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class happens when some men, as a result of common experiences (inherited or shared), feel and articulate the identity of their interests as between themselves, and as against other men whose interests are different from (and usually opposed to) theirs.
If we stop history at a given point, then there are no classes but simply a multitude of individuals with a multitude of experiences. But if we watch these men over an adequate period of social change, we observe patterns in their relationships, their ideas, and their
institutions. Class is defined by men as they live their own history, and, in the end, this is its only definition.
In the years between 1780 and 1832 most English working people came to feel an identity of interests as between themselves, and as against their rulers and employers.
I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity.
Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.
“Christ’s poor” and the “corrupt lump” were of course the same people: from another aspect the “wildness” of the poor was a sign that they lived outwith the bounds of grace. The Calvinist elect tended to narrow into a kinship group.
The Puritan emphasis upon a “calling” was (as Weber and Tawney have shown) particularly well adapted to the experience of prospering and industrious middle class or petty bourgeois groups.
The more Lutheran traditions of Anglican Protestantism were less adapted to
exclusive doctrines of “election”; while as the established Church it had a peculiar charge over the souls of the poor—indeed, the duty to inculcate in t...
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If Christ’s poor came to believe that their souls were as good as aristocratic or bougeois souls then it might lead them on to the arguments of the Rights of Man.
Those who have wished to emphasise the sober constitutional ancestry of the working-class movement
have sometimes minimised its more robust and rowdy features. All that we can do is bear the warning in mind. We need more studies of the social attitudes of criminals, of soldiers and sailors, of tavern life; and we should look at the evidence, not with a moralising eye (“Christ’s poor” were not always pretty), but with an eye for Brechtian values—the fatalism, the irony in the face of Establishment homilies, the tenacity of self-preservation. And we must also remember the “underground” of the ballad-singer and the fair-ground which handed on traditions to the 19th century (to the music-hall,
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But after the French Revolution no Whig politician would have risked, no City father condoned, the tampering with such dangerous energies; while the reformers, for their part, worked to create an organised public opinion, and despised the technique of unleashing the mob.
At election times in the large towns, the open vote by show of hands on the “hustings” which preceded the poll usually went overwhelmingly for the most radical candidate. The
reformers ceased to fear “the mob”, while the authorities were forced to build barracks and take precautions against the “revolutionary crowd”. This is one of those facts of history so big that it is easily overlooked, or assumed without question; and yet it indicates a major shift in emphasis in the inarticulate, “sub-political” attitudes of the masses.
Freedom from absolutism (the constitutional monarchy), freedom from arbitrary arrest, trial by jury, equality before the law, the freedom of the home from arbitrary entrance and search, some limited liberty of thought, of speech, and of conscience, the vicarious participation in liberty (or in its semblance) afforded by the right of parliamentary opposition and by elections and election tumults (although the people had no vote they had the right to parade, huzza and jeer on the hustings), as well as freedom to travel, trade, and sell one’s own labour. Nor were any of these freedoms
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constitutional precedent for the right to riot in resistance to oppression.
If the law is open alike to rich and poor, said Horne Tooke, so is the London Tavern: “but they will give you a very sorry welcome, unless you come with money sufficient to pay for your entertainment”.
For a plebeian movement to arise it was essential to escape from these categories altogether and set forward far wider democratic claims.
In the years between 1770 and 1790 we can observe a dialectical paradox by means of which the rhetoric of constitutionalism contributed to its own destruction or transcendence. Those in the 18th century who read Locke or Blackstone’s commentaries found in them a searching criticism of the workings of faction and interest in the unreformed House of Commons.2 The first reaction was to criticise the practice of the 18th century in the light of its own theory; the second, more
delayed, reaction was to bring the theory itself into discredit. And it was at this point that Paine...
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The rights of men in governments are … often in balances between differences of good; in compromises sometimes between good and evil, and sometimes between evil and evil.…
Burke’s great historical sense was brought to imply a “process of nature” so complex and procrastinating that any innovation was full of unseen dangers—a process in which the common people might have no part. If Tom Paine was wrong to dismiss Burke’s cautions (for his Rights of Man was written in reply to Burke), he was right to expose the inertia of class interests which underlay
his special pleading.
Paine lacks any depth of reading, any sense of cultural security, and is betrayed by his arrogant and impetuous temper into writing passages of a mediocrity which the academic mind still winces at and lays aside with a sigh.
for his epochal indiscretion—“the swinish multitude”
All governments, except those in France and America, derived their authority from conquest and superstition: their foundations lay upon “arbitrary power”.
The success of the First Part of Rights of Man was great, but the success of the Second Part was phenomenal. It was this part—and especially such sections as these—which effected a bridge between the older traditions of the Whig “commonwealthsman” and the radicalism of Sheffield cutlers, Norwich weavers and London artisans.
What he gave to English people was a new rhetoric of radical egalitarianism, which touched the deepest responses of the “free-born Englishman” and which penetrated the sub-political attitudes of the urban working people.
In terms of political democracy he wished to level all inherited distinctions and privileges; but he gave no countenance to economic levelling. In political society every man must have equal rights as a citizen: in economic society he must naturally remain employer or employed, and the State should not interfere with the capital of the one or the wages of the other.
Volney’s Ruins of Empire
Too often events in England in the 1790s are seen only as a reflected glow from the storming of the Bastille.1 But the elements precipitated
by the French example—the Dissenting and libertarian traditions—reach far back into English history. And the agitation of the 1790s, although it lasted only five years (1792–6) was extraordinarily intensive and far-reaching.
Here is something unusual—pitmen, keelmen, cloth-dressers, cutlers: not only the weavers and labourers of Wapping and Spitalfields, whose colourful and rowdy demonstrations had often come out in support of Wilkes, but working men in villages and towns over the whole country claiming general rights for themselves. It was this—and not the French Terror—which threw the propertied classes into panic.
The existence of a heresy-hunt of these proportions, in time of war, does not prove the widespread existence of heresy. “Loyalism” at such times always supposes the existence of “treason”, if only as a foil to itself. And yet something more than “war fever”, or the guilt and uneasiness of the propertied classes, is indicated by the outpourings of tracts and sermons, and the attacks on specific Jacobins in outlying parts.
The millennarial spirit which visited Wisbech and Liverpool indicated a restiveness, which authority decried as “the spirit of innovation”, an indefinite social optimism of the credulous which was kin to the revolutionary aspirations of the more sophisticated.
The spirit, whether in its visionary or in its superstitious form, is a curious paradox of the advent of “The Age of Reason”. But, in its modification of attitudes and nourishment of new aspirations, it was perhaps as long-lasting in its influence as the arguments of Tom Paine.
But Fox’s Libel Act had reached the statute book in the temperate early months of 1792, making the jury the judge of the matter as well as of the fact. It was, perhaps, Fox’s greatest service to the common people, passed at the eleventh hour before the tide turned towards repression.3 Thus, in England, the Government was faced with a series of obstacles: an indefinite law, the jury system (which humiliated authority by twice acquitting Daniel Eaton and by acquitting Thomas Walker in 1794), a small but brilliant Foxite opposition among whose number was the great advocate Thomas Erskine (who led
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constitutionalist rhetoric and willing to spring to the defence of any invasion of individual liberties.
This was the harvest, not only of persecution, but also of rising prices and of economic hardship.
He stood up during Robespierre’s Terror to declare that “the excesses and violences in France have not been the consequence of the new doctrines of the Revolution;
but of the old leaven of revenge, corruption and suspicion which was generated by the systematic cruelties of the old despotism”.
Thelwall took Jacobinism to the borders of Socialism; he also took it to the borders of revolutionism. The dilemma here was not in his mind but in his situation: it was the dilemma of all Radical reformers to the time of Chartism and beyond. How were the unrepresented, their organisations faced with persecution and repression, to effect their objects? As the Chartists termed it, “moral” or “physical” force?
Again and again, between 1792 and 1848, this dilemma was to recur. The Jacobin or Chartist, who implied the threat of overwhelming numbers but who held back from actual revolutionary preparation, was always exposed, at some
critical moment, both to the loss of the confidence of his own supporters and the ridicule of his opponents.
In the 1790s something like an “English Revolution” took place, of profound importance in shaping the consciousness of the post-war working class. It is true that the revolutionary impulse was strangled in its infancy; and the first consequence was that of bitterness and despair. The counter-revolutionary panic of the ruling classes expressed itself in every part of social life; in attitudes to trade unionism, to the education of the people, to their sports and manners, to their publications and societies, and their political rights. And the reflex of despair among the common people can be
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If there was no revolution in England in the 1790s it was not because of Methodism but because the only alliance strong enough to effect it fell apart; after 1792 there were no Girondins to
open the doors through which the Jacobins might come.
Isolated from other classes, radical mechanics, artisans and labourers had perforce to nourish traditions and forms of organisation of their own. So that, while the years 1791–5 provided the democratic impulse, it was in the repression years that we can speak of a distinct “working-class consciousness” maturing.
