by Frank McLynn
Chartism was now in terminal decline and, as if to provide a personal dimension to the sociological debacle, the later history of most Chartist leaders was not a happy one. O’Connor rapidly plummeted into dementia – the result of tertiary syphilis or general paralysis of the insane and spent his remaining few years in an asylum.127 With the great leader off the scene, what was left of Chartism splintered into many segments, but basically the divide was between those who moved left into socialism and those who opted for mild reformism, still with dreams of a trans-coalition. In the latter category were Lovett and O’Brien. Lovett tried to devote himself to the education of the working class and founded a movement called the New Move, but this was a dismal failure, with membership never topping 5,000. He gave up in 1857, opened a bookshop, which likewise did not prosper, wrote an autobiography and died in poverty.128 Bronterre O’Brien tried his hand at newspaper publishing after his break with O’Connor and produced two short-lived organs: the Poor Man’s Guardian in 1843 and the National Reformer in 1844. Neither was a financial success and both had ceased publication by 1847. O’Brien then essayed some desultory journalism and gave adult education classes. Despite his reputation as an intellectual, most observers found his writings rambling, inaccurate and incoherent, and as he got older he added peevish rancorousness to his defects as a politician. From 1850 his health was in decline with chronic bronchitis, though he lingered until 1864, sustained by financial subsidies from well-wishers.129
The fortunes of those on the Left were more mixed. After two harsh years in Kirkdale jail from 1848 to 1850, Peter McDouall tried to establish a medical practice to provide for his growing family, but this failed abysmally. He and his family emigrated to Australia in 1854 but he died soon after arrival at the age of forty.130 George Julian Harney, who became close friends with Marx and Engels, spent a frustrating three years on unsuccessful and shortlived newspapers before finding a more stable position as editor of the Jersey Independent. However, in 1861–2 he fell out with the proprietor Joseph Cowen because Harney supported the North in the American Civil War; it should be remembered that, at least until the Battle of Antietam in 1862, British opinion was overwhelmingly in favour of the southern Confederacy. Harney resigned and emigrated to the USA, where he worked for fourteen years as a clerk in the Massachusetts State House. On his retirement he returned to England, wrote some part-time journalism, and died in 1897, aged eighty.131 Perhaps the most interesting later Chartist career was that of Ernest Jones. After his sulphurous rhetoric in 1848, Jones was a marked man by the authorities, and they did not even need to deploy their ultimate legal weapon, the Treason Felony Act, against him, easily convicting him instead under the heading of sedition. Imprisoned in Tothillfields jail, the Alcatraz of Victorian England (off Victoria Street at the junction with the Vauxhall Bridge Road), Jones endured far harsher conditions than O’Connor had in 1840–1 in York Castle. Although we can discount the more lurid stories about his captivity – such as that he was denied pen and paper and had to write his epic poem The Revolt of Hindoostan in his own blood – his experience in jail was no picnic. Jones was treated as a common criminal rather than a political prisoner, still less a martyred poet, and spent much of his two years in solitary confinement because he refused to pick oakum like other common criminals. To show who was master, the warden put him on bread and water and placed him in a cell recently occupied by a cholera victim.132 Promised an early release if he would abjure politics for the future, he refused and at the end of his sentence could no longer stand upright. On his release he was pressurised by a rich uncle to give up politics on pain of being disinherited from a large estate, but again refused, returned to his early calling as a lawyer and defended the Fenians in the 1860s. Like Harney, he had close contacts with Marx and Engels, though Marx gradually became disillusioned with him.133 He continued with a prolific output of poems and novels, and was about to contest a parliamentary seat in Manchester which he was certain to win, when he suddenly died the day after his fiftieth birthday. Jones was a man of absolute integrity and dauntless courage but, like many ‘sea-green incorruptibles’ he was not a very attractive human being. Even his biographer calls him ‘duplicitous and unpleasant: in short, a liar, a cheat, an anti-Semite, a racist bigot, and absent father, and a neglectful husband’.134
Two issues require further investigation: the deeper reasons for Chartism’s failure in 1848, and the separate but allied question of why the movement declined thereafter. One salient consideration about 1848 is that England, with a repressive apparatus apparently lagging far behind those of continental ruling elites, yet managed one of the greatest police/demonstrator ratios in all history. This alerts us to the fact that large sections of the working class and the city of London, with a population of 3 million, simply absented themselves. By contrast Paris in February saw about 5,000 police and national guardsmen trying to contain a population of 700,000 and being overwhelmed. It is usually considered that a police/public ratio of about 1:200 is adequate for containing normal crime (in most US cities in the 1960s this was the ratio; Paris in 1968 had 1:187).135 Yet such numbers cannot deal with an entire population driven by hunger and anger. In Paris in 1848 regular troops were not trusted, as they were both ill-paid and suspected of sympathising with the rioters. In France the loyalty of the army in revolutionary times was always suspect: Louis XVI feared to put them to the test in 1789, which was one of the factors that allowed the revolution to escalate.136 In England there were never such fears, as General Napier’s eupeptic comments in 1839–40 make clear. With a small turnout (relative to population) of 150,000 on Kennington Common on 10 April 1848, and an army loyal to the government, the result of a call to arms could only have been a bloodbath, as O’Connor concluded. The Chartists, meanwhile, were not united. Different people pursued different agendas in different places at different times, with O’Connor, McDouall and Cufay successively at the helm, and the focus shifting from London to the industrial north. Another view of 1848 was that the Chartists had, so to speak, already missed the revolutionary boat, that the ideal time for revolution was 1830–2, not 1838–9 or 1842, and still less 1848.137 Allegedly, there was a greater revolutionary ‘window’ in 1830–42 for four main reasons: the ‘Captain Swing’ agitation in the countryside, sometimes called the last peasants’ revolt in England, was cutting a swathe through the rural areas; there was industrial unrest involving miners, handloom weavers, spinners, artisans and factory workers; the Irish problem was acute, with a plethora of food riots; and the middle classes were involved in a movement for parliamentary reform. Certainly in some areas there was greater militancy than in the Chartist period, with the mini-Gordon riots in Bristol in 1831 featuring as the last great urban revolt. These arguments have a certain force, but the only really telling one concerns the middle classes. Chartism could only have succeeded with their support, but they had largely got what they wanted with the 1832 Reform Bill and, even more, with the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. It was quite clear that middle-class pressure groups sought what they wanted for themselves, not for the proletariat.138 Besides, by 1848 their political consciousness had deepened, and they were aware that the gap between capital and labour was greater than in 1830. It followed that tinkering with revolution in 1848 was likely to have far more serious consequences than it would have done a dozen or so years earlier. The reason why 1838–48 was a more serious threat to the state than 1830–2 was because the demand for universal suffrage was a far more radical demand than anything the Establishment had had to confront at the time of the Great Reform Bill.139
The decline of Chartism after 1848 has invited many interpretations and speculations, ranging from the somewhat flippant and impressionistic to profound exegesis at the interface of history and sociology. Among the former we would classify the idea that Chartist supporters became cynical because of the fiasco over the bogus names allegedly contained in the third petition; no one in the movement ever took this seriously. A facile attempt to explai
n the fall of Chartism via the ‘three Rs’ – ridicule, repression and reactive indifference – will not take us very far. A famous attempt at the superficial explanation of ‘decline and fall’ was given by the journalist, novelist and Parnellite MP, Justin McCarthy (1830–1912): ‘English Chartism died of publicity; the exposure to the air; of the Anti-Corn Law League; of the evident tendencies of the time to settle all questions by reason, argument and majorities; of growing education; of a strengthening sense of duty among all the more influential classes.’140 More sophisticated views are that Chartism was trying to solve by political methods problems that were essentially economic, or to use reformism to achieve the kind of socio-economic change that could only be accomplished by revolution. Others say that in the 1850s and 1860s the ruling classes cleverly bamboozled the working classes by bombarding them with a number of sensations, one rapidly succeeding another, most drawn from the Empire or foreign affairs: the Great Exhibition of 1851, the Crimean War of 1854–6, the Indian Mutiny of 1857, the Volunteer Movement of 1859, Garibaldi and the Italian crisis in 1860, the American Civil War of 1861–5. More solidly based interpretations point to the growth of the British economy in the 1850s as against the depression and relative stagnation of the 1840s, so that ‘hunger Chartism’ lost its appeal. The repeal of the Corn Laws did lead to lower food prices. The burgeoning cotton industry soaked up previous unemployment; the 262,000 employees in cotton factories in 1840 had become 427,000 by 1860.141 The Chartist decade had also convinced the British elite that reforms were urgently needed to head off revolution. It took the ruling classes a long time to take in that they had defeated the quarter-century-long threat from France, first via the Revolution and then in the form of Napoleon, and could therefore relax; once they did, they were increasingly inclined to take off the repressive brakes.142 The repeal of the Corn Laws, the Bank Charter Act of 1844, the passage of the Ten Hour Act in 1847, the Public Health Act of 1848, were all signs of the times. Additionally, class lines in England were not rigid but relatively fluid. In nineteenth-century Germany a coalition of Junkers, peasants and industrialists, backed by a programme of reaction and imperialism, had disastrous results for the working classes and, ultimately, for twentieth-century democracy. No such coalition appeared in England. And although it would be naive to put too much emphasis on individual personalities – which might result in the absurdity whereby the Duke of Wellington could genuinely, and with a straight face, believe that without him, there would have been a revolution in 1830143 – it is worth underlining the way that Peel, Russell and others were prepared to bend to the wind and better the conditions of the working classes, albeit solely in ways they approved. Russell, for instance, said that the failure of the British people to support revolution in 1848 made him willing to work for genuine suffrage reform.144
After 1848 the English working class moved decisively away from thoughts of revolution. The workers embraced trade unions, cooperative societies, friendly societies – what Lenin would later call ‘trade union consciousness’ or mere ‘economism’, and in politics gradually attached themselves to the new Liberal Party, which would arise from the ashes of the Whigs. Conveniently for the elite, most proletarian riots and violence after 1850 tended to be directed against the Irish.145 This led some observers to conclude that Chartism had only ever been a comfortable crutch for the workers, the default position for an unrevolutionary working class, the exact role that would later be fulfilled by the Labour Party.146 The Chartists, for all their failures, had convinced the governing classes that something had to be done about their woes, the message had gone home, and even voting rights gradually returned to the liberal agenda. Of their two great opponents in the ACLL, Cobden never came round to working for an extension of the franchise, but his partner John Bright did.147 The implosion of the British proletariat after 1850 has always puzzled observers, and some say the historiographical conundrum arises because historians have assumed the existence of a monolithic and persistent working class but that its segmented nature was temporarily masked by Chartism. A huge gulf separates the artisan of the early nineteenth century (the typical Chartist supporter) from the much more class-conscious factory worker at the end of the century. One theory is that the decline of working-class activism after 1848 is predicated on a monolithic proletariat with a continuity of aspirations and interests, so that if in the 1840s it was radical but in the 1850s quiescent this immediately generates a puzzle. Yet it could simply be that different sections of the working class were dominant at different times and that they evolved differently.148 This would make sense of the lack of nationwide organisation among the Chartists, which is usually set down to inept leadership. To take two obvious examples, there was no real attempt made to integrate Scotland into the wider movement, and the same was the case in Wales. The Rebecca riots in Wales from 1839 targeted tollgates as a symbol of oppression of the Welsh working classes, but O’Connor and the other leaders proved incapable of utilising the riots for their own ends.149 A fissiparous, heterogeneous proletariat, on the other hand, would do much to explain the failure.
Yet another explanation for Chartist decline insinuates the notion that the movement was an anachronism or, at any rate, that it did not have an ‘organic’ relationship with the highly industrialised society of the 1840s. Here are two statements of this idea, both from sympathetic historians: ‘Chartism’s tragic predicament as a political movement was its historical placement between pre-industrial and industrial modes of action.’150 The idea is that Chartism was a hybrid of the ‘spontaneous combustion’ riots of the eighteenth century – most notably the Gordon riots – and the control and discipline of a modern Labour movement. While Chartism was still over-reliant on the older rhetoric and ideology directed at ‘Old Corruption’, the nature of the State had changed: the elite had both woken up to the potential danger of the social volcano on which they sat and had taken appropriate reformist measures to assuage the threat (the deluge of legislation mentioned above). Too much Chartist energy was used up in barging at open doors, and not enough in thinking through ‘what if?’ strategies – the most obvious one was what was to happen if the government continued to reject national petitions.151 ‘And here is another statement of the ‘anachronism’ thesis:
The ethos of Chartism anyway may not have survived into the great urban centres of the later nineteenth century. It needed small communities, the slack religious and moral supervision, the unpoliced street and meeting place … As society in Britain became increasingly polarised between a depopulated countryside and large urban centres, the unifying influence of a common living area and shared institutions lessened.152
When the Labour movement became almost overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the great industrial cities, many important groups ceased to be part of it – especially women, immigrants, unskilled and semi-skilled workers, home-based artisans, radical lay preachers. And there can be no doubt about the unstoppable surge in urbanism. By 1840 only 22 per cent of England’s labour force worked in agriculture, which accounted for just one-fifth of the Gross National Product of the United Kingdom.153 The relationship of Chartism to increasing industrialisation is a fascinating one, for the nineteenth-century Industrial Revolution was itself Janus-faced. Some say that overpopulation or even rapid population growth are prime triggers for revolution. If so, industrialisation was the Chartists’ enemy in more senses than one for, while on the one hand the huge growth in population after 1815 kept wages low and unemployment high for twenty years after Waterloo, the population increase was absorbed by industrialisation and did not subject English society to impossible stresses. As one authority has written: ‘Without industrialisation, there might have been a social catastrophe.’154
The two most original attempts to account for the rapid decline of Chartism after 1850 involve the concepts of hegemony and the aristocracy of labour. Repeatedly, scholarly studies of the English working class in the second half of Victoria’s reign emphasise notions such as deference, res
pectability, Smilesian self-help, ‘incorporation’, ‘transformation’ and ‘embourgeoisement’.155 This emphasises the crucial and sometimes underestimated role of culture and ideologies in history. While revolutions cannot occur simply as a result of a change of sensibilities in society – people thinking differently, looking at life differently, having a different world view, etc – such a process can often explain the otherwise inexplicable in non-revolutionary process. According to the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, capitalism achieves its greatest success when it persuades the working class that the values, standards, ideals, images and ideologies embraced by the ruling class are truly universal values, and thus persuades the proletariat to subscribe to them; conversely, Gramsci thought that it was a necessary condition for proletarian revolution that the working class evolve its own, unique and distinctive culture and ideology.156 Certainly after 1850 one can discern a social harmony in which the workers seem to have accepted ‘bourgeois’ modes of thought and absorbed them as the only sensible way of looking at society. The thesis is even more attractive if one conjoins to it the idea of an aristocracy of labour emerging among the proletariat. The phrase ‘aristocracy of labour’ has to an extent been discredited by Lenin’s glib use of it – for instance, he alleged that the British Empire engendered super-profits with which the ruling class could buy off the more affluent sections of the working class – but is by no means self-evidently false as an intrinsic idea. It is not suggested that Chartism itself was anything other than an authentic working-class movement during the halcyon days of 1838–48, but what is proposed is that as part of the splintering process after 1850 potentialities that were always endemically present in Chartism – and which O’Connor himself noticed – allowed the detachment of a proletarian elite to occur.157 This would make sense of some enduring historical puzzles. For example, if it is true, as Engels vociferously alleged, and he was backed up by many ‘bourgeois’ critics, that England hovered on the brink of revolution in the 1840s, what sense are we to make of certain economic statistics that seem to point the other way? By 1840 Great Britain had 72 per cent of Europe’s total steam horsepower: 620,000 units of horsepower as against 90,000 in France. Britain was in the 1840s thirty years ahead of France and forty years ahead of Germany in industrial output. Her textile mills consumed 100,000 tons of raw cotton per year in 1830; France reached this level only in 1860 and Germany in 1871. Britain produced one million tons of pig iron in 1835; France reached this level in 1862, and Germany in 1867.158 All this seems in flat contradiction to the situation reported by Engels in his famous The Condition of the Working Class in England. A possible explanation might be that the benefits of industrialisation were seen mainly in London and the south. Although it is sometimes alleged that Chartism’s greatest mistake was to neglect the workers of London, perhaps it is rather that London proletarians saw no real need of Chartism but were lured into a radical posture in 1848 by the sheer euphoria of events in Europe and the expectation of continent-wide revolution.159
