Victorian Labour History

Experience, Identity and the Politics of Representation

John Host

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134663217
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First Published in 2004. In Victorian Labour History: Experience, Identity and the Politics of Representation, John Host addresses liberal, Marxist and postmodernist historiography on Victorian working people to question the special status of historical knowledge. The central focus of this study is a debate about mid-Victorian social stability, a condition conventionally equated with popular acceptance of the social order. Host does not join the debate but takes it as his object of analysis, deconstructing the notion of stability and the analyses that purport to explain it. In particular, he takes issue with historical evidence, noting the different possibilities for meaning that it allows and the speculative character of the narratives to which it is adduced. Host examines an extensive range of archival material to illustrate the ambiguity of the historical field, the rhetorical strategies through which the illusion of its unity is created, and the ultimately fictive quality of historical narrative. He then explores the political contingency of the works he addresses and the political consequences of representing them as true.

1
NARRATIVES OF THE PAST OR HISTORIES OF THE PRESENT?

Throughout the twentieth century and increasingly in recent decades, the life-expectancy of historiographical conventions has tended to diminish. Empirical research uncovers evidence which modifies or even negates earlier accounts; new theoretical developments, reflecting different epistemological positions, undermine the truth effects of conventional histories; and current events serve to falsify the teleologies of existing narratives, demanding new constructions of the past and demonstrating the extent to which the meaning of the past is determined in the present.¹ Predominantly, though not exclusively, the production of ‘new’ history has been an enterprise of the Left, an important aspect of whose role has been to challenge dominant truth. And perhaps nowhere more, nor with more intellectual rigour, has the past so consistently been rewritten than in the historiography of the nineteenth-century English working classes.

Chartism serves as a salutary example of this process. In some histories it has been interpreted as a purely working-class phenomenon; in others as a movement linked to and influenced, even compromised, by middle-class radicalism. Research now indicates that Chartism exerted a profound effect throughout Britain and Ireland, yet a 1925 publication, in which the 1839 Newport debacle was depicted as Chartism’s most memorable event, was sufficiently respected at mid-century to be republished with two additional print-runs.² And whereas the movement could once be dismissed as a futile expression of protest against temporary distress, which dissolved when conditions improved, it has since been represented as an important agent of change which foreshadowed and precipitated substantial ameliorative reform.³

Class is another site at which the history of Chartism has been subjected to persuasive and authoritative reinterpretation, notably by the proponents of a new populist historiography, but the class character of the movement is a convention which continues to resist displacement. Hence the prevailing consensus is that the Chartist era was a watershed beyond which an older, more spontaneous radicalism based on an appeal to tradition, or customary rights, gave way to organized political agitation which reflected popular acceptance of social and economic change and a growing consciousness among workingpeople of their class identity.⁴ Class consciousness is seen as an awareness among workers that their interests were different from, and in tension with, those of the employing and propertied classes. In E.P.Thompson’s formulation, it was ‘the consciousness of an identity of interests as between…diverse groups of working people and as against the interests of other classes’.⁵ This consciousness, according to Thompson, was awakened simultaneously among the middle and working classes in a process largely completed by 1830.⁶ More recently, however, it has been suggested that workers began to identify in class terms only with (or after) the advent of the 1832 Reform Act, and that they did so less antagonistically than Thompson discerned. But insofar as class consciousness continues to be discussed, it is construed in terms of one class defining itself against another.⁷

If the interpretative importance of class consciousness has diminished in recent decades, it nevertheless remains the most substantial historiographical link between Chartism and mid-Victorian radicalism.⁸ It is seen by many commentators to have informed the mid-Victorian fulfilment, albeit in varying degrees and modified forms, of a range of Chartist objectives. Some exception to this construction is taken by the liberal minority among labour historians, who recognize a progressive improvement in the working-class condition but suggest that it was an inevitable development which had little to do with class consciousness.⁹ Marxist historiography also resonates with the idea of progress, but renders it in terms of working-class achievement, in an equation to which class consciousness is an indispensable term. In constructions of the later period this equation constitutes a problem, for the evidence appears to indicate that, with the demise of Chartism, politicized workers often sought accommodation with the bourgeoisie, and working-class initiatives were far too narrowly based to constitute class actions. Historians have therefore been constrained to address the question of why the working class has not fulfilled the role of ‘revolutionary class actor’ in which Marxian theory cast it.

This need has produced a range of explanations, some of which point to the direct and deliberate practice of social control, and others, based on more sophisticated analyses, to the ideological incorporation of the lower classes with the help of a co-opted labour aristocracy. Such explanations have been contested, however, in histories which elaborate the crystallization of a distinctive and independent working-class culture—with indigenous criteria for self-definition, self-respect and respectability—which successfully resisted ruling ideas. Much of the historiography referred to here is, thus, in a sense, counter-factual, for although it seeks explicitly to engage with working-class experience in terms of what people did and why they did it, its implicit concern is to explain why the working classes failed to institute Marx’s dictatorship of the proletariat. More importantly, the latter approach seeks to demonstrate that this failure did not reflect false consciousness or a lack of working-class agency or complete acquiescence in bourgeois hegemony. It is mainly with this latter body of scholarship that my analysis will be concerned. At one level, the work in question can be situated within the contours of the general debate about mid-Victorian radicalism. However, because of the implied continuities between the Chartist and mid-Victorian periods, its context is considerably broadened. The first step, therefore, will be to illuminate this context in a survey of the main interpretative positions adopted in Chartist and mid-Victorian radical studies, thus to identify important issues which generally constitute the framework of debate and are therefore omitted from discussion.¹⁰ It will then be possible to delineate certain inconsistencies and interpretative problems in the treatment of experience, consciousness and identity by historians of mid-Victorian radicalism, and to raise questions about the character of the historiography itself. Because of its length, the survey will be divided into two sub-chapters. The first will be concerned with liberal and Marxist interpretations which adhere to positivist epistemology. The second will focus on revisionist approaches, most of which employ ‘post-structuralist’ concepts and attempt to distance themselves from positivism.¹¹

WHIG INTERPRETATIONS AND THE MARXIST CHALLENGE

In the first full-length history of Chartism, published in 1854, R.G.Gammage described the movement as one committed to the elimination of social inequality through the political empowerment of the working classes. Its social vision he outlined as a state in which all shared fairly in the work of production, in which no one evaded ‘useful labour’ thus to overburden others and to diminish ‘the public stock of wealth’.¹² Its political purpose he found encapsulated in the People’s Charter, the document from which it took its name. A response both to the 1832 Reform Act, which extended the franchise to £10 householders, effectively excluding most workers, and to a declaration by Lord John Russell that no further extension would be considered, the Charter, he indicated, was a refusal of such limits. The political power implicit in the measures which it proposed—universal male suffrage, annual parliaments, vote by ballot, abolition of the property qualification, payment of Members of Parliament and an equitable electoral redistribution—was in his view such that the working classes, had they obtained it, might have eliminated the social misery by which they were beset.¹³ But the opportunity was denied them, Gammage concluded, by a self-serving cadre of Chartist leaders who divided the movement and eventually destroyed it.¹⁴

Writing in 1894, Sidney and Beatrice Webb also judged Chartism an unmitigated failure, and although they described it as the most important event ‘in the working-class annals from 1837 to 1842’, they treated it as a minor aberration in the larger scheme of things, writing it off in 4 of the volume’s 540-odd pages.¹⁵ They made no reference to Gammage, but like him, they attributed the ‘collapse’ of Chartism to a flawed leadership which reduced ‘Lovett’s high ideal of a complete political democracy to an ignoble scramble for the ownership of small plots of land’.¹⁶ They characterized Chartism as revolutionary but found that, as ‘the ruder methods of the Class War’ gave way to industrial diplomacy, the working-class mind rejected the appeal of revolution for that of a new system of society based on universal agreement.¹⁷ Prominent members of the Fabian Society, the Webbs were exemplars of the kind of socialism which it espoused, condescending from a conspicuous height to the classes which they proposed to transform. They accorded working people no aptitude to control their own affairs and were contemptuous of any attempt to do so. Hence they found that fledgling trade organizations, unserved by ‘professional’ leaders, were inevitably short-lived, while the New Trade Unionism went from strength to strength under the guidance of ‘able and energetic’ individuals like the solicitor W.P.Roberts and, implicitly, themselves.¹⁸ They were obviously convinced that power, politics and leadership should be left to those who knew best. And in the best Whig tradition, they made it equally clear that misguided initiatives like Chartism had little hope of seriously affecting society’s progress.¹⁹

Between 1898 and 1920 a series of more specifically Chartist studies emerged in England and abroad.²⁰ They offered a range of perspectives and gave rise to considerable debate, though always within the limits imposed by positivism and a Whig-like teleology. This framework did not inhibit the repudiation of certain aspects of conventional wisdom. Indeed, in a posthumous 1918 publication, The Chartist Movement,²¹ which subsequently became and remained for many years the definitive history of Chartism, Mark Hovell effectively overturned the traditional interpretation to pronounce Chartism a qualified success.²² Nevertheless, though interested in structural developments, he lacked a structural critique. He projected a sense of the uniqueness of the English political system, and on the basis of certain state-instituted reforms whose effects he scarcely analysed, he depicted it as one singularly responsive to popular demands in which ‘revolutionary initiatives from below’ were rendered irrelevant by the inexorable progress of British democracy.²³

Hovell defined Chartism as a movement born in revolt ‘against intolerable conditions of existence…whose immediate object was political reform and whose ultimate purpose was social regeneration’.²⁴ Unlike Gammage, he found its social programme to be vague and unproductive, ‘a protest against what existed’ rather than ‘a reasoned policy to set up anything concrete in its place’.²⁵ Nevertheless, he identified the deferred implementation of Chartism’s revolutionary political agenda as a measure of the movement’s achievement. ‘Its restricted platform of political reform’, he wrote, ‘though denounced as revolutionary at the time, was afterwards substantially adopted by the British state without any conscious revolutionary purpose or perceptible revolutionary effect’. ‘Before the Chartist leaders had passed away’, he concluded, ‘most of the famous Six Points became the law of the land’.²⁶

In declaring Chartism a partial success on the basis of these developments, Hovell struck a note of irony, for, as he remarked, implementation of its political programme began well after the movement’s demise, and only when the programme was no longer seen as the instrument of social transformation which its architects claimed it would be.²⁷ In addition, he indicated that the ideals embodied in the Charter had been cherished long and widely in English society and that, as it became possible to enshrine them in law, the state did so, quite independently of any need for revolution.²⁸ In this formulation, he simultaneously dignified Chartism and rendered it precocious if not superfluous, for he recognized the state, not Chartism, as the real agent of change. And although he acknowledged that much was yet to be done, he was unmistakably impressed with what the state had thus far accomplished.

As it had become practicable, Hovell observed, ‘the excessive cruelties of the criminal code’ had been abolished, factory reform initiated, religious disabilities dissolved, anti-combination laws repealed and restrictions on free trade removed. If nowadays ‘the gulf between classes is bad enough’, he continued, ‘it is difficult for the present generation to conceive the deeply cut line of division between the governing classes and the labouring masses in the early days of Victoria’.²⁹ At that time, ‘[i]t was the duty of the common man to obey his masters and be contented with his miserable lot’ but this, he suggested, was no longer the case.³⁰ As a consequence of the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884, he wrote, the suffrage had been extended ‘to every adult male householder, and to some limited categories beyond that limit’. And, in 1917, Parliament had begun to enfranchise ...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1: NARRATIVES OF THE PAST OR HISTORIES OF THE PRESENT?
• 2: SOCIAL IDENTITY AND THE REPRESENTATION OF EXPERIENCE
• 3: WHO ARE ‘THE PEOPLE’ IN MID-VICTORIAN LABOUR HISTORY?
• 4: NARRATIVE HISTORY AND THE POLITICS OF EXCLUSION
• AFTERWORD
• APPENDIX: INTRODUCTORY REMARKS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY