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Passages in the Life of a Radical
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 25, 2018
Bamford's prosecutor for high treason sniffily called him a 'person living in humble circumstances'; he was a Manchester, or Middleton, weaver, whose precocity in reading and writing made him the natural leader of a chapter of Radicals claiming political rights in the period from 1817 to 1819. Turned onto an institutional analysis of his and his class's penury by a reading of Cobbett's Register, his particular brand of Radicalism calls for manhood suffrage, with no property qualification; yearly parliaments (later recanted as prohibitively expensive); the secret ballot, and seats of equal size for every 20,000 head of population. The proud banner his phalanx of men carry to Peterloo, 'representation or death!' on a blue background, is misinterpreted as threatening violence to that nebulous text, the British Constitution, certainly to the established order. Apparently against the instructions of the judge, he is jailed for a year in Lincoln Castle, where his militancy softens as a result of constant contact with his wavering, eccentric Radical cellmate.
This memoir, dealing with a two-year period and featuring a number of narrative eyewitness account of the Peterloo massacre in its centre, including his wife's, recollects many of the characters of Radicalism, both working-class chancers and rabble-rousers and ultimately distant and chilly gentlemen backing Reform. Bamford is hard on 'Orator' Hunt, the leading light of Radical speechifying, who forced him to defend himself, unprepared, until the court's recess for the day, so that he, Hunt, could rise the next morning unfatigued and with the advantage of a lawyer's briefing. Maybe Hunt, who has a mistress, will tire of the cause when the people no longer give up the 'incense' of their acclamation to his self-regard? By 1844, the time of the book's writing, Bamford has virtually changed sides, working as a special constable to police the Chartists on Kennington Common. He deplores 'physical force' Chartism as woefully misconceived. Nothing, no structural social change, can lift up the lives of the poor so much as a single day spent in sobriety, in healthful conversation, doing something you set out to do and stuck at.
This memoir, dealing with a two-year period and featuring a number of narrative eyewitness account of the Peterloo massacre in its centre, including his wife's, recollects many of the characters of Radicalism, both working-class chancers and rabble-rousers and ultimately distant and chilly gentlemen backing Reform. Bamford is hard on 'Orator' Hunt, the leading light of Radical speechifying, who forced him to defend himself, unprepared, until the court's recess for the day, so that he, Hunt, could rise the next morning unfatigued and with the advantage of a lawyer's briefing. Maybe Hunt, who has a mistress, will tire of the cause when the people no longer give up the 'incense' of their acclamation to his self-regard? By 1844, the time of the book's writing, Bamford has virtually changed sides, working as a special constable to police the Chartists on Kennington Common. He deplores 'physical force' Chartism as woefully misconceived. Nothing, no structural social change, can lift up the lives of the poor so much as a single day spent in sobriety, in healthful conversation, doing something you set out to do and stuck at.
July 27, 2012
Read this for upper-division British history class in college. While it does provide a first-hand account of what life was like for the mid-to-lower classes in Britain during the early 1800s, the diary can be tough to get through.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews