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The second point about Peterloo which has somehow evaded definition is the sheer size of the event, in terms of its
psychological impact and manifold repercussions.3 It was without question a formative experience in British political and social history.
Peterloo outraged every belief and prejudice of the “free-born Englishman”—the right of free speech, the desire for “fair play”, the taboo against attacking the defenceless.
If Peterloo was intended to curb the right of public meeting it had exactly the opposite consequences. Indignation provoked Radical organisation where it had never before existed, and open-air demonstrations were held in regions hitherto under the spell of the “loyalists”.
But by the end of December 1819 the movement was in a virtual state of collapse. For this there were two reasons: the divisions among the Radical leaders, and the repression of the Six Acts.
The Six Acts appear as a codification and extension of the legislation of 1795 and 1817. The first Act prohibited drilling and “military” training: the second authorised justices to enter and search houses, without warrants, on suspicion of there being arms: the third prohibited meetings exceeding fifty in number, with certain exceptions (county and parish meetings) and additions (designed to suppress Radical lecture-meetings): the fourth Act (of great importance in the next twelve years) increased the stamp duty on periodical publications, raising their cost to 6d. and above: the fifth and
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campaign of prosecutions
With meetings banned and the press under fire, political unions began to fall apart. As this happened, two other events occurred which altered the character and direction of the movement. The first was the onset of the years of general prosperity, from 1820 to 1825. Falling prices and fuller employment took the edge off Radical anger.
And, at the same time, the surviving Radical journalists settled (almost with relief) upon a new cause—the agitation on behalf of the honour and regal rights of Queen Caroline, whom George IV wished to set aside for misconduct, and who was the latest victim of a “Green Bag”.
First, it served notice upon the middle-class reformers and Whigs as to the consequences that would flow from their loss of influence over the unrepresented masses.
Second, the experience of the post-war agitation shook the confidence of the ancien régime in itself; and some of the loyalists of 1819 became, in the 1820s, willing to admit the need for limited concessions.
But, third, the enduring influence of Peterloo lay in the sheer horror of the day’s events.
From 1830 onwards a more clearly-defined class consciousness, in the customary Marxist sense, was maturing, in which working people were aware of continuing both old and new battles on their own.
This was the culture—with its eager disputations around the booksellers’ stalls, in the taverns, workshops, and coffee-houses—which Shelley saluted in his “Song to the Men of England” and within which the genius of Dickens matured. But it is a mistake to see it as a single, undifferentiated “reading public”. We may say that there were several different “publics” impinging upon and overlapping each other, but nevertheless organised according to different principles.
Persecution cannot easily stand up in the face of ridicule. Indeed, there are two things that strike one about the press battles of these years. The first is, not the solemnity but the delight with which Hone, Cruikshank, Carlile, Davison, Ben-bow and others
baited authority.
The second point is the real toughness of the libertarian and constitutional tradition, notwithstanding the Government’s assault.
The artisans, who formed the nuclei of Carlile’s supporting “Zetetic Societies” (as well as of the later Rotunda) were profoundly suspicious of an established culture which had excluded them from power and knowledge and which had answered their protests with homilies and tracts. The works of the Enlightenment came to them with the force of revelation.
By 1836 the struggle was substantially over, and the way had been opened for the Chartist press.
Two consequences of the contest may be particularly noticed. The first (and most obvious) is that the working-class ideology which matured in the Thirties (and which has endured, through various translations, ever since) put an exceptionally high value upon the rights of the press, of speech, of meeting and of personal liberty.
But if this was, in part, the rationalist illusion, we must remember the second—and more immediate—consequence: between 1816 and 1836 this “multiplication” seemed to work. For the Radical and unstamped journalists were seizing the multiplying-machine on behalf of the working class; and in every part of the country the experiences of the previous quarter-century had prepared men’s minds for what they now could read.
The culture of the theatre and the print-shop was popular in a wider sense than the literary culture of the Radical artisans. For the keynote of the autodidact culture of the Twenties and early Thirties was moral sobriety. It is customary to attribute this to the influence of Methodism, and undoubtedly, both directly and indirectly, this influence can be felt. The Puritan character-structure underlies the moral earnestness and self-discipline which enabled men to work on by candle-light after a day of labour. But we have to make two important reservations. The first is that Methodism was a
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It was Cobbett who created this Radical intellectual culture, not because he offered its most original ideas, but in the sense that he found the tone, the style, and the arguments which could bring the weaver, the
schoolmaster, and the shipwright, into a common discourse. Out of the diversity of grievances and interests he brought a Radical consensus.
Paine anticipates the tone; but Cobbett, for thirty years, talked to his audience like this, until men were talking and arguing like Cobbett all over the land. He assumed, as a matter scarcely in need of demonstration, that every citizen whatsoever had the power of reason, and that it was by argument addressed to the common understanding that matters should be settled.
Paine affected to reduce things to first principles, to announce self-evident truths. Cobbett troubles himself about little but the details and local circumstances.… Paine’s writings are a sort of introduction to political arithmetic on a new plan: Cobbett keeps a day-book, and makes an entry at full of all the occurrences and troublesome questions that start up throughout the year.
The personalisation of politics—this labourer in his cottage-garden, this speech in the House of Commons, that example of persecution—was well adapted to the pragmatic approach of an audience only awakening to political consciousness.
Cobbett, in fact, helped to create and nourish the anti-intellectualism, and the theoretical opportunism (masked as “practical” empiricism) which remained an important characteristic of the British labour movement.
he warned against men who “would persuade you, that, because things have been perverted from their true ends, there is nothing good in our constitution and laws. For what, then, did Hampden die in the field, and Sydney on the scaffold?” The Americans, in seceding from Britain, had taken care to preserve “Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus” and the body of the Common Law:
Cobbett’s prejudices keyed in with the grievances of the small producers, shopkeepers, artisans, small farmers, and the consumers. Attention was diverted from the landowner or industrial capitalist and focussed upon the middleman—the factor or broker who cornered markets, profited from the people’s shortages, or lived, in any way not closely attached to land or industry, upon unearned income. The arguments were moral as much as economic. Men were entitled to wealth, but only if they could be seen to be hard at work.
According to this view, the landowners’ tenure of their land was not of absolute right, but was dependent upon their fulfilling their social obligations. Neither Cobbett nor Fielden started from the assumption that the working people had any right to expropriate landed property or capital; but both accepted that if the existing property-relations violated, for the labourer or his child, essential claims to human realisation, then any remedy, however drastic, was open to discussion.
Cobbett did more than any other writer to preserve the Radicals and Chartists from becoming the camp-followers of Utilitarians or of Anti-Corn Law League. He nourished the culture of a class, whose wrongs he felt, but whose remedies he could not understand.
Yet we must not forget the inconsistencies, the bullying, the anti-intellectualism, the professions of loyalty to Throne and Church, the theoretical opportunism, the turns and twists of Cobbett’s ephemeral political writing.
We have already examined the main stock of ideas of the first, in Rights of Man, and its most important contribution in Carlile’s fight for the free press.
The note is quite clear. Gast had rejected the model of a “natural” and self-adjusting political economy, which, left unrestrained, would operate to the benefit of employers and employed alike. An essential antagonism of interests is assumed, and its resolution or adjustment must be a matter of force. What might be of utility to capital might well be oppressive to labour.
Combination is of itself no crime; on the contrary, it is the principle on which societies are held together.
even if Owen, Gray, Pare and Thompson had not been writing, Hodgskin’s work was bound to lead on to the further question: if capital was largely parasitic upon labour, might not labour simply dispense with it or replace it by a new system?
Hence Owenite Socialism always contained two elements which never wholly fused: the philanthropy of the Enlightenment, devising “span-new systems” according to principles of utility and benevolence: and the experience of those sections of workers who selected notions from the Owenite stock, and adapted or developed them to meet their particular context.
by the end of the Twenties one variant or another of co-operative and “labour” economic theory had taken hold of the cadre of the working-class movement. Cobbett offered no coherent theory. Carlile’s individualism was repellent. Hodgskin, by
implication, pointed towards mature socialist theory, but his analysis pulled up before that point, and was in any case compatible with co-operative theory as William Thompson showed.
general national unionism.
But despite its failure, the National Association gave new notations to the idea of co-operation;
Too many of the Owenite ventures overshot themselves, and ended in this sort of muddle of waste, benevolence and bad planning. If Owen was the greatest propagandist of Owenism, he was also one of its worst enemies. If the Labour Exchange had been left in the hands of such men as Lovett, the outcome might have been different.
These examples all serve to emphasise that it is premature, in the 1830s, to think of the English working people as being wholly open to secular ideology. The Radical culture which we have examined was the culture of skilled men, artisans, and of some outworkers. Beneath this culture (or co-existing with it) there were more obscure levels of response, from which the charismatic leaders like Oastler and O’Connor drew some of their support. (In the Chartist movement, men like Lovett were never finally to find a common outlook and strategy with the “unshorn chins and fustian jackets” of the
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patterns impinged upon each other, or were in conflict within the same mind. But, whereas Dissent and rationalism seem to have ordered and tamed the character of the southern artisan, in those parts where the Methodist pattern was dominant during the Wars, emotional energies seem to have been stored or repressed. Strike a spade into the working-class culture of the north at any time in the Thirties, and passion seems to spring from the ground.
The communitarian yearning revived, and the language of rationality was translated into that of brotherhood. As in all such phases of ferment, Antinomianism also revived, with its mystical equivalents of the secular notions of sexual liberation held among some Owenite communitarians:
Moreover, for the poor, Owenism touched one of their deepest responses—the dream that, somehow, by some miracle, they might once again have some stake in the land
With the Owenites the Millennium was not to arrive, it was to be made, by their own efforts.
And this is where we may gather all the lines of Owenism together: the artisans, with their dreams of short-circuiting the market-economy: the skilled workers, with their thrust towards general unionism: the philanthropic gentry, with their desire for a rational, planned society: the poor, with their dream of land or of Zion: the weavers, with their hopes of self-employment: and all of these, with their image of an equitable brotherly community, in which mutual aid would replace aggression and competition.
This “we will” is evidence that working people were approaching maturity, becoming conscious of their own interests and aspirations as a class. There was nothing irrational or messianic in their offering a critique of capitalism as a system, or in projecting “utopian” ideas of an alternative and more rational system.
