, TMEWC, p. 567.
24 Hone, Radicalism in London, pp. 320–1.
25 Hilton, Mad, Bad and Dangerous People?, p. 574.
26 Ibid., p. 576.
27 Cole and Postgate, British Common People, p. 240.
28 Dinwiddy, From Luddism to the First Reform Act, p. 59.
29 Dinwiddy, ‘Bentham’s Transition’, pp. 286–7.
30 See D. Hirst, The Representatives of the People? Voters and Voting in England under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge, 1975), p. 105. But, as Mark Kishlansky points out, the right to vote and the actual exercising of that vote were two different things: Parliamentary Selection: Social and Political Choice in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1986).
31 The point is well made in Hilton, Mad, Bad and Dangerous People?, pp. 422–3. For categorical evidence that the Great Reform Act ‘diminished the penetration of the electorate down the social scale’, see O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties, p. 217.
32 Although O’Gorman notes that labourers voted two to one against Hunt at the 1830 election: ibid., p. 221.
33 T. Morton, ‘Receptions’, in T. Morton, ed., Cambridge Companion to Shelley (Cambridge, 2006), ch. 2, at p. 40.
34 Quoted in S. Schofield, Short Stories about Failsworth Folk (Blackpool, 1905), pp. 40–1. Another old Chartist, Ben Wilson, also began his political autobiography with Peterloo: see Vincent, ed., Testaments of Radicalism, p. 195. In Britain, the memory of Peterloo continues to be commemorated, thanks in large part to the efforts of the Peterloo Memorial Campaign: see D. Ward, ‘New plaque tells truth of Peterloo killings 188 years on’, Guardian, 27 December 2007.
PART SIX: A KNIFE-AND-FORK QUESTION
1 Quoted in D. Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (Aldershot, 1986), p. 146.
CHAPTER 15
1 Quoted in P. Jones, ‘The Tolpuddle Martyrs Museum and related sites’, Labour History Review, 67 (2002), 221–8, at 225.
2 On the legal aspects of the case see J. Marlow, The Tolpuddle Martyrs (London, 1971), chs 5–7. This line of attack was used in other cases to hobble early trade associations: see J. V. Orth, Combination and Conspiracy: A Legal History of Trade Unionism, 1721–1906 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 113–14. On the importance of oaths and other ritual aspects to early trade unions, see M. Chase, Early Trade Unionism: Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 167–70.
3 Marlow, Tolpuddle Martyrs, p. 115.
4 Chase, Early Trade Unionism, pp. 162–6.
5 For their conditions see Marlow, Tolpuddle Martyrs, chs 10–11.
6 Ibid., p. 272.
7 Quoted in J. Epstein, The Lion of Freedom: Feargus O’Connor and the Chartist Movement, 1832–1842 (London, 1982), p. 18.
8 On the links between Loveless and Chartism see R. Wells, ‘Southern Chartism’, in J. Rule and R. Wells, Crime, Protest and Popular Politics in Southern England 1740–1850 (London, 1997), ch. 7, at p. 129; C. V. J. Griffiths, ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs’, ODNB.
9 Epstein, Lion of Freedom, pp. 90–1.
10 Quoted in M. Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester, 2007), p. 21.
11 Hay and Rogers, Eighteenth-Century Englis
h Society, p. 9.
12 G. Claeys, ed., The Chartist Movement in Britain 1838–1850 (6 vols, London, 2001), i, p. xx.
13 F. Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England, trans. and ed. W. O. Henderson and W. H. Chaloner (Stanford, 1958), p. 312.
14 Quoted in Chase, Chartism, p. 22.
15 E. Royle, Chartism (3rd edn, Harlow, 1996), p. 97; Vincent, ed., Testaments of Radicalism, p. 187.
16 On the debate over the ‘economic’ or ‘political’ nature of Chartism see G. Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in his Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), ch. 3.
17 On the full powers given by the coercion bill and the English reaction to it see Thompson, Chartists, p. 19.
18 D. Slack, ed., Lives of Victorian Political Figure, II: vol. 4, James Bronterre O’Brien (London, 2007), p. xii. See for O’Brien’s interest in land reform, prefiguring the Land Plan by over a decade, A. Plummer, Bronterre: A Political Biography of Bronterre O’Brien 1804–1864 (London, 1971), p. 36.
19 Though Slack suggests that Bronterre’s increasingly ‘difficult’ behaviour was the result of mental illness, not heavy drinking: see Slack, O’Brien, pp. xxxv–xxxvii.
20 See the reproduction in Claeys, Chartist Movement, i, p. 120. For a discussion of the People’s Charter which goes beyond the Six Points see M. Taylor, ‘The Six Points: Chartism and the Reform of Parliament’, in O. Ashton, R. Fyson and S. Roberts, The Chartist Legacy (Woodbridge, 1999), ch. 1.
21 Epstein, Lion of Freedom, p. 23.
22 M. Chase, ‘London Working Men’s Association’, ODNB.
23 Thompson, Chartists, p. 120.
24 Ibid., pp. 57–8.
25 P. A. Pickering, ‘“And Your Petitioners &c.”: Chartist petitioning in popular politics 1838–48’, English Historical Review, 116 (2001), 368–88, at 378. Thompson, Chartists, p. 60, questions the worth of petitioning in binding together Chartist groups. However, she arguably employs too restrictive a definition of who was a Chartist. Chartism was a mass movement, but not a mass membership movement. In this respect, as in others, it was like a modern political party.
26 Pickering, ‘Chartist petitioning’, 379.
27 Ibid., 378.
CHAPTER 16
1 Stephens, ‘The Political Pulpit’, no. 6, delivered at Shepherdess Fields, Islington, London, 12 May 1839, in Claeys, Chartist Movement, i, p. 264.
2 Thompson, Chartists, p. 67.
3 For these rumours, see D. J. V. Jones, The Last Rising: The Newport Insurrection of 1839 (Oxford, 1985), p. 94.
4 Chase, Chartism, p. 113.
5 Ibid., p. 116.
6 Jones, Last Rising, p. 198.
7 See for example Stephens, ‘The Political Pulpit’, no. 12, sermon delivered at Ashton-under-Lyne, 9 June 1839, which employed King Alfred, Henry of Bracton, Queen Elizabeth I, Algernon Sidney and William Blackstone (on the Bill of Rights), in Claeys, Chartist Movement, i, pp. 340–1.
8 Ibid., ii, p. 13.
9 See Eckersley, ‘Of radical design’, p. 572.
10 See Thompson, Chartists, p. 67: ‘The question was much more one of tactics than one of fundamental principle.’ This is half right. Public attitudes towards the right of resistance shifted according to circumstances, but the point is that the right of resistance had been an accepted part of one British political ideology, Whiggery, for well over a century.
11 The Northern Star, III, 142, 1 August 1840, reproduced at http://ncse-viewpoint.cch.kcl.ac.uk/Repository/NSS/1840/08/01/101-NSS-1840-08-01-PG0 01.PDF#OLV0_Page_0001, accessed on 18 June 2008. See also M. Chase, ‘National Charter Association of Great Britain’, ODNB.
12 Quoted in Thompson, Chartists, p. 131. For women and Chartism generally see ibid., ch. 7.
13 Stephens, ‘The Political Pulpit’, no. 2, in Claeys, Chartist Movement, i, p. 214.
14 Thompson, Chartists, p. 137.
15 Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 259.
16 K. Marx, ‘The Chartist movement’, New York Tribune, 25 August 1852, reproduced at http://gerald-massey.org.uk/jones/b_marx.htm, accessed on 20 June 2008. For other comments from Marx lauding the Chartists see Chase, Chartism, p. 289.
17 Ibid., p. 250.
18 See for example Tom Nairn, The Enchanted Glass: Britain and Its Monarchy (2nd edn, London, 1994), pp. 205, 327.
19 Quoted in Pickering, ‘Popular monarchism’, 243.
20 R. Carlile, An Address to that Portion of the People of Great Britain and Ireland calling themselves Reformers (1839), in Claeys, Chartist Movement, ii, 136.
21 Engels, Condition of the Working Class, p. 259. Of course, the anti-democratic Bagehot thought that this ‘sham’ was actually a good thing, as it served to distract the disgruntled working classes from the true source of their misery.
22 Pickering ‘Popular monarchism’, 242.
23 Quoted in Chase, Chartism, p. 241.
24 Ibid., p. 168.
25 Claeys, Chartist Movement, i, p. 244.
26 Chase, Chartism, p. 171.
27 Ibid., p. 172.
28 Ibid., p. 174.
29 Ibid., p. 197.
30 Ibid., p. 183.
31 See Marx, ‘The Chartist movement’.
32 Chase, Chartism, p. 202.
33 Claeys, Chartist Movement, i, p. 135.
34 Chase, Chartism, p. 206.
35 Ibid., p. 214.
36 Quoted in Chase, ‘National Charter Association of Great Britain’, ODNB.
37 Chase, Chartism, p. 223.
38 Ibid., p. 224.
39 Ibid., p. 214.
40 Ibid., p. 241.
CHAPTER 17
1 See R. Moran, ‘Daniel McNaughtan’, ODNB.
2 Chase, Chartism, p. 209.
3 Ibid., p. 248.
4 Ibid., pp. 250–1.
5 Ibid., p. 249.
6 Ibid., p. 253.
7 Quoted in J. Bronstein, ‘The homestead and the garden plot: cultural pressures on land reform in nineteenth-century Britain and the USA’, European Legacy, 6 (2001), 159–75, at 168.
8 Chase, Chartism, p. 260.
9 Ibid., pp. 260–1.
10 Ibid., p. 284.
11 Quoted in S. Roberts, ‘Feargus O’Connor in the House of Commons, 1847–1852’, in Ashton et al., eds, The Chartist Legacy, ch. 5, at p. 105.
12 Chase, Chartism, p. 294.
13 Ibid., p. 295.
14 For a detailed breakdown of the figures see D. Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–1848 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 136–40.
15 Quoted in Claeys, Chartist Movement, i, p. xxxii.
16 Chase, Chartism, p. 302.
17 Quoted in Royle, Chartism, p. 45.
18 Quoted in Vincent, ed., Testaments of Radicalism, p. 202.
19 P. Fryer, ‘William Cuffay’, ODNB.
20 Pickering, ‘A Wider Field’, p. 43; Chase, Chartism, p. 311.
21 In Claeys, Chartist Movement, i, p. xxxii.
22 P. A. Pickering, ‘The Chartist Rites of Passage: Commemorating Feargus O’Connor’, in P. A. Pickering and A. Tyrrell, eds, Contested Sites: Commemoration, Memorial and Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke, 2004), ch. 5, pp. 116–17. The statue is currently in a rather neglected state: see http://pmsa.cch.kcl.ac.uk/NM/SB0077.htm, accessed on 11 June 2008.
23 Chase, Chartism, p. 328.
24 Quoted in Bronstein, ‘Homestead and the garden plot’, 168.
25 Ibid., 171.
26 Royle, Chartism, p. 49.
27 Ibid., p. 50.
28 Ibid., p. 86.
29 B. Brierley, Home Memories and out of Work (Bramhall, 2002), p. 23.
30 Vincent, ed., Testaments of Radicalism, p. 141.
31 Ibid., p. 211.
32 G. Monbiot, ‘These objects of contempt are now our best chance of feeding the world’, Guardian, 10 June 2008.
33 For the commemoration of Tolpuddle see C. V. J. Griffiths, ‘Remembering Tolpuddle: rural history and commemoration in the in
ter-war labour movement’, History Workshop Journal, 44 (1997), 145–70; Jones, ‘Tolpuddle Martyrs Museum’.
34 J. Lawrence, ‘Popular socialism and the socialist revival in Britain’, Journal of British Studies, 31 (1992), 163–82, at 172, for the influence of Chartism on the early Labour Party.
35 P. Wright, On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in Contemporary Britain (London, 1986), p. 56.
36 M. Chase, ‘“Wholesome object lessons”: the Chartist Land Plan in retrospect’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003), 59–85, at 85.
37 I thank Malcolm Chase for this point.
38 www.chartists.net.
PART SEVEN: THE BLOODLESS REVOLUTION
1 Annie Kenney, Memories of a Militant (London, 1924), p. xx.
CHAPTER 18
1 Quoted in P. Foot, The Vote: How It Was Won, How It Was Undermined (London, 2005), p. 148.
2 J. Rendall, ‘The Citizenship of Women and the Reform Act of 1867’, in C. Hall, K. McClelland and J. Rendall, eds, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 3, p. 135.
3 Ibid., p. 136; for the figures see K. T. Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998), p. 253. The relatively small increase in the county franchise reflected, along with the redistribution of pocket boroughs to counties rather than large Liberal-voting cities, Disraeli’s cunning skewing of the act to favour Tory voters.
4 J. Purvis, Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (London, 2002).
5 M. Phillips, The Ascent of Woman: A History of the Suffragette Movement and the Ideas behind It (London, 2003), p. 242. Phillips’s approach was neatly lampooned by June Purvis in her review ‘Man-hating lesbian precursors of the Nazis and their struggle for higher morality’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 10 October 2003.
6 See Martin Pugh’s The Pankhursts (London, 2001). Pugh’s work came in for heavy criticism: J. Purvis, ‘Pugh’s book is full of errors’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 22 January 2002; H. Swain, ‘The Pankhursts – politics and passion’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 25 January 2002; J. Liddington, ‘Pankhursts and provocations’, Times Higher Education Supplement, 31 January 2003.
7 An exception is Pugh’s Pankhursts.
8 On the centenary see J. Liddington, ‘Era of commemoration: celebrating the suffrage centenary’, History Workshop Journal, 59 (2005), 195–218.
9 E. Pankhurst, ‘Why We Are Militant’, in J. Marcus, ed., Suffrage and the Pankhursts (London, 1987), p. 154.