Chartism

Edward Royle,Roger Lockyer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317887980
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Grande-Bretagne

This text has established itself as the best short account of the Chartist movement available. It considers its origins and development, placing the movement within its broad social and economic context. Dr Royle also provides clear analysis of its strategy and leadership and assesses the conflicting interpretations for the failure of Chartism.

PART ONE: THE BACKGROUND

1 THE NEW SOCIETY

Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century was the scene of unprecedented economic and social change: so much so that in the 1840s Friedrich Engels could describe what was happening as comparable to the political upheaval in the French Revolution of 1789 [5]. Indeed, industrialisation, urbanisation and pressure of population growth were transforming the face of the countryside and the lives of the people from decade to decade more surely than any political upheaval. The old certainties were being swept away before the march of material progress.

This was the image. The reality was different in two respects. First, the picture of an industrial revolution sweeping the whole of Britain is a grossly exaggerated one by any modern standards; secondly, many of those men and women who were experiencing this revolution were far from convinced that the new society was an improvement on the old.

The industrial revolution made its greatest impact on those parts of the country having exposed coalfields with readily available supplies of both coal and iron. Here, in South Wales and Central Scotland, in the West Midlands and South Lancashire, in the West Riding and on Tyneside, a new human geography was being created, with a new technology, new concentrations of industry and population, and new social relationships. With larger units of production and improved communications, regional specialisation was becoming more marked: cotton manufacture in South Lancashire and the Glasgow area; the metal trades in the West Midlands and South Yorkshire; lace and hosiery production in the East Midlands; worsted manufacture around Bradford in the West Riding at the expense of East Anglia; and woollen production, generally in West Yorkshire at the expense of the West Country. Rural industries everywhere were slowly succumbing to the competition of the towns [16].

Even so, small units of production were still more common than really large-scale enterprises. The typical textile factory in cotton or worsted production had a hundred or so workers; few had over a thousand; and in the woollen industry the average size of workforce was nearer fifty. The backyard workshops of the Black Country were more typical of the metal trades than large concerns such as those at Dowlais in South Wales or Carron in Scotland. Only a small proportion of the total labour force, even in 1851, worked in factories, and the days of the handloom weaver, though numbered, were still far from over, especially in the woollen trade. The largest manufacturing centre was London, which had scarcely any large-scale industry. What was new here, and in the experience of artisans throughout the country, was not the scale of the unit of production but the organisation of production. Increasingly, capitalists, through their control of raw materials and marketing, were able to control the conditions and remuneration of labour, and exploit unregulated and unskilled labour to the detriment of many of the traditionally skilled [84; 89].

With a population in 1841 of two million out of a total population in Britain of a little over eighteen and a half million (with a further eight million in Ireland), London was the greatest economic fact in the life of the nation. Manchester, however, was the ‘shock city’ of the industrial revolution [21]. Here it was that the images of industrial Britain were formed; here visitors came to peer into the future. This might at first seem surprising. In 1851 there were only seven provincial towns in England (and only Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland) with populations over 100,000: Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol, Sheffield and Bradford. The total population of these great cities would have been lost in London, which in the first half of the nineteenth century was expanding by well over 100,000 people each decade. Britain was the most urbanised country in Europe, but it was still a place of medium-to-small towns, overgrown villages and broad acres of open farm land. Even the largest towns were compact. As Geoffrey Best has reminded us, ‘At the beginning of Victoria’s reign Manchester or Leeds were physically as easy to walk out of as Winchester or Stirling are now’ [176, p. 390]. But compactness meant overcrowding. The expanding towns compounded the public health nuisances of rural Britain in a way known previously only in London, and too rapid a growth brought with it a burden of badly built, badly drained, unsanitary and insalubrious dwellings, especially for the lower classes.

What was so shocking about the new industrial towns, epitomised by Manchester, was the pace of change, rather than the scale. Within living memory, villages were turning into cities, green fields being swallowed up by grey buildings and smoke. Increasingly, the social divisions of the new society were being printed on the new urban map. Town centres were becoming slums, squeezed in among commercial developments, as improved communications carried the wealthy to the suburbs and beyond. Town houses were becoming tenements; sunless courts were being built over gardens; railways were marching across living communities like giants, pushing out of their way all that stood in their paths. The modern city was being born [19]. The division of society into classes, not new in itself, was all the more obvious in the smaller, newer towns. Even Manchester, which was a commercial as well as manufacturing town, had something of a metropolitan air, with an estimated two-thirds of its population in 1836 belonging to the operative classes; but in nearby Stalybridge the proportion was 90 per cent [178]. It was in towns like this that the economic basis of class consciousness was being laid – a consciousness felt by industrialists and workers alike. All that was needed to turn consciousness into conflict was an economic or political crisis.

This is what happened on occasions between 1790 and 1850, and in the making of Chartism there is a close connection between economic crises and political unrest. William Cobbett once said, ‘I defy you to agitate a fellow with a full stomach’ [44, p. 80]. This idea led Professor W. W. Rostow to devise a ‘social tension chart’ which attempts to pinpoint those years between 1790 and 1850 when social tension could be expected to be unusually high or low [177]. His method, based on details of the state of the economy and the price of bread, suggests for years of high tension 1795–96, 1801, 1811–13, 1816–17, 1819, 1826–32, 1837–42, 1847–48; and for years of low tension 1790–92, 1798–99, 1802–07, 1809–10, 1815, 1818, 1821–25, 1834–36, 1843–46, 1850. These annual calculations mask seasonal and local variations, but the correlation seems generally good, especially for the Chartist years in the late 1830s and 1840s. It is true that the political message of Chartism did find its readiest, most widespread and most violent responses in years of business depression and high bread prices, though correlation should never be mistaken for cause.

The industrial revolution gave the new society both power and problems, and for a generation the latter seemed in danger of paralysing the former. After 1815 recurrent slumps in trade caused chaos on an unprecedented scale. For thirty-five years the birth pangs of the new society were felt by all classes, for despite a general expansion in the economy, especially in cotton textiles, there were severe periods of cyclical unemployment. The masters were caught in the net of competition. Techniques for producing goods were increasing faster than the markets for those goods. Profit margins in bad years were pared down to nothing, and when no more costs could be saved on machinery, attempts were made to economise on labour. Handworkers were kept on to supply extra labour for the booms, but were the first to be laid off in the slumps. Long after the wages of the cotton handloom weavers had passed their peak, the numbers in the trade continued to grow, right up into the 1830s when there were a quarter of a million of them. Much of the industrial strife of the late 1830s and early 1840s can be traced to depression and attempts to reduce wages. The men fought against their hardships, through their trade unions and political societies, but with little success. Some socialist economists argued that higher wages would fortify the home market, but most masters decided that if foreign corn could be imported into Britain, then not only could their men survive on lower wages but also foreigners would be able to use the exchange gained from grain to purchase British industrial goods.

This economic uncertainty is the background to the many controversies of the 1830s and 1840s – whether a ten-hour day in the textile factories was economically possible (it was argued that all the profit was made in the last hour); whether the poor laws were adequate, or whether they simply made the situation worse; whether the Corn Law should be abolished; whether an aristocratic constitution was appropriate to an industrialising nation; whether the worker was entitled to the full fruits of his own labour; and whether labour, as the main contributor to wealth, should not have the vote [32]. Economic uncertainty was also the background to the feeling which was widely shared in the 1830s that the present system was too frail to last. The new industrial capitalism seemed to contain within itself the seeds of its own destruction. Its contradictions were manifest and apparently insoluble. The capacity to produce greater wealth had, it seemed, also produced greater misery; machines were devouring men while competition was driving down wages and profits [Doc. 28]. Some observers, like Engels and his friend Karl Marx, thought that capitalism was inevitably destroying itself; socialists like Robert Owen daily expected the government to send for them to solve its problems; others, like the Southcottians, prepared to gather in their New Jerusalem at Ashton-under-Lyne to await the Second Coming of Christ [5; 33].

The picture of life in early industrial Britain, though, should not be painted in tones of unrelieved gloom. Not all occupational groups suffered by industrialisation; not all urban life was squalid. Moreover, not all rural life matched that picture of blissful contentment which nostalgic town-dwellers sometimes believed it to have been. The towns had much to offer. The historian of Chartism might dwell on the dark side, and select those aspects of working-class life which prompted political concern and social protest, but these need to be set against the broader canvas of what urban life could be. The city had a magnetic quality, and London had long drawn people from all parts of the country. The new towns similarly had many attractions: an intimacy of social intercourse, a diversity of interests, undoubted opportunities, freedom from traditional restraints and hope of economic freedom from parents – all these drew the young and more adventurous to the towns. The social life of the town, whether expressed in the public house and gin palace or in the temperance society and mechanics’ institute, had a richness rarely found in the countryside [21].

It was this vitality which impressed visitors to the new industrial towns of the provinces, and provided their inhabitants with a confidence that expressed itself in the political and economic life of the nation. The early industrial revolution had given to the provinces, and especially to the North of England, the initiative over London in both social and economic progress, and it is this provincialism which makes the history of Britain in the nineteenth century unique. London, of course, remained pre-eminent as the capital city and seat of government, and any movements seeking to be truly national and to influence politicians through public pressure could not afford to neglect London [Doc. 8], but it was the provinces that provided the dynamism and generated the popular support [22].

2 POLITICAL ORIGINS

Chartism was a product of the industrial revolution and cannot be understood apart from the economic and social problems of Britain in the 1830s and 1840s, but it was also a political movement with a specific programme for radical reform. So, although economic and social circumstances must play an essential part in the historian’s understanding of the incidence of Chartist activity, year by year and area by area, he or she must also ask why the protest movement should have turned to politics.

In the eighteenth century and earlier, the form which crowd activity took was usually determined by the social and economic norms of the community, so that bread riots have to be seen, not as spontaneous outbreaks of irrational though understandable violence, but as attempts of the people to enforce popularly conceived views of the just price. Such notions persisted into the nineteenth century, but increasingly the political response became more marked. The transition involved considerable sophistication, for whereas the link between highly priced grain and the demand for the just price was immediate and obvious, the link between high food prices or unemployment and an abstract programme for political change was far less clear. Lessons about the nature of the prevailing political and economic system had first to be taught, and something of the structure of power in society understood. In other words, for economic grievances to lead to a political response, the crowd had first to become politically aware.

To say that Chartism was primarily a political movement is to make the claim that the Chartists were politically conscious, but many historians have had grave doubts about how true this was. Most would agree that the leaders of the Chartists were acutely politically aware people, as their writings in their newspapers make clear. We may presume that some who read those articles were also capable of understanding their general import and taking their lessons to heart, but we do not know how far down the ranks this sort of political education could penetrate. Did there come a point, and if so where, at which the political programme became a mere incantation to be recited because it was said to be the solution to all problems, and which was accepted as such until the promise proved barren with successive failures to achieve any political change? Rather than assume that politics were of primary concern at this level, should one instead be looking for other influences shaping the popular response to hardship, such as deference to paternalism or the desire to reassert the ‘moral economy’ by direct action, both of which had existed long before the advent of political radicalism and the new industrial society? Finally, one might ask whether the political response in Chartism really was the most appropriate one in circumstances of economic hardship or whether the people were merely deluded by their leaders?

The origins of the radical political programme adopted by the Chartists can be traced back to the third quarter of the eighteenth century, though in a more general way the nineteenth-century radicals also saw themselves as part of the Leveller tradition of the seventeenth. In 1774–75 James Burgh, a disciple of the radical Dissenter, Richard Price, published his Political Disquisitions, in which he renewed the call for manhood suffrage, and in 1776 John Wilkes echoed the cry in a speech in Parliament. From this time onwards the extension of the franchise was firmly established, alongside shorter parliaments, as an essential plank in the reformers’ platform.

This same year, 1776, saw the outbreak of the American rebellion and the publication of Major John Cartwright’s pamphlet, Take Your Choice, which set out the essence of what was to become the Chartist programme, with universal suffrage, annual parliaments and vote by ballot. Unlike Burgh, however, who was willing to contemplate the replacement of Parliament with an alternative assembly (which is what the Americans did), Cartwright more moderately hoped that the Commons could be brought to reform itself. Both Burgh’s and Cartwright’s views were to co-exist within British radicalism, the latter generally predominating.

Great though Cartwright’s contribution was, however, by far the most important of all the eighteenth-century reformers was Thomas Paine, who had cut his radical teeth in the American revolution with his pamphlet Common Sense and his Crisis papers. Back in England in the early 1790s, he went on to celebrate the French Revolution with a vigorous defence of its principles, and an equally vigorous attack on the British system in his two-part Rights of Man (1791–92). These products of Paine’s fluent pen were to become the foundation documents of nineteenth-century British radicalism. As journeymen and apprentices in London, Sheffield, Norwich, Manchester and other towns and villages up and down the country read or heard read aloud extracts from the Rights of Man and similar political pamphlets that rapidly became popular, the theme of the necessity for radical political reform began to strike home. The government clamped down on such seditious works, and Paine left for France, his parting shot being his most radical work, A Letter addressed to the Addressers on the late Proclamation, in which he called for a National Convention elected on adult male suffrage. Though this letter was never as widely circulated as Rights of Man, the idea and the examples of America and France were to remain with the radicals and shape the Chartist reaction in 1839.

Paine was both a political pamphleteer and an able political theorist, advocating political, economic and social reforms which only the twentieth century has taken seriously enough to embody in legislative programmes. Even his warmest disciples do not seem to have fully absorbed his teachings on social welfare (including old-age pensions), currency reform, and the foundation of political rights in abstract reasoning. Historical appeals to lost Saxon liberties, denunciations of the Norman Conquest (and sometimes the dissolution of the monasteries as well) long continued to be heard, and for many the Bible continued (in the Puritan tradition) to be regarded as a republican’s handbook, even though Paine thought the very reverse. Paine was popular and influential, but his ideas were absorbed rather than fully understood.

The later eighteenth century also bequeathed to the nineteenth the beginnings of radical organisation, as provincial constitutional societies and the London Corresponding Society (founded 1792) met to discuss, educate their members, and prepare for the day when England and Scotland would throw off their monarchical and aristocratic chains and walk in the full freedom of democracy. How far this brand of radicalism had petered out by the end of the 1790s, or how far it had been suppressed but survived as an underground tradition, is a matter hotly disputed among historians [24]. Certainly, formal political organisations largely disappeared, but in some parts of the country a minority of extremists does seem to have maintained a revolutionary tradition of subversive activity. More respectably, Major Cartwright continued his patient propagandism while Francis Place, master tailor and former member of the London Corresponding Society, began his equally patient career as wire-puller extraordinary in the no-man’s-land between the popular and respectable worlds of London radicalism [62].

The events of the 1790s, when the lower-class wing of the British reform movement took heart from the French Revolution, proved to be a turning-point in the development of radicalism. Although the reformers were a small minority of the population, the skilled and literate artisans had now, if not before,...