Celebrities, heroes and champions

Popular politicians in the age of reform, 1810–67

Simon James Morgan

• Verlag: Manchester University Press
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526117458
• Thema: Storia
• Thema: Storia sociale

Celebrities, heroes and champions explores the role of the popular politician in British and Irish society from the Napoleonic Wars to the Second Reform Act of 1867. Covering movements for parliamentary reform up to and including Chartism, Catholic Emancipation, transatlantic Anti-Slavery and the Anti-Corn Law League, as well as the receptions of international celebrities such as Lajos Kossuth and Giuseppe Garibaldi, it offers a unique perspective on the connections between politics and historical cultures of fame and celebrity. This book will interest students and scholars of Britain, Ireland, continental Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, as well as general readers with an interest in the history of popular politics. Its exploration of the relationship between politics and celebrity, and the methods through which public reputations have been promoted and manipulated for political ends, have clear contemporary relevance.

1

Building reputations: the path to renown

As a youth, the Irish radical Daniel O’Connell was reputedly fascinated by the Dublin Magazine’s portraits of contemporary celebrities, which included many of the prominent politicians of the time. One of these was Henry Grattan, whose influence was such that he gave his name to the independent Irish Parliament which existed from 1783 to 1800. As Oliver MacDonagh reports it, ‘One day, O’Connell told his elders, his picture would appear in this illustrious succession’, an ambition fulfilled in 1810.¹ Of course, there is a limit to how much store we can set by these memories, at least as indicators of future achievement; how many unremembered youths have indulged in vainglorious boasting? They are more interesting for what they tell us about the late eighteenth-century public sphere in Ireland and the kinds of figures that inspired such aspirations. Never mind that, as a Catholic, O’Connell was automatically debarred from such august company as Grattan’s: inconvenient facts rarely trammel the excursions of a youthful mind, though even at this age O’Connell would have been aware of the harsh realities of the Protestant Ascendancy. The important point is the pull exercised by the theatre of Dublin politics, even half-glimpsed through the Kerry mizzle. What was true of Palace Green was more so of Westminster, particularly after 1801 when the Act of Union silenced ‘Grattan’s Parliament’ forever. In the early nineteenth century, Parliament was one of the few truly national institutions of note; the only one whose members’ words were reported regularly in the daily press. Gaining a hearing from outside it was one of the first and greatest challenges to be overcome by the aspiring popular politician.

The main theme of this chapter is the process by which some of them did so, and how, to employ Antoine Lilti’s terminology, they used the available tools of publicity and communication to forge localised reputations, which could then become the springboard to national or even international renown.² How did they become visible, and how was that process shaped by the nature of the early nineteenth-century public sphere? The chapter concludes with a study of Richard Cobden’s rise to national notoriety through the pages of the British press, taking advantage of the digitisation of nineteenth-century media to establish new methodologies for the study of reputation and fame in the Victorian period. First, however, we will turn to the actors themselves, examining the opportunities and motives which their backgrounds and life experiences provided to raise their reputations beyond their immediate circles of family, friends and collaborators.

Standing out

O’Connell was not alone amongst our case studies in the urge to stand out, and several endured a number of false starts in their efforts to forge public reputations before gaining prominence as popular politicians. The autodidact Thomas Cooper tried several avenues, including Methodist preacher and journalist, before finding Chartism amongst the Leicester stockingers.³ Before his establishment as a successful Lancashire businessman gave him a solid platform from which to launch a career as a pamphleteer and reforming politician, Richard Cobden had tried his hand as a dramatist, receiving rejections for his manuscript of The Phrenologist from the managers of Covent Garden, Drury Lane and the Theatre Royal, Edinburgh.⁴ Ernest Jones, the dominant figure of late Chartism, enjoyed some minor literary success as a poet before taking advantage of the position vacated by Cooper as Chartism’s ‘poet laureate’, thus rescuing himself from a downward spiral of poverty.⁵ James ‘Bronterre’ O’Brien had been destined for the Irish bar before being seduced by radical politics in 1830s London.⁶

Cobden, Cooper and Jones had very different backgrounds and life experiences, but their literary endeavours reveal much about their early influences and inspirations. In his exploration of Victorian mentalités, Walter E. Houghton posited a connection between admiration of the ‘sublime’, including ‘heroic men and heroic action’, and a mood of ‘excited aspiration’: ‘In the presence of the sublime, one is swept by an exhilarating sense of reaching up, of breaking through limitations, of possessing within himself tremendous potentialities … He longs to be a great man – as distinct from a benevolent man’.⁷ In the early 1800s, Lord Byron emerged as a key source of such sublime inspiration, presenting a compelling model of Romantic literary fame which subsequently captured the imagination of countless male youths, including Benjamin Disraeli.⁸ In the mid-1830s, Cobden and John Bright had each undertaken Mediterranean tours, their responses to the scenes around them influenced by Byron’s descriptions in Childe Harolde.⁹ Cobden’s letters also reveal him to have been an admirer of Robert Burns, whose birthplace he visited while working as a commercial traveller in 1826.¹⁰ Cooper was a keen versifier, and made his national name in Chartism by penning poems and songs for the movement. While awaiting sentencing for seditious conspiracy, for his part in the ‘plug plot’ disturbances of 1842, he conceived the idea of ‘a large work I purpose to complete during my next imprisonment’.¹¹ This became The Purgatory of Suicides, copies of which he smuggled out of Stafford jail for safekeeping. Cooper revealed the scope of the work, and of his own ambitions for it, in a letter to the friend who received the smuggled copies:

I purpose constructing a fabric that shall place me out of the rank of triflers – a severe, serious poem, that will receive all of the grand or sublime I can effect – but no joke, no foolery: satire & irony it may admit of – but only of the gravest & most unrelenting kind. If I carry out my design of 12 books (comprising 1200 Spenserean stanzas), the poem will be something longer than Paradise Lost, – And, let me hope, may be worth one of Milton’s books: that would be immortality.¹²

Cooper believed that his herculean feats of auto-didacticism marked him out above the common herd. Defending himself against charges of despotism in the way he ran Leicester Chartism in 1842, he set out his struggles in the pursuit of knowledge, arguing that ‘such a man is very jealous of other people’s control – and is never likely to seek fetters for his opinions’.¹³ However, to attain prominence in a society dominated by wealth and pedigree required hard work, diligence and not a little luck. As a young man in Gainsborough, Cooper’s feats of learning and early efforts from the Methodist pulpit had attracted the attention of local gentlemen who tried to help him further his career. When he fell out with the Methodist hierarchy, they first set him up as a schoolmaster and then as correspondent of the Lincoln, Rutland and Stamford Mercury, where his acid pen found ample scope in scorching portraits of local preachers.¹⁴ O’Brien was the son of a down-at-heel wine and spirit broker of Co. Longford, who emigrated to the West Indies and abandoned his family. He was saved from anonymous poverty by the headmaster of Granard Parochial School, who secured him a place at the experimental school in Edgeworthstown founded by a brother of the novelist, Maria Edgeworth. He went up to Trinity College Dublin in 1822 as a pensioner, probably funded by the Edgeworths, being admitted to King’s Inn, Dublin, in 1826. The patronage of a wealthy but progressive Anglo-Irish landowning family was therefore essential to securing him a traditional classical education.¹⁵ Cobden, meanwhile, having received only the ‘cruel and disgusting mockery’ of an education at Bowes Hall in Yorkshire (one of the models for Dickens’s ‘Dotheboys Hall’), was largely self-taught.¹⁶ While working for his uncle’s calico firm in London, he attended meetings of local debating societies.¹⁷ Such organisations were a training ground for would-be orators including George Donisthorpe Thompson, who joined both the London Mechanics’ Institute (1823) and the London Literary Institute (1825). Thompson later claimed that his entire library at eighteen years of age consisted of Paradise Lost, Cowper’s poems, a few Shakespeare plays and Johnson’s Rasselas, and that he would ‘loiter about the courts of law in London that he might gaze on the faces and follow in the footsteps of Lord Brougham and Lord Lyndhurst’.¹⁸

Formative experiences

Politics drew this motley assortment of individuals in different ways, and each successive generation became the inspiration for the next. They of course lived in ‘interesting times’, marked by far-reaching yet uneven social and economic change and rapid urbanisation, overcast by the shadow of the French Revolution and the long period of war and upheaval that followed. As a youngster in revolutionary France, O’Connell had endured a hurried evacuation from his school at Douay and shared a boat across the Channel with men who claimed to have witnessed the execution of the King. Oliver MacDonagh contended that this experience inoculated him permanently against sympathy for violent revolution, although more recently Patrick Geoghegan has challenged this view, citing evidence that O’Connell flirted with the revolutionary United Irishmen before the 1798 rebellion.¹⁹ As a young lawyer in Dublin he joined the volunteer militia during the French invasion scare of 1797, though it is unclear whether out of genuine enthusiasm or, as he protested to his uncle in Kerry (who had to pay for his kit), to avoid coming under suspicion of disloyalty.²⁰ While his early politics were unsettled, a keen sense of injustice ev...