The Emergence of Stability in the Industrial City

Manchester, 1832–67

Martin Hewitt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781351890748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The rapid eclipse of Chartism, and the relative tranquility of the period 1848-67 has been one of the most enduring puzzles of nineteenth-century British history. This book takes a fresh look at this conundrum, treating the period between the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 as a coherent whole for the first time. It suggests that previous depictions of 1848 as a watershed in British history have both exaggerated the nature of the transitions which occurred at mid-century, and have over-estimated both the collapse of radical attitudes and the fading of working-class resentment. The experiences of the Manchester working class show that poverty, unemployment and hardship persisted through the mid-Victorian boom. While some workers may have taken advantage of economic opportunities and the various movements of social and moral reform promoted by the middle class to acquire respectability, in general, attempts at middle-class 'moral imperialism' brought only marginal changes to popular culture and attitudes. Instead, it is argued, the roots of the radical collapse and of political stability lie elsewhere: in the initial failure of radical leaders to sustain a firm consensus on effective strategies of reform, and in changes in the political culture of the mid-century city which closed off spaces in which independent working-class politics could continue to function. In the context of the most important industrial city of the era, this study provides a wide-ranging analysis of the complex forces which forged the uneasy compromise on which mid-nineteenth century stability rested.

Chapter One Introduction

A mid-century watershed?

Until recently it would have been impossible to conceptualise British history in the nineteenth century without acknowledging the presence of a fundamental watershed at around mid-century, involving what Trygve Tholfsen has described as ‘the swift transition from the militant working class radicalism of the 1830s and 1840s to the relative quiescence of the age of equipoise’.¹

The debate which existed – and it existed in profusion – concerned the genesis and significance of this transition. Did it, as G.M. Young once suggested, mark merely a return to normality, so that ‘[a]fter all the alarms and agitations of thirty years, the State had swung back to its natural centre’.² Or did it, as many later historians, especially of the Left, argued, constitute a more decisive moment of definition for British political culture, ‘a change of atmosphere’, as David Kynaston puts it, ‘so fundamental that it gave the British labour movement a reformist character of apparent permanence’.³

In the last decade, however, the established depiction of mid-century discontinuity has been challenged, largely by two bodies of research emanating from Cambridge and Manchester, which we might describe as the ‘Cambridge School’⁴ and the ‘Manchester School’⁵ (with apologies to Richard Cobden and his allies). The Cambridge School, concentrating on studies of the ideologies and practices of chartism and working-class or reforming liberalism, has argued the defeat of the chartists in 1848 and their subsequent decline were not as significant as hitherto suggested, because chartism was not the revolutionary class-conscious movement it had been painted. The reformist lib-labism enshrined in the Gladstonian Liberal party did not mark a break with the past, but rather the culmination of traditions of radicalism stretching back into the eighteenth and seventeenth centuries. 1848 was not a watershed, but merely a staging post on the long climb towards the summit of Gladstonian Liberalism. Taking a complementary perspective, which is focused on local rather than national politics, and on political culture rather than political action, the Manchester School has stressed the multiple meanings and gradual evolution of rituals, symbols and ideas, in such a way as to question both the significance of class, and the validity of the Thompsonian narrative of the formation (and then presumably the destruction or demobilisation) of the English working class.

It is easy, as Robbie Gray has recently pointed out, to take joy in demolishing the familiar landmarks of historical chronology, to uncover elements of continuity with which to soften sharp breaks in the historical narrative.⁶ It is almost as easy, of course, to cling to established ways of thinking, especially ways which have for so long defined the questions asked, and the approaches taken, by many historians. What recent scholarship has done, amongst other things, is to draw our attention to the need for care in evaluating the nature of the transition in mid-nineteenth century Britain. It has challenged a chronological bifurcation which had become almost institutionalised, particularly within British labour history, in which studies tended to deal either with chartism, or with the post-chartist period, and which in the process exaggerated the mid-century hiatus.

However, despite the powerful continuities which the new scholarship traces, it has neither denied nor fully explored the dramatic differences in almost all aspects of political and cultural life between the turbulent antagonisms of the chartist years and the complexly negotiated relations of the 1850s and 1860s.⁷ (This period, as contemporaries were not slow to recognise, saw the emergence of stability in industrial society.) Nor has it done much to bridge the historicar chasm of 1848; with a few honourable exceptions, 1848 remains a watershed that historians of the nineteenth century working below the level of broad survey seem reluctant to traverse.

In response, one of the aims of this study is to confront the period from the 1830s to the 1860s as a whole, through detailed use of primary material from across the period. In this way it seeks to contribute to this process of re-examination, not by denying the dramatic nature of change at mid-century, but rather by uncovering some of the complex inter-relationships between change and continuity which only close study across the ‘watershed’ can reveal.

Marxism and the dynamics of transition?

The renewal of debate over the nature of the mid-century transition has taken place within the context of sustained debate over its causes. Until the mid-1980s this debate might be characterised as comprising a series of internal disagreements within marxist and marxisante labour history over the causes of the failure of the working class to live up to its revolutionary mission, and a more general disagreement between these historians, and those of a more social democratic (if not conservative) frame of reference, who advanced a number of rival arguments, anticipating in many cases some of the themes of the Cambridge School.⁸

The main features of these debates can be quickly caricatured. For many historians mid-Victorian stability was, as Bill Lancaster put it, the ‘simple and unsurprising’ result of prosperity.⁹ Not only did the incidence of cyclical unemployment decrease, and wage levels rise, but the structural dislocation of the early nineteenth century made way both for more stable employment conditions, and the establishment of new supervisory and intermediate grades, whose greater rewards and status contributed to the fragmentation of the working class and the emergence of an aristocracy of labour.¹⁰ The greater prosperity of the post-1850 period also provided scope for a more general ‘liberalisation’ of upper- and middle-class attitudes, building on the legislative concessions of the 1840s, and the fiscal reforms of the 1850s. This both opened up a vista of gradual improvement within the existing political system, and suggested a more accommodating stance towards the working classes on the part of those with political power.

At the same time the diversity of prosperity was emphasised by the cultural accretions, especially the trade unions but also religious, educational, provident and recreational societies, which, as Burgess puts it, ‘acted to confirm the process of working class differentiation’.¹¹ These institutions in many cases functioned as part of a process of social control, or embourgeoisiement, and hence as one wing of the wider processes by which the middle classes controlled and transformed working-class culture, the other wing of which (characterised by Robert Storch’s picture of the policeman as ‘domestic missionary’) were those campaigns and initiatives backed up by the coercive arms of the state, the law, the magistracy, the police, and the poor law guardians.¹²

When, during the 1970s, the concept of social control came under sustained theoretical attack, it was replaced by Gramsci’s theory of hegemony, which for all its more sophisticated theoretical underpinnings, has often been used in a purely analogous fashion, for describing a means by which, whatever the viscidity of the process, the working classes were prevented from developing or sustaining radical ideas, and were either incorporated into the capacious ranks of respectable culture,¹³ or were left inchoate and leaderless by the failure to sustain an intellectual challenge to bourgeois society.¹⁴

In one sense the notion of hegemony, in that it generally argued for the creation of a significant, albeit fragile and limited, consensus between middle and working classes, is part of a wider suggestion that mid-Victorian stability was based on a core of shared values, perhaps deriving from the institutions of respectability and self-help;¹⁵ perhaps emerging out of the complex processes of learning based on the practical lessons of the structures of everyday working-class life, the shape of the family, the overwhelming presence of authority, the symbolic lessons of the physical environment;¹⁶ perhaps the result of the common intellectual heritage of radicalism. Hence for Brian Harrison and Patricia Hollis, the career of Robert Lowery demonstrated the rationality of chartism’s absorption by liberalism.¹⁷

While these arguments undoubtedly provided some of the necessary materials for a comprehensive explanation of the emergence of mid-Victorian stability, they present a series of empirical and theoretical problems. Although the improvement of the economy remains undeniable, the ebb and flow of radicalism was never fully synchronised with the economic cycle, even at the height of chartism in 1841. The rapid collapse in 1842, the narrow revival in 1848, and in particular the lack of response to the quite severe crisis of 1857 and the even more disastrous ‘Cotton Famine’ in the 1860s all call into question any simple connection. Moreover studies of working-class incomes suggest that there was little marked improvement in working-class standards of living and a widespread persistence of working-class poverty into the 1860s.¹⁸ While it is clear that some occupational groups (not necessarily ‘skilled’ workers) did better out of the post-1850 prosperity than others, the notion of a labour aristocracy remains descriptively imprecise, and the implications of wage differentials on social and political attitudes far from clear.¹⁹

Undoubtedly, the middle classes did reap economic benefits from the greater stability of the economy after 1842, and this and the lessons of chartism helped encourage reforming legislation, civic philanthropy, and even a degree of political accommodation; but it is easy to over-exaggerate the impact of these. One of the key elements of liberalisation in the 1840s, the 1847 Ten Hours Act, was in practice reneged on as soon as the act was passed: the 10.5 hour settlement enshrined in the acts of 1850 and 1853 was for the cotton operatives as much a symbol of middle-class perfidy as it was of a new humanitarian state.²⁰ Philanthropy also had its limitations: there was no guarantee, as civic leaders found time and again, that the provision of a library or some drinking fountains could bring more amicable and deferential relations between the classes. While it may well be true, as Joyce has suggested, that there was a much greater chance of success in developing this kind of deferential relationship between an individual master and his workforce within the structures of factory work, the stable factory communities of the North Lancashire towns on which he based his study of factory paternalism were far from characteristic even of Lancashire, the paternalism of the masters was an ambivalent one, and processes which he incorporates into his notion of ‘the culture of the factory’ were largely the same as those which operated so ambiguously in the wider society.

Indeed, in many cases the reaction of the working classes to the institutions of hegemonic control, whether community- or factory-based, was to avoid them. The greater success of such institutions from the 1850s is as much a symptom of the new basis of class relations as a cause, not least because the operation of these institutions cannot be assumed to be detrimental to the maintenance of distinctive working-class attitudes. As Peter Bailey has demonstrated, working-class participation in such institutions often represented a sophisticated process of role playing, the acknowledgement that certain values and beliefs, and the codes of conduct which went with them, were appropriate in certain situations or at certain times but were far from absolutely binding.²¹

Populism, chartism and liberalism

One of the most striking features of the debate as it had evolved into the 1980s was relative neglect of the actual attitudes and beliefs of the working classes. Many studies failed to move beyond a comfortable behaviourism, making little attempt to examine working-class attitudes themselves, and instead taking the apparent collapse of radicalism and increased working-class participation in the institutions of respectability as prima facie evidence of changes in attitude. This was particularly true of the more empirically-inclined non-marxist historians, but it was a danger which even the more sophisticated marxisante historians did not avoid.²² Hence even the culturalist labour aristocracy studies of Gray and Crossick tended to use ‘respectable labour patterns’ or ‘distinct patterns of behaviour’ as a surrogate for attitudes themselves, in the process skirting around the central problem of establishing the full boundaries of the intellectual world in which the working classes lived.²³

It has been the significant achievement of the ‘linguistic turn’ in nineteenth century social history, in striving to emphasise the importance of historical languages, to bring the close study of what, amongst others, the mid-Victorian working class actually wrote and said, back to centre stage.²⁴ In doing so, it has in part taken up the work of the earlier ‘consensus historians’, and considerably developed their insights. It has also essayed a more fundamental challenge to the dominant traditions of nineteenth century social history, repudiating what is seen as the social determinism of cultural materialism, the assumption that, for all the qualifications which might be invoked, political movements and the attitudes which lie behind them ‘are little more than the natural (i.e. causally determined) outgrowths of prior social and economic realities’ – that, in Thompsonian terms, there is a direct relationship between social being and social consciousness.²⁵ Instead, emphasis is placed on the importance of language, symbols, rituals, and the cultural genesis of identities.²⁶ In the process, the linguistic turn seeks to reorder the priority usually given to class, asserting instead ‘the absence of class as the dominant or most meaningful category’.²⁷

The repudiation of class proceeds on several levels. Doubt is thrown on the existence of homogenous class positions by reference to the greater complexity currently ascribed to the process of industrialisation in Britain.²⁸ Detailed empirical investigation of the languages and identities of what might be termed the ‘working class’, is used to demonstrate that although the language of class is never finally eclipsed, increasingly as the century goes on, ‘class is subsumed in broader moral and political values’, and complementary vocabularies of, for example, the ‘people’ are drained of their class connotations, leaving a populist demotic in which languages of class become increasingly prescriptive rather than descriptive, and ‘the principal emphasis is not on class, but on the distinctions between rich and poor’.²⁹ It is suggested that the consciousness of the working class is not the consciousness which is identified in the Thompsonian tradition; i.e., that as the working classes do not focus on economic exploitation, and the replacement of economic individualism by collectivism, they do not demonstrate class consciousness.

Furthermore, the linguistic turn seeks to take issue with the concept of ‘experience’ which was central to the Thompsonian dialectic of consciousness-formation. For Thompson, experience was the frame in which social being was manifested to the individual, the interpretation of which led to consciousness. In the critiques of the Cambridge and Manchester schools, however, Thompson’s notion of ‘experience’ is demonstrated to be both imprecise and inadequate. Not only does it fail to take into account the different levels of experience (which can include, for example, shared family traditions, as ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Manchester: economic growth and social structure
• 3 The genesis of middle-class moral imperialism
• 4 The rejection of religion
• 5 The repudiation of useful knowledge
• 6 The resilience of unrespectable recreation
• 7 The continuities of working-class consciousness
• 8 The strategic contradictions of mid-nineteenth century radicalism
• 9 The restraint of working-class politics
• 10 Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index