by Simon Heffer
The ‘Condition of England’ novels were designed to alert the literate and leisured classes to the plight of their inferiors. They were also designed to reduce class prejudice. In his preface to Alton Locke, Kingsley analysed the origin of what he called ‘the hateful severance between the classes’ that had been ‘unknown to old England.’ He continued:
From the middle ages, up to the latter years of the French war, the relation between the English gentry and the labourers seems to have been more cordial and wholesome than in any other country of Europe. But with the French Revolution came a change for the worse. The Revolution terrified too many of the upper, and excited too many of the lower classes; and the stern Tory system of repression, with its bad habit of talking and acting as if ‘the Government’ and ‘the people’ were necessarily in antagonism, caused ever-increasing bad blood. Besides, the old feudal ties between class and class, employer and employed, had been severed. Large masses of working people had gathered in the manufacturing districts in savage independence. The agricultural labourers had been debased by the abuses of the old Poor Law into a condition upon which one looks back now with half-incredulous horror. Meanwhile, the distress of the labourers became more and more severe.6
There were some enlightened employers. However, the public believed most mill-, mine- and factory-owners had embraced a capitalism red in tooth and claw, and saw people simply as commodities. Kingsley put this in the uncompromising language of a Christian socialist:
We shall become the slaves, often the bodily prisoners, of Jews, middlemen, and sweaters, who draw their livelihood out of our starvation. We shall have to face, as the rest have, ever decreasing prices of labour, ever increasing profits made out of that labour by the contractors who will employ us – arbitrary fines, inflicted at the caprice of hirelings – the competition of women, and children, and starving Irish – our hours of work will increase one-third, our actual pay decrease to less than one-half; and in all this we shall have no hope, no chance of improvement in wages, but ever more penury, slavery, misery . . . You know there will be no hope for us. There is no use appealing to government or parliament.7
Although most capitalists were gentiles, the Jews were targets not only for Kingsley’s vilification, but also for Dickens’s in Oliver Twist and in the writings of Carlyle. Alton Locke is told by his Chartist mentor Crossthwaite: ‘Look at Shechem Isaacs, that sold penknives in the street six months ago, now a-riding in his own carriage, all along of turning sweater.’8
The economic difficulties experienced by capitalism’s army of operatives might have been more easily borne had that class had a formal political voice: but it had almost none. The 1832 Reform Act had left five out of six working men without a vote. The rise of the bourgeois – a new middle class made by the creation of wealth after the first wave of industrialisation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries – had changed the political settlement. An articulate, and increasingly organised, working class sought to change it further. It was confronted by a middle class determined to entrench its new-found privileges – a determination it would adhere to until the defences crumbled in 1867, and another Reform Bill was passed – and by an aristocracy largely paralysed with fear at the prospect of an assault on its property and status, and an uprising by the working class. There was talk not just of establishing a form of socialism, but also of using violent means to achieve the working class’s aims, as in France half a century earlier.
Not all radicalism was potentially violent: George Eliot’s novel Felix Holt, the Radical, written at the time of the second Reform Act about the climate after the passing of the first, is partly about a man who determines to secure change peacefully. However, his very definition of his beliefs would be taken as a threat by most of the moneyed classes, even without the promise of force. ‘I’m a Radical myself,’ Holt announces, ‘and mean to work all my life long against privilege, monopoly and oppression.’9 Mrs Gaskell, in a passage of commentary in Mary Barton, reveals her perception of the early 1840s, of the suffering of the industrial workers, and the inevitable political results of that suffering. ‘For three years past trade had been getting worse and worse, and the price of provisions higher and higher. This disparity between the amount of the earnings of the working classes and the price of their food, occasioned, in more cases than could well be imagined, disease and death. Whole families went through a gradual starvation. They only wanted a Dante to record their sufferings.’10
Mary Barton reflects the widespread fear of violence, and the breakdown of Christian values among masters and men, that was experienced at the lowest point of the early 1840s. It shows men driven by starvation to punish their employer by killing his son; it also shows one throwing acid in the face of another driven by the plight of his own family to break a strike; and the carelessness of the moneyed classes towards the suffering of their workers. Mrs Gaskell was the wife of a clergyman, and her message is that adherence to Christian values by both masters and men would see society through. This meant masters using their resources to support those driven from work by the collapse of demand, and men giving loyalty to the social order in return. Carlyle liked the book, perhaps because it seemed to advocate a variant of his own beloved feudalism.
Mrs Gaskell wrote from profound personal experience of Manchester. Geraldine Jewsbury wrote to Arthur Hugh Clough in January 1849 to say she knew ‘the authoress of Mary Barton’. She added: ‘She is a very nice woman and was much admired before any of us suspected her of writing a book. It has however raised a great clamour, for it is said to be dreadfully one sided, and from my own knowledge I don’t think the masters of the present day deserve such a bad character; it is however a most powerful book.’11 When Clough, a little later, met Mrs Gaskell he said she was ‘neither young (past 30), nor beautiful; very retiring, but quite capable of talking when she likes – a good deal of the clergyman’s wife about her.’12
She writes that ‘the differences between the employers and the employed’ are ‘an eternal subject for agitation in the manufacturing districts’.13 John Barton, the father of the eponymous heroine, is a Manchester weaver and Chartist. His wife dies in childbirth. He is on the front line of Disraeli’s two nations, and smoulders with anger. We see the gulf between the affluence of the mill-owners, even in times of low demand, and the abject poverty of their employees on short time, or who had been laid off. Mrs Gaskell caricatured the impression only to say that ‘I know that this is not really the case . . . but what I wish to impress is what the workman feels and thinks’.14
II
Immediately after the Reform Act there were attempts to unionise labour, and these had sometimes been severely repressed: most famously in the transportation to Australia of six agricultural labourers from Tolpuddle in Dorset in 1834 for administering illegal oaths to fellow members of a trades union. When the government refused to overturn the sentences there was a widespread outcry. A huge petition was presented to Parliament, setting a trend for the expression of the discontent of the populace for their rulers that would be further exploited in the years ahead. In 1836 the labourers were pardoned and brought home, and set up with their own farms. The first blood was to the working class. For the moment, at least for those unskilled workers who formed the majority of those unrepresented at Westminster, trades unionism became their collective voice, and almost a challenge to the supremacy of Parliament itself. While the artisan class, with the help of middle-class radicals, drove Chartism, the unskilled used the union movement to seek to achieve something even more fundamental than manhood suffrage – a living wage and the avoidance of starvation.
Allowing workers to form combinations was a big concession: but those who articulated their feelings (or claimed to) had a longer agenda. One was William Lovett, a Cornish cabinetmaker who settled in London in the 1820s. Lovett had a thirst for knowledge, but only a meagre education, which he supplemented by attending public lectures and mutual improvement societies. He came under the influence
of the socialist thinking of Robert Owen, who had built the factory town of New Lanark near Glasgow on the principles that if his workers lived in good conditions they would be happier and more productive.
Lovett joined various groups, notably the Radical Reform Association, and at the time of the 1830 revolution in France professed support for a violent uprising in Britain. He made high-profile public protests, such as refusing to serve in the militia unless given the vote, and lobbying for the end of stamp duty on newspapers. He became an early campaigner for the greater provision of education for the working classes; and in 1836 was appointed founder secretary of the London Working Men’s Association. Out of this group Chartism was born.
The LWMA held a public meeting at the Crown and Anchor in the Strand in February 1837 to design a petition supporting six demands for reform. These demands, or six points, became the People’s Charter, largely drafted by Lovett and Francis Place, a middle-class advocate of reform. They called for a secret ballot; annual parliaments; salaried MPs; equal-sized constituencies; universal male suffrage; and the end of the property qualification for MPs. It was published on 8 May 1838. The point of annual elections was to make bribery impracticable, the secret ballot would help prevent the coercion of workers by their masters, and universal suffrage would allow the working classes to participate in the running of the country. Salaried MPs who did not have to be householders or landowners could, equally, come from the working class.
All demands except annual parliaments were acceded to within eighty years. Because of the differences between various gradations of the working class, the entire movement did not, however, immediately accept them. Although Birmingham, with its larger artisan population, did, Manchester and the north – where less-skilled workers predominated – felt them insufficient, and a split opened up. The divisions were obvious at the first meeting of delegates to a National Convention in London in February 1839, a gathering limited to fifty men because of a law forbidding larger meetings. It immediately became apparent that the main division was between those who advocated violence, if necessary, to achieve their ends, and those who did not.
A petition the Chartists presented to the House of Commons noted a painful paradox. Skilled workers produced fine goods that sold all over the world, from a country that had good infrastructure and harbours, and whose agriculture benefited from rich soil and a temperate climate: and yet the ordinary people were ‘overwhelmed with public and private suffering. We are bowed down under a load of taxes; our traders are trembling on the verge of bankruptcy; our workmen are starving; capital brings no profit and labour no remuneration; the home of the artificer is desolate, and the warehouse of the pawnbroker is full; the workhouse is crowded and the manufactory is deserted.’15 The petitioners knew who was responsible: ‘The foolishness of our rulers has made the goodness of God of none effect.’
Agitation spread across the manufacturing districts as the weather improved in the spring and early summer of 1839; and in July that year the petition in favour of the Charter, signed by 1.25 million people, was presented to Parliament. This was the Chartists’ first failure: they had boasted they would collect 3 million signatures. It was presented by Thomas Attwood, the MP for Birmingham who, as one of the founders of the Birmingham Political Union, had been a motive force behind the 1832 Reform Act. Attwood detailed the consequences of ignoring the claims of the poor. He reminded the House of ‘the situation of Louis XVI in 1787 and 1789. When Louis was asleep ruin was stalking through the land. In 1787 an individual who travelled through Burgundy and Champagne found almost every gentleman’s house burned to the ground, and their owners murdered. Two years afterwards the Bastille fell. Charles X was hunting in the wood of Fontainebleau when the Revolution [of 1830] took place, and the crown dropped from his head. The crown of James II was shaken from his head. What is the position of the Queen of England at this hour?’16
Attwood rejected armed or physical force to achieve the working classes’ aims. However, Lord John Russell reminded him – and the House of Commons – that the people whom he was championing ‘have been found going through the country, from town to town, and from place to place, exhorting the people in the most violent and revolutionary language – language not exceeded in violence and atrocity in the worst times of the French Revolution – to subvert the laws by force of arms.’17 Russell and others also mocked the idea that universal suffrage would guarantee widespread prosperity. In this he was supported by a Tory backbencher, Benjamin Disraeli, though Disraeli – who had been in the Commons barely two years – firmly believed some measure of additional civil rights should be accorded to the lower classes. He believed there was an ‘intimate connexion’ between the New Poor Law and Chartism.18 He thought that if the national, centralised character of poor relief were persisted in, rather than returning to a local, more humane and comprehensible system, it would ‘endanger not only the national character, but also the national throne.’19
The Commons threw the motion out by 235 votes to 46, with Disraeli voting against: the Charter was too simplistic, and the call for annual parliaments deemed impracticable even by supporters. If the Commons defeat was a challenge to the Convention to inspire an uprising, the Convention failed to rise to it. For a time Chartism had little or no national cohesion, but existed through local committees. As Parliament rejected the idea, Lovett was arrested for seditious libel, for criticising how a cohort of the Metropolitan Police, sent to Birmingham to put down a riot in the Bull Ring, had acted against demonstrators. He was imprisoned for a year in Warwick jail. His influence dwindled.
Continual, and often violent, disturbances blew up through the summer of 1839. There were riots in Birmingham. A general strike was announced for 12 August. It was the next blow to the movement’s credibility that nobody came out. Some of the worst disturbances were at Newcastle-upon-Tyne at the end of July, at which the police and a number of freshly sworn special constables ended up in hand-to-hand fighting with the rioters. The Mayor, John Fife, had issued a proclamation warning that those who were ‘calling themselves members, and acting as members of a society or societies of an illegal character,’ and were ‘inducing others to become members of such society or societies, and to hold intercourse with the same, and by contributions of money and otherwise to aid and support the same’ were ‘guilty of a combination and confederacy, and, on conviction, are liable to a penalty of £20, or commitment to the House of Correction for three calendar months’.20
This had no effect at all. The riot took hold on the evening of 31 July, after Fife had refused a petition from the Chartists to hold a public meeting, because of the effect he and the magistrates feared it would have on the ‘preservation of peace’. Word went round during the afternoon of the 31st that a meeting would be held in any case. Fife hoped the swearing in of more special constables would, in itself, deter the Chartists. However, this tactic failed. At 6 p.m. a crowd of forty or fifty men with banners marched through the town: as they went about Newcastle and Gateshead they were soon augmented by other groups of similar size and appearance. ‘And so alarming had the aspect become by 10 o’clock, that the mayor, who for a considerable time had been riding about the different streets endeavouring both by persuasion, and eventually by threats, to induce the misguided men to return peaceably and quietly to their homes, was compelled to send for the assistance of the military.’21 The shops were shut up; the general population barred itself indoors. The leaders of the protest began addressing their followers: Fife ordered the police to seize the banners of the protestors. However, the moment they engaged with them ‘brickbats, stones, and other instruments of civic warfare, were to be seen flying about in unusual abundance’. It was reported that one protestor was ‘stabbed near the groin’ by a policeman. Then the soldiery arrived and ‘scoured the main streets’. Forty arrests were made: the foot soldiers and the cavalry patrolled the streets until 4 a.m. If the Chartists wanted a fight, they could have one.
In November there wa
s a small uprising in Newport, in Monmouthshire. A local draper, John Frost, got it into his head that if he started a rebellion in rural Wales, revolution would start in the industrial heartland of northern England. When Chartist leaders in the north heard of his scheme they did all they could to talk him out of it. They failed. Frost led his followers into a rain of fire by the local militia, who killed fourteen of them and wounded ten others. Frost’s death sentence was commuted to transportation for life. He was pardoned and allowed to return to England in 1854.
III
By 1842, as the Anti-Corn Law League failed to make any headway, it was drawn towards an alliance with the Chartists, the community of view exemplified by men such as Cobden. On 2 May 1842 a great petition, 6 miles long, was presented to the Commons with a two-mile-long procession behind it. It called for equal representation for all. It said the government had created ‘an unbearable despotism’ and a state of ‘degrading slavery’.22 It called for resistance to taxation unless electoral reform was granted: of the 26 million in the total population only 900,000 had the vote, and Guildford, with a population of 3,290, returned to Parliament the same number of MPs as Tower Hamlets, which had 300,000 people.
