The Road Not Taken

by Frank McLynn

95. Napier, Life, ii, pp. 82, 88–9.

  96. Pickering, Feargus O’Connor, pp. 80–1.

  97. Hobhouse, Recollections, v, pp. 242–4.

  98. See Mike Saunders, The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (Cambridge 2009).

  99. Matthew Lee, ‘Duncombe, Thomas Slingsby’, in ODNB (Oxford, 2004), 17, pp. 261–3; Thomas H. Duncombe, The Life and Correspondence of Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, Late MP for Finsbury (1868); Ann Mitchel Pfaum, ‘The Parliamentary Career of Thomas S. Duncombe, 1826–1861’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Minnesota, 1975.

  100. Chase, Chartism, p. 158.

  101. Schoyen, Chartist Challenge, p. 96.

  102. Haraszti, Chartism, pp. 162–3.

  103. Tom Nairn, The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy (1994), pp. 205, 327; P. A. Pickering, ‘“The Hearts of Millions”: Chartism and Popular Monarchism in the 1840s’, History, 88 (2003), pp. 227–48; Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the English Working Class in 1844 (NY, 1892), p. 259.

  104. Brian Harrison, ‘Teetotal Chartism’, History, 58 (1993), pp. 193–217.

  105. Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (1991), pp. 256–8; cf. also Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, ii, pp. 299–313.

  106. See Hugh Fearns, ‘Chartism in Suffolk’, in Briggs, ed., Chartist Studies, pp. 147–93; R. B. Pugh, ‘Chartism in Somerset and Wiltshire’, in ibid., pp. 174–219.

  107. Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, i, p. 244; Chase, Chartism, pp. 168–71.

  108. Aileen Smiles, Samuel Smiles and His Surroundings (1956), pp. 70–1.

  109. Samuel Smiles, Thrift (1875), p. 330.

  110. J. A. Phillips, The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs (Oxford, 1992), pp. 155–6.

  111. P. A. Pickering, ‘Class Without Words: Symbolic Communication in the Chartist Movement’, PP 112 (1986), pp. 144–62; Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, ii, pp. 359–68.

  112. Figures taken from Colin Rallings and Michael Thrasher, British Electoral Facts, 1832–1999 (Ashgate, 2000).

  113. For Sturge himself see Alex Tyrell, Joseph Sturge and the Moral Radical Party in Early Victorian England (1987); Cole, Chartist Portraits, pp. 163–86.

  114. For Sturge’s programme see Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, ii, pp. 381–450.

  115. For O’Connor on Ireland at this time see ibid., pp. 335–55.

  116. Quoted in Vallance, Radical History, p. 399.

  117. Henry Richard, ed., Memoirs of Joseph Sturge (1864), pp. 315–16; Haraszti, Chartism, p. 173; Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, iii, pp. 3–102.

  118. Chase, Chartism, p. 197.

  119. Thomas Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper Written by Himself (1872), p. 157.

  120. For the prolonged battle between O’Connor/Chartists and Sturge/NCSU in 1842 see Lovett, Life, pp. 283–5; Tyrell, Sturge, pp. 129–31; S. Hobhouse, Joseph Sturge (1919), p. 78; Cooper, Life, pp. 221–7; Thompson, Chartists, pp. 268–9.

  121. See, for example, Haraszti, who rates the 1839 and 1842 agitation as far more serious than that of 1848, in contrast to, say, John Savile in 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge, 1987).

  122. Haraszti, Chartism, p. 234.

  123. John Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 1700–1870 (1979), p. 262.

  124. Chase, Chartism, p. 192.

  125. Ibid., pp. 203–5.

  126. Ibid., p. 206.

  127. F. C. Mather, ‘The General Strike of 1842: A Study in Leadership, Organisation and the Threat of Revolution During the Plug Plot Disturbances’, in J. Stevenson and R. Quinault, eds, Popular Protest and Public Order (1974), pp. 115–35.

  128. Mather, ‘Government’, in Briggs, ed., Chartist Studies, p. 386.

  129. Chase, Chartism, pp. 223–4.

  130. Thompson, Chartists, pp. 289–90.

  131. Chase, Chartism, pp. 209–27, 229–30, 232–4.

  132. C. S. Packer, Life and Letters of Sir James Graham (1907), i, p. 323.

  133. Mather, ‘Government’, pp. 387–9.

  134. Chase, Chartism, pp. 225–6.

  135. Mather, ‘Government’, p. 389.

  136. Robert Fyson, ‘The Transported Chartist: The Case of William Ellis’, in Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson and Stephen Roberts, eds, The Chartist Legacy (1999), pp. 80–101 (at p. 80).

  137. Mather, ‘Government’, pp. 390–3.

  11 Chartism’s Decline and Fall

  1. H. Richard, The Memoirs of Joseph Sturge (1864), p. 318.

  2. Engels, Condition of the English Working Class.

  3. Plummer, Bronterre, p. 177; Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, ii, pp. 427–59; Chase, Chartism, pp. 255–6.

  4. Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, i, pp. 340–1; ii, p. 13.

  5. J. A. Epstein, ‘Feargus O’Connor and the Northern Star’, International Review of Social History, 21 (1976), pp. 51–97 (at pp. 96–7).

  6. Chase, Chartism, pp. 255–6.

  7. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (1962) pp. 41, 48.

  8. N. McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League, 1838–1846 (1958), pp. 102–3.

  9. Cooper, Life, p. 178; R. P. Groves, A Narrative History of Chartism (1938), p. 126.

  10. Lucy Brown, ‘The Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League’, in Briggs, ed., Chartist Studies, pp. 342–71 (at pp. 363–6).

  11. Thompson, Chartists, p. 97.

  12. Brown, ‘Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League’, p. 346.

  13. Thompson, Chartists, p. 97.

  14. Brown, ‘Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League’; Gammage, History, pp. 253–5.

  15. Pickering, Feargus O’Connor, pp. 104–5.

  16. These points are admirably dealt with in P. A. Pickering and Alex Tyrell, The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League (2000).

  17. Thompson, Chartists, pp. 273–6.

  18. NY Daily Tribune (25 August 1872).

  19. G. D. H. Cole, A Short History of the British Working Class Movement, 1789–1947 (1948), p. 109.

  20. Brown, ‘Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League’, pp. 366–70.

  21. Haraszti, Chartism, p. 181.

  22. For O’Brien’s 1842 conception see Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, ii, pp. 427–59. For the repudiation of O’Connor’s notions see Haraszti, Chartism, p. 196. The idea of O’Brien as the brains behind the Land Plan was an idea particularly associated with the volume by Julius West, A History of the Chartist Movement (1918).

  23. Haraszti, Chartism, p. 193.

  24. There are many fine books on this subject. Mark Holloway, Heaven on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680–1880 (1960); Delores Hayden, Seven American Utopias: The Architecture of Communitarian Socialism, 1790–1975 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975); William Alfred Hines, American Communities and Comparative Colonies in America, 1680–1880 (1966); J. F. C. Harrison, The Second Coming: Popular Millenarianism, 1780–1850 (1979).

  25. Chase, Chartism, p. 248; Thompson, Chartists, p. 306.

  26. For a detailed explanation of O’Connor’s scheme see Alice Mary Hadfield, The Chartist Land Company (Newton Abbot, 1970).

  27. Thompson, Chartists, pp. 305–6.

  28. J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, Book 11, Ch. 10, Section 7.

  29. J. Bronstein, ‘The Homestead and the Garden Plot: Cultural Pressures on Land Reform in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the USA’, European Legacy, 6 (2001), pp. 159–75 (at p. 168).

  30. There is a huge bibliography on Owen. Representative titles include G. D. H. Cole, The Life of Robert Owen (1930); M. I. Cole, Robert Owen of New Lanark (1953); R. H. Harvey, Robert Owen: Social Idealist (1949); S. Pollard and J. Salt, eds, Robert Owen: Prophet of the Poor (1971).

  31. J. F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America (1969).

  32. See A. L. Morton, The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen (1962).

  33. L. Kolakowksi, Main Currents of Marxism (2005), pp. 150–91.

  34. Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, iv, pp. 89–232.

  35. Edward Royle, ‘Chartists and Owenites
– Many Parts but One Body’, Labour History Review, 65 (2000), pp. 2–21; Haraszti, Chartism, pp. 191–3.

  36. Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, i, p. xxxv.

  37. Harrison, Robert Owen, pp. 159–60. Cf. also E. Royle, Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium (Manchester, 1998).

  38. Joy MacAskill, ‘The Chartist Land Plan’, in Briggs, ed., Chartist Studies, pp. 304–41 (at p. 339).

  39. Ibid., p. 339.

  40. Ibid., p. 323.

  41. Malcolm Chase, ‘The Concept of Jubilee’, PP 129 (1990), pp. 132–47.

  42. Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, iii, pp. 407–75.

  43. Benjamin Wilson, The Struggles of an Old Chartist (1887), p. 14; Thompson, Chartists, p. 305.

  44. MacAskill, ‘Chartist Land Plan’, p. 339; Chase, Chartism, p. 275.

  45. Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, iii, pp. 407–75.

  46. See the biography by Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism and the Romance of Politics, 1819–1869 (Oxford, 2003). Cf. also Cole, Chartist Portraits.

  47. Taylor, Ernest Jones, pp. 77–107.

  48. Chase, Chartism, pp. 276–7.

  49. MacAskill, ‘Chartist Land Plan’, p. 324.

  50. Chase, Chartism, p. 275.

  51. MacAskill, ‘Chartist Land Plan’, pp. 314, 331–2.

  52. Bronstein, ‘Homestead’, pp. 168–71.

  53. Chase, Chartism, p. 331.

  54. Ibid., p. 273.

  55. MacAskill, ‘Chartist Land Plan’, pp. 336–8; Bronstein, ‘Homestead and Garden Plot’.

  56. Eileen Yeo, ‘Some Problems of Chartist Democracy’, in J. Epstein and D. Thompson, eds, The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–60 (1982), pp. 345–80; Chase, Chartism, pp. 256–7.

  57. Pickering, Feargus O’Connor.

  58. Bronstein, ‘Homestead’, pp. 168–71; Chase, Chartism, pp. 328–9.

  59. MacAskill, ‘Chartist Land Plan’, p. 313.

  60. Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 208–60.

  61. For the People’s International League see Henry Weisser, British Working Class Movements and Europe, 1815–1848 (Manchester, 1975).

  62. H. M. Boot, The Commercial Crisis of 1847 (Hull, 1984).

  63. Chase, Chartism, p. 290.

  64. Ibid., pp. 282–5.

  65. Stephen Roberts, ‘Feargus O’Connor in the House of Commons 1847–1852’, in Ashton, Roberts and Fyson, eds, Chartist Legacy, pp. 102–18 (at pp. 105–7).

  66. Kathleen Quigley, ‘Daniel O’Connell and the Leadership Crisis Within the Irish Repeal Party’, Albion, 2 (1970), pp. 99–107.

  67. Chase, Chartism, pp. 292–4.

  68. Dennis Gwynn, Young Ireland and 1848 (Cork, 1949).

  69. D. Thompson, ‘Ireland and the Irish in English Radicalism before 1850’, in Epstein and Thompson, Chartist Experience, pp. 120–51; see also G. Davis, The Irish in Britain, 1815–1914 (Dublin, 1991).

  70. J. H. Treble, ‘O’Connor, O’Connell and the Attitude of Irish Immigrants towards Chartism in the North of England, 1838–48’, in J. Butt and P. F. Clarke, eds, The Victorians and Social Protest (Newton Abbot, 1973), pp. 33–70. See also D. Goodman, London Chartism, 1838–1848 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 64–5.

  71. Benjamin Wilson, Struggles, p. 10; Goodway, London Chartism, p. 69.

  72. For the Kossuth analysis see Haraszti, Chartism, p. 244. For the ‘baboon’ remark see Thompson, Chartists, p. 311. For 1848 in general there is a huge literature. Jonathan Sperber, The European Revolutions 1848–1851 (2005), is a good survey.

  73. Chase, Chartism, pp. 294–7.

  74. Savile, 1848, pp. 88–9.

  75. Goodway, London Chartism, pp. 70–2.

  76. John Belchem, ‘Feargus O’Connor and the Collapse of the Mass Platform’, in Epstein and Thompson, eds, Chartist Experience, pp. 269–310.

  77. Savile, 1848, pp. 90–1, 103–4.

  78. Thompson, Chartists, p. 311.

  79. Gwynn, Young Ireland, pp. 167–8.

  80. Mather, ‘Government and the Chartists’, pp. 394–5.

  81. A. C. Benson and Viscount Esher, eds, The Letters of Queen Victoria, vol. 2, 1837–61 (1907), pp. 198–200.

  82. Gordon M. Ray, ed., The Letters and Private Papers of W. M. Thackeray (1946), ii, p. 364.

  83. D. Cairns, Berlioz: Servitude and Greatness (1999), p. 412.

  84. Lord John Russell, Recollections and Suggestions, 1813–73 (1875), pp. 252–3; Mather, ‘Government’, p. 396.

  85. L. Strachey and R. Fulford, eds, The Greville Memoirs (1938), ii, p. 198; Savile, 1848, p. 81.

  86. Spencer Walpole, The Life of Lord John Russell, 2 vols (1889), ii, p. 69.

  87. George Jacob Holyoake, Bygones Worth Remembering, 2 vols (1905), i, p. 375.

  88. For O’Connor in early April see Pickering, Feargus O’Connor, p. 133.

  89. Savile, 1848, pp. 24, 238–9.

  90. Ibid., p. 25.

  91. Goodway, London Chartism, pp. 72–4; Savile, 1848, p. 111.

  92. Goodway, London Chartism, pp. 100–5.

  93. Mark Almond, The Springtime of Peoples’ Revolutions: Five Hundred Years of Struggle for Change (1996), p. 96; Haraszti, Chartism, p. 226.

  94. Goodway, London Chartism, pp. 131–3.

  95. The sanest and most convincing estimate, as provided by Goodway, ibid., 130–1.

  96. The high figure for Chartists is provided in Mark Hovell, The Chartist Movement (Manchester, 1966), p. 290; cf. also Elie Halévy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, 6 vols (1961), iv, p. 245. The figure of 175,000 specials is given in Jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (1970), p. 339 and is raised to 200,000 in T. A. Critchley, A History of Police in England and Wales (1978), p. 99 and Elizabeth Longford, Wellington: Pillar of State (1972), p. 379. For a good overall summary see R. E. Swift, ‘Policing Chartism, 1839–1848: The Role of the “Specials” Reconsidered’, EHR, 122 (2007), pp. 669–99.

  97. Goodway, London Chartism, p. 139.

  98. G. P. Gooch, ed., The Later Correspondence of Lord John Russell, 1840–1878, 2 vols (1925), i, p. 174.

  99. For O’Connor as ‘yellow’ see T. A. Critchley, The Conquest of Violence: Order and Liberty in Britain (1970), p. 140. For the correct interpretation see Roberts, ‘Feargus O’Connor’, pp. 102–18 (at pp. 105–7) and Pickering, Feargus O’Connor, pp. 134–5.

  100. There have been many studies of 10 April 1848 apart from those in Savile, 1848, pp. 102–20 and Goodway, London Chartism, pp. 129–42. The most comprehensive is Henry Weisser, April 10: Challenge and Response in England 1848 (1983). See also David Large, ‘London in the Year of Revolution’, in J. Stevenson, ed., London in the Age of Reform (Oxford, 1977), pp. 177–211; Stanley Palmer, Police and Protest in England and Ireland, 1780–1850 (Cambridge, 1988) pp. 484–90.

  101. Pickering, ‘“And your petitions”’, pp. 383–6.

  102. Chase, Chartism, pp. 312–13, says it was a bad error on O’Connor’s part to make this allegation – surely a statement of the blindingly obvious – but does not explain why he thinks that.

  103. Roberts, ‘Feargus O’Connor’, p. 113; Pickering, ‘“And your petitions”’, pp. 383–6.

  104. Chase, Chartism, pp. 313–14.

  105. Here is a (perhaps fanciful) analogy from my own experience. In the Hitchcock film Rope (1948), the Nietzschean professor played by James Stewart tells his students that the ‘superman’ is beyond good and evil, and to him all things are permitted. When two of his students take him at his word and commit the ‘perfect murder’, he tells them that they have misinterpreted his meaning. But what other meaning could his words have had? Similarly, O’Connor advocated a revolutionary violence which was never supposed to be actualised and if anyone – Jones, Harney, McDouall et al. – tried to actualise it, they were immediately denounced and disowned.

  106. Again, being speculative, one wonders if O’Connor turned to the (by now almost o
utmoded) process of duelling because of an unconscious association of ideas with O’Connell. Chartists were jeering at O’Connor, saying that he had flopped as badly at Kensington as O’Connell had at Clontarf. Now in some eyes O’Connell’s greatest claim to fame was that he had killed John D’Esterre in a duel (1815), and D’Esterre at the time had the reputation as the nation’s premier duellist. It is also well known that O’Connell in a fit of remorse thereafter renounced duelling for all time. Might not O’Connor, by issuing the duel challenge, have been trying to go ‘one better’ than the Liberator?

  107. P. A. Pickering, ‘Repeal and the Suffrage: Feargus O’Connor’s Irish Mission, 1849–50’, in Ashton, Roberts and Fyson, eds, Chartist Legacy, pp. 119–46.

  108. All quotes are from Savile, 1848, pp. 120, 126.

  109. Henry Vizetelly, Glances Back through Seventy Years: Autobiographical and Other Reminiscences, 2 vols (1893), i, p. 334.

  110. Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men (1964), pp. 297–300; Iorwerth Prothero, ‘Chartism in London’, PP 44 (1969), pp. 76–105; George Rudé, ‘Why Was There No Revolution in England in 1830 or 1848?’, Studien über Revolution (Berlin, 1969), pp. 231–44; Goodway, London Chartism, pp. 223–4.

  111. Henry Solly, These Eighty Years, 2 vols (1893), ii, p. 59.

  112. Thompson, Chartists, p. 327; Edward Royle, Robert Owen and the Commencent of the Millenium (Manchester, 1998), p. 45.

  113. P. A. Pickering and S. Roberts, ‘Pills, Pamphlets and Politics: The Career of Peter Murray McDouall (1814–54)’, Manchester Region Historical Review, 11 (1997), pp. 34–83; cf. also Claeys, ed., Chartist Movement, v, pp. 1–8.

  114. Goodway, London Chartism, p. 123; Chase, Chartism, pp. 317–20.

  115. Chase, Chartism, p. 320.

  116. Goodway, London Chartism, pp. 85–7.

  117. Chase, Chartism, p. 322.

  118. J. Belchem, ‘Britishness and the UK Revolutions of 1848’, Labour History Review, 64 (1999), pp. 143–58.

  119. See Armand Coutant, Quand la République combattait la démocratie (Paris, 2009); Ines Murat, La Deuxième République (Paris, 1987). See also Collected Works of Marx and Engels (Moscow, 1969) 7, pp. 130–61. The quote is from A. J. P. Taylor, Revolutions and Revolutionaries (1980), p. 80.

  120. Goodway, London Chartism, pp. 93–5.