Popular virtue

Continuity and change in Radical moral politics, 1820–70

Tom Scriven

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526114778
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Radicalism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A major study into the changes in moral politics and culture of working-class Radicalism during a crucial period of modern British history.

1

A ‘Radical Underworld’? The infidel roots of Chartist culture

Historians of Chartism have tended to downplay the role of its initial authors, the London Working Men’s Association (LWMA), in the movement. Although this group both penned and initially distributed the People’s Charter, the impetus and leadership of the movement quickly shifted north, towards a populist Radicalism centred on the charismatic Feargus O’Connor and his newspaper the Northern Star.¹ The LWMA are largely seen as moralistic, elitist and too small to properly affect political change or forge a coherent movement, representing the interests of the London artisanal labour aristocracy and thus both incapable and unwilling to foster genuinely popular politics.² Its key members – figures like William Lovett, Henry Hetherington, James Watson and John Cleave – have been relegated as a result to a fringe group, who led only a moralistic, intellectual clique. In fact, as the lead figures in the ‘War of the Unstamped’, or the campaign to reduce the tax on newspapers, these figures regularly suffered imprisonment for publishing and selling illegal, unstamped publications.³ In doing so they achieved national notoriety, backed by public support and solidarity, with their newspapers circulating in the tens of thousands.⁴ This campaign built on the position of leadership they had already gained as leaders of the National Union of the Working Classes (NUWC), particularly during the agitation for reform between 1831 and 1832.⁵ It also led to their newspapers and other publications becoming the basis of Radical print and political culture throughout the decade, as well as prominent and influential features in plebeian everyday culture. A month before the Charter was published, William Thackeray visited the Radical booksellers on Paternoster Row and reported that he found ‘nothing of a grave, doctrinal character, and no sort of sober discussion regarding the first principles of that creed which, as we are told, they prize so highly’. All he claimed to find instead was smut.⁶

Thackeray’s observations were partly correct. These newspapers were popular pieces of entertainment and amusement, often combining humour, sexual scandal, and violent police news. Nevertheless, this amusing and ostensibly sensational material was consistent with, and designed to illustrate, the wider moral philosophy and social critique that Radicalism developed throughout the 1820s and 1830s. The popularity and success of this project meant that Cleave, Hetherington, Watson, and their associates formed a significant aspect of the intellectual and cultural backbone of Chartism. In doing so they perpetuated and modified the culture of the ‘Radical Underworld’ that preceded Chartism.⁷ This culture of moral and religious heterodoxy, Republicanism and salacious publications was integral to plebeian Radicalism from the 1790s to the 1820s, but is seen as having died out by the 1830s when the LWMA’s generation took over the leadership of London Radicalism. This chapter will outline how early Chartism grew out of these traditions, which profoundly informed its intellectual and popular print cultures. Rather than elitist moralists as historians have held them, or demagogic sell-outs as Thackeray contended, these men repackaged popular culture and the radical enlightenment to produce a moral populism that is necessary for an understanding of many of the characteristics of Chartism. Their work in the 1820s and 1830s is crucial to understanding the changes within Radical political culture both during and after Chartism.

Chartism’s infidel roots

One of the environments from which this moral populism would emerge was the Freethought culture of the 1820s. Although there was no longer a mass-movement of the lower classes for political reform, as there had been in the 1816–19 period, London’s Radical artisans were enthusiastically adopting the principles and canon of the radical enlightenment, beginning the plebeian refinement of those principles that would become the basis of Chartism. Figures like Hetherington, Watson, and Cleave were immersed in this freethinking culture, and although their trajectories into political Radicalism were disparate by the time of the Reform Crisis between 1830 and 1832 they had refined the key aspects of their Radical populism: a broad idea of civic virtue, resting on universal rationality, liberty, and primitive Christian ethics; a moralism that sought to defend working-class culture while attacking upper-class debauchery and hypocrisy; an intellectualism that sought to inculcate rationalism and scepticism amongst the working class; and a tone of humour, sarcasm, irony, and theatricality. By the late 1830s these aspects had been spliced together into a genuinely popular press and print culture which became the templates for the plethora of Chartist newspapers, which will be discussed later in this chapter. To understand this process it is necessary to first outline the moral philosophy to which they were oriented by the beginning of the 1830s.⁸

Hetherington and Watson would become lifelong friends, co-agitators and business partners. Hetherington was born in Soho and was trained as a printer, picking up his Radicalism during a stint in Belgium following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. By the early 1820s, he had fallen into one of the myriad of ‘rationalist’ Christian sects that existed in London, which grew from the Unitarianism that had become common amongst Radicals following the 1790s.⁹ The ‘Freethinking Christians’ were formed by Westminster victualler Samuel Thompson in 1798, with origins in the Baptist Assembly. The object of Thompson and the other seceders was ‘to make the conduct and example of the first Christians, so far as they followed the commands of Jesus Christ and his apostles, their only rule’, and to this end they initiated the constant and close reading of the New Testament in weekly group meetings a core practice.¹⁰ Hetherington was a member from at least 1823, as he was the printer of the first edition of the Freethinking Christian’s Quarterly Register.¹¹ However, by 1828 he was one of a number of members who left the church, after the Elders had refused to allow entry to a Jewish man even though he had accepted Christ. Hetherington ascribed this to anti-Semitism, writing witheringly that his membership was rejected as ‘the leaders, or teachers, of the church soon ascertained that Mr. Caisson was not quite so rich as Rothschild’.¹² Although the split was divisive, and Hetherington would never again join a sect or church, the basic principles of the Freethinking Christians remained with him as the basis of his moral outlook. His next authored pamphlet, Cheap Salvation, was produced during his imprisonment in Clerkenwell in 1832 for selling unstamped papers.¹³ In this Hetherington rejected all ‘mysterious doctrines’, arguing that Jesus attacked superstition and taught people to think rationally.¹⁴ This position had been undermined by organised priestcraft, which encouraged Christians to ‘sink into a state of imbecility of character’ that permitted the exploitation of the many by the few.

Watson came to similar conclusions.¹⁵ In his recollections of Watson following his death, his friend W.J. Linton suggested that if he ‘had been questioned, I think he might have replied in the words of Paine – To do good is my religion … I would imagine … that his faith was much the same as Paine’s: a simple belief in some over-ruling Power which leads the harmony of the Universe’.¹⁶ Born in Malton, near York, Watson had moved to London from Leeds in 1823 in order to serve as one of the volunteers in the shop of the prominent Radical publisher and atheist Richard Carlile, who was serving a lengthy prison sentence in Dorchester Gaol.¹⁷ As he had intended, Watson was arrested and imprisoned for selling Elihu Palmer’s Principles of Nature, an avowedly Deist text which was known for its strident tone and admired by Paine.¹⁸ Prevented by the judge from reading from Palmer’s book during his trial defence, Watson instead read from James Foster’s 1754 text, Discourses on all the principal branches of natural religion and social virtue, which argued that the desire for liberty was so universal that it could only be concluded that it was ‘a divine instinct and impulse in the human soul’.¹⁹ The universal nature of liberty and rationality meant that God clearly intended all to be both socially and politically equal, leading Watson to conclude: ‘What communication have my inquisitors had with God, that they audaciously set up a system before which all men shall prostrate themselves.’²⁰ It was on this point that Freethought enabled the egalitarian political and social conclusions that animated Radicalism throughout the 1830s. Both Watson and Hetherington subscribed to a Newtonian Deist understanding of God, defined by Hetherington as an ‘incomprehensive Supreme Cause’, the laws of which were ‘calculated to promote universal happiness’.²¹ In this understanding, the ‘Supreme Cause’ established the self-regulating laws of the universe, which were benign and beneficial, but most importantly progressive. Living ‘naturally’ did not mean in a primitive manner, but instead in accord with natural laws, which tended towards the improvement of individuals. Individuals would in turn improve social and political structures, which had a tendency to become rigid and static largely out of the self-interest of the elite. Violation of these laws produced negative results. In physiological terms, for instance, failure to live according to natural law produced disease, while in political terms it would cause demoralisation, ignorance...