by A. N. Wilson
His spiritual journey from High Tory absolutist to darling of the radicals, from churchman to unbeliever, was dynamoed by high intelligence and independence of mind, lubricated by enormous inherited wealth. (It was in origin a pawnbroking fortune.) He had the leisure, time, health and money to devote laborious hours to considering the whole nature of society, what makes it function and what, in revolutionary periods, makes it break down. His ‘utilitarian’ doctrine – the phrase was popularized by the son, John Stuart, of Bentham’s most ardent follower, James Mill – of the greatest happiness of the greatest number led in one direction to radical libertarianism and in another to rigid notions of control. His ‘Panopticon’ in prisons and workhouses was the architectural expression of his political outlook – central control must depend on keeping an eye on the dissident or recalcitrant elements in a state. Because of his huge expertise in the field of what we should call sociology and economics, Bentham was in fact consulted by politicians with whom no one would expect him to be in sympathy. Robert Peel corresponded with him about the setting up of a police force. The judicial reforms of Henry Brougham, from the suppression of special pleading to the setting up of local courts, followed Bentham to the letter. Wider yet and wider – Bentham’s ideas about governing India, which seemed fantastic in the 1820s when the East India Company held its sway, were all put in force by the time of Imperial Expansion in the 1860s.8
Bentham therefore in fact as well as in spirit may be seen as the father of Victorian realpolitik. The ‘greatest happiness of greatest numbers’ theory was based on the callous but realistic view that pleasing everyone is impossible. The secret of a stable society is to isolate and emasculate the miserable.
Whereas in the aristocratically dominated hierarchical world of eighteenth-century England life and property were largely protected by law, meted out with great severity from magistrates or the judicial bench, the Age of Reform substituted for the concept of law the concept of preventive policing. Eighteenth-century England got by without a police force partly because the population was so small, partly because there were, by the time of the 1820s, over 200 capital offences. England had the harshest criminal code in Europe. By 1841, only eight offences remained on the statute book for which an individual could be hanged. In effect the only capital offence was murder. These reforms were the delight of liberals, happy to escape the Beggar’s Opera world of the gallows. But the working classes were the chief opponents of introduction of the police force. Liberalism, using the term in its loosest sense, extended certain political rights to a wider group of propertied individuals, but it sharply reduced personal liberty. The establishment of a centralized police force, abolishing the local ‘watch’, the Dogberrys and Elbows who had kept the peace since Tudor times, tightened the hold of the state.9
There was, incidentally, no noticeable reduction in crimes against property after the establishment of the Met.10 Peel’s force of 3,000 men had a very largely political function in the first twenty years of its life. Almost to a man – this in itself was a sign of the times – they were agricultural labourers, drawn to the work by poverty, but detached from the urban proletariat whom they were enlisted to control. (‘I have refused to employ gentlemen’, Peel explained, ‘as superintendents and inspectors, because I am certain they would be above their work.’).11 Though all the talk, when they were established, was of their supposed efficacy in stemming the loss of £900,000 worth of property by theft and violence, it was not long before the Metropolitan Police were being used to put down the rising tide of Chartist agitations.12
It is possible to view the phenomenon of Chartism as a premature harbinger of twentieth-century leftists, though the links are tenuous and it is often hard to find much in the way of an apostolic succession being passed from surviving Chartist groups or individuals to incipient Labour-ites. Chartism is perhaps more helpfully seen as a phenomenon of its time. Its aspirations, the hopes and fears which it inspired in differing parts of the populace, its near victories and its muted defeat form the most consistently interesting backdrop to the political history of Victoria’s reign in its first ten years.
Those who hoped that the Reform Bill of Lord Grey (1764–1845) and Lord John Russell (1792–1878) would usher in an era of democracy, or even of government by the bourgeoisie, were to find their hopes disappointed. Grey’s Cabinet was almost entirely aristocratic; the four members of it who sat in the House of Commons were Lord Palmerston (1784–1865), an Irish viscount, Lord Althorp, heir to the Spencer earldom, Grant, a Scottish landowner raised to the peerage as Lord Glenelg, and Graham, an English baronet with huge estates. The first act of Grey’s government, after the passage of the Reform Bill, was to create two dukes.13 Fifteen years later when John Bright (1811–89), the North Country radical, spoke of the middle-class composition of the new reformed Parliament and told Parliament, in 1847, that ‘the present Government is essentially of the middle classes’, there was laughter in the House.14 The reforms of 1832 perhaps extended the suffrage to some propertied persons who had hitherto been excluded, but many of the old ways persisted. ‘Proprietary boroughs’ still existed for example, parliamentary seats which were effectively in the possession of one patron. The borough of Calne in Wiltshire was owned by the Marquess of Lansdowne. In 1832 it returned the Earl of Kerry to Westminster as its MP – Lord Lansdowne’s eldest son. He died in 1836 to be replaced by John Charles Fox Strangways, Lansdowne’s brother-in-law. In 1837 the seat passed to Lord Lansdowne’s surviving son, the Earl of Shelburne, who was returned to Parliament in the elections of 1841, 1847 and 1852.15 Nor should we imagine that the extension of the franchise in 1832 affected more than a handful of the populace. In terms of actual votes cast the Reform Act made no difference at all in many regions. In Harwich, which returned two members, the electorate was 214 people, of whom 156 voted in the election of 1832, and only 123 in 1835. Totnes with 179 voters returned two members; Liverpool with its 8,000 new voters also returned two members. Very many of the smaller seats, particularly those owned by aristocrats, were uncontested at elections, and the bribing of voters was an accepted part of the procedure – not merely accepted but necessary, in order to persuade those eligible to vote at all. As for voting in secret, many perhaps would share the view of Lord Palmerston, that ‘to go sneaking to the ballot-box, and poking in a piece of paper, looking round to see that no one could read it, is a course which is unconstitutional and unworthy of the character of straightforward and honest Englishmen’.16
At the meeting of Queen Victoria’s first Parliament, Thomas Wakley, our old friend the radical member for Finsbury, had suggested extending the suffrage still further, and introducing a secret ballot to make elections less vulnerable to abuse. He provoked the acknowledged Master Craftsman of the Great Reform Bill, Lord John Russell, to make his celebrated ‘Finality’ speech in the House of Commons. Lord John did not rule out the possibility of Reform being taken further at some future date; but if ‘the people of England did not care for Lord John’s moderate reforms, they may reject me. They can prevent me from taking part either in the Legislature or in the councils of the Sovereign; they can place others there who may have wider and more extended, more enlarged, and enlightened views, but they must not expect me to entertain these views.’ Quite how ‘the people of England’ could have any effect at all on the political fortunes of Lord John Russell when he considered ‘unwise’ the very notion of offering any more of them the vote, His Lordship did not on that occasion vouchsafe.
It was largely in response to this intransigent Whig mindset, at a time of unprecedented economic hardship, made worse by the Liberals’ workhouses and police forces, that the movement known as Chartism came into being.
‘There is verily a “rights of man” let no man doubt. An ideal of right does dwell in all men in all arrangements, actions and procedures of men: it is to this ideal of right, more and more developing itself as it is more approximated to, that human society forever tends and struggles.’17 So affirm
ed the great Carlyle, and others must have felt that there was something apocalyptic in the air, a change which had to happen merely because the gross disparities between rich and poor were so glaring, and the absence of political representation for the majority of the population was in the very nature of things wrong.
In 1837 The Northern Star, the Chartist newspaper, was founded in Leeds, using machinery and type brought from London. The comparative cheapness and speed of producing a newspaper, and the ease of disseminating its ideas by means of newly built railways, are important features of the Chartist story. The half-starved labourer in Andover was now in touch, in a manner impossible or inconceivable in previous generations, with the radical weaver of Spitalfields in London, the potter of Staffordshire choked on china clay, the overworked miner of Nottinghamshire, loom-hand of Yorkshire, cotton-spinner of Lancashire, iron-worker of South Wales, docker of Harwich. The working classes began for the first time to have a sense of solidarity. From the beginning, though its leaders were not working-class, Chartism was essentially a working-class movement because the only ‘radicals’ in the House of Commons represented the interests of factory-owners and industrialists who would oppose such reforms as the Christian Tory Lord Ashley’s (1801–85) – from 1851 7th Earl of Shaftesbury – attempts to protect children and women from working more than ten hours a day or in dangerous conditions. The New Poor Law, believed the Chartists, placed the labouring classes ‘at the feet of the rich assassins, who rob, brutalize, and enslave the population … It is in the nature of things that the middle classes must be worse than any other part of the community.’18
Carlyle believed that for the working-class movement to succeed, it needed ‘not misgovernment, but veritable government’; not democracy or ‘clattering of ballot-boxes’ but firm leadership. ‘This at bottom is the wish and prayer of all human hearts, everywhere and at all times: “Give me a leader, a true leader, not a false sham-leader; a true leader, that he may guide me on the true way.”’19 It was the undoing of the Chartist cause that no such People’s King arose. James Bronterre O’Brien (1805–64), the thirty-two-year-old son of an Irish wine merchant who read for the Bar in London, presented the first petition to the Parliament in 1837 – ‘THAT THE POOR OF ENGLAND SHALL BE HEARD BY COUNCIL AT THE BAR OF THE HOUSE OF COMMONS AGAINST THE LATE TYRANNICAL AND INHUMAN ENACTMENT MISCALLED THE POOR LAW AMENDMENT ACT.’20 He effectually passed over the leadership of the movement – as far as its parliamentary life was concerned – to Feargus O’Connor (1794–1855), the member of Parliament for Cork.
From the beginnings, however, there was always a division among Chartists between the emphasis of O’Connor, who called, in often fiery language, for working-class resistance and if necessary the use of force against their oppressors, and those who believed with William Lovett (1800–77) that the strength of their position lay in ‘moral force’. Feargus O’Connor, brought up on his father’s estates in Dangan Castle, Co. Cork, educated at Trinity, Dublin, called to the Bar, belonged to the colourful and noisy tradition of radical Irish gentry – though he represented in Parliament the English seat of Oldham, vacated by the death of Cobbett. Lovett, a failed cabinet-maker who became a pastry-cook and small-time shopkeeper in London, had founded the London Working Men’s Association to ‘draw into one bond of unity the intelligent and influential portion of the working classes in town and country, and to seek by every legal means to place all classes of society in possession of equal political and social rights’.21
Whether they looked to O’Connor, who was called ‘an English Marat’,22 or to the peaceable Lovett, the Chartists shared a conviction (drawn from the socialist ideas of Robert Owen) that labour, being the source of value, was a form of wealth. The labourer, therefore, just as much as the man of property, was entitled to a stake in the political life of the nation. They weren’t looking, as Carlyle thought they should have been, for one dynamic figurehead who could bring justice to them. Rather they believed that if every man had the vote, as opposed to the mere 8,000 property-owners of Liverpool, or the 179 of Totnes, then it would follow automatically that the interests of justice and equality would be dispensed from the parliamentary system. Electoral systems, even when the franchise had become universal, were so designed as to moderate, if not actually to thwart, the unruly majority; and to leave as unshaken as was consistent with the principles of decency the small oligarchy who in fact governed, and govern, the nation. In Victorian times this was a largely aristocratic oligarchy, evolving in time into a system of prime ministerial patronage, Cabinet government and a tightly run Civil Service. This system still obtains, so we have no means of knowing whether the ideals of the Chartists, if put into practice, would have brought universal felicity or social anarchy.
William Lovett favoured true universal suffrage, which meant, logically, the extension of the vote to women as well as to men. Other Chartists such as John La Mont and W.J. Linton shared the ideal, but it was not made part of the original Charter – which gives the movement its name – since they did not trust the Spirit of the time. It was felt to be too ‘extreme’ to suggest that women could vote. Another error. It would probably have made no difference to the eventual fate of the Movement, but there was no shortage of women prepared to support Feargus O’Connor, Lovett and the others. Witness the exchange between the registrar of Manchester, Richard Webb, and a Mrs King, who came to register the birth of her newborn son in March 1841.
Webb:
What is the child to be called?
King:
James Feargus O’Connor King.
Webb:
Is your husband a Chartist?
King:
I don’t know, but his wife is.
Webb:
Are you the child’s mother?
King:
Yes.
Webb:
You had better go home and consider of it again; for if the person you are naming your child after was to commit high treason and get hanged, what a thing it would be.
King:
If that should be the case, I should then consider it an honour to have my child named after him, so long as the child lives for I think Feargus O’Connor a great deal honester man than those who are punishing him.
Webb:
Well, if you are determined to have it named after him, I must name it; but I never met such an obstinate lady as you before.23
The Charter itself – The People’s Charter and National Petition – was published in May 1838. It had six points, asking for annual parliaments, universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts (to iron out the disparity between Totnes and Liverpool), the removal of the property qualification for membership of Parliament, a secret ballot, and payment for members. The impressiveness of the Charter was in the purity of its political language. That is, Chartism spoke, from first to last, in political terms and for political ends. Though embracing the cause of the disadvantaged and speaking up for the poor, it wasn’t a glorified trade union. It was not asking Parliament as then constituted for higher wages or shorter working hours or better housing. It was asking for what it deemed to be a just and a logical political representation, confident that these other benefits would flow inexorably therefrom. ‘The Charter was a means to an end – the means was their political rights, and the end was equality.’24
It is important to recognize that Chartism was largely a political reaction to the Whig-Radical alliance which brought in the Reform Act, the new Poor Laws, the police and all the other paraphernalia of control which were to be necessary in a successful liberal economy. In some regards therefore, the Chartists were not so much revolutionaries, still less prototypes of later collectivist solutions to social difficulties, as they were old-fashioned libertarians. Suffrage was the only possible weapon against what felt, if you lived at the bottom end of society, like a repressive coup d’état by the Whigs. In the many riots which the movement provoked, throughout the country, during the first decade of Victoria’s reign, the demonstrators us
ually singled out for aggressive attacks those noted in the locality for their obnoxious political views. In the riots in the Potteries, for instance, it was not so much the employers and the pot banks which were the objects of violence as the Poor Law Commissioners, the unpopular magistrates and the workhouses which were besieged. The rector of Longton, a man noted for the excellence of his wine cellar, had advised the poor to use dock leaves as a substitute for coffee.25 He did not have many glass panes left in his windows by the time the riot was over. The mob on this occasion had been directly stirred up by O’Connor, who toured the country whipping up frenzied support for the cause. About 350 women marched to greet him, each carrying a white wand. A thousand men from Stoke joined the Potteries Political Union – the local Staffordshire branch of the Chartist cause – on the day O’Connor said, ‘You have about 130 master potters who annually share about one million’s worth of your labour. Now, £250,000 would be more than ample for risk and speculation, and the remaining £750,000 would make you independent of the Three Devil Kings of Somerset House.’ (That is, the Poor Law Commissioners.)
The most famous master potter of all, one may note in passing, was Josiah Wedgwood (1730–95), the most successful businessman of the eighteenth century, whose unwillingness to divide his wealth with his workers along the lines suggested by O’Connor directly subsidized, in the next generation, the leisure-time required by his grandson Charles Darwin to apply the Malthusian principle to the natural world at large. The Wedgwood works at Etruria in its early nineteenth century manifestation employed more than one hundred, but it was unusual in so doing, most of the rival potteries being much smaller. Even the factory mills of Yorkshire, which caused so much distress to the hand-loom weavers at home, were found by. factory inspectors in 1835 to employ an average of 44.6 persons per mill.26 We remember that Alton Locke, the eponymous hero of Charles Kingsley’s (1819–75) Chartist novel, was a tailor. In those days before the mass-production of clothes there were some 74,000 male tailors in England (you can double that number because women nearly always sewed the buttonholes – smaller fingers – and usually the waistcoats, which is a quite separate skill from cutting out a coat). At this date, the Durham and Northumberland coal mines, Britain’s chief coal producers, employed 20,954 men and boys.27 Chartism was not the first blast of the collectivist-socialist trumpet; it was a cry by those described by G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936) in another context as ‘the secret people’:
