Popular virtue: Continuity and change in Radical moral politics, 1820–70 9781526114761

Table of contents :
Front matter
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction
A ‘Radical Underworld’?: The infidel roots of Chartist culture
Politics and everyday life in early Chartism
From insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’
Medicine, popular science, and Chartism’s improvement culture
Communal self-improvement after the ‘disasters of the Strike’
The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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Popular virtue

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POPULAR VIRTUE Continuity and change in Radical moral politics, 1820–​70

Tom Scriven

Manchester University Press

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Copyright © Tom Scriven 2017 The right of Tom Scriven to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 1475 4 hardback First published 2017 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-​party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Out of House Publishing Ltd

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For Jess

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Contents List of figures Acknowledgements

page viii ix

Introduction 1 A ‘Radical Underworld’? The infidel roots of Chartist culture 2 Politics and everyday life in early Chartism 3 From insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’ 4 Medicine, popular science, and Chartism’s improvement culture 5 Communal self-​improvement after the ‘disasters of the Strike’ 6 The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics Conclusion

1 13 44 74 103 130 164 193

Bibliography Index

196 218

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Figures 1 The header of A Slap at the Church!, from the edition of April 14 1832. © The British Library Board page 24 2 ‘Interior of the Tory Charnel House’, Figaro in London, 21 April 1831. Image produced by ProQuest as part of British Periodicals. Inquiries may be made to www.proquest.com 26 3 ‘The Royal Civic Gorge, or Who Pays for It’ from Cleave’s London Satirist and Gazette of Variety, 11 November 1837. © The British Library Board 50 4 ‘Phrenology’, in Henry Dewhurst, A Guide to Human and Comparative Phrenology (London, 1830). By permission of Yale University, Harvey Cushing/​John Hay Whitney Medical Library 88 5 ‘The Drunkard’s Coat of Arms’, from Cleave’s Penny Gazette and Variety of Amusement, 17 March 1838. © The British Library Board 109 6 ‘The English Town’, drawing by Ernest Jones c. 1848. © The British Library Board 145 7 ‘The Grecian City’, drawing by Ernest Jones c. 1848. © The British Library Board 146 8 O’Connorville, The Northern Star, 22 August 1846. © The British Library Board 152 9 ‘Louisa Stanley’, from George W.M. Reynolds, Mysteries of the Court of London, Volume III (London, 1851). © The British Library Board 171 10 ‘Venetia’s Lovers’, from George W.M. Reynolds, Mysteries of the Court of London, Volume III (London, 1851). © The British Library Board 172

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Acknowledgements I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the research from which this book originated. Sarah Wood and James Greenhalgh both commented on versions of the first two chapters, for which I am extremely grateful. Sarah Roddy’s advice was also invaluable while I was preparing the proposal, as was Henry Miller’s, who also provided many pertinent leads to sources and material. Paul Pickering provided encouragement along with copies and a transcript of a letter of Henry Vincent’s from the Dorothy Thompson archive, transcribed by Robert Fyson. I would also like to thank Bertrand Taithe, Julie-​Marie Strange, and Michael Sanders for supervising the thesis, imparting upon me the skills and knowledge necessary to complete a book, as well as numerous instances of help and encouragement since 2012. On the same note I  would like to thank my external examiner, Malcolm Chase, who has remained an inquisitive, informative and helpful presence. The anonymous reviewers at Manchester University Press provided invaluable comments and suggestions for which I am grateful, while the rest of the team ensured that the production went smoothly. I would also like to thank the various archives I visited during the research, in particular the remarkable Labour History Archive and Study Centre at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, which possesses extremely friendly and knowledgeable staff. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank Jess Patterson for comments, advice, and providing a sounding-​board for ideas. In particular she deserves recognition for answering my constant questions about Christian heterodoxy, the Enlightenment, and intellectual history more generally. She also deserves recognition for dealing with my grumpiness during the researching and writing of the book.

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Introduction

On 24 August 1849 the prominent Chartist publisher Henry Hetherington died aged fifty-​ seven, another victim of the cholera epidemic sweeping London. As the eulogy by his friend Thomas Cooper suggested, this was more likely worsened than prevented by his years of teetotalism and vegetarianism and his preference for homeopathic and botanical medicines: With regret, it must be stated that there is too strong reason to conclude that our friend’s decease was hastened by want of proper care. His strict temperance –​for he had been almost an absolute teetotaller, for many years –​ warranted him in believing that he was not very likely to fall a victim to the prevailing epidemic. When he was seized with it, he refused –​from what we must call a prejudice –​to call in medical relief. Our friend Holyoake prevailed with him to have a physician called, after having himself stayed the cramp he suffered from. It was too late, however, for medicines to relieve his case –​although several medical friends were successively brought to his bed-​side. His natural frankness and humour were exhibited even in his last hours. ‘Why did you not call for help sooner?’ said one medical friend to him. ‘Why, you know,’ he replied with a smile, ‘I don’t like you physic-​folks; and besides, I have had Doctor Holyoake attending me; and he has done all that could be done.’1

These were not just the acts of an isolated eccentric who succumbed to a misguided fad, but in fact representative of a much wider political culture within the British working class over the course of the 1840s as thousands turned towards various forms of dietary, physical, mental, and moral improvement, all with the aim of thereby affecting social and political change. Alongside this Hetherington’s death scene was emblematic in other ways; his friend George Julian Holyoake reported that when he realised his ‘malady might terminate fatally’ Hetherington insisted on attempting to finish the production of some of his books, attesting to the vibrant intellectual culture of which he himself

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2 Popular virtue was a key instigator. The ‘natural humour’ recalled by Cooper was one of the ways in which he had helped build that culture, being part of a group of publishers who produced often caustic political commentaries throughout the 1830s, while the friend that cared for him, the Owenite midwife Emma Martin, illustrates the proximity of Chartist and Radical thought to socialism and feminism. One of Hetherington’s final acts was to sign a document he had written over a year previously, which became his last will and testament. In it he attacked the clergy and stated his abject refusal to their speaking at his funeral, and re-​affirmed his strongly materialist Deism along with his faith in both Robert Owen and socialism. The development and shifting priorities afforded to all of these different currents within Chartist thought is the subject of this book. Between 1838 and 1852 millions of working-​class men and women campaigned for the implementation by Parliament of the ‘People’s Charter’, the six points of which were sought to overturn a political system that only represented the propertied classes by demanding universal male suffrage, the ballot, the equalisation of electoral districts, the payment of MPs, the ending of the property qualification for MPs, and annual Parliaments. This had grown from the earlier campaign for reform of Parliament between 1830 and 1832, which culminated in the 1832 Reform Act –​which, in setting property qualifications on the rights to vote and hold office, sorely disappointed those working-​class Radicals like Hetherington who had campaigned for reform. Subsequently the 1830s became a decade of strife as the Whig government, which was widely seen as representing the newly enfranchised middle class, violently repressed unrest in Ireland, struck at trade union organisation within Britain, and replaced the generous welfare system with the draconian and penal new Poor Laws. Chartism was therefore an attempt to continue the reforms of 1832 in order to ensure that working-​class interests were represented in Parliament and that economic and social grievances could then be redressed. Over the course of 1838 and 1839 the hostility it received from the government and its own internal radicalisation pressed it into a much more confrontational position with the State and the British ruling class. Many Chartist leaders and rank-​and-​file members were pressed by both economic distress and a sense of political crisis into revolutionary positions, with some even calling for a fundamental restructuring of the economy and the distribution of wealth. A huge national petition that demanded the implementation of the Charter was presented to Parliament in May 1839, only to be ignored. The National Convention, an anti-​Parliament formed from the Chartist leadership that sat throughout much of the spring and summer of 1839, ended in indecision and disunity and in August a politicised general strike dubbed the ‘Sacred Month’ failed through a lack of leadership and firm planning. Many Chartists thereafter turned to the ‘Ulterior Motives’ they had threateningly mooted throughout the year, and during the winter of 1839–​40 insurrectionary plots were launched to almost immediate failure. Hundreds of Chartists

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Introduction 3 were subsequently arrested, regardless of whether they had been involved in the plots or even supported insurrection. The early, enthusiastic phase of Chartist organising ended abruptly. It was following this that the culture encapsulated in Hetherington’s death was pressed much more to the forefront of the movement. The impasse after 1839 convinced many Chartists that the government could not be coerced or overthrown, and that instead only a longer-​term strategy could secure political emancipation. Consequently, the early years of the 1840s saw working-​class Radicalism posit the unified moral, physical, and intellectual improvement of the individual as the chief means of bringing about a more benevolent society. By directly challenging the degrading effects of both political corruption and economic exploitation through education and physical improvement it was hoped that a rational, sober, and united working class would finally seize political power, not only because it was morally just but also because such an organisation would be undefeatable. Chartist leaders presented a range of means of bringing this about –​from the teetotalism and quackery practiced by Hetherington to wider schemes of mutual improvement and co-​operative land ownership. This was intensified as 1842 witnessed similar defeats as in 1839, when a second National Petition was disregarded by Parliament and a politicised mass strike with revolutionary undertones once again failed. After this, the strategy of gradualist moral improvement became viewed as one of the few remaining viable spheres of working-​class political action. As much as this was a continuation of earlier working-​class ideas about education, improvement and social progress, it was also an abrupt shift away from the culture of early Chartism and the movement’s Radical antecedents. In the 1830s Radicalism incorporated many aspects of working-​class life, such as drinking, festivity, and sexual libertarianism, as a means of infusing politics into the everyday life of the working class. Bawdy satire and sensational crime stories were both the basis of the immense popularity of the Radical press and the vehicle for cautionary tales and moral criticism of society and its elite. The changing fortunes of Chartism transfigured these moral attitudes into increasingly austere forms that shunned more libertarian outlooks, so that in the 1840s Chartism pushed for ascetic forms of ‘self-​culture’. After 1848 –​the year of revolutions across Europe, which saw Chartists turn towards social ​democratic ‘Red Republicanism’ –​this direct link between Chartism and asceticism was cut. The movement’s new socialist leadership posited moral improvement as something that could only come after the seizure of political power and then social reform, and returned once again to a bawdier and more sensational political culture. However, self-​improvement lived on within the co-​operative and trade union movements, and with fundamental revisions this moral politics survived to become an important aspect of not only the politics of the Reform League and Popular Liberalism after the 1860s, but also the developing ideology of self-​help. Moral politics was therefore profoundly important during the Chartist era, and it is in this sphere that many of the defining characteristics, discourses

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4 Popular virtue and practices of mid-​Victorian plebeian culture were shaped and delineated. The dominance of political reform within Radical action and discourse from the 1832 Reform Act to the decline of Chartism after 1848 was accompanied by a cohesive but dynamic and changing moral philosophy and concerted attempts to put it into practice. This study looks in detail at the extensive counter-​culture that resulted from this interchange between the mass-​agitation for universal suffrage and the campaign for individual self-​ improvement. It reveals the extent to which these two ideological stances were responsive to one another, producing a political culture that comprehensively sought to reform society from its most prosaic points up.

Politics, society, and culture in Chartist historiography Chartism’s political culture has dominated the recent historiography of the movement, but despite this the changing nature of its emphasis on morality and everyday life has been neglected. Following Gareth Stedman Jones’s pioneering work on the language of Chartism, historians have studied the movement chiefly in terms of how it communicated its ideas and formed and represented a distinct identity. Stedman Jones’s account argues that rather than a novel response to industrialisation, as the earlier Marxist historiography proposes, Chartism was instead a continuation of the older ‘Old Corruption’ tradition of Radicalism. This discourse focused on State tyranny, corruption, and over-​taxation, and was therefore primarily a political critique. As such, it was potentially inclusive of many sectors of society and not the preserve of the proletariat alone.2 This argument was given weight since it was concurrent with a number of methodologically distinct studies which nevertheless came to the similar conclusion that there was an uninterrupted continuity within British Radicalism throughout the long nineteenth century.3 Stedman Jones’s method and argument set the agenda for language (broadly understood to include oral, written, and symbolic communication) and representation being the key prisms for analysis of Chartism, even amongst historians critical of his conclusions and his rejection of class consciousness as the movement’s chief ideological expression. This development within the historiography of British popular politics and labour history was an important feature of the rise of cultural history after the 1980s.4 These studies have shared the tendency of viewing political culture as a means of conveying political ideas, and while this has led to interesting approaches to the debates surrounding Chartist ideology it also possesses a number of deficiencies. The emphasis on representation and symbolism has led to an idea of culture as something that political movements utilise, for instance to press their critique of society or in order to bind their members together. Isolated case studies of such symbolism and representation do not encourage investigation of change within the movement, as such studies are often focused on individuals or very particular moments, tendencies, and

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Introduction 5 regions. The dynamism of political culture, its ability to change quite dramatically, and its role not just as a means of facilitating political activity but also as a sphere of political action in itself have all therefore been marginalised by the ‘cultural turn’. Rather than emphasise how Chartists sought to represent themselves and their ideas, Popular Virtue instead turns to the broader mentalité of the movement. What was the moral mindset of Chartism? How did this mindset change, and what did it retain? What practices did this mentalité require of the movement’s supporters? One of the core conclusions that Popular Virtue arrives at after posing these questions is that the idea of an uninterrupted political tradition during the period disregards a more complex and contradictory trajectory for popular politics during the Chartist era. It does this by emphasising the changes and bifurcations that occurred within moral politics and everyday culture. In itself ‘Old Corruption’ was a moral critique of the political system, arguing that it was designed largely to exploit ‘the People’, defined as the productive working and middle class, in order to uphold both the power and the dissolute lifestyles of the rich. For those arguing for a fundamental continuity running through early Radicalism, Chartism, and then Popular Liberalism, this moral critique and the existence amongst Radicals of a moralistic culture that valued hard work, sobriety, sexual propriety, and thrift are important indicators of both continuity and values shared across class boundaries.5 If such values were not hegemonic within Radicalism by the Chartist period then a major assumption of the continuity thesis is undermined. Popular Virtue outlines how the ‘Radical underworld’ of humour, irreligion, and sexual libertarianism remained a feature in early Chartism and returned in late Chartism after the interregnum caused by Chartism’s turn towards ascetic moral improvement.6 Furthermore, the improving strategy that took hold of Chartism in the 1840s had very different aims from the improvement culture of either its Whig and Utilitarian contemporaries who sought to ‘improve’ the working class through education, or popular Liberalism later in the century which represented an alliance between working-​class Radicals and middle-​ class  Liberals. Chartism’s improvement culture incorporated eccentricities such as phrenology, mesmerism, hydropathy, homoeopathy, vegetarianism, and herbal medicines. This emphasis on materialist moral philosophy and science was responsive to popular criticisms of industrialisation and capitalism that were simultaneously developing within working-​class Radicalism. A core aspect of Stedman Jones’s argument was the claim that Chartists did not adopt the critique of capitalism or socialist interpretation of the labour theory of value most clearly adopted by the socialist Owenites after the 1820s. John Saville rejected this, noting that this argument relied upon a neglect of research which had showed that such critical political economy was prevalent within working-​class Radicalism since the 1830s, and he was soon followed by Gregory Claeys’ outlining of the birth of ‘social Radicalism’ in the 1830s, which by 1848 had developed into political socialism within both Chartism

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6 Popular virtue and Owenism.7 This book will parallel this argument by outlining how ethical Radicalism built upon social Radicalism’s critique and outlook by seeking an immediate palliative to the corruption and degradation of the working class under industrial capitalism. Chartism should consequently be placed within a socialist continuity as much as a Liberal one. This book therefore seeks to understand Chartim’s moral politics not by projecting back from those of the 1860s and 1870s, but in their own terms.

From Freethought to social democracy Alongside the discontinuities within Radical culture, the other core argument of this book is that social concerns were foregrounded within Chartism. Popular Virtue therefore posits a different narrative for the development of Chartism than most studies, which emphasise instead its place within a political continuity. This book charts the development of the movement against its intellectual culture, and with that the changing nature of its politicisation of everyday life. When viewing Chartism from the perspective of its moral politics abrupt changes become apparent, despite a consistent and fundamental emphasis upon the moral and social consequences of political corruption and economic exploitation. This moral politics originated in the ‘Freethought’ culture that emerged in the 1820s. In print and in meetings these ‘infidels’ –​an appellation originally applied by opponents before being adopted by the freethinkers themselves –​drew from the radical enlightenment to advocate moral and religious unorthodoxy and Republicanism. This culture possessed several distinct nuclei. One was the ‘underworld’ outlined by Iain McCalman, which coupled religious and political heterodoxy with a bawdy and festive culture that often shaded into obscenity and pornography.8 Another was the loose movement that surrounded the anti-​Christian Republican Richard Carlile, a self-​educated former tinplate worker from Devon who became the most prominent Radical journalist of the 1820s.9 By the end of the decade Carlile’s influence faded, and the Owenite movement absorbed many of his associates, along with many involved in the ‘underworld’ and broader freethinking culture. Owenism advocated a rational, scientific socialist system designed to replace competitive capitalist society with a co-​operative one based around concepts of mutual aid and collective labour. Its utopian ambitions for a ‘New Moral World’ enraptured many plebeian radicals and freethinkers with its proposals for progress and liberation through alternate moral outlooks, practices, and lifestyles.10 This infidel and Freethought tradition has been traced into the mid-​Victorian campaigns for secularisation, and more recently as a progenitor of late-​Victorian feminism, but historians have not strongly associated it Chartism.11 In fact, many of the hallmarks of Freethought –​humour and satire, religious heterodoxy, political burlesque and festivity, and sexual libertarianism –​were present in the early stages of the Chartist movement.

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Introduction 7 The repudiation of these aspects of Radical culture in the early 1840s was therefore a major moment of change within Chartism and wider Radical politics. Importantly this rejection was still grounded within the infidel tradition. The increasing abandonment of those aspects of infidel and working-​class culture that seemed frivolous and demoralising occurred alongside an intensification of interest in other aspects of the infidel intellectual tradition, in particular its emphasis upon the destructive potential of ‘unnatural’ practices and environments on the mind and body. A core aspect of this was the belief in phrenology, the theory that the brain was the material organ of the mind. This book will outline how it was far more widespread within Chartism than previous accounts have recognised, and due to this formed an important component of the intellectual and strategic revisions of the early 1840s.12 This utilisation of phrenology was coupled with texts of the late Enlightenment that posited mankind’s perfectibility. Authors in the Radical canon since the 1790s, in particular William Godwin and Volney, were drawn from alongside contemporary figures like the American transcendentalist William Ellery Channing and a host of British Owenite and Radical lecturers. While these figures all posited the innate perfectibility of human individuals and society through education, phrenology’s materialist definition of the mind meant that education and moral improvement would require simultaneous physical improvement. Under this influence, Chartist intellectual culture based political morality within the body, and it followed from this that the improvement of the body would have direct political consequences. A core component of this was the social critique that had been elaborated within Owenism since the 1820s and which had come to inform ‘social Radicalism’ in the 1830s. This critique emphasised a hybridised elite, formed from aristocrats who possessed monopolies on the land and capitalists who possessed monopolies on industry.13 Both groups utilised these monopolies to extract from the people the total value of the produce of their labour, through forms of ‘artifice’ such as taxation, rent, or profit. For some Radicals this led to a fusion of the demand for political reform with demands for social reform. As Bronterre O’Brien, the editor of the Poor Man’s Guardian, a newspaper owned by Hetherington, wrote in 1833:  ‘the working classes aspire to be at the top instead of at the bottom of society –​or, rather that there should be no bottom at all.’14 After the apparent disaster of 1839, many Chartist leaders turned to this critique along with the philosophies of perfectibility. After re-​appraising the early stages of the movement, they concluded that the monopolies of the aristocracy and capitalists had demoralised the people to the point that they were not effective political actors. As the popular Chartist leader Henry Vincent put it, ‘our exertions have been neutralised by the sottishness of portions of the very class we desired to benefit’.15 Phrenology, perfectibility and social Radicalism all drew these leaders to the conclusion that the people needed to be improved to overcome the rapacious effects of industrial capitalism and political corruption. It followed

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8 Popular virtue that physical improvement would directly combat the deleterious impact of society, consequently morally and mentally improving the people while also directly attacking the stranglehold the middle class, aristocracy, and clergy all had on working-​class life. Tolerance of ‘irrational’ or ‘unhealthy’ tendencies, such as sexual libertarianism, drink-​fuelled festivity, or political violence, was therefore marginalised as the leaders developing this strategy sought to avoid all ‘bestial’ activities, which could only corrupt the body and therefore also the mind. Chartism was therefore a major cause of the rapid growth of heterodox medicine in the 1840s.16 This leads to an important conclusion of Popular Virtue. Historians have tended to associate the culture of heterodox medicine and moral improvement with Owenism, whilst within Chartist studies moral improvement has tended to be viewed as a minority tendency within the ‘moderate’ wing of the Chartist movement. In this viewpoint after 1841 this tendency effectively formed a faction ostracised from mainstream Chartism, represented by the National Charter Association (NCA) and the leadership of Feargus O’Connor, after O’Connor denounced those proposing improvement as orchestrating a ‘New Move’ that would split the movement.17 This has been perpetuated by an overriding focus upon O’Connor since his rehabilitation in the 1970s, when following Dorothy Thompson studies presented him as a competent and strategic thinker rather than the dangerous demagogue of older historiography.18 The argument of this book instead follows observations made by Malcolm Chase that such a split is overstated and there is ample evidence that improvement culture became broadly practised within the movement, a position similar to Edward Royle’s argument that Chartism and Owenism considerably overlapped in cultural and intellectual terms.19 Along these lines, moral improvement was widely popular within the movement and many Chartists within the NCA and allied with O’Connor came to adopt its precepts and practices. Crucial to understanding this process is appreciating that it was a reformulation of Chartist strategy rather than a fundamental break with Chartism’s emphasis upon universal suffrage and working-​class political independence. In particular, once the controversy of 1841 had dissipated improvement became central to Chartist counter-​ culture. By the mid-​1840s even O’Connor had come to advocate it as integral aspects of the culture of his ‘Land Plan’, an attempt to relocate thousands of industrial workers to small rural farmsteads. In short, while there were distinct disputes amongst the Chartist leadership and grassroots after 1840, there was not a fundamental intellectual or cultural split within the movement. Chartism in the 1840s came to be dominated by its moralistic counter-​culture. Study of this culture reveals that it incorporated aspects of several of the different forms of socialism outlined by Marx and Engels in the third section of the Communist Manifesto. Produced in 1848, this critique of the politics of the 1840s identified several of the projects that emerged within Chartism after 1840: forms of ‘reactionary’ and ‘petty-​bourgeois’ socialism that sought to return to the agrarian capitalism of

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Introduction 9 spade husbandry that supposedly conformed to natural and moral law, ‘temperance fanaticism’ that sought the physical and moral reform of individuals in order to maintain ‘the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements’, and ‘utopian’ socialism and communism which sought experimental communities and ascetic ways of life as a means of gradually reforming ‘competitive’ capitalist society.20 While Marx and Engels presented these movements as being not only discrete from one another but also in opposition to political movements like Chartism, in practice they all intersected and bled into one another. Importantly, the political culture that resulted from these influences was rooted in a deeply critical attitude towards industrial capitalism. Chartism’s counter-​culture was rooted in the socialist critique of ‘competitive’, capitalist society, which it sought to overcome through reform of the working-​class mind, body, and environment. The first chapter will therefore focus on the Radical print culture of the 1820s and 1830s to revise the notion that the early Chartists were austere and moralistic, highlighting instead the populist elements of their moral politics, which was heterodox, libertarian, and incorporated amusement and humour. Importantly it was at this point that the moral critique of capitalism became incorporated into working-​class Radicalism, and the impact on society on individual character (and vice versa) cemented within Radical thought. The second chapter will use the itinerant activism of Henry Vincent in the west of England between 1837 and 1839 as the central case study to establish how early Chartist activists integrated plebeian culture and everyday life into the movement, finding success but also revealing problematic attitudes towards sexuality and women. The third chapter will look at the impact of repression and imprisonment between 1839 and 1843 on Chartist leaders, and argues that this experience was the impetus for moral improvement to increasingly come to the forefront of the movement, whilst sexuality, satire, and violent acts and language began to lose their prominence. The fourth chapter will study in detail the intellectual, political, and cultural shifts within the Chartist press after 1840, in which individual moral improvement allied to a critique of capitalism became increasingly prominent. It will then outline how this led to a vibrant ideology and culture of improvement, which was particularly pursued through dietary reform and quack healthcare. The fifth chapter will expand upon this analysis by investigating how this politicisation of health and the body was allied to the desire within working-​class movements during the 1840s to establish new communities that would be organised according to the supposed laws of nature, rather than the artifice represented by the aristocracy and industrial capitalism. The final chapter will discuss the legacy of this moral politics, arguing that the post-​Chartist period shows no neat continuity within working-​class culture and politics. Ultimately, Popular Virtue argues that Radical intellectual and popular culture before, during, and after the Chartist era does not exhibit any straightforward continuity, but a number of points of change. The most sustained and coherent aspect of this culture was moral improvement, which was born of the

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10 Popular virtue repression of the movement in 1839–​40, became hegemonic within the movement by the mid-​1840s, and fragmented in the 1850s into numerous different successor movements, tendencies, and sects. However, Chartism’s political culture can equally claim descent from the infidel traditions, and particularly in its early stages the traditions of the Radical underworld, and through this was an important moment in gender and sexual politics. Furthermore, social critique was always a central aspect of Chartism, although it took notably different forms, ranging from the ‘social Radicalism’ of the 1830s to the moralism of the 1840s and then the social democracy of the late Chartist period. The fact that this social critique was expressed through popular science, fringe medicine, and the discourse of improvement in the 1840s has obscured its centrality to the movement and indicates an abrupt and heterodox turn within British socialism and progressive politics. Consistently, however, Chartism sought both the political emancipation and the social amelioration of the working class. Chartist moral politics cannot be divorced from its developing critique of both capitalism and class stratification.

Notes 1 G.J. Holyoake, The Life and Character of Henry Hetherington… (London, 1849), p. 8. 2 Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class:  Studies in English Working Class History (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 90–​178. This is an extended version of his ‘The Language of Chartism’, in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience:  Studies in Working-​ Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–​60 (London, 1982), pp. 3–​58. 3 Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid (eds), Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–​ 1914 (Cambridge, 1991); Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–​1880 (Cambridge, 1992); Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1848–​ 1914 (Cambridge, 1991); Michael Winstanley, ‘Oldham Radicalism and the Origins of Popular Liberalism, 1830–​ 52’ Historical Journal 36:3 (1993), pp. 619–​43. 4 James Epstein, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (Stanford, 2003), ‘Radical Dining, Toasting and Symbolic Expression in Early Nineteenth-​Century Lancashire:  Rituals of Solidarity’ Albion 20:2 (1988), pp. 271–​ 91, Radical Expression:  Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–​1850 (Oxford, 1994), ‘Understanding the Cap of Liberty:  Symbolic Practice and Social Conflict in Early Nineteenth-​Century England’ Past and Present 122:1 (1989), pp. 75–​118; John Belcham, ‘Radical Language and Ideology in Early Nineteenth-​Century England:  The Challenge of the Platform’ Albion 20:2 (1988), pp. 247–​59; Pete Brett, ‘Political Dinners in Early Nineteenth Century Britain: Platform, Meeting Place and Battleground’ History 81:264 (1996), pp. 527–​52; Paul

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Introduction 11 Pickering, ‘Class without Words:  Symbolic Communication in the Chartist Movement’ Past and Present 112:1 (1986), pp. 144–​62; Robert Poole, ‘The March to Peterloo: Politics and Festivity in Late-​Georgian England’ Past and Present 192:1 (2006), pp. 109–​53; Katrina Navickas, ‘ “That sash will hang you”: Political Clothing and Adornment in England, 1780–​1840’ Journal of British Studies 49:3 (2010), pp. 540–​65. 5 This is particularly emphasised in Biagini’s Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform, Joyce’s Visions of the People and his Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth Century England (Cambridge, 1994) and Winstanley’s ‘Oldham Radicalism and the Origins of Popular Liberalism’. 6 The role of G.W.M. Reynolds within late Chartism has elicited some attention. See Rohan McWilliam, ‘The Mysteries of G.W.M. Reynolds: Radicalism and Melodrama in Victorian Britain’ in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (eds), Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 182–​99. For the fluidity of post-​Chartist political respectability, see Peter Gurney, ‘Working-​Class Writers and the Art of Escapology in Victorian England: The Case of Thomas Frost’ Journal of British Studies 45:1 (2012), pp. 51–​71, at p. 60. 7 John Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 214–​ 215; Noel Thompson, The People’s Science:  The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis (Cambridge, 1984). See Malcolm Chase, The Chartists: Perspectives and Legacies (London, 2015), pp. 171–​3 for more on Gareth Stedman Jones’s argument and Saville’s critique; Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-​Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989). See also Alfred Plummer, Bronterre: A Political Biography of Bronterre O’Brien, 1804–​1864 (London, 1971). 8 Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld:  Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–​1840 (Cambridge, 1988). 9 Michael L. Bush, The Friends and Following of Richard Carlile:  A  Study of Infidel Republicanism in Early Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Diss, 2016); Joel H. Weiner, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth Century Britain: The Life of Richard Carlile (London, 1983). 10 J.F.C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America:  The Quest for the New Moral World (London, 1969); Iowerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-​Century London:  John Gast and his Times (Folkestone, 1979). 11 Laura Schwartz, Infidel Feminism:  Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830–​ 1914 (Manchester, 2013); Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–​1866 (Manchester, 1974); Helen Rogers, Women and the People: Authority,Authorship and the Radical Tradition in Nineteenth-​Century England (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 48–​79; R.W. Davis and R.J. Helmstadter (eds), Religion and Irreligion in Victorian Society (London, 1992). 12 David Stack, ‘William Lovett and the National Association for the Political and Social Improvement of the People’ Historical Journal 42:4 (1999), pp. 1027–​50; Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science:  Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Cambridge, 1984).

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12 Popular virtue 13 Alongside Claeys, Citizens and Saints and Plummer, Bronterre, see Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press:  A  Study in Working Class Radicalism of the 1830s (London, 1970). 14 Poor Man’s Guardian, 19 October 1833. 15 English Chartist Circular, Volume 1, No. 42. 16 Prothero, Artisans and Politics, p. 263; Logie Barrow, ‘Why Were Most Medical Heretics at Their Most Confident Around the 1840s? (The Other Side of Mid-​ Victorian Medicine)’ in Roger French and Andrew Wear (eds), British Medicine in an Age of Reform (London, 1991), pp. 165–​185; John Belcham, ‘ “Temperance in all things”: Vegetarianism, the Manx Press, and the Alternative Agenda of Reform in the 1840s’ in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (eds), Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 149–​62; J.F.C. Harrison, ‘Early Victorians and the Medical Fringe’ in W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds), Medical Fringe & Medical Orthodoxy, 1750–​1850 (London, 1987), pp. 198–​215. Brian Harrison’s ‘Teetotal Chartism’ History 58:193 (1973), pp. 193–​203 outlines the importance of Godwin and health in the turn towards improvement in the early 1840s, although the importance of this beyond just teetotalism has been little explored. Recently, James Gregory’s The Poetry and the Politics: Radical Reform in Victorian England (London, 2014) has illustrated the wide variety of heterodoxies that became prominent within Chartist culture in the 1840s. 17 Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (London, 2013), p. 38. 18 James Epstein, The Lion of Freedom:  Feargus O’Connor and the Chartist Movement, 1832–​1842 (London, 1982). 19 Malcolm Chase, Chartism:  A  New History (Manchester, 2007), pp. 175, 184–​91, 279; Edward Royle, ‘Chartists and Owenites: Many Parts but One Body’ Labour History Review 65:1 (2000), pp. 2–​21. 20 Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London, 2012), pp. 62–​75.

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1 A ‘Radical Underworld’? The infidel roots of Chartist culture

Historians of Chartism have tended to downplay the role of its initial authors, the London Working Men’s Association (LWMA), in the movement. Although this group both penned and initially distributed the People’s Charter, the impetus and leadership of the movement quickly shifted north, towards a populist Radicalism centred on the charismatic Feargus O’Connor and his newspaper the Northern Star.1 The LWMA are largely seen as moralistic, elitist and too small to properly affect political change or forge a coherent movement, representing the interests of the London artisanal labour aristocracy and thus both incapable and unwilling to foster genuinely popular politics.2 Its key members –​figures like William Lovett, Henry Hetherington, James Watson and John Cleave –​have been relegated as a result to a fringe group, who led only a moralistic, intellectual clique. In fact, as the lead figures in the ‘War of the Unstamped’, or the campaign to reduce the tax on newspapers, these figures regularly suffered imprisonment for publishing and selling illegal, unstamped publications.3 In doing so they achieved national notoriety, backed by public support and solidarity, with their newspapers circulating in the tens of thousands.4 This campaign built on the position of leadership they had already gained as leaders of the National Union of the Working Classes (NUWC), particularly during the agitation for reform between 1831 and 1832.5 It also led to their newspapers and other publications becoming the basis of Radical print and political culture throughout the decade, as well as prominent and influential features in plebeian everyday culture. A  month before the Charter was published, William Thackeray visited the Radical booksellers on Paternoster Row and reported that he found ‘nothing of a grave, doctrinal character, and no sort of sober discussion regarding the first principles of that creed which, as we are told, they prize so highly’. All he claimed to find instead was smut.6 Thackeray’s observations were partly correct. These newspapers were popular pieces of entertainment and amusement, often combining humour, sexual scandal, and violent police news. Nevertheless, this amusing and

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14 Popular virtue ostensibly sensational material was consistent with, and designed to illustrate, the wider moral philosophy and social critique that Radicalism developed throughout the 1820s and 1830s. The popularity and success of this project meant that Cleave, Hetherington, Watson, and their associates formed a significant aspect of the intellectual and cultural backbone of Chartism. In doing so they perpetuated and modified the culture of the ‘Radical Underworld’ that preceded Chartism.7 This culture of moral and religious heterodoxy, Republicanism and salacious publications was integral to plebeian Radicalism from the 1790s to the 1820s, but is seen as having died out by the 1830s when the LWMA’s generation took over the leadership of London Radicalism. This chapter will outline how early Chartism grew out of these traditions, which profoundly informed its intellectual and popular print cultures. Rather than elitist moralists as historians have held them, or demagogic sell-​outs as Thackeray contended, these men repackaged popular culture and the radical enlightenment to produce a moral populism that is necessary for an understanding of many of the characteristics of Chartism. Their work in the 1820s and 1830s is crucial to understanding the changes within Radical political culture both during and after Chartism.

Chartism’s infidel roots One of the environments from which this moral populism would emerge was the Freethought culture of the 1820s. Although there was no longer a mass-​ movement of the lower classes for political reform, as there had been in the 1816–​19 period, London’s Radical artisans were enthusiastically adopting the principles and canon of the radical enlightenment, beginning the plebeian refinement of those principles that would become the basis of Chartism. Figures like Hetherington, Watson, and Cleave were immersed in this freethinking culture, and although their trajectories into political Radicalism were disparate by the time of the Reform Crisis between 1830 and 1832 they had refined the key aspects of their Radical populism: a broad idea of civic virtue, resting on universal rationality, liberty, and primitive Christian ethics; a moralism that sought to defend working-​class culture while attacking upper-​class debauchery and hypocrisy; an intellectualism that sought to inculcate rationalism and scepticism amongst the working class; and a tone of humour, sarcasm, irony, and theatricality. By the late 1830s these aspects had been spliced together into a genuinely popular press and print culture which became the templates for the plethora of Chartist newspapers, which will be discussed later in this chapter. To understand this process it is necessary to first outline the moral philosophy to which they were oriented by the beginning of the 1830s.8 Hetherington and Watson would become lifelong friends, co-​agitators and business partners. Hetherington was born in Soho and was trained as a printer, picking up his Radicalism during a stint in Belgium following the

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A ‘Radical Underworld’?  15 end of the Napoleonic Wars. By the early 1820s, he had fallen into one of the myriad of ‘rationalist’ Christian sects that existed in London, which grew from the Unitarianism that had become common amongst Radicals following the 1790s.9 The ‘Freethinking Christians’ were formed by Westminster victualler Samuel Thompson in 1798, with origins in the Baptist Assembly. The object of Thompson and the other seceders was ‘to make the conduct and example of the first Christians, so far as they followed the commands of Jesus Christ and his apostles, their only rule’, and to this end they initiated the constant and close reading of the New Testament in weekly group meetings a core practice.10 Hetherington was a member from at least 1823, as he was the printer of the first edition of the Freethinking Christian’s Quarterly Register.11 However, by 1828 he was one of a number of members who left the church, after the Elders had refused to allow entry to a Jewish man even though he had accepted Christ. Hetherington ascribed this to anti-​Semitism, writing witheringly that his membership was rejected as ‘the leaders, or teachers, of the church soon ascertained that Mr. Caisson was not quite so rich as Rothschild’.12 Although the split was divisive, and Hetherington would never again join a sect or church, the basic principles of the Freethinking Christians remained with him as the basis of his moral outlook. His next authored pamphlet, Cheap Salvation, was produced during his imprisonment in Clerkenwell in 1832 for selling unstamped papers.13 In this Hetherington rejected all ‘mysterious doctrines’, arguing that Jesus attacked superstition and taught people to think rationally.14 This position had been undermined by organised priestcraft, which encouraged Christians to ‘sink into a state of imbecility of character’ that permitted the exploitation of the many by the few. Watson came to similar conclusions.15 In his recollections of Watson following his death, his friend W.J. Linton suggested that if he ‘had been questioned, I  think he might have replied in the words of Paine  –​To do good is my religion … I  would imagine … that his faith was much the same as Paine’s: a simple belief in some over-​ruling Power which leads the harmony of the Universe’.16 Born in Malton, near York, Watson had moved to London from Leeds in 1823 in order to serve as one of the volunteers in the shop of the prominent Radical publisher and atheist Richard Carlile, who was serving a lengthy prison sentence in Dorchester Gaol.17 As he had intended, Watson was arrested and imprisoned for selling Elihu Palmer’s Principles of Nature, an avowedly Deist text which was known for its strident tone and admired by Paine.18 Prevented by the judge from reading from Palmer’s book during his trial defence, Watson instead read from James Foster’s 1754 text, Discourses on all the principal branches of natural religion and social virtue, which argued that the desire for liberty was so universal that it could only be concluded that it was ‘a divine instinct and impulse in the human soul’.19 The universal nature of liberty and rationality meant that God clearly intended all to be both socially and politically equal, leading Watson to conclude: ‘What communication have my inquisitors had with God, that they audaciously

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16 Popular virtue set up a system before which all men shall prostrate themselves.’20 It was on this point that Freethought enabled the egalitarian political and social conclusions that animated Radicalism throughout the 1830s. Both Watson and Hetherington subscribed to a Newtonian Deist understanding of God, defined by Hetherington as an ‘incomprehensive Supreme Cause’, the laws of which were ‘calculated to promote universal happiness’.21 In this understanding, the ‘Supreme Cause’ established the self-​regulating laws of the universe, which were benign and beneficial, but most importantly progressive. Living ‘naturally’ did not mean in a primitive manner, but instead in accord with natural laws, which tended towards the improvement of individuals. Individuals would in turn improve social and political structures, which had a tendency to become rigid and static largely out of the self-​interest of the elite. Violation of these laws produced negative results. In physiological terms, for instance, failure to live according to natural law produced disease, while in political terms it would cause demoralisation, ignorance, and destitution. This distinction between ‘Nature’ and ‘Artifice’ had been important to Radicalism since the 1790s, but after the 1830s became the basis of a united political, social, and moral critique which underpinned Chartism.22 The natural laws crafted by God and outlined in Jesus’s ethics were obscured by the elite that benefited from the artificial constraints they placed on politics and society. Central to Watson and Hetherington’s ideas of social progress was a belief that priestcraft and superstition needed to be undermined and decoupled from the State for true progress to take place, an assessment drawn from a number of prominent sceptical historians. During his imprisonment Watson read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Hume’s History of England, and Mosheim’s Ecclesiastical History. Watson felt that the Ecclesiastical History ‘would have made me a free-​thinker if I had not been one before’, and Hetherington also mentioned that he had read it.23 Mosheim argued that the early Christian church was democratic, and that pastors had seized it to establish civil and religious tyrannies, and Gibbon thought him ‘masterly’ and used this argument as the basis of his treatment of Christianity in his history of Rome.24 Gibbon himself was claimed by nineteenth-​century Freethought, who admired his scepticism of the orthodox history of the early Christian church.25 Hume’s History exhibited much of his general scepticism about the history of religion, including several parts documenting sectarianism, strife, and violence, and Watson would go on to publish Hume’s sceptical ‘Essay on Miracles’, or Section X of An Enquiry into Human Understanding.26 After he left prison the first product of Watson’s long publishing career was the French philosopher and Revolutionary figure Count Constantin de Volney’s Lectures on History, in which he advocated inculcating ‘a spirit of investigating doubt, because all history informs me that confidence is the doctrine of error or of falsehood, and the constant arm of despotism’.27 For Volney, the character and stage of the scientific and moral development of a nation was demonstrated by the nature and methodology of their history: ‘its representations are more analogous to the order with which

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A ‘Radical Underworld’?  17 we are acquainted, in proportion as those nations become enlightened, polished and civilized.’28 A free and equal society was therefore one incredulous and doubtful of its own history, dismissive of ‘miraculous events, prodigies, and monsters of every kind’.29 Like the English Deist and Radical traditions, Volney argued that human perfectibility was a result of the upholding of natural law, and that the modern arts –​particularly history –​were the means of discovering what these laws were and how to live in accordance with them.30 Volney was an important influence on Radicals from the post-​war period onwards, including the Spenceans and Carlile.31 The Ruins; or, Survey of the Revolutions of Empires was his most notable work, published in 1791 just as the French Revolution intensified. It became a central part of Watson’s catalogue for the rest of his life, with his first edition coming out in 1831 at 3s (he would later bring out a version in five parts at 6d each). Written in first person, The Ruins is told from the point of view of a narrator who had stumbled across the ruins of Palmyra and felt despair at the evident futility of civilisation. An apparition then emerges, asserting that rather than fate or a capricious, malign God, mankind is ‘governed, like the world of which he forms a part, by natural laws, regular in their operation, consequent in their effects, immutable in their essence’ which were crafted by ‘the secret power the animates the universe’.32 Perception was the basis of the moral world, as through this humans learned how to seek those things that brought them pleasure, and avoid those things that brought them pain:  ‘Self-​love, the desire of happiness, and an aversion to pain, are the essential and primary laws that nature herself imposed on man.’33 Prosperity and progress are assured to those civilisations that make sure the needs of all are met and harm is avoided. However great the short-​term benefits of a civilisation run according to the desires of a minority are, in the long term this leads only to destabilisation and ultimately ruin. The authors of this short-​term, selfish accumulation of goods and luxuries, and with that society’s decline, were ‘priests, courtiers, public accountants, commanders of troops’, who existed off the work of ‘labourers, artisans, tradesmen, and every profession useful to society’.34 If all understood these natural laws and recognised that individual welfare was tied to the welfare of the entirety of society, then the entire species would achieve universal happiness. This realisation would be gained through enlightenment, public education, and the printing press, and it therefore could be achieved peacefully. Volney’s optimism was expressed in other texts popular amongst Radicals. Shelley’s epic poem Queen Mab, which directly borrowed many of its concepts from The Ruins, was published by Watson from 1833 and became the ‘Bible’ of Chartism.35 William Godwin’s Enquiry into Political Justice also presented a similarly optimistic progressive view of history, through its argument that knowledge of truth enables individuals to perfect themselves, and therefore create a society that required no government. Throughout 1832 Watson read chapters from the book during meetings of his NUWC class every Sunday night. He went on to quote him in his Working Man’s Friend in 1833,

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18 Popular virtue while in 1836 he produced and sold Chapter XI of Book V of the Enquiry, ‘The Moral Effects of Aristocracy’, as a pamphlet appended to William Hazlitt’s The Spirit of Monarchy.36 From 1842 he began the production of relatively cheap copies of the entirely of Enquiry, facilitating its influence on the Chartist moral improvement culture as will be discussed in Chapter 3. Taken together, Hetherington and Watson assembled from Freethought and enlightenment moral philosophy a sophisticated moral argument for political and social equality that required as a prerequisite the undermining of clerical authority, a heterodox understanding of Christ, and a Deist understanding of God. On the one hand this led to a moral justification of political and social equality. As Hetherington wrote in his will, ‘I have ever considered that the only religion useful to man consists exclusively of the practice of morality, and in the mutual interchange of kind actions’.37 Equally, it firmly established in the developing political culture of the 1830s the belief in natural law as the basis for the social and moral critique of society, and the notion of ‘artifice’ as both the cause of demoralisation and the impediment to natural progress. Watson and Hetherington’s trajectory was shared by their contemporaries. Upon first arriving in London, William Lovett, one of the most important of the early Chartist leaders, was drawn to artisanal debating societies. The first of these was a ‘small literary association’ in Newport Market named ‘The Liberals’, which was comprised of working men who paid a subscription to form a library and discuss ‘literary, political, or metaphysical’ questions.38 Although at first he taught himself as much as possible on theology so that he could defend Christianity, by the time of his marriage he ‘had been led from my recent studies to look upon practical Christianity as a union for the promotion of brotherly kindness and good deeds to one another, and not a thing of form and profession for mercenary idlers to profit by’.39 This attitude was likely cemented by his attendance of lectures by Carlile and Robert Taylor.40 Like Hetherington, Lovett spliced his Deism with a common-​sense, ‘practical Christianity’. He described his mother’s Methodism as believing that the ‘great power’ that created the ‘gay, sportive, singing things of earth and air’ must be gratified ‘with the solemn faces, prim clothes, and half-​sleepy demeanour of human beings’. He instead emphasised ‘the wondrous laws that govern [the universe]’ and his belief that humans should ‘understand and live in accordance with those laws; of performing our moral and religious duties; of trying to improve ourselves and to elevate our race; and of striving to make earth more in accordance with heaven’.41 Freethought, infidelism, and moral philosophy drew many of these men together from their disparate origins into the Owenite socialist movement.42 The influx of dissenters and infidels drawn towards Owenism in the 1820s changed what had ‘once been a quasi-​sect’ to something ‘on the way to becoming a mass-​movement’.43 The basic point that unified Owenites was a belief that competition degraded individuals and society, both materially and morally, and that socialism in the form of individual co-​operatives and communes was the means of overcoming this. Robert Owen himself was a Deist,

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A ‘Radical Underworld’?  19 who drew from the same moral philosophy as Hetherington and Watson to outline his own belief system. In this he saw humans as ‘a compound being, whose character is formed of his constitution or organisation at birth, and of the effects of external circumstances upon it from birth to death’. Feelings and convictions ‘created the motive to action called the will, which stimulates him to act and decides his actions’.44 He also believed in hedonic theories of motivation: humans sought out what was pleasant to them and rejected what was not. These were natural laws, and Owen believed that by providing the right environment –​by satisfying their needs, protecting them from harm, and enlightening them –​it was therefore possible to create rational, humane, benevolent people. These men saw in Owenism a system of benevolence that was attuned with the rationalist, sceptical tradition. Owen’s Deism and his complete rejection of the clergy and the immaterial soul was in agreement with these working-​class Radicals’ belief that the Christian church upheld elite power and needed removal before the people could study and then live according to natural law. Importantly, Owenism also went further by promoting through socialism the means of overcoming the social and moral problems of the artificial organisation of society. Hetherington had been amongst the first drawn to Owenism. At the beginning of the 1820s he was a member of the Co-​operative and Economical Society, the publisher of the associated journal The Economist, edited by George Mudie, and a member of the ‘Spa Fields Congregational Families’, a commune of numerous families established at Spa Fields in London.45 Owenism was Hetherington’s moral philosophy in action, and at the end of his life Hetherington looked back with distaste on ‘a system … by which … all men are trained to be either slaves, hypocrites, or criminals’ and pledged himself to socialism as Owen’s ‘system is the only true road to human emancipation’.46 After the failure of communities such as Spa Fields, Owenites turned to forming societies that sought to raise profits to buy land through co-​operatively owned retail stores; the ‘First Co-​operative Trading Association’ on Red Lion Square, London, was run by Watson in 1828, with Lovett succeeding him and making his first acquaintance with Hetherington, Watson, and Cleave.47 By the early 1830s labouring members were more interested in forming producers’ co-​operatives, particularly to alleviate unemployment. Ultimately, however, the ‘role of Owenites was mainly to provide the facilities to forward these activities, in the form of premises, money, periodicals, publicity and some expertise’.48 The chief organisation that fostered Owenite periodicals, propaganda, and missionaries was the British Association for Promoting Cooperative Knowledge (BAPCK), founded in May 1829. This collected together many of the chief Radicals of the early 1830s. The vanguard of the War of the Unstamped –​Hetherington, Watson, Cleave, and William Carpenter –​were all members, as were Lovett and Dr Julian Hibbert, Watson’s friend and mentor. Yet these labouring Owenites were also largely autonomous from Robert Owen himself, and increasingly and vociferously were opposed to his refusal

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20 Popular virtue to engage in politics, as well as his authoritarian tendencies. In April 1830 its committee resolved to support political reform, and after Carpenter began publishing his unstamped Political Letters the BAPCK supported him, as did many co-​operative stores.49 The July Revolution in France, the onset of the Reform Crisis, and then the rising of the agricultural labourers across the south of England from summer to winter in 1830 intensified the clamour for political action. The intellectual culture of the 1820s that had culminated in Owenism was now transformed into the twin causes of the 1830s: political reform and popular enlightenment.

Moral populism in the Radical press Although politics was an important part of this plebeian intellectual culture, political reform was not seen as realistic throughout the 1820s, and energy was largely channelled into Freethought, debating societies, Owenism, and trade unionism. By 1830, this had changed, and the turn to political reform culminated in the formation of the NUWC in April 1831. As a consequence, men like Hetherington, Lovett, Cleave, Watson, Carpenter, and Hibbert became the leadership of the ultra-​Radical wing of the Reform movement.50 In June 1831 the NUWC adopted and published its Rules, which as a whole were a lengthy, varied mix that illustrated the influences Radical artisans had picked up over the course of the 1820s. The first section, ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’, was evidently modelled on the French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen’ of 1792, well known to British Radicals since it appeared in Paine’s Rights of Man and had recently been reprinted in William Carpenter’s Annecdotes of the French Revolution of 1830.51 The preamble of the NUWC’s Rules was a clear rewording of the preamble of the French declaration. In the individual points the Rules largely followed the Declaration, although additions such as ‘the full enjoyment of the produce of his labours’ indicates the Owenite influence, in particular the work of the Owenite political economist William Thompson’s critique of capitalist exploitation.52 In the third point the NUWC defined liberty as: ‘that power which belongs to a man of doing everything that does not infringe upon the right of another. Its principle is nature; –​its rule justice; –​its protection the law; –​and its moral limits are defined by this maxim: –​Do unto others as you would that others should do unto you.’ The NUWC sought to consciously copy French Republicanism and Painite natural rights, injecting into this Owenite rationalism and the sceptical recuperation of primitive Christianity. In this the NUWC was part of a common intellectual and political culture within ultra-​Radicalism. The Union met at the Rotunda, a theatre on the south bank of the Blackfriar’s Bridge, purchased by Richard Carlile in summer 1830 with money fronted by Hibbert, among others.53 As the Reform Crisis grew the ‘Rotunda Radicals’ or ‘Rotundaists’ gained a reputation throughout the capital as particularly extreme, revolutionary Republicans.

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A ‘Radical Underworld’?  21 The reform politics of the Rotunda was complimented by discussions of sexuality, gender, and religion, points of common interest to both Carlile and his group and the Radicals of Owenite backgrounds.54 The Rotunda was also a space in which the Radical traditions of burlesque and satire were maintained. Throughout the 1820s London Radicalism was dominated by an ‘underworld’ culture of blasphemous infidel chapels, obscene satire, and pornography. This remained an important aspect of the Rotunda, with the ‘Devil’s Chaplain’ Robert Taylor putting on energetic satirical plays and counter-​liturgies.55 Taylor’s satirical play on the risings amongst agricultural labourers in winter 1830 was extremely popular, both on stage and in print, and his ‘sermons’ became increasingly ribald and satirical, explicitly and energetically mocking the Anglican liturgy in a clownish ‘astronomical pantomime’ of a Church of England service.56 All of this was wildly popular, as Carlile realised and exploited. Taylor was evidently in touch with the style of other plebeian Radicals on London’s streets, as W.J. Linton recalled of his youth at that time: ‘Popular objections to things as they were had not much of “sweetness and light,” but were sometimes as harsh and unseemly as their provocation. Two low fellows parading London streets of an evening as parson and clerk, mouthing out a ribald parody of the “Form of Common Prayer,” did not betoken much popular respect for either Church or State.’57 This was not new to plebeian radicalism, as such burlesque theatricality was an important aspect of the Spencean Radicalism of the post-​war period and 1820s, and McCalman posits Taylor as a bridging point between this period and the Chartist era. The Spenceans were not the only Radicals of the Regency period who successfully utilised humour, as the songs Linton was remembering were likely the parodies of the liturgy produced by the Radical William Hone for which he was prosecuted in 1817.58 Radicalism had a rich satirical and humorous tradition by the 1830s, and it is therefore not surprising that the new, emergent leadership possessed a sense of humour. Linton remembered his friend Hetherington as ‘a ready and effective speaker, plain, pathetic, humorous, or sarcastic, as occasion required’, and Watson as possessing ‘a sense of humour’ that lurked ‘around the firm-​set lips’.59 Thomas Cooper referred to Hetherington’s ‘natural humour’ and George Jacob Holyoake to his ‘jocular speech’ in their eulogies.60 Even Owenite discussions on a hypothetical tax on machinery were sharpened by Hetherington’s sarcasm: Mr. HETHERINGTON thought, those persons had done very wrong, who had prayed for taxation on machinery. His friend (Mr. Lovett) seemed to have a great aversion to praying. (Laughter) He (Mr. H.) had not quite so much, for he had heard that praying was in some places done by machinery. (Renewed laughter.) They would soon hear, he supposed, of cast-​iron parsons, preaching by steam. He had heard of a heathen tribe, who prayed by machinery. (Laughter.) They put their prayers into the machine, and then sat round it smoking and regaling themselves. (Laughter.) He should like such machinery, and such praying, too, as this.61

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22 Popular virtue Ridicule was an important aspect of eighteenth-​century Deist texts, and could be witnessed in authors such as Hume or Gibbon who used it as a means of undermining superstition and mysticism.62 Hetherington put mockery to effective use in his own writings, such as his attacks on the ‘intellectual Goliahs’ in the Freethinking Christians in Principles and Practices Contrasted or his ridicule of the Chaplain of Clerkenwell Prison in Cheap Salvation.63 This humour was an easy and popular way to undercut the moral foundations of the Church and State. In 1832 Watson, William Strange and Cleave were responsible for The Poor Man’s Book of the Church, which Abel Hall, a spy within the NUWC, reported sold very well. Attributed ‘not by Dr.  Southey’, the book was titled to mock the poet and former Radical Robert Southey’s conservative ecclesiastical history of Britain, The Book of the Church.64 The Poor Man’s Book of the Church centred on a satirical poem, ‘This is the Church that God Built’, which was clearly derived from Hone and George Cruikshank’s The Political House that Jack Built, produced in 1819 to mock the corruption of the Regency government.65 This poem along with most of the satirical material in The Poor Man’s Book of the Church was written by the Comet Club, a group of Catholic Dublin journalists opposed to the Church of Ireland and engaged in the Tithe War, the often bloody campaign in Ireland to resist the established Anglican Church’s tithes. The club was responsible for The Parson’s Horn Book, a satirical volume in which the engravings and poem in The Poor Man’s Book of the Church originally appeared, and later the Comet, a satirical anti-​tithe newspaper.66 Alongside this appeared numerous anti-​clerical essays along with detailed breakdowns of the cost of the Anglican Church compared to the number of people in Britain and Ireland who were not Anglicans. Taken together this material produced an entertaining ecclesiastical counter-​ history for popular consumption, a populist re-​interpretation of the sceptical histories of Hume, Mosheim, or Gibbon. As the preface made clear, the objective was ‘not to desecrate PIETY, but to expose PRIESTCRAFT; not to injure the cause of “pure and undefiled religion,” but exhibit the injustice and evils of law-​ church establishments’.67 Such caveats were important if those from the infidel tradition were to be successful in forming a popular mass-​movement. The formation of the NUWC drew together more orthodox Christians with Radicals positioned on the spectrum of Freethought, and this could be a source of tension, with Hall reporting on one meeting within Class 73 of the NUWC –​the class led by Watson –​where Christians and infidels clashed. Nevertheless there is also clear evidence that Christian and infidel thought bled into one another and that even provincial Christians were influenced by Freethought. In 1838, for instance, Hetherington published The Church Shown Up, a pamphlet by George Loveless, the leader of the Tolpuddle Martyrs and a veteran Wesleyan preacher in rural Dorset, in which he violently attacked not only Anglicanism but also the Wesleyan hierarchy and expounded a form of Methodism very similar to the primitive Christianity that existed in London.68 Anti-​clericalism

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A ‘Radical Underworld’?  23 amongst Christians was also seen by some as the basis for the steady development of scepticism amongst Radicals, culminating in non-​belief. G.J. Harney, a Jacobin socialist who led the Chartist left and began his Radical career as Hetherington’s shop assistant, wrote a letter to the Chartist and Owenite G.J. Holyoake later in life outlining how such anti-​clericalism would hopefully lead to atheism, just as political and social reform would lead to communism.69 The moderation of the infidelism of the 1820s into a more inclusive anti-​clericalism was an important development within Radicalism in the early 1830s, but this transition was as much due to evident heterodoxy amongst Christian Radicals as it was a sign of the dilution of infidelism. In essence, The Poor Man’s Book of the Church, produced by Irish Catholics, was making the same heterodox argument as the Deist Londoner Hetherington in Cheap Salvation or the provincial Wesleyan Loveless in The Church Shown Up: ostentation, corruption, and hierarchy were not compatible with the church of Christ. This message was particularly expounded in a raft of anti-​ecclesiastical, rationalist satire by Cleave, Strange, and Carpenter during 1832, such as the Church Examiner and Ecclesiastical Record and A Slap at the Church! The unstamped A Slap at the Church!, priced 1d, was one of the penny papers that set the mould for Radical satire throughout the decade; lengthy editorials, combined with satirical prints, poetry, and joke and curio columns. It presented bishops as corrupt drunkards and hypocrites, who abused their riches and political powers to persecute the honest and exploit the vulnerable. Its editorials regularly presented scurrilous versions of the sceptic histories of the early church, claiming to show how church establishments had ‘been the invention of rapacious and ambitious men, assuming the garb of religion, and employing the influence and power with which this invested them, to create and multiply the very evils religion was intended to destroy’.70 Its regular ‘Revelations’ column continued the tradition in Radical newspapers, begun in T.J. Wooler’s Black Dwarf a decade earlier, of satirical mock-​ ups of features common to upmarket papers, for instance a report on the ‘State of the Episcopal Markets’, which read: ‘PIETY. –​Very little of the genuine article to be met with; but plenty of spurious and mock quality, which hangs in hand. Of the latter kind the Bishop of London is a large holder. He has been endeavouring to force a sale, at an immense sacrifice (of principle as well as interest) but it won’t go off’.71 This hybridisation allowed the inculcation of scepticism, Freethought and rational critique amongst its readers through plainly written, engaging stories and jokes. This continued staples of Regency attacks on the Church, for instance by focusing on clerical immorality or hypocrisy, but resisted other staples, such as obscene or pornographic prints. This mixture was in evidence not only in the print output of this group, but also in the most successful demonstration in the NUWC’s history, the Fast Day procession which led to the arrest and trial of Watson, Lovett, and William Benbow. During the 1832 cholera epidemic, the millennial evangelical

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24 Popular virtue

Figure 1  The header of A Slap at the Church! depicting the porcine, overweight Anglican Mother Church, her gluttonous offspring, and abundant tithes. Spencer Perceval MP (mocked as ‘Sinecure Perceval’ in A Slap at the Church!) proposed a general fast to supplicate God. The government acceded to this, and the National Fast Day was set for 21 March. The NUWC met on the same day that the fast was declared, 6 February, opening the discussion of the fast sardonically: ‘When we first heard of a General Fast, we thought that Perceval was a madman; but it seems we must have been mistaken in our opinion, or else the government are suffering under the same mental delusion as himself.’72 Some members proposed that they had a feast on the fast day, and on 20 February Watson announced ‘the intention of having a procession on the fast day to make a display, not only of their numbers, but of their destitution, peaceably but publicly’.73 The resulting procession, led by Hetherington, Watson, and Lovett, among others, drew at its height 100,000 people and was followed by dinners of roast beef. The procession itself, and the Poor Man’s Guardian’s publicising of it, satirically contrasted the rationality and order of the marchers with the conduct of their opponents. While the marchers were peaceful, the police evinced a ‘malignant and murderous disposition’.74 At the subsequent trial of Lovett, Benbow, and Watson for conspiracy to commit a public disturbance, Watson attacked Perceval’s ‘imbecility and bigotry’ and asserted that Lord Brougham, the Lord Chancellor who had

 25

A ‘Radical Underworld’?  25 approved the fast, was a hypocrite, since he plainly ‘could never bring his mind to believe that the farce of a day being set apart for a general fast could produce any change in the decrees of omnipotence’.75 As the defendants and the Poor Man’s Guardian repeatedly asserted, the marchers were attacked and their leaders arrested simply for taking a walk in public space. The ‘Farce Day’ was designed to illustrate the embodiment of liberty and reason with a tone of burlesque, an approach that was simultaneously utilised in the unstamped press. The Poor Man’s Guardian adopted invective, sarcasm, and ridicule in its front-​page editorials and its parliamentary reporting, although it was not as consistently satirical as publications like A Slap at the Church! Following the collapse of both of his ventures with Carpenter and Strange at the end of 1832, Cleave worked with Watson on the Working Man’s Friend. Yet although they have a totemic status for labour historians and historians of political print, the Guardian, Working Man’s Friend, and Carpenter’s Political Magazine are not wholly representative of the cheap press. Figures such as William Strange were responsible for much of the Radical print output during the period, often co-​ operating with Watson, Hetherington, and Cleave, yet as Ian Haywood notes he is rarely studied or incorporated into the wider story.76 Strange began Figaro in London in 1831, modelled on the Parisian satirical weekly Le Figaro. The first editor was Gilbert Abbot à Beckett, with his assistant Henry Mayhew taking over after 1834, and as such it was a precursor to Punch.77 Figaro was brazen political satire, with a masthead print depicting Figaro (in the Marriage of Figaro, a barber) in a shop, shaving mannequin heads with a razor; the lettering on the window reads ‘Whigs Dressed Here’. In the first article of the first edition, à Beckett warned: ‘If our readers should trace a likeness between the blocks in the cut, and certain well-​known public characters, we have only to say that we ordered our artist to draw a number of block-​heads, and that we suppose he has represented those who would naturally occur to him on receiving our instructions.’78 Elements that would be common throughout the Radical press by the end of the decade, such as weekly theatre news, satirical songs (often sung in soliloquy by political figures during sketches) and joke columns, also ran from the first edition of the Figaro. Its companion paper, The Thief, produced by à Becket and Mayhew and published by Strange, also based on a Parisian archetype, was equally irreverent but also possessed clear moralistic and political objectives. The Thief accumulated all of its material from attributed cuttings from the press, contrasting its own honesty with the hypocrisy of the ‘legitimate’ press, amongst whom ‘scissor and paste’ journalism was also a common practice but attribution was not.79 The material they republished was wholly literary, and thus The Thief was making a strong claim to democratising amusement, producing a ‘free trade in literature’. As Catherine Feely has argued, this further illustrates the entwined nature of entertainment and political critique, and undermines E.P. Thompson’s claims that Mayhew and his coterie were largely apolitical, being ‘anti-​ establishment’ rather than Radical.80 Although Figaro was an anti-​Chartist paper by the end of

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26 Popular virtue

Figure  2  ‘Interior of the Tory Charnel House’, Figaro in London, 21 April 1831. The Tories are dissecting the Reform Bill in an image representative of the grotesque, corporeal, and often gruesome imagery of Radical satire in the 1830s.

the decade its earlier Republicanism, support for Reform, anti-​clericalism and its criticisms of the police indicate that it was a key example of popular Radicalism at the decade’s beginning.

From anti-​clerical satire to social Radicalism The irreverent style of sceptical philosophy and the strategic importance of undercutting the moral hegemony of the Anglican Church both informed a deeply heterodox and satirical culture surrounding the development of working-​class Radicalism in the early 1830s. As the decade progressed Radical publishers –​chiefly Hetherington and Cleave –​began to move away from this older satirical tradition of focusing upon the Church and started to incorporate ostensibly ‘lighter’ material which supported a wider social critique, clearly influenced by Owenism’s economic critiques. Symbolic of this was the replacement as editor of the Poor Man’s Guardian of Thomas Mayhew, the eldest brother of Henry and an earnest critic of the aristocracy and Church, with James ‘Bronterre’ O’Brien, an articulator of socialism and, like Hetherington, influenced by the Owenite critique of competitive society. O’Brien’s experience of the Reform Crisis and his interest in socialism convinced him that capitalists, already in possession of excessive social and economic power, were in a compact with the aristocracy in the Reformed

 27

A ‘Radical Underworld’?  27 Parliament. As he concluded, from ‘these two master monopolies proceed a thousand others, all working in the same way, all tending to the same end –​ namely, the absorption of the annual produce of the country into the hands of the monopolists’.81 This analysis closely followed that of the Owenite William Thompson, in which surplus value was essentially stolen from workers at the point of distribution through the artifices of taxation, tithes, rent, and (the largest proportion of surplus value) profit. It followed that capitalists and workers had nothing in common, a proposition that O’Brien argued was ‘a damnable delusion’, since it ‘is the interest of the operative to work as short time and to get as much for it as possible’, whereas the capitalist needs to get ‘the greatest possible quantity of work out of the operative, and giving him as little as possible for it’.82 O’Brien’s socialism was most clearly advocated in his translation of Buonarroti’s History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality. This was advertised in the Poor Man’s Guardian as having affixed ‘annotations and arguments of our own, so as to present that famous Revolution in a point of view as novel to the British public, as it will be true to reality’, and was published by Hetherington in twenty parts at 2d each.83 Phillip Buonarroti was an Italian of aristocratic heritage who became a French citizen in 1792 in order to partake in the Revolution. He met Francois-​Noel Babeuf in the Society of the Pantheon, a clandestine group established amongst ex-​Jacobins who wanted the reinstatement of the democratic Constitution of 1793, which had been rolled back after the fall of Robespierre in 1794 by the reactionaries in the Directory. Within the Society the pair were part of a secret group which plotted an insurrection and coup which would reinstate the Constitution but, further, establish a ‘Republic of Equals’ in an economic as well as political sense.84 The logical consequence of the French Revolution, these conspirators argued, was a second revolution that established a communist society. O’Brien sought to translate and publish the work since it ‘contains one of the best expositions I have seen of those great political and social principles which I have so long advocated’ in Hetherington’s newspapers, and the ‘application of these principles I deem to be of paramount importance to the human race’.85 O’Brien perceived analogies between the French Revolution and Britain in the 1830s, where reactionary Liberals, the Girondins and the Whigs, had allied with Royalists and Tories to cement their position within a kleptocracy that controlled the spoils of their respective revolutions. This allowed an optimistic assessment that Britain was on the verge of a second revolution for genuine political and social equality, which was illustrative of both the militancy and socialist tendencies of left-​wing Radicals in the embryonic Chartist movement. The most important point for O’Brien in Buonarrotti’s history was his argument that mankind had fallen into a ‘false civilization’. This artificial state could be corrected by the objectives of the French Revolution –​the universal aims of genuine liberty and equality. Since history was ‘Philosophy teaching by examples’, Buonarrotti’s true history of the Revolution was an important document for the new generation of British Radicals.

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28 Popular virtue It is therefore not surprising that over the course of the 1830s the social condition of the people became as much an aspect of the Radical press as anti-​clerical and political satire and news. The collective point of these columns was to document through humour or pathos the ‘false civilization’ of Britain in the 1830s in a manner which complemented O’Brien’s deeper analysis, which appeared in both his own editorials but also regular reporting on Owenism or the meetings of the Saint-​Simonians, French socialists who regularly visited Britain in the early decade. From February 1833 Hetherington began the Destructive, or Poor Man’s Conservative. In June, the Destructive included a reply to ‘A Casual Observer’ agreeing that ‘sufficient space has not been hitherto allotted to Police Reports’, and that since other readers had written to complain of the same thing ‘more attention shall, in future, be given to the proceedings at our Police Offices’.86 This was not, however, the ‘big concession to public opinion’ that Patricia Hollis claims it was, since the note made it clear that the Destructive agreed.87 These stories were not just about increasing circulation but also allowed a comprehensive detailing of what was wrong with society. On one level these columns continued the sort of muckraking and caustic attacks on the moral authorities evident in earlier Radical satire. Satirical liturgies, irreverent reportage of parliamentary debates, and stories of the brutality and sexual violence of the recently established police were common in The Destructive.88 When the Tory MP for Dorset, William Bankes, was arrested for having sex with a soldier in Westminster The Destructive printed a long report which included description of the large crowd that gathered outside the courthouse attempting to get a glimpse of Bankes, who were angry that they would not be allowed in: ‘frequent were the cries of “It’s because he is a rich man”.’ This was accompanied by crude satirical poems.89 Alongside these attacks on the elite was a documentation of everyday life in a competitive society through the regular court reports and varieties columns. Sometimes this more directly complemented the social reporting and analysis, such as a report that told of the ‘firmness and resolution’ of a man executed for setting fire to a barn, part of a rise in incendiarism which the paper argued were legitimate continuations of the Swing protests.90 On other occasions, the viciousness and incompetence of capitalists was subtextual, and could be inferred from the numerous essays on competition and exploitation. After the tunnels of two rival mines in Derbyshire met, the owners went to court to contest their claims, which culminated in one mine deliberately gassing the other, killing three men and injuring numerous others. Others simply told of demoralisation and cruelty, such as a report of two drunken prostitutes fighting over who had lived in London the longest.91 This was much more than puerility, or appeals to an easy audience. In keeping with his faith in an enlightened, educated readership, Hetherington was laying out the facts for all to see. This empiricist outlook was the basis of the Destructive’s satirical title, which was explained in the first issue:

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A ‘Radical Underworld’?  29 As to our title, suffice it to say, that while we desire to be destructive of evil, we are still more zealous to be conservative of good; and in adopting a nickname fabricated by the people’s enemies, we desire not only to manifest our determination to ‘take the bull by the horns,’ but also to prove our confidence in the increasing good sense of the people. This good sense will teach them to henceforward disregard mere sounds –​to judge by things not words –​and never again (as in the ‘olden times’) to be either the dupes of misnomers, or the trembling victims of hard names.92

‘Destructive’ was a conservative term for a Radical, implying their destruction of the constitution. The recuperation and inversion of this term by Hetherington was an intelligent piece of anti-​Burkean satire, redolent of Thomas Spence’s use of Pig’s Meat for his journal, mocking Burke’s references to the ‘Swinish Multitude’. The explanation of the name also touches on a deeper aspect of Radical moral philosophy, the desire drawn from scepticism for unadulterated access to the truth so as to bring about an enlightened populace capable of enforcing change. As he outlined in a later essay, Hetherington believed that the reading was one of the most fulfilling and improving forms of entertainment, since: the enjoyments received through the eye are of all others the highest and most elevating to the mind. Through this sense we enjoy, not only the objects immediately around us, but draw our gratifications from the immense systems of worlds rolling in unbounded space … The enjoyments which may accrue to the well-​trained mind through the medium of this sense, are unlimited, and they are equally free to all.93

Hetherington would not publish material he thought likely to harm public morals, largely because reading was an inherently improving and instructive act. As Ian Haywood has outlined, Hetherington’s eclectic provision of publications, from Radical staples like Queen Mab or Tom Paine to biographies of Wellington and Nelson, illustrates how readers could ‘choose to assimilate the usable elements of the dominant culture without fear of contamination’.94 What was important was not cultural delineation but instead, as the Destructive’s notice put it, the objective of conveying ‘the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth’. This was also the case with the presentation of Cleave’s Weekly Police Gazette, which began publication a year after the Destructive. The paper’s masthead prominently featured personifications of Liberty and Truth with the Great Seal of the United States as the centrepiece. Beside the image of the artisan, which represented truth, was a quote from President Madison: ‘A well-​instructed people alone can be a free people.’ The point was plain:  presenting and consuming this news was an act of Republican civic virtue, and people had a right and a duty to understand how society operated. Humour and crime reporting were important aspects of this.

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30 Popular virtue As Edward Jacobs has suggested, the page layout of Cleave’s Weekly Police Gazette was refined so that different court reports shared thematic similarities, or crime reportage touched on the topics satirised in the prints on the front page.95 Building on this analysis, it was not just the proximity between political and sensational content that is important, but also the context of the moral philosophy of plebeian Radicalism. Stories about murder, prostitution, alcoholism, adultery, or lunacy all told of a fundamentally sick society, where the individual was driven to madness or immorality, and to understand them fully they must be read in light of the wider catalogue on offer in Radical booksellers. In his recollections of the beginning of his friendship with Watson, W.J. Linton recalled stopping in his shop to buy ‘one of Roebuck’s Pamphlets or Gilbert à Becket’s Figaro in London … Volney’s Ruins of Empires, the Lectures on History, or such-​like’.96 Evidently there was little separation, by either the vendors or the readership, of entertaining periodicals and philosophical books and pamphlets. These pamphlets provided the intellectual key for how to read entertainment. A lecture by Charles Rosser at the Owenite Institution on Burton Street, published by Strange and Watson, argued that the endless capacity for love and sympathy that humans possessed was undermined by the individualised nature of competitive society.97 What Radicals had realised, Rosser argued, was the knowledge that ‘no permanent improvement can reach them, while the vices, crimes, and errors of society shall continue to be generated by the erroneous fundamental principle upon which it is now constituted’.98 Like many Owenites and many figures in the radical enlightenment, Rosser believed in hedonic theories of motive and character formation, and he believed this to be the motor of human change and progress. The ‘New Era of Society’ being ushered in by the Radical and Owenite led popular enlightenment would feature exemption from ‘the pains arising from the institutions of society’. Error, vice, crime, and intemperance were all caused by ‘the nature of man acted upon by circumstances around him’.99 As another of the Owenite pamphlets published by Strange put it:  ‘Competition as the cause, and community as the cure of evil, have not yet been investigated and brought to bear; till this has been done, let no man say that the cause of all perplexities of society is the depravity of human nature.’100 This is not to say that the proprietors were not aware of the commercial prospects of sensation. A  notification given by Hetherington at the end of the Destructive’s run in summer 1834 made clear that he was now starting a new paper that explicitly ventured into amusement, although in reality the Destructive had already shifted in that direction the previous year. The government had decided to pursue Hetherington by proceeding by information, at the suit of the Attorney General, in order to seize his property rather than imprison him. This presented an obvious danger to Hetherington, as he believed that much of his support came from his frequent martyrdoms in prison: ‘they calculate on the support of the whole “legitimate” press, and it

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A ‘Radical Underworld’?  31 not being a criminal process, they expect we shall have no sympathy or support from the Public. In short, by making it a question of revenue, instead of politics, they hope to detach us, at once, from our property and our friends’. His response to this was to found the Destructive as the broadsheet Two-​Penny Dispatch: So long as the Conservative was a purely political paper, its circulation was necessarily restricted to political readers. It shall henceforward be a repository of all the gems, and treasures, and fun, and frolic, and ‘news and occurrences,’ of the week. It shall abound in Police Intelligence, in Murders, Rapes, Suicides, Burnings, Maimings, Theatricals, Races, Pugilism, and all manner of moving ‘accidents by flood and field.’ In short, it will be stuffed with every sort of devilment that will make it sell.101

This was not the major change in direction that it was being painted as, as a shorter notice had appeared that January declaring the Destructive to be on such a populist course: ‘The chief object of the proprietors in enlarging this paper, is to make it a comprehensive vehicle of news, as well as a sound public instructor. The grand secret in journalism, as in every thing else, being to combine the utile dulci –​ the new arrangement will give us ample means of effecting this desideratum.’102 By combining the ‘useful with the agreeable’ the Destructive had already been stuffed with devilment. Evidently, ‘sound public instruction’ was in itself amusement. Just as anti-​c lerical satire exaggerated the enlightenment rhetoric of ridicule in order to forge a popular scepticism, stories of crime, sex and insanity were a means of plainly stating the moral state of the country, and highlighting its remedies. Political news was amusing, whether it was plainly written, satirical, or peppered with sarcastic comments and asides. Equally, the ‘lighter’ content, such as the pathetic or comedic police news, or the columns of facts and information, were designed as commentaries on the state of society and a remedy for improving it. Publishers like Hetherington were not only combining amusement and education in their catalogues. Instead, when read in the context of their sceptical, freethinking moral philosophy, their apparently ‘lowest’ material was in fact making important moral and political points. To see a potential conflict between these different categories of literature is to miss much of the nuance of this process and this content. Rather than a sign of insincerity, commercialisation, or hypocrisy, this hybridisation was consistent with Radical moral philosophy as it had developed in the 1820s and as it was fostered by these publishers in the 1830s. Hollis’s suggestion that the sensationalist additions to the Destructive came at the expense of material on moral improvement overlooks the way that such ‘entertainment’ was inventively and implicitly presented in terms of Radical and Owenite morality.103

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32 Popular virtue

Sexual heterodoxy as entertainment One of the most common themes in the Radical press of the later 1830s was either comical or morbid stories about everyday sexual encounters, and this chapter will conclude by dissecting some of these. Reportage and pamphlets on sexuality and gender illustrates an area in which Radicals simultaneously sought to criticise, defend, and reform plebeian everyday life through such moralistic amusement. Material that may at first seem voyeuristic, such as court reports on rape, adultery, incest, domestic and misogynistic violence served the same function as other criminal reports in documenting everyday life in a violent, competitive, and selfishly governed society. These were not simply cautionary tales that through melodrama or ridicule encouraged sexual prohibition, since in conjunction with such stories Radicals presented remedies for these ills in the form of sexual liberty. A major role of the material in the Radical press that may seem the most gratuitous and commercialised was actually to serve as a contrast with optimistic Radical ideas about morality. Sexuality was a key prism through which to view the degrading effects of both capitalism and the aristocracy. Education of women, communal childrearing, and equal distribution of domestic labour were all key aspects of Owenite thought, and would have been practised at the Spa Fields community where Hetherington lived in the early 1820s. Owen himself saw marriage as ‘a crime, against the everlasting laws of your nature when you say that you will “love and cherish” what your organization may compel you to dislike and to loath, even in a few hours’.104 Owenites frequently saw sexual love and desire as a natural force, interpreted in a typically Deist manner as something to be enjoyed rather than resisted. This was not a doctrine of casual sexuality, but rather a belief that couples should be free to form and dissolve unions within ‘moral marriages’.105 This was inherently connected to Owenism’s economic critique, particularly after the socialist economist William Thompson and the feminist Anna Wheeler produced in 1825 Appeal of One Half of the Human Race, a detailed argument for the emancipation of women which advocated mutual co-​operation as the only scheme of social arrangements ‘which will complete and for ever insure the perfect equality and entire reciprocity of happiness between women and men’.106 By communalising domestic labour and childcare, and fully utilising women’s physical and mental labour, the moral wrong of women’s oppression would be ended and love and sexuality would be freed from any economic dependencies or motives. This would benefit society not only by liberating the talents of women but by improving the moral conduct of men by removing their ability to exercise economic power over others. However, moral marriages were advocated beyond Owenite socialism, and the wide Radical interest in them came from a number of sources. Godwin, Shelley, and Carlile were all sources for non-​communitarian arguments for free love and female emancipation. Carlile began a second ‘moral marriage’ with Eliza

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A ‘Radical Underworld’?  33 Sharples, the famous ‘Isis’ who spoke at the Rotunda for sexual and gender equality, along with other infidel topics.107 This is not to say that the Radical movement could be described as a feminist one. Although Hetherington would come to support sexual equality more strongly, in 1833 the Destructive felt that the Saint-​Simonian socialists were too eager in their attempts to emancipate women, and paternalistically felt that men needed to be emancipated first:  ‘Why talk of making women rational until we have first made ourselves rational? or why talk of restoring them to their social rights, till we have first obtained our own? We may sigh for the condition of women as we did for that of the poor Poles, but until we secure our rights of citizenship, we can do nothing for them, nor, indeed, for ourselves.’108 Despite this paternalism the recognition of female rationality and the necessity of degrees of sexual and gender equality was a prominent feature of Radical moral philosophy. Hetherington was close friends with the Owenite feminist Emma Martin (who would nurse him on his deathbed), James Watson was a constant publisher and admirer of the Scottish-​American Owenite Frances Wright’s lectures and in 1844 Strange was the first English publisher of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman for five decades.109 In his preface to Vindication, amongst numerous statements of admiration for the book and its author, Strange wrote: ‘We may indulge the hope, that, ere long, women will be in some degree emancipated from the degraded and demoralized condition to which caprices or the passions of the other sex have hitherto condemned them.’110 He was not alone. Wollstonecraft was a highly respected figure even before this republication of Vindication, and as early as 1833 Watson was selling portraits of her for 2d, along with those of Paine and Epicurus. Concurrent with this, Hetherington, Watson, and Cleave were producing and distributing a number of Owenite guides on contraception that challenged accepted ideas on gender and sexuality. In this they were part of a rich recent Radical tradition. In the 1820s Carlile represented the most vocal and controversial of the libertarian Radicals who saw sexual morality as a matter of individual liberty, considering his own ideas to be reflections of respectable artisan culture.111 He had already published a book of sex theory and practical advice, Every Woman’s Book, based on a long essay that had appeared in The Republican. Fundamental to Carlile’s beliefs, drawn from Shelley’s essay ‘Even Love is Sold’ that appeared as an appendix to Queen Mab, was the idea that if a man and woman stopped loving one another they should simply be free to end the relationship and begin anew.112 He also included practical advice on contraception, discussing the sponge, the ‘baudruche’ or ‘glove’ (condoms produced from leather or animal intestine), and full or partial withdrawal. When Carlile’s estranged son Richard published a half-​priced pirated edition of his father’s book in 1834 (his brother Alfred published another copy in 1838), he offered the apology that he had done so because he knew that otherwise Cleave and Hetherington would

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34 Popular virtue pirate it.113 Francis Place authored Illustrations and Proofs of the Principles of Population, which advocated contraception and was well received by a number of workers who wrote to him.114 Owen himself advocated contraception and was rumoured to have distributed condoms to his (mostly female) operatives at the New Lanark factory.115 However his son, Robert Dale Owen, was a far more important figure, as the author of Moral Physiology.116 First published in America, Watson quickly produced an English edition of Moral Physiology in the early 1830s, priced at 6d. It went on to run for many editions throughout the 1840s. Dale Owen was not advocating licentiousness but rather the application of reason to sexuality, yet this was far from a call for abstinence: ‘Reason recognizes the romantic and unearthly reveries of Stoicism, as little as she does the doctrines of health-​destroying and mind-​debasing debauchery … In all our inquiries, then, let reason guide us, and let UTILITY be our polar star.’117 The most moralistic were dubious in his eyes, and nothing was as suspicious as a woman with ‘vehement pretensions to especial chastity’, while among men ‘the obtrusive and sensitive stickler for the etiquette of orthodox morality is the heartless rake’.118 Instead he adopted Benjamin Franklin’s definition of chastity: ‘the regulated and strictly temperate satisfaction, without injury to others, of those desires which are natural to all healthy adult beings’. He also suggested his father Robert Owen’s definition was ‘excellent and important’:  ‘Prostitution, sexual intercourse without affection; chastity, sexual intercourse with affection.’119 These were fairly broad definitions, incorporating any sexual relationship based on emotional attachment, consent, and rejecting the sorts of excess that would overcome reason. A more benevolent society would educate its members to utilise reason to focus such natural desires on mutual pleasure. This literature has often been received as Malthusian. Thomas Malthus was a political economist who, in response to Godwin’s utopian idea of an infinitely perfectible society, outlined a theory of how high wages led to overpopulation and starvation, thereby naturalising poverty. This became a major ideological justification for the extremely unpopular new Poor Law of 1834, which sought to replace the old and generous welfare system with one that made poor relief both miserly and contingent upon the humiliation and misery of the workhouse. Contraception was also proposed as a more controversial method of lowering population, to be practised alongside or instead of low wages. Place and Dale Owen’s texts both were explicitly Malthusian, and this is why Place helped finance Watson’s initial publication of it.120 O’Brien ‘never forgave’ Watson and Hetherington for their dissemination of these contraceptive tracts, and in 1837 the London Working Men’s Association was attacked for having middle-​class Malthusian honorary members, including Place. Hetherington defended himself by describing the Malthusianism of these members as ‘peculiar opinions’ that held no sway over the rest of the Association, but the mud stuck.121 In fact, the Malthusianism of Moral Physiology was secondary to its moral message and its advocacy of mutual sexual enjoyment and a woman’s right to control her body.122 Whilst population

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A ‘Radical Underworld’?  35 was only briefly mentioned, most of the text centred upon ensuring that ‘the reproductive instinct should never be selfishly indulged’ and the belief that ‘a man who will ever put his desires in competition with [a woman’s], and who will prize more highly the pleasure he receives than that he may be capable of bestowing –​such a man, appears to me, in the essentials of character, a brute’.123 These texts were first and foremost instructive guides for how to behave morally. This was especially true of Fruits of Philosophy, which was written by Charles Knowlton, a Massachusetts physician who was friends with Dale Owen, partly in response to Moral Physiology.124 Like Moral Physiology, Fruits of Philosophy was published by Watson in 1833, and sold by Cleave and Hetherington. Knowlton was a materialist who subscribed to hedonic theories of motivation and the principle of utility, reflecting the common freethinking position on sexuality: ‘That which gives rise to agreeable consciousness is good, and we desire it. If we use it intemperately, such use is bad, but the thing in itself is still good.’125 Unlike Moral Physiology, which was a lengthy advocacy of contraception and sexual liberty in principle, Knowlton’s tract discussed anatomy and the present understanding of the physiology of conception in depth. It then moved on to discussing contraception. In Moral Physiology Dale Owen only dedicated two pages to specific discussion of contraception, where he solely advocated withdrawal. He dismissed the sponge as ineffectual and uncomfortable, and also rejected the baudruche since it was designed to protect against syphilis and he considered its advocacy would lead to ‘the degrading intercourse of which it is intended to obviate the penalty’.126 Knowlton, however, frankly provided much more specific advice. He described the clitoris as ‘exquisitely sensitive, being as it is supposed, the principle seat of pleasure’, and provided detail of the causes and remedies of impotency, since it greatly lessens ‘one’s ability of giving or receiving … pleasure’.127 Like Dale Owen he tersely dismissed the baudruche as being for syphilitics and not ‘general use’. He did advocate withdrawal, correcting the notion (subscribed to by Carlile in Every Woman’s Book) that partial withdrawal was sufficient, and the sponge, although he suggested soaking it in a spermicide to make it more effective. His preferred method of contraception was washing the vagina out with a spermicidal solution, a recipe for which he supplied, and which was useful because ‘it requires no sacrifice of pleasure’, was cheap, was completely in control of the female, and was hygienic.128 Dale Owen acknowledged that withdrawal was problematic as it placed the responsibility in the hands of men who may be careless or selfish, but weakly argued that to solve this women should be discerning about who they slept with.129 Knowlton’s vaginal wash went notably further and accepted that male selfishness and manipulation was not a woman’s moral responsibility. The advocacy of female sexual initiative, enjoyment, and control over contraception has been overlooked in Anna Clark’s influential account of the decline of Radical ideas of sexual liberty following the bastardy clause of the new Poor Law.130 The clause put the responsibility for raising a bastard

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36 Popular virtue on the mother, who could no longer pursue the father for financial aid by naming him in an oath given to a magistrate. In Clark’s account, Owenite and Carlilean ideas about marriage and sexuality were rejected by defensive Radicals who instead depicted plebeian sexuality as morally pure, with women asexual and lacking sexual initiative. It was ‘seduction’, usually by aristocrats, the masters of servants, or factory owners that led to bastards, not female licentiousness. In part, this is due to Clark’s acknowledgement of only Carlile and Place’s role in the birth control movement in the 1820s, and not Dale Owen or Knowlton’s pamphlets and their dissemination by several key Chartists throughout the 1830s.131 When read alongside articles on sexuality in the Poor Man’s Guardian these pamphlets indicate that Radicals felt women’s sexual passivity was caused by the material fact of the fear of childbirth, and that women’s sexuality would therefore be liberated by contraception. Similarly, the belief that women possessed ‘affection, sincerity, softness, and constancy’ was unlikely to be assertions of female asexuality, given that these were the same virtues Dale Owen and Knowlton advocated amongst men in sexual relationships.132 While, as Barbara Taylor argues, it is apparent that Radical and Owenite women did increasingly become suspicious of ‘free love’ and sexual libertarianism in the decades following the Poor Law reforms –​a conclusion they came to with good reason, as the next chapter argues  –​it is nevertheless clear that sexual liberty remained part of early Chartism’s intellectual culture and was not rejected as outright as Clark argues.133 This was the intellectual context for all articles on marriages and sexuality. Advocates of birth control frequently suggested that it would end infanticide, and such rational attitudes towards sexuality and contraception were illustrated by stories such as a servant at the palace of the Bishop of Worcester who unexpectedly gave birth to a baby which she then murdered (this story also conveniently possessed an implication of impropriety within the Church).134 Equally, a rational attitude towards sexuality and gender would undermine gender violence. A report in the Destructive of an extremely brutal rape was immediately followed by a report of a male Saint-​ Simonian lecturing on the rights of women, arguing that if women were no longer ‘kept in slavery and degradation’ they would make man ‘abhor force, and teach him sympathy and affection’.135 Brutality and bestial behaviour were important recurring concepts in Radical moral philosophy, signalling someone who had lost control of their faculty to reason, and these aspects of masculinity were directly critiqued by both Dale Owen and Knowlton. The first issue of the London Dispatch, the amalgamation of the Two-​Penny Dispatch and Cleave’s Weekly Police Gazette which was joint-​owned by Cleave and Hetherington, told of a vicious example of domestic abuse, when a husband burned his wife with heated tobacco pipes, beat her with a stick, and threatened to poison her.136 The story was not simple voyeurism, however.

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A ‘Radical Underworld’?  37 As was evident from the court transcript, avarice and greed were closely related to such behaviour: Magistrate –​How long have you been married to this brute of a husband of yours? Applicant –​Nearly 12 months, Sir. I suppose he married you for your money? –​There is very little doubt of that, Sir, though he has got plenty of his own. There was a clear confluence between such stories and the rhetoric of the political content of the Radical press. ‘Brutality’ was also used to describe the master of a workhouse who tortured a female pauper, the vicious abuse of a female factory worker in Bradford, or the character of the entire Tory Party.137 This broad application implied a shared root for all such brutality. This root, according to the anti-​capitalist, anti-​aristocratic Radical moral philosophy that developed throughout the 1830s, was a competitive and stratified society. Consensual but illicit sexual relations were dealt with more lightly, often in mocking, comical tones. One man who was clandestinely meeting a servant was discovered by her employer. The servant claimed that she did not know him, but he proved that he was not a burglar by showing that his socks, spectacles, and snuff-​box were in the sheets of a bed inside the house.138 Stories which required one improper act, clandestine and usually adulterous sex, to be revealed in order to absolve the defendants from a worse one, such as robbery or house-​breaking, were common.139 These comic stories were bawdy, and illustrate the continuity of ribald sexual humour from the Georgian into the Victorian periods. Along with the darker and more mawkish stories this content clearly illustrated in tones of pathos or ridicule the sorts of bad sexual morality that Radical morality rejected. Compared to the Owenite ideal of a consenting, affectionate couple, attentive to one another’s sexual pleasure and, thanks to the application of precautions, less fearful of an unwanted pregnancy, these stories of brutality, exploitation, and covert sex painted the picture of sexual immorality in the present state of society. Importantly, both the comic and the bleak stories were almost always tales of workers, artisans, clerks, and shopkeepers. Whereas Clark argues that the Radical and Chartist press of the period claimed sexual impropriety was the fault of sexually predatory aristocrats, these depictions of immoral and abusive relationships were predominantly within the lower classes.140 It is difficult to interpret such stories as being primarily about defending the working class, rather than instructing them. The arguments were clear. Rational sexuality would ensure sexual consent, pleasure and moderation within those who had been brutalised by society. As Hetherington warned, reflecting Dale Owen’s own contrast of Stoicism and debauchery:

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38 Popular virtue The epicurean acknowledges the value of the enjoyments of sense, although he has sometimes set too high a value upon them, thus leading to a gross sensualism; whilst the stoic, on the other hand, endeavours to persuade himself of the utter worthlessness of sensitive pleasures; thus suffering the mind to be pined away into a dreamy, mawkish spiritualism. So long as men are animated beings, possessing animal feelings, the enjoyments of sense will always have a definite value; and, on the other hand, so long as the reflective, or reason, or the merely imaginative faculties of man are cultivated and developed, there will be other pleasures than those of sense.141

Evidently, there existed into the Chartist period a strong concept of sexual liberty, and a concept of what a Radical sexual morality would look like. This was implicit in the London-​based Radical newspapers, and explicit in texts such as Moral Physiology, Fruits of Philosophy, Queen Mab, or Owen’s writings on marriage. Furthermore, this was not isolated to an intellectual, London-​centred clique. Owen’s lectures on marriage were produced by Mancunian publisher Abel Heywood (jointly with Cleave), Watson advertised Moral Physiology in the Northern Star, where the publisher of obscene prints William Dugdale also advertised Fruits of Philosophy alongside Jean Dubois’s Marriage Physiologically Discussed.142 Sexual liberty and heterodoxy was a key aspect of early Chartist intellectualism, albeit one that, as the next chapter will discuss, failed to contribute to a coherent programme of gender equality or sexual change.

Conclusion Chartism’s political culture drew from the rich satirical and freethinking traditions of its antecedents, meaning that in its early stages it was bawdy, sexually libertarian, and morally heterodox. Initially, this took the form of political and anti-​clerical satire that was designed to inculcate a popular scepticism, utilising ridicule to undermine social ‘betters’ and moral authorities while simultaneously instructing the working class about corruption and the pressing need for political reform. As ‘social Radicalism’ developed over the course of the 1830s, this populism came to incorporate moral tales of everyday life alongside satirical critiques of the aristocracy and clergy. The addition of amusement to political newspapers was not just an attempt to drive up sales, but also the utilisation of popular culture as a means of developing and inculcating Radicalism’s moral philosophy, social critique, and political objectives. Despite the Owenite inheritance this social critique was always more prominent and sophisticated than any attempts at remedies, which fell far short of being systemic and tended to prioritise political reform above social change.143 Nevertheless, morbid stories of industrial accidents and tales of comic sexual escapades successfully illustrated why social stratification, competition, and political inequality had direct and profound impacts on the living standards and morality of everyday life for the lower classes.

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A ‘Radical Underworld’?  39 This combination of festivity, moralism, and critique became an effective way of appealing to the working class once Chartism proper came into being, and its leadership sought to build a national constituency. Equally, this process had profound reciprocal effects on the nature of the leadership as well.

Notes 1 Malcolm Chase, Chartism:  A  New History (Manchester, 2007); Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1984). 2 D.J. Rowe, ‘The Failure of London Chartism’ The Historical Journal 11:3 (1968), pp. 427–​87; David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–​1848 (Cambridge, 1982). 3 Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press:  A  Study in Working Class Radicalism of the 1830s (London, 1970); Joel H. Weiner, The War of the Unstamped:  The Movement to Repeal the British Newspaper Tax, 1830–​1836 (Ithaca, 1969). 4 Ian Haywood, The Revolution in Popular Literature:  Print, Politics and the People, 1790–​1860 (Cambridge, 2004). 5 Iowerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-​ Century London: John Gast and his Times (Folkestone, 1979). 6 Fraser’s Magazine, 17 March 1838. 7 Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld:  Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795–​1840 (Cambridge, 1988). 8 The best political and social history of this group, class and their activities remains Prothero, Artisans and Politics. 9 Iain McCalman, ‘New Jerusalems:  Prophecy, Dissent and Radical Culture in Britain, 1786–​ 1830’ in Knud Haakonsen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth Century Britain (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 312–​35. 10 The Christian Teacher: A Theological and Literary Journal, Volume III (London, 1841), p. 353. 11 The Freethinking Christians’ Quarterly Register (London, 1823). 12 Henry Hetherington, Principles and Practice contrasted; or a Peep into ‘the only true church of God upon earth,’ commonly called Freethinking Christians (London, 1828). 13 Henry Hetherington, Cheap Salvation; or, An Antidote to priestcraft:  Being a Succinct, Practical, Essential, and Rational Religion, Deduced from the New Testament (London, 1832). 14 Hetherington, Cheap Salvation, p. 8. 15 A Report of the Trial of James Watson for having sold a copy of Palmer’s Principles of Nature at the shop of Mr. Carlile, 201, Strand (London, 1825); W.J. Linton, James Watson: A Memoir (New Haven, 1879). 16 Linton, James Watson, p. 72. 17 Joel H. Weiner, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth Century Britain: The Life of Richard Carlile (London, 1983). 18 Elihu Palmer, Principles of Nature:  or, a Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery amongst the Human Species (London, 1823).

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40 Popular virtue 19 James Foster, Discourses on all the principal branches of natural religion and social virtue (London, 1754), p. 172. 20 A Report of the Trial of James Watson, p. 15. 21 Hetherington, Cheap Salvation, p. 10. 22 David Stack, Nature and Artifice: The Life and Thought of Thomas Hodgskin (Woodbridge, 1998), pp. 8–​33. 23 Linton, James Watson, pp.  16–​ 17; Hetherington, Principle and Practice Contrasted, p. 30. 24 John Lawrence Mosheim, An Ecclesiastical History, Antient and Modern, From the Birth of Christ to the Beginning of the Eighteenth Century, Volume 1 (London, 1793), p. 4; J.G.A. Pocock, Religion: The First Triumph (Cambridge, 2011), pp. 163–​212. 25 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘Superstition and Enthusiasm in Gibbon’s History of Religion’ Eighteenth Century Life 8 (1982), pp. 83–​94. 26 David Hume, An Essay on Miracles (London, 1840). 27 Linton, James Watson, p.  19; C.F. Volney, Lectures on History (London, 1831), p. 28. 28 Volney, Lectures on History, p. 20. 29 Volney, Lectures on History, pp. 20, 21. 30 Alexander Cook, ‘Volney and the Science of Morality in Revolutionary France’ Humanities Research 16:2 (2010). 31 McCalman, Radical Underworld, p. 24. 32 M. Volney, The Ruins:  or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires, to which is added the Laws of Nature (London, 1833), p. 20. 33 Volney, Ruins, p. 21. 34 Volney, Ruins, pp. 69–​70. 35 Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab:  A  Philosophical Poem (London, 1833); George Bernard Shaw, ‘Shaming the Devil about Shelley’ in Pen Portraits and Reviews by Bernard Shaw (London, 1949), pp. 236–​246. See also: Bouthaina Shaaban, ‘The Romantics in the Chartist Press’ Keats-​Shelley Journal 38 (1989), pp. 25–​46; Bouthaina Shaaban, ‘Shelley in the Chartist Press’ Keats-​ Shelley Memorial Bulletin 34 (1983), pp. 41–​60. 36 NA: HO 64/​12, 13 February 1832. 37 G.J. Holyoake, The Life and Character of Henry Hetherington… (London, 1849), p. 9. 38 William Lovett, Life and Struggles of William Lovett in his Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (New York, 1920), p. 35. 39 Lovett, Life and Struggles, p. 38. 40 Joel H. Weiner, William Lovett (Manchester, 1989), p. 9. 41 Lovett, Life and Struggles, pp. 7–​8. 42 Prothero, Artisans and Politics. 43 Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–​1866 (Manchester, 1974), p. 46. 44 Cited in J.F.C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America: The Quest for the New Moral World (London, 1969), pp. 79–​80. 45 R.G. Garnet, Co-​operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities (Manchester, 1972), pp. 42–​4.

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A ‘Radical Underworld’?  41 46 Holyoake, Life and Character of Henry Hetherington, p. 10. 47 Lovett, Life and Struggles, pp. 41–​2. 48 Prothero, Artisans and Politics, p. 255. 49 Prothero, Artisans and Politics, p. 255. 50 For a detailed discussion of the creation of the NUWC, see Prothero, Radical Artisans, pp. 268–​99. 51 D.J. Rowe (ed.), London Radicalism, 1830–​1843: A Selection from the Papers of Francis Place (London, 1970), pp. 29–​33; William Carpenter, Annecdotes of the French Revolution of 1830 (London, 1830). 52 Noel W. Thompson, The People’s Science:  The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis, 1816–​1834 (Cambridge, 2002). 53 Christina Parolin, Radical Spaces:  Venues of Popular Politics in London, 1790–​c.1845 (Canberra, 2010), pp. 179–​272. 54 Helen Rogers, Women and the People:  Authority, Authorship and the Radical Tradition in Nineteenth-​Century England (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 48–​79. 55 Iain McCalman, ‘Popular Irreligion in Early Victorian England:  Infidel Preachers and Radical Theatricality in 1830s London’ in R.W. Davis and R.J. Helmstadter (eds), Religion and Irreligion in Victorian Society (London, 1992), pp. 51–​67. 56 Robert Taylor, Swing; or,Who are the Incendiaries? (London, 1831). 57 W.J. Linton, Memories (London, 1895), p. 14. 58 J. Anne Hone, For the Cause of Truth:  Radicalism in London, 1796–​ 1821 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 332–​6. 59 Linton, Memories, p. 37; Linton, James Watson, p. 65. 60 Hoyloake, Life and Character of Henry Hetherington, pp. 8, 13. 61 Magazine of Co-​operative Knowledge and Useful Miscellany, 30 October 1830. 62 James A. Herrick, The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680–​1750 (Columbia, 1997). 63 Hetherington, Practices and Principles Contrasted, p. 2. 64 National Archives, Kew:  HO 64/​12, Report of 16 January 1832; The Poor Man’s Book of the Church: not by Dr. Southey (London, 1832). 65 The Political House that Jack Built (London, 1819). 66 The Parson’s Horn-​Book (Dublin, 1831). 67 Poor Man’s Book of the Church, ‘Advertisement’. 68 HO 64/​12, Report of 6 January 1832; George Loveless, The Church Shown Up: In a Letter to the Vicar of Hazelbury Bryant, Dorsetshire (London, 1838); Tom Scriven, ‘The Dorchester Labourers and Swing’s Aftermath in Dorset, 1830–​8’ History Workshop Journal 82 (2016). 69 National Co-​operative Archive, Manchester. Collection of George Jacob Holyoake Documents, 1835–​1917: G.J. Harney to G.J. Holyoake, 22 March 1844. 70 A Slap at the Church!, 14 April 1832. 71 A Slap at the Church!, 11 February 1832. 72 Rowe, London Radicalism, p. 73. 73 Rowe, London Radicalism, p. 74. 74 Poor Man’s Guardian, 24 March 1832. 75 A Correct Report of the Trial of Messrs, Benbow, Lovett, and Watson, as the Leaders of the Farce Day Procession (London, 1832), pp. 25–​6.

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42 Popular virtue 76 Haywood, Revolution in Popular Literature, pp. 133–​5. 77 Arthur William à Beckett, The à Becketts of ‘Punch’: Memories of Fathers and Sons (London, 1903). 78 Figaro in London, 10 December 1831. 79 Catherine Feely, ‘Scissors-​ and-​ Paste Journalism’ in Laurel Brake and Maryssa Demoor (eds), Dictionary of Nineteenth-​ Century Journalism (London, 2009), p. 561. 80 Catherine Feely, ‘ “What say you to free trade in literature?” The Thief and the Politics of Piracy in the 1830s’ Journal of Victorian Culture 19:4 (2014), pp. 497–​506. 81 Poor Man’s Guardian, 26 July 1834. 82 Poor Man’s Guardian, 14 April 1832. On Thompson see R.K.P. Pankhurst, William Thompson:  Britain’s Pioneer Socialist, Feminist, and Co-​ operator (London, 1954) and Thompson, The People’s Science. 83 Bronterre O’Brien, Buonarroti’s History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality (London, 1836). 84 Alfred Plummer, Bronterre:  A  Political Biography of Bronterre O’Brien, 1804–​1864 (London, 1971), p. 63. 85 O’Brien, Buonarrati’s History, p. xiii. 86 The Destructive, 15 June 1833. 87 Hollis, Pauper Press, p. 121. 88 The Destructive, 7 September 1833; 29 June 1833. 89 The Destructive, 15 June 1833. 90 The People’s Conservative, 11 January 1834. 91 The Destructive, 14 September 1833. 92 The Destructive, 2 February 1833. 93 Halfpenny Magazine of Entertainment and Knowledge, 9 May 1840. 94 Haywood, Revolution in Popular Literature, p. 116. 95 Edward Jacobs, ‘The Politicization of Everyday Life in Cleave’s Weekly Police Gazette (1834–​36)’ Victorian Periodicals Review 41:3 (2008), pp. 225–​47. 96 Linton, James Watson, p. 48. 97 Thoughts on the New Era of Society:  A  Lecture Delivered at Mr. Owen’s Institution … On the New Era of Society, by C. Rosser (London, n.d.), p. 3. 98 Thoughts on the New Era of Society, p. 5. 99 Thoughts on the New Era of Society, p. 7. 100 Thomas MacConnell, A Lecture on the Signs of the Times (London, 1832), p. 11. 101 The Destructive, 7 June 1834. 102 The Destructive, 25 January 1834. 103 Hollis, Pauper Press, p. 121. 104 Robert Owen, Lectures on Marriages of the Priesthood in the Old Immoral World (Leeds, 1840), p. 16. 105 Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1983), p. 44. 106 William Thompson and Anna Wheeler, Appeal of One Half of the Human Race:  Against the Pretensions of the other Half, Men… (London, 1825), p. 199.

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A ‘Radical Underworld’?  43 107 Hollis, Pauper Press, pp. 147–​9; Rogers, Women and the People, pp. 48–​79. 108 The Destructive, 23 November 1833. 109 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (London, 1844). 110 Wollstonecraft, Vindication, p. iv. 111 M.L. Bush, What is Love? Richard Carlile’s Philosophy of Sex (London, 1998), p. 45. 112 Bush, What is Love?, p. 118. 113 Bush, What is Love?, p. 50. 114 Francis Place, Illustrations and Proofs of the Principles of Population (London, 1822). 115 Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, p. 54. 116 Robert Dale Owen, Moral Physiology:  or, a Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question (London, 1842). 117 Dale Owen, Moral Physiology, p. 11. 118 Dale Owen, Moral Physiology, p. 7. 119 Dale Owen, Moral Physiology, p. 41. 120 Bush, What is Love? p. 29. 121 Hollis, Pauper Press, p. 231; London Dispatch, 9 April 1837. 122 Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, pp. 54–​5. 123 Dale Owen, Moral Physiology, p. 41. 124 Charles Knowlton, Fruits of Philosophy, or, the Private Companion of Young Married People (London, 1891). 125 Knowlton, Fruits of Philosophy, p. 13. 126 Dale Owen, Moral Physiology, p. 39. 127 Knowlton, Fruits of Philosophy, p. 70. 128 Knowlton, Fruits of Philosophy, p. 74. 129 Dale Owen, Moral Physiology, p. 39. 130 Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches:  Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London, 1995). 131 Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 177–​96. 132 Poor Man’s Guardian, 24 May 1834. 133 Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, pp. 205–​16. 134 London Dispatch, 1 October 1836. 135 The Destructive, 26 October 1833. 136 London Dispatch, 17 September 1836. 137 London Dispatch, 4 December 1836; 15 January 1837; 5 February 1837. 138 The Destructive and Poor Man’s Conservative, 26 October 1833. 139 London Dispatch, 24 September 1836; 20 November 1836; 19 March 1837. 140 Anna Clark, ‘The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language, and Class in the 1830s and 1840s’ Journal of British Studies 31:1 (1992), pp. 62–​88, at p. 64. 141 Half-​Penny Magazine, 30 May 1840, p. 1. 142 Jean Dubious, Marriage Physiologically Discussed (New York, 1838). 143 Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-​Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 170–​94.

 4

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2 Politics and everyday life in early Chartism

Although the LWMA has often been regarded as elitist and reluctant to adopt a leadership position within organised Chartism, several key members –​in particular Henry Hetherington, John Cleave, and Henry Vincent –​ were instrumental in forming the organisational basis for Chartism outside of London.1 Born in Holborn in 1813, Vincent was the son of a Radical gold-​ and silversmith whose business failed when Henry was eight. In poverty, the family moved to Hull where Vincent was apprenticed as a compositor, and in 1829 his father died, leaving Vincent to care for his mother. In 1833 his apprenticeship ended and he began working in London, where following a trade dispute in 1836 he left his employment and joined the LWMA. After 1837 he became an extremely popular leader and orator, and after 1838 he relocated to Bath, becoming the most important organiser and speaker in much of the West Country and south Wales. This chapter will focus on these tours to illustrate how not only Vincent but many Chartist activists during this period achieved success by adopting the festive and populist ethos evident amongst London Radicals in the 1830s and applying it to their agitation. The movement in the west of England can be characterised as close-​knit and good-​humoured, and was receptive to Vincent’s deployment of London’s Radical satirical tradition and his encouragement of female activism.2 By visiting homes and pubs his activism also successfully hybridised quotidian concerns with Chartism’s political critique in the same manner outlined by Robert Hall’s study of early Chartists.3 Vincent argued that destitution, wages, low employment, and the suffering caused by the new Poor Laws were rooted in class exploitation and resolvable with political reform. However, the inverse is equally evident, and a major strength of Vincent’s organising was the way in which he incorporated the everyday life of the communities he visited into the structure of Chartism. Conviviality, sociability, and festivity were integral to the organisation of Chartism in the west of England, and this facilitated the democratic

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Politics and everyday life in early Chartism  45 structuring of the movement.4 This conviviality was sexual, ribald, and often incorporated drink, aspects of Chartism drawn from the political culture that preceded it. This intimate contact encouraged Vincent to see social destitution and class conflict as being at the heart of Chartism and drew him into an increasingly revolutionary outlook, a transition which illustrates the organic development amongst many leaders towards militancy and an understanding of Chartism as being fundamentally a movement opposed to both the aristocracy and the middle class.5 After the failure of 1839 and the repression of the movement, this intimate and affective organisation, its politicisation of everyday life, and in particular its veneration of domesticity laid the path towards the vastly different ethical Radicalism of the 1840s.

Chartism, festivity, and ‘taproom politics’ In 1837 Vincent and Cleave toured the north, founding Working Men’s Associations and discovering a highly agitated working class. In Hull, Vincent reported ‘The Whigs are smashed, and the Tories are all gone to the devil –​ There is a fine body of democrats here’, and throughout Yorkshire he was impressed by the popular support for the Radical-​Tory Richard Oastler’s campaigns for factory reform.6 When these activists returned a year later to promulgate the newly published People’s Charter the Associations that had been established the previous year served as a pre-​fabricated national communications network that helped form the sinews of the movement. Outside of the Working Men’s Association, the London Democratic Association (LDA), which considered itself more confrontational and populist than the LWMA, speedily supported the Charter and put forward some of the most notable leaders of the nascent movement. G.J. Harney, Hetherington’s assistant heavily influenced by Bronterre O’Brien’s social Radicalism, was foremost amongst the movement’s militant left and by the beginning of 1839 was developing a strong following in the north east.7 Feargus O’Connor, a Radical Irish aristocrat who used his swaggering persona to develop a popular following, began to cement his role as the figurehead of the movement. His Northern Star became its national newspaper, and largely through this he adopted a position that was ambiguous on the use of violence but robust in its defence of working-​class political independence. Opposition and mistrust was evident between this group and the moderates, in particular William Lovett who increasingly viewed popular leaders as mere demagogues. The LWMA was seen as tainted by figures like O’Brien and O’Connor due to its association with middle-​class  MPs who supported the new Poor Law. Equally, O’Brien and O’Connor’s attempts to form a national Radical association, the Central National Association, was attacked by Hetherington since their allies in this endeavour were ultra-​Tory farmers who were hardly considerate of the rights of their agricultural labourers.8 Despite such frictions a discernible Chartist leadership was beginning to cohere, particularly around

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46 Popular virtue figures like Hetherington, Cleave, and O’Connor who controlled Radical newspapers with a national reach. To push on from this early support, the Chartist leadership now set about organising the first National Petition, which was to be delivered to Parliament and demand the enacting of the points of the Charter. Yet this in itself was not enough, and by the New Year of 1839 the movement began organising a National Convention, both to co-​ ordinate the petition and to create a body that could steer the confrontation with Parliament that many Radicals now viewed as inevitable.9 The Petition and the Convention were the first nationally significant activities undertaken by Chartism as a discernible mass-​movement. To build support, the Convention’s organisers initiated the third major activist tour of the Chartist movement. On 8 February 1839 the National Convention’s ‘Committee of Extending Political Information’ resolved that several men would travel the country, starting on the 26 February, in simultaneous lecturing tours. The intention was for delegates to visit ‘the portions of the Kingdom which are not sufficiently instructed of the Chartist movement, to explain the principles of the Charter, to obtain signatures to the national petition & subscription of rent’, and Vincent and William Burns were selected to visit Somerset, Gloucestershire, and Herefordshire.10 They were to be given a cheap map of their district, papers for collecting signatures, copies of the national petition and People’s Charter, along with credentials proving that they were from the Convention. They were also given £10 spending money, which the Committee clearly expected would not be wasted, since the ‘delegate missionaries’ were required to keep track of what they spent in an account book and return any surplus.11 Written in their instructions, but later struck out, was the request that they spend no more than 10s a day.12 One recurring feature of Vincent’s tour was his daily use of inns and taverns as the base of activism. Inns were important community centres with multifarious uses, both for locals for whom they were cheap forms of recreation and for travellers where they were simultaneously official stops on the stagecoach network, places for resting, and purveyors of food.13 It is therefore not surprising that the inn recurs frequently in Vincent’s account as the location of important meetings, both pre-​planned and spontaneous. In Gloucester a ‘small Chartist society’ helped Vincent organise a meeting in the large room of the Upper George Inn, the Bell Inn was used in Monmouth for meetings, with Vincent’s rooms in a separate inn used as the location for the formation of the Monmouth Working Men’s Association, in Newport a woman’s meeting and later a mixed gender meeting were held in the Bush Inn, and in Stroud on Good Friday the procession began and ended at Vincent’s inn.14 This was a far from unusual situation in 1839. Robert Lowery later wrote that in the 1830s ‘the old tavern system still prevailed’, and that not only all political parties but also literary, scientific, and artistic groups had their own public house within which to hold meetings.15 Other Chartist leaders had even more direct control of public houses. ‘Fat Peter’ Bussey, an O’Connor ally and leader of the Bradford Chartists, was a blacklisted former

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Politics and everyday life in early Chartism  47 wool-​comber who established his own beerhouse in the town where he would read reports of his own speeches to gales of laughter.16 Publican Chartist leaders could also be found in Barnsley and Tyneside.17 Leisure and popular culture therefore became the terrain for much of Vincent’s organising during the 1839 tour. The first day of the tour was spent in Frome, Somerset, at a fair and in pubs. Vincent and his friends Roberts and Young of Bath arrived at one o’clock, when the Secretary of the local Working Men’s Association, along with some other radicals, took the men to the Sun Inn, ‘where we partook of an excellent dinner of beef steak and onions, and washed it down with a few glasses of fine spring water’.18 They then headed to the marketplace to attend the fair, which quickly emptied as 4,000 people were assembling at a hustings to hear Vincent speak. Afterwards he returned to the Sun for dinner, then held an evening meeting for the benefit of those who had been at work, after which he ‘sat down with some excellent Radicals until twelve o’clock’.19 Although the LWMA favoured moderation most of its members were not total abstainers, and Vincent seems to have principally avoided spirits.20 In March 1839 a correspondent accused the editors of the Western Vindicator of being hypocrites for praising a teetotaller in one part of the paper while calling teetotallers ‘canting hypocrites’ in another. In reply, the editors wrote ‘that it no more follows we should totally abstain from malt liquors (for we seldom indulge in anything else) because its excess is bad, that it would, because the Roman Catholic religion may be presumed to be wrong, that we should have no religion at all’.21 The Radical advocacy of sensual moderation rather than excess did not yet mean an austere level of abstinence. Vincent’s glass of spring water at lunchtime was a public declaration of this moderation, but he seems to have often happily drunk throughout the night. Chartism’s local critics certainly characterised the movement by its alcoholism. Writing of the advertisements for the open-​air meeting of September 1838 that would elect Bath’s representative to the Convention, the Bath Chronicle wrote that: The attendance of that large and respectable class of radicals, the politicians of the tap-​room school, is fished for in a nota-​bene of the placard, which says that ‘booths will be erected on the ground with refreshments.’ In other words, there is to be a general boozing by all who have money to disburse, or who can, through long and sedulous practice, rely on their evasive talents for getting off without undergoing the awkward and troublesome ceremony of paying.22

The ‘general boozing’ that was seen by anti-​Chartists as signs of decadence and moral degeneracy was a sign of a successful, festive, and vibrant political culture, where conventions indigenous to London Radicalism were also found in the provinces. The spy reports of Abel Hall illustrate that the members of the NUWC regularly met in drinking establishments where they smoked and drank, once to the point that the meeting’s chairman had to be expelled

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48 Popular virtue because he was so inebriated he was disrupting the speakers. This culture was challenged by more sedate alternatives such as William Lovett’s coffee house or James Watson’s chapel, although Hall’s account shows that these accompanied rather than prevented more raucous and lubricated meetings. Moreover, even the men most associated with moderation partook in festive drinking from time to time, such as when Lovett and Watson both celebrated the not guilty verdict in their ‘Farce Day’ trial by drinking ale in a large and happy meeting.23 In 1839 Vincent’s evenings in drinking places were long, political, and cheerful. At Wooton-​under-​Edge on 6 March he reported that following an afternoon meeting: ‘We returned to our inn in procession, and spent the evening in the company of 200 ultra rads. “Fall, tyrants, fall” was sung by the whole company in famous style. We separated about eleven o’clock.’24 As a result, Vincent likely spent most of his funding on this form of socialising, such as the ‘excellent repast in the company of about fifty sturdy Radicals’ in the village of Holt.25 Being a taproom politician and partaking in festivity and burlesque served a crucial function. Singing, for instance, was important to Radical groups as a ‘ritual of solidarity’ and bonding activity that did not require the ability to read or write, nor great expense or any equipment.26 Everything that marked Vincent as different  –​his upbringing in Yorkshire and London, his trade as a compositor, his education, and his ambitions –​ could be levelled through sociability and drink. It also served a key logistical function. As a local meeting place as well as the first port of call for strangers, the inn provided locals with regular access to new ideas and new faces. They were also frequently newsagents, post offices, and stops on stagecoach routes.27 Inns therefore served as important logistical as well as social and political hubs for early Chartism, which allowed men like Vincent the opportunity to meet and interact with complete strangers. In Tewkesbury, during the daytime of 12 March 1839, Vincent walked into the Queen’s Arms, chatted to the landowner and discovered he was a Radical, and then bumped into two men reading the Northern Star. Upon introducing himself they left, promising to organise a meeting for that evening, which resulted in the establishment of the Tewkesbury Working Men’s Association.28 Vincent’s crafting of the movement out of sociable and convivial relations resulted in a form of ‘shared’ leadership amongst both leaders and their audiences, of the sort that Lowery later recalled when he described public speaking as being ‘where speaker and audience are one in feeling and desire. The speaker only gives vent to the hearer’s emotions. His words at once find a response in their wishes’.29 This is reflected in the way Vincent’s social skills and good humour became a central tool in his political agitating. After his death, his wife reflected that it ‘was his constant remark that in all his travels he found so many friends that he seldom entered an hotel’.30 His first visit to Bath in October 1838 had been fleeting, but after he began spending more time there in June he became close with a number of families, many of whom he lodged with. One of his letters ends in a scrawl: ‘you must think all else I would say –​for I am writing in the Company

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Politics and everyday life in early Chartism  49 of Mr Bolwell, Mr Day and a host of young lasses –​and they all desire me to tell you that they think you must be a lady in disguise or I would not sit writing a letter instead of talking to them they are all at working jogging my arm so by God I cannot write any more’.31 This intense and close friendship group became the core organising body for both Bath and the wider region, and is evident of emotional, sociable and familial relations that formed the core of the west’s Chartist networks. Since activism also meant friendship, rural walks, fairs, drinking sessions, singing, and (as will be discussed at the end of this chapter) sexuality, it is not surprising that a number of Chartists described a post-​Chartist future as one of abundance and easy living. William Carrier was a Trowbridge organiser and friend of Vincent’s who declared that after the Charter was enacted the working class would receive ‘plenty of roast beef, strong beer, and plum pudding by working three hours a day’.32 O’Brien made the same claim in a later meeting in Bolton.33 This discourse often referred back to an idealised pre-​industrial golden age of luxury and plenty, but the Chartist era was significant for introducing the argument that the remarkable productive power of machinery should be used to both lessen labour and produce luxury for all. As O’Brien wrote in 1833: ‘If, instead of working to enrich a few avaricious task-​masters at the expense of their slaves, machinery were made to work for the general good by being employed as an auxiliary to, instead of as the antagonist of, human labour, there is no fixing a limit to the blessings that might be derived from it.’34 In his Life of Robespierre, O’Brien argued that in a ‘just state of society’ workers would only have to contribute their share of the common stock, ‘and this would hardly require the labour of three hours a-​day at his hands’.35 Most famously, the Reverend J.R. Stephens –​a Tory opponent of the Poor Laws who was one of the most important early Chartist leaders in Lancashire –​argued that Chartism was a ‘knife and fork … bread and cheese question’. While this speech has become a metonym for the debate amongst historians over whether Chartism was primarily a political movement or one driven by the hunger caused by trade depressions, it is clear that Stephens was outlining an anti-​work, hedonic picture of what everyday life should be like: every working man in the land had a right to have a good coat to his back, a comfortable abode in which to shelter himself and his family, a good dinner upon his table, and no more work than was necessary for keeping him in health, and as much wages for what work as would keep him in plenty, and afford him the enjoyment of all the blessings of life which a reasonable man could desire. (Tremendous cheers.)36

It is also not surprising that a major part of Chartism’s print culture in the provinces, just as it was in London, was humour and satire. The Western Vindicator was founded by Vincent along with a number of local Chartists at the very end of 1838, and in its short run throughout 1839 became a

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50 Popular virtue prominent Chartist newspaper.37 The Vindicator very clearly drew on the traditions of Radical satire, ranging from Regency newspapers such as the Black Dwarf to the contemporary work that Cleave was producing in the London Satirist that he founded in 1837. Cleave regularly lambasted figures in both national and London politics as debauched, simple-​minded ‘tax eaters’, usually through arresting front-​page woodcuts that very often depicted Britain in the tradition of Georgian satire as John Bull, the victimised tax-​payer.38 In the Vindicator his friend Vincent produced long and elaborate spoof reports that depicted his local antagonists, such as the Mayor of Newport Thomas Phillips or Lord Powerscourt, the Tory MP of Bath, as sexually predatory gluttons and alcoholics. Phillips’ likeness to a chimpanzee was exploited in one of the few woodcuts printed in the Vindicator, and led to a local Chartist custom of mocking his ugliness. A ball held by Powerscourt was lampooned in a long article in the Vindicator which depicted it in the style of Georgian grotesque humour:  ‘We had well nigh a regular row. For there was a little stumpy fellow, with bandy legs, who had brought a carroty-​haired six-​foot girl to the ball –​he had gone down the room to light his pipe and fetch her a glass of gin, when Col. Daubeney, taking a cowardly advantage of his absence, had talked some soft nonsense to her in a corner.’ After being confronted by the woman’s suitor the Colonel replied: ‘Sir, I know not who you are. But mark me, I consider every lady in a ballroom … is public property’, leading to him getting punched in the mouth. The article also claimed the Powerscourt spent most of the night with ‘two such fat girls’ on his knees and ended up so drunk he passed out on the floor.39 This was not limited to the Vindicator, as the Jacobin Newcastle-​based Northern Liberator copied from Cleave’s publications his satirical woodcuts, piracy of Dickens, and his innovative joke

Figure 3  ‘The Royal Civic Gorge, or Who Pays for It’ from Cleave’s London Satirist and Gazette of Variety, 11 November 1837. The mascots of the City of London, the giants Gog and Magog, watch as the City’s Aldermen eat John Bull out of pocket during the Lord Mayor’s show.

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Politics and everyday life in early Chartism  51 columns. In the provinces as in London, integral to early Chartism was a vibrant, mordant, and moralistic culture of humour and satire.40 This sort of festivity and good cheer was a dominant characteristic of the early movement, before it began to darken after the failure of the Newport rising in November 1839. Vincent’s sociability and enthusiasm for the taproom helped cohere the movement and formed a Chartist political community. His integration of festive culture illustrates an astute awareness of how important sociability and direct contact was. He was aware of the ‘complex mutual relationship of expectation, performance and response’ identified by Paul Pickering as an element in being a leader, yet Vincent was not just playing a role or adopting an identity.41 Practices such as dining, drinking, and singing were not only a means of representing or symbolising the movement.42 Instead, they allowed Chartism and working-​class community to bleed into one another, integrating diffused structures of leadership into those communities. This conviviality had direct practical consequences for the way that Chartism was organised and the way that national leaders like Vincent interacted with the movement’s body.

The politicisation and mobilisation of everyday life The chief impact of this festive and convivial culture was the development of an informally democratic culture within Chartism. This sociable, good-​ humoured, and egalitarian environment allowed a diverse number of experiences and perspectives to come into play. Conferences with the most capable and active locals were a key part of forming this local leadership. Evening social meetings were therefore not just about drinking, singing, and eating, but also had crucial organisational consequences, as in Monmouth:  ‘On retiring to our inn we were waited upon by several intelligent people, who undertook to form the nucleus of an association, and to obtain signatures for the National Petition.’43 The effect of these egalitarian sociable environments was to allow plain communication between Vincent and the local leadership. The letters that Lovett, as Secretary of the Committee in London, received illustrate this. When in Tewkesbury Vincent at some point spoke to William Morriss, who then wrote a letter to Lovett: I now write to you sir, on the advice of Mr Vincent for copies of the Rules of the ‘London Working men’s association’ begging that you will also be please to send us therewith every other requested information if you can please do send them we should like a couple of copies of the ‘People’s Charter’ as explaining the principles embodied in the ‘National Petition’ with a few copies of the ‘Petition’ also.44

Similar letters came from Ledbury, who also requested copies of the Charter and Northern Star, since ‘we like the papers very much’, and Stroud, who

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52 Popular virtue spoke of attempting to organise a county-​wide meeting for Whit Tuesday.45 The Bath Chronicle dismissed the region’s meetings and organisations as being ‘the efforts of some quarter of a score of cobblers, or tinkers, too lazy to do anything but smoke and tipple and talk inflammatory balderdash for the good of the nation’.46 Rather than distractions, smoking and tippling were instead integral aspects of the development of Chartism as a nationally co-​ ordinated mass-​movement. While ceremony was crucial to Chartism’s presentation of a rational, orderly political culture, there also existed a festive and raucous culture of sociability.47 Chartist leadership may have been tremendously successful on the local level, but nationally there was little central organisation. The Convention and the Committee of Extending Political Information did not provide the support for Lovett, who as the Secretary was severely overworked with no clerical staff to assist him.48 Requests for help, materials and information from Shaftsbury and Blandford in Dorset went similarly unanswered, wasting a relatively successful organising campaign undertaken by the recently repatriated Dorchester Labourers.49 In Leamington, Joseph B.  Smith told Lovett that ‘Our town contains twelve thousand inhabitants: –​but, hitherto, we have not had a public meeting, in consequence of your inability to send us a Delegate’.50 He went on to argue that the town would be more active if large public meetings occurred more regularly. In Tiverton in Devon, Henry Hamlin sent a desperate letter asking what had happened to the money and signatures for the National Petition they had sent, complaining that many in the west of England ‘feel Ourselves Neglected’ and hoping ‘that you Will Not forget is for the Future’.51 However the lack of leadership did not result in the local movements running out of co-​ordination and energy, but rather resulted in localities such as the west enthusiastically pushing Chartism into a Radical and confrontational direction.52 While it has been suggested that the lack of strong national leadership allowed ‘demagogues’ like O’Connor to exploit the vacuum and push the movement toward physical force, in reality leaders like Vincent learned a new, more violent and socially conscious form of Chartism.53 It is clear that over the course of 1839 the Chartist grassroots pressed the leadership into a position of arming, open confrontation, and the serious consideration of revolutionary planning. In Vincent’s case this transition was fuelled by an emotive response to the distress that he witnessed, which was facilitated by his intimate relations with the members of the movement.

Emotions and the turn towards violence Home Office documents indicate that the region was becoming a concern of the State’s from the beginning of 1839. In Trowbridge in February a man was arrested for making spears, and a report was sent to Lord Russell at the end of March claiming muskets, pistols, and other arms were circulating

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Politics and everyday life in early Chartism  53 in Monmouthshire and Glamorganshire.54 On 13 March 1839, Vincent’s friend, the Bath solicitor W.P. Roberts, showed a crowd in Holt a pike that was ‘an elegant specimen of physical force workmanship’, while in the same month reports were being sent to the Home Office of muskets being assembled in Bath and sent to Trowbridge.55 The frequency of letters from magistrates to the Home Office increased after two substantial riots in the town of Devizes, on 22 March and 1 April. These served as a watershed moment both in the Chartist agitation of the region and the nation, being the first serious violent event that could be attributed to the movement. The 22 March riot was due to an ambush of Vincent and the radicals surrounding him by a group of drunken ‘Tories’ (which Vincent later noted also included Whigs), leading to a vicious fight that only ended when the two groups retired to their appropriately named inns, the Tories to the Castle Inn and the Radicals to the Curriers’ Arms. Vincent then spoke inside the inn in private, and although the Tories attempted to gain entry, they were denied by the constables, who dispersed both crowds and escorted the Chartists out of town.56 It is clear that Vincent intended to return to settle the score. The next day he informed Lovett that he could not be in London for two weeks, and that: in consequence of our temporary defeat at Devizes, a second Meeting is commended for Easter Monday when the Chartists of Wiltshire will accompany me into the town in sufficient force to put down the hireling ruffians by who we were previously assailed the Meeting will be at 10 in the forenoon, so we shall have day-​light for our battle … I have no doubt that a dreadful riot would have occurred had we not adjourned the Devizes meeting.57

It probably is true that fighting would have resumed had the Chartists not left, but Vincent’s intention to visit the town again on a public holiday seems counter-​productive if he actually sought to avoid violence. In the Vindicator he requested a large force to join him, specifying men: LONG LIVE THE PEOPLE Men of Trowbridge, Bradford, Holt, Westbury, Bromham, and all the villages around Devizes. –​You must all be in Devizes at 10 0’clock, on the Morning of Easter Monday. Do not be later. I will meet you on the Bath road, one mile from Devizes, at a quarter to one. Yours truly, HENRY VINCENT58

Malcolm Chase notes that it is difficult to distinguish ‘loose talk from firm planning’, suggesting that Vincent’s threats were the former.59 His decision to march on Devizes seems firm planning: he may have wanted an unopposed entry to prove a point, but he was clearly prepared for a fight. In this, he was aligned with the body of the local movement. Over the next week and a half,

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54 Popular virtue bills from magistrates appeared warning against the procession and meeting, and the Royal Wilts Yeomanry were mobilised and special constables called up along the marchers’ route.60 One magistrate in Bradford-​on-​Avon reported the Chartists armed ‘at least with Bludgeons’.61 William Carrier was reported theatrically addressing an audience before leaving for Devizes while putting on a life preserver (a rudimentary stab-​or bullet-​proof vest) and showing a brace of pistols. The audience reciprocated by showing him their bludgeons, ‘loaded with lead’.62 Another man had a life-​preserver made from whale bone, while others had assorted sticks and carving knives.63 Political violence was not unusual during the period, and was a major feature at elections throughout the century. This has been attributed to ‘boorish masculinity’, and in particular Radicalism’s close connection with pub culture has been seen as giving it a pugilistic tendency.64 There is some justification for this. In Vincent’s report of the first Devizes riot he refers to the Radicals as ‘taking refreshment’ before the hustings, and more explicitly refers to the Tories as being ‘drunken’.65 However, these riots were not just ill-​thought, hot-​headed, drunken eruptions of violence. Alongside being a traditional part of British party politics, violence was a legitimate political tendency within Chartism, drawing from its Republican and insurrectionary forebears. Both Cleave and Hetherington remained Republicans into the Chartist period, facts that have been neglected, while throughout its run the Poor Man’s Guardian possessed an ambivalent attitude towards violence, alternately disapproving of it or holding it as a legitimate part of the Radical working-​class’s political arsenal.66 At the beginning of the decade Richard Carlile sold an edition of Colonel Macerone’s Defensive Instructions for the People, and this was published in an abridged and illustrated form by Hetherington in the Poor Man’s Guardian during the Reform Crisis, while Watson went as far as advocating that the NUWC all be trained in its measures.67 At the National Convention Peter McDouall advocating arming according to Macerone’s system, pointing out that the Morning Chronicle had done the same in 1831.68 Some, like Harney or O’Brien, came from a militant Jacobin tradition influenced by Babeuf, and saw Revolution as an inevitability given the intransigence of the aristocracy and middle class to cede away any of their political or economic power. Others, like O’Connor, were deliberately ambiguous and utilised the threat of justified violence as the ominous backdrop to more peaceful activities, such as petitioning or grand meetings. Finally, moderates like Lovett accepted the constitutional right to arm and believed that violence initiated by the government was a likely possibility, and that therefore some preparations for self-​defence might be necessary. All three groups were unified by their belief that arming was legal, and were well aware that Chartists in the provinces were strongly in favour of ‘ulterior measures’. As a consequence the boundaries between these respective positions was blurred by May 1839, indicated by the fact that even the moderate Chartist was by then advocating arming.69

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Politics and everyday life in early Chartism  55 Vincent’s militarised rhetoric in his depiction of the march to Devizes and the conflict itself illustrates his part in this complicated and evolving attitude to arming and violence. Direct action was also a form of militancy that still sat in local memory: riot combined with union organising had been crucial in the cloth-​weavers’ struggle against mechanisation a generation before, when during the Wiltshire Outrages in 1802 skilled shearmen destroyed machinery, mills, and factories.70 As with the delegates to the Convention, Chartists in the west genuinely believed that they were under imminent threat from an armed government attack, a belief compounded both by army mobilisation and the expansion since the 1820s of the highly unpopular police force.71 As early as February, on the second day of Vincent’s tour, a crowd in Holt shouted to Vincent ‘WE ARE ARMED  –​WE WILL RESIST THEM BY FORCE!’ when he asked what would happen if the government forcefully repressed them.72 Furthermore, in Wales Vincent repeatedly appealed to a notion of cultural and national separatism, such as when he wrote on the way to Newport that he ‘could not help thinking of the defensible nature of the country in the case of foreign invasion! A few thousands of armed men on the hills could successfully defend them. Wales would make an excellent Republic’.73 Vincent’s experiences were similar to reports from other leaders during the same period. O’Brien remarked that in south Lancashire there was ‘a pike for every signature’, and in April encouraged the Convention to move from London to Birmingham or Manchester where it would be protected by ‘the guns of the people’.74 Harney similarly argued that the Convention should move to Manchester where it would be defended by ‘250,000 men who would be determined to defend their liberties’, and argued that the people of the north were ‘ready to slake themselves in blood rather than lose the Charter’.75 The turn towards arming, drilling, and violence was genuinely popular, but also had robust moral and political justifications. That is not to say that there was no emotional aspect to violence or these calls to arms. Researchers into social movements have highlighted the way that emotions are integral components in political action, and by no means opposed to rationality.76 Vincent’s emotive linking of poverty to political revolution was a direct consequence of not only his own political and intellectual influences, but also his reaction to the social conditions in the communities in which he organised. He appealed directly to the deeply rooted sentiments and outlooks within the communities which the Chartist movement sought to shape, direct, and define.77 In particular starvation, the suffering of women and children, and notions of familial sacrifice were recurring themes in Vincent’s speeches and writings during this period. Before visiting the large Inn in Tewkesbury, Vincent ‘called upon Mr. Craig the currier, who received us politely and gave us every information in his house regarding the political opinion of the people’.78 The day after, in Ledbury, the men went from house to house enquiring about the town’s state of poverty, finding female glove-​ makers whose earnings had collapsed.79 During one of Vincent’s

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56 Popular virtue fact-​gathering walks in the town he was horrified by what he witnessed. The invective is worth quoting at length: I saw two girls, one 15 and the other 9 years of age. It was 11 o’clock in the forenoon, and they told me they had not tasted food since nine o’clock on the morning of the preceding day, and then had had but a small piece of dry stale bread. They had two younger sisters at home crying for food, and they had come out to see if they could find any dirty food which had been thrown away. Their father was a carter, his average earnings was 3s. 6d. per week, and he had gone to work that morning without food. I gave them a trifle each, and one of them immediately ran and purchased a threepenny loaf and carried it to her starving father. I met with many other instances of extreme destitution  –​indeed, I  found it no unusual thing for families to be entirely without food for the last two or three days of the week, and to exist entirely upon what they could pick up from dunghills, &. Oh, that I had but the power! –​but I will not say what I would do. One thing I am now convinced of, that if we do not have an almost immediate political and social change, A BLOODY REVOLUTION MUST TAKE PLACE. The people will not starve much longer. Let their tyrant rulers beware!80

Local Chartists sought out similar ways to shock. At a meeting in Bath, the chairman presented a three-​year-​old child who had been placed in a workhouse owing to the poverty of their mother and death of their father. As a consequence, ‘its teeth and gums were cut away –​its feet twisted –​and its whole frame reduced to skin and bone. THE CHILD HAD BEEN NEGLECTED BY THE KIND POOR LAW UNIONISTS. Great sensation was created on viewing the awful condition of the little sufferer’.81 Vincent was now advocating arming as a civic virtue, and this possessed an emotive as well as an intellectual basis. After describing in great and vivid detail in the pages of the Vindicator the severe (and life-​threatening) beatings he had received during the second Devizes riot, Vincent expounded the necessity of arming as the means of defending Chartism’s political moralism: I am more than glad the visit occurred; it has taught us a good lesson –​ THAT THE ARISTOCRACY WILL COMMIT MURDER RATHER THAN GIVE THE PEOPLE FOOD; AND THE RIOT TELLS US, IN LANGUAGE WE CANNOT MISTAKE, TO PROVIDE ARMS FOR OUR SELF-​ DEFENCE. CHARTISTS! TAKE, FOR ONCE, A LESSON FROM YOUR FOES.82

The emotive, political, and communal turn towards arming and violence dominated Chartist activism in the west over the first months of 1839. This alarmed Lord Russell, the Secretary of State and MP for Stroud whom Vincent had denounced on his visit to the town as a ‘sneaking little pettifogger’.83 The Devizes riots convinced Russell that suppression using military force was now

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Politics and everyday life in early Chartism  57 necessary, and he began to leave less to the initiative of magistrates. By the beginning of May, Russell was receiving reports of arming and illegal meetings from across the region, and became far more willing to deploy troops to ensure no breach of the peace.84 A Royal Proclamation was signed on 3 May, empowering magistrates to outlaw any Chartist meeting at will, specifically allowing the harassment of Chartists meeting in inns and other public houses, underlining their importance to Chartist organising.85 On 7 May, Russell circulated a printed document to magistrates telling them to ‘take all adequate Precautions, and employ an adequate and fully sufficient Force’ for the suppression of illegal meetings, especially those at which arms were present.86 On the same day, Vincent, who had just returned to London to attend the Convention, was heading to his mother’s home on Cromer Street in Bloomsbury after a meeting with John Frost, the Newport Chartist leader. When he approached the door he was arrested on a warrant issued from Newport by Thomas Phillips, the mayor, and taken away in front of his little sister who ‘seemed sadly terrified’.87 Vincent’s arrest alarmed the Convention, and supported the arguments of those like O’Brien and Harney that they needed to reassemble in a city more hostile to the government. The move to Birmingham was completed by 13 May. Vincent’s arrest was also the beginning of a long period of repression throughout 1839, as the army was mobilised in the north. After a break over Whitsuntide the National Convention reconvened in July. Riots ensued in Birmingham’s Bull Ring once it was learned that Parliament would not hear the National Petition, and this led to Lovett’s arrest when he bravely put his name as the sole signature to a document attacking the conduct of the Metropolitan Police. In the west of England and south Wales, Vincent’s incarceration intensified conflict. Local magistrates clambered to ban the Vindicator as it produced more articles on the themes of Republicanism and self-​defence.88 The Chartist procession in Bath on Whit Monday 1839 was greeted by special constables and the army, called out by the Radical Council.89 Soon after a Bishop’s ricks at his farm close to Bath were burnt in response to him refusing to hire Chartists.90 Nationally, the failure of the Petition and the Convention prompted the Chartist leadership to adopt the ‘Grand National Holiday’, a general cessation from all work and financial activities (including purchasing excisable articles such as alcohol or tobacco) which had been advocated by William Benbow since the early 1830s and was now being pushed by Harney. The Holiday was intended to take place in August, and in that month the Bath Association was organising Tiverton and Radstock in preparation, reporting to London that the workers of Bath were ‘afraid to think that a strike will not take place’.91 However nationally the Holiday was largely a failure, since few could afford to observe it, and the Convention had trimmed it from a month to only a few days. This period of repression served as a breakwater for the initial stages of Chartism, and the failure of the sacred month has been described by Chase as a ‘climb-​down of great significance’.92 However, until this point it is evident that early Chartist organising possessed much energy and was confrontational. The devolution of Chartist leadership to spaces like inns,

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58 Popular virtue and the engagement of men like Vincent with the lives of the movement’s supporters, created a festive, informal, and sociable culture which was integral to Chartism. The problem of the inefficient organisation of the national movement was solved somewhat by men like Vincent forming these informal bonds between the localities and the national leadership.93 A  consequence of this intimacy was the movement being directed towards Republicanism, direct action and arming, as insurrectionary political traditions became fused with anger within close-​knit Chartist communities. Vincent was not a Jacobin or ‘social Radical’ before 1838, but through exposure to working-​class militancy he had organically progressed to sharing many of their opinions by May 1839. It is clear that the festive, sociable, and militant traditions of Radicalism earlier in the decade facilitated this transition.

Sexuality and humour in the provinces Early Chartism’s attitude to morality was flexible enough that it encompassed festivity and alcohol. Moral arguments were used to both denounce the ruling class as well as justify arming and the potential of revolutionary violence. A central aspect of early Chartism, which illustrates both its communal roots and the legacy of the heterodox infidel culture, was the highly prominent participation of women. Vincent has been well noted, by both historians and contemporaries, for the particular interest he took in female activism. In return, he was popular amongst female Chartists.94 However, the sexual dimensions to this have not been addressed, with historians suggesting that by the Chartist period sexual libertarianism had largely disappeared from mainstream Radical culture.95 It is clear that the sexually heterodox culture of the 1830s in fact continued into early Chartism and was an aspect of the provincial tours. However, studying Vincent’s attitude to sexuality, both in London and on his tours, and contrasting this with his public statements on women’s political activism and the statements of those women themselves there is clear evidence that in practice sexual liberty was largely about masculine sexuality and pleasure. The social issues affecting women were largely conceived of in paternalistic terms, and were not combined with a position of sexual or political emancipation. While it is clear that women sometimes defined and politicised themselves as sexual actors and participated in Radical’s bawdy sexual discourse, the doctrines of sexual liberty were often articulated in phallocentric and even misogynistic tones. The contradiction between this form of sexual libertarianism and the veneration and politicisation of women’s domestic labour undercut women’s mobilisation and, as Jutta Schwarzkopf has argued, boxed female activists into an auxiliary role.96 This veneration of domesticity in turn established the foundations for the moral improvement culture of the 1840s, which centred on the reform of the home and which will be outlined in the following chapters.

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Politics and everyday life in early Chartism  59 It is very clear that there were sexual aspects to the activism and itinerant tours of young, unmarried Chartists, and that men and women participated in romantic fraternisation. Robert Gammage, a Chartist veteran who became the first historian of the movement, suggested that Vincent’s famed abilities as an orator were in part sexual: ‘With the fair sex his slight handsome figure, the merry twinkle of his eye, his incomparable mimicry, his passionate bursts of enthusiasm, the rich music of this voice, and, above all, his appeals for the elevation of woman, rendered him an universal favourite.’97 He further claimed that:  ‘Doubtless the fascinating personal qualities of Vincent had their share in rousing the patriotism of these fair Democrats.’98 Similarly, Sir William Napier, from an aristocratic family of Bath Radicals, wrote to his wife that the city Council had refused to allow Vincent to speak to a female meeting in the Guildhall as he ‘was to be alone with six hundred women’ and the Council, ‘as conservators of the women … could not permit them to go’. He concluded however that this was a forlorn hope, given Vincent’s popularity and the assertiveness of female Chartists: ‘I guess the ladies will win in the end. They have given Vincent a scarf already, and he is moreover rather goodlooking.’99 Later the Radical and non-​conformist teacher Mary Smith was ‘fascinated’ by Vincent, the first political lecturer she had ever seen, when he was contesting the Banbury election in 1841 although she ‘dare not tell [my] father’ that she had gone to see him.100 This gives some weight to Vincent’s suggestive account of a meeting with female Chartists in Trowbridge: ‘I was presented with a handsome green silk scarf by a pretty smiling young lady who trembled from head to foot. She put it round me herself in the presence of the assembled thousands for and on behalf of the single ladies of that town. Do you call that nothing?’101 The young Harney was remembered for his fraternising, when nothing ‘pleased him more than to take his partner for a dance at the Highlander Inn … On these occasions he would frequently place his red cap, which he usually wore, on the head of his fair partner and conduct her along the room, delighting the company by his gallantry’.102 His itinerancy led to him meeting his first wife, Mary Cameron, after relocating to Scotland in 1840–​41 a woman from a Radical working-​class family who Harney found ‘a brave counsellor in all risks and a resolute sharer of any consequences’.103 In prison in 1840 Peter McDouall was given permission to eat his meals next to the turnkeys’ lodges, causing him to form ‘an intimacy with one of the Turnkeys’ daughters … whom he succeeded in inducing to abandon her home on his discharge and who is now living with him’.104 The pair later married and had a number of children. Dr John Taylor deliberately affected a Byronic appearance, personality, and exoticism, aided in part by his family wealth and the fact that he was half-​Indian. He had spent his youth as a political adventure, imprisoned for his involvement in French Republicanism before outfitting a ship on which he sailed to personally take part in the Greek War of Independence. With long black curly hair that fell in curls, a thick beard, dark eyes, and open-​necked striped coloured shirts, he certainly left an impression

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60 Popular virtue on Harney, who later described him as ‘a cross between Byron’s corsair and a gypsy king’ who ‘carried ladies’ hearts by storm’.105 Although with less material to work with than Taylor, Vincent similar presented himself as a Byronic hero, quoting Don Juan –​Byron’s epic poem of male sexual adventure –​to Minikin after meeting with the women of Trowbridge: Oh that they had one rosy mouth! I’d kiss them all from north to south.106

Vincent was inculcated into this culture by both his workmates and his Radicalism. As a trained compositor Vincent would have come of age in an intellectual yet bawdy culture, and he matched closely one of the archetypal print office workers described in an article in Cleave’s London Satirist in 1837: ‘That fine-​looking fellow with an oval border of whiskers round his face, and corresponding curve of his leg, the wit, orator, and gay Lothario of the establishment, has a taste which the foreman himself does not disdain occasionally to call to counsel.’107 Vincent arrived in London in 1833 having already been an active Radical since the age of fifteen. W.J. Linton, born in London a year before Vincent, looked back on this decade as the ‘Days of the Saturnalia of Free Slaves!’ the era when ‘even the “goddess” Liberty, so lately come from France, had something of the harlot in her nature’, and ‘even noble men of that day’ were licentious due to the ‘intoxication of that time of renewed youth to Western Europe’.108 An avid reader in his youth, Vincent would have been drawn straight into London’s print culture, as indicated by his references in his letters to Byron and Shelley’s Queen Mab, the ‘bible’ of Chartism and a major work of sexual libertarianism as well as Radical politics.109 Vincent’s interest in Shelley and Byron likely led him directly to books on rational sexuality, not only because they were mainstays within the culture, but also since Moral Physiology and Fruits of Philosophy were prominently advertised in Watson’s editions of Queen Mab. Linton had purchased a copy of Moral Physiology from Watson’s shop and subsequently became an ‘enthusiastic’ convert.110 The National: A Library for the People was produced by Linton and published by Watson throughout 1839, and wrote extensively on divorce, the political and social equality of the sexes, and contraception.111 Vincent was probably long acquainted with the methods of contraception when he suggested to Place in 1841 that birth control was one solution to poverty.112 It is therefore not surprising that the correspondence with Minikin indicates Vincent was sexually active in London. The pair reminisced about a prostitute who both men were acquainted with from walks through Regents Park, and whom Vincent described as being able to ‘turn an anchorite or a stoic and tea totaller to sin’.113 After his arrest Vincent referred to a woman named ‘Mrs. V’ from Kentish town who he could no longer ‘sweetheart’, reminding Minikin at one point to ‘bear in mind your favourite motto Discretion is the better part of valour’.114

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Politics and everyday life in early Chartism  61 As I have argued elsewhere, it is clear from Vincent’s letters that the sexually libertarian culture and morality of Radicalism and early Chartism was in evidence in the provinces as much as it was in London, and that he regarded his tours as being, at least in part, a sexual adventure.115 In the second letter he sent to Minikin, from Huddersfield during a lecture tour in 1837, he instructs him to ‘Tell the girls there is a profusion of bright eyed Yorkshire Radical lasses’.116 In the next letter, written from Birmingham, Vincent wrote after a walk with a young woman that ‘I know of no greater pleasure (always excepting the advocacy of Democratic and philosophical principles) than the companionship of one of the fairest flowers of creation’.117 More often, however, Vincent was crude and demeaning. One Monday morning he referred to the woman he had spent the previous day with as a ‘piece of green silk and a pair of piercing eyes’.118 In Bath he reported that he had ‘lots of sweathearts Married! And single’, and claimed that the woman joked that they were afraid ‘there will not be “a bit of me left” ’. He then jokingly implied to Minikin that he had made three women pregnant, although in reality he was referring to babies who were going to be baptised with his name.119 After receiving a number of gifts from female visitors to Monmouth Gaol he excitedly wrote to Minikin, describing them as ‘sweet-​little-​teasing-​bewitches!’ and promising that ‘I shall pay them all, in kind, for all their little kindnesses when I get “among them” again’.120 In August 1840, Vincent discussed with Minikin the news that the Queen was pregnant: ‘The papers say that our Queen is in an “interesting position” Mercy on me! –​I have seen ladies in very interesting positions ere this –​but I was never mean enough to make the matter public … I sometimes stand on my head for joy of the thought of these “interesting positions” ’121 Amongst these more predatory letters Vincent was also extremely frank with Minikin to the point of being scatological. From Monmouth in September 1839 he wrote a long note about how a sex dream in which he was ‘in the act of kissing the sweetest and prettiest lips that ever eye beheld or heart desired’ was interrupted by a flea biting his bottom. He concluded: I thrust my finger slyly down to my seat of honour, approached my gentleman cautiously  –​ and  –​ and-​ smashed him! I  sent him suddenly to his account ‘with all his imperfections on his head!’ –​after burying him in my what-​d’ye-​call-​it –​I snoozed off again –​but my fair angel disliking my want of gallantry in such an ‘interesting position’, returned no more! Curse the flea! Henceforth I am the sworn foe of fleas!122

Vincent’s letters therefore illustrate an extremely close affective relationship between himself and Minikin, but little sense of affective relationships with women  –​beyond one intervention by Minikin’s wife, Mary-​Ann, whose caution that Vincent should be more discreet indicates a degree of closeness, even though it was dismissed. Such close masculine relationships had been notable since the period of the French Revolution, and bawdy sexual and gender experimentation has been noted by historians as an aspect of

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62 Popular virtue friendships shaped by Radicalism and Romantic literature.123 Vincent’s flippancy indicates that sexuality was for him a matter of masculine self-​identity rather than the sort of mutually affectionate relationships advocated by Dale Owen or Knowlton. Alongside Vincent’s predatory letters, there is clear evidence that Radicalism’s positive and libertarian attitudes to sexuality were practised in narrowly patriarchal and exploitative terms. In 1840 Cleave began an affair that led to his wife, Mary-​Ann, moving away and withdrawing her investments in his business, apparently because he moved his mistress into the family home. Notably, this was in the same year he began selling Owen’s treatise on marriage, Lectures on the Marriages of the Priesthood in the Old Immoral World.124 As the preface plainly stated, ‘All reasonable persons must admit that it is a grievous evil for man or woman to be induced to become, or compelled to continue, united in marriage to an individual for whom they cannot feel a sincere affection’.125 In 1841 Francis Place, who was friends with Mary-​ Ann and aided her after the separation, wrote a note to Lovett complaining that Cleave had been ‘Cruel in the extreme towards his wife whom he always boasts of as his delight, his friend, his companion and his helpmate’, and alluded to his conduct towards his daughters as being ‘disgraceful beyond expression’.126 It is likely because of such opinions that Cleave reacted badly to the marriage between his daughter Lucy and Henry Vincent in February 1841, two months after Vincent left prison. ‘[B]‌eing a man of sensitive honour’ Cleave was worried that people would think he had made a deal to agitate for Vincent’s release in return for a partner for his daughter.127 While the exact details of the Cleaves’ separation or Vincent’s marriage are unknown, a letter from a Dublin Owenite bookseller to his friend Watson reveals that sexual liberty could be interpreted in strongly misogynistic terms: I am sorry I cannot pay you a visit this year. If I was single, I should not hesitate a moment, but her Ladyship is not to be long trusted behind my back. Even to day, she has threatened to destroy the manuscript, if she can lay hold on it! The married women of the middling classes of this country are not indeed faithless to their husbands bed, but they are sad spendthrifts & drunkards, & extremely irritable & violent. Under the Community system the characters of the female … will easily be ascertained, but under the present insulated one, they elude all examination. The present marriage Laws are detestable. There lives near me an ingenious man, a Warper, who can earn 30/​-​a week, but it is all converted into Whiskey by the rapacity & drunkenness of his wife! –​Who is inalienably chained to him by our wise legislator’s code.128

This was likely one of the class of Radicals described by the Chartist John James Bezer in 1851 when he remembered his master in his youth twenty years earlier, ‘a great Radical –​one who’d beat his wife and shout for reform …

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Politics and everyday life in early Chartism  63 who can prate against tyranny wholesale and for exportation, and yet retail it out with all their hearts and souls, whenever they have the opportunity’.129 During one of the fratricidal disputes common to Chartism in the 1840s the Northern Star alluded to some dark aspects of the past of William Carpenter, threatening to ‘tell of his numerous avocations, both literary, RELIGIOUS, and not as a putter-​down of prostitution … ask WHAT drove a wife into a madhouse, and who it is that has been elevated to take her place at bed and board’.130 It is therefore evident that unscrupulous ‘sexual adventurers’ were not just a problem amongst Owenites.131 It should however be noted that female Chartists did not always present themselves asexually, and like Vincent they utilised bawdy humour and sexual archetypes. Gammage’s claims that women were sexually attracted to Vincent have been seen as dismissive by Dorothy Thompson, who asserts that women heard him speak because of their politics, not his looks.132 There were nevertheless some statements produced by women rather than men that state the sexual engagement and interest of female Radicals. The Ashton Female Political Union stated that ‘no man shall ever enjoy our hands, our hearts, or share our beds’ if they were not Chartists.133 The Female Patriotic Association of Newport published an address of support to Vincent which mocked his persecutor, the Mayor of Newport Thomas Phillips, for his ugliness: And sure, we are, as connoisseurs in matters of such task as personal appearance, that coupled with his conduct of late, which had added much moral deformity to a physical frame naturally repulsive, he is now essentially one of the ugliest men; and if he ever win the affections of women, it can only be those of a Medusa –​a Gorgon as ferocious as himself, and who will be attracted only by his similarity to the bloodless, veinless, cold, cold stone.134

This ridicule was attuned with the broader traditions of disrespectful and ribald humour within Radical culture; Vincent himself referred to Phillips as ‘the fellow who is Mayor, or more properly speaking ass’.135 The Association drew on a description of Angelo, the harsh judge from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, to describe Phillips: Drest in a little brief authority, He doth play such tricks before high heaven, As make the angels weep.

This description came from Isabella, whose brother Claudio had been arrested and sentenced to execution by Angelo, who as the interim ruler of Venice decided to enforce a lapsed law punishing fornication by death. Angelo offered to release Claudio if Isabella, a novice nun, yields him her virginity, which she refused. Utilising this play allusively was a bold statement of moral criticism as well as sexual humour, and clearly casts Vincent as the

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64 Popular virtue wronged Claudio. Claudio’s crime of infidelity is technically inaccurate, since he argues along with Juliet, his wife, that they are married under common law, by the fact that they have had sex before marriage. This was a commonplace of plebeian sexuality, and quite likely something in which Vincent had engaged. As Barbara Taylor suggests, there was likely a confluence between Owenite sexual libertarianism and plebeian customs such as pre-​marital sex, common-​law marriage, and various socially recognised means of dissolving marriages.136 However, alongside this engagement with sexual activity and sexualised language was a growing suspicion of sexual libertarianism as largely phallocentric. Some Owenite women were less enthused by prospects of sexual liberty, and possessed an ‘anxiety about unwanted pregnancy or their resentment against men who treated them as sexual playthings’. By the 1840s this was intensified by the Poor Law reforms and economic distress which placed women in more insecure positions and made them far more hesitant to run the risk of unwanted pregnancies.137 Sexual liberty was in practice about broadening masculine gender roles and sexual experience rather than the moral improvement projected in Radical literature. This is particularly problematic owing to prominent participation of women within the movement. Harney, Lowery, and O’Brien encouraged female engagement during their activism tours, and both expressed admiration for the commitment and ability of female activists. Frequently Vincent spoke about women’s activism in the Western Vindicator, which gave a notably large amount of space over to addresses from and to female Radical groups.138 The issue of female suffrage found widespread support in the initial stages of the movement, and after it was distributed throughout the provinces many suggested that votes for women should be added to the People’s Charter. In the third edition of the Charter the LWMA responded that they rejected female suffrage not because they thought it was unreasonable in itself, but because the ‘false estimate man entertains for this half of the human family’ would be used to set men against the document.139 Nevertheless, women made repeated calls for female suffrage and established autonomous political associations. The Ashton Female Political Union demanded women’s suffrage and threatened civil war if the Charter were not enacted.140 Unlike the LWMA the LDA possessed several female members and a sister organisation in the London Democratic Female Association, which possessed stringent rules governing men’s participation in its meetings. In a noteworthy address in May 1839, probably penned by Elizabeth Neesom, the Association argued forcefully that the recent accession of Queen Victoria proved that women had as much right to participate in politics as men. As figures such as Neesom illustrate, many women were as energetic and bellicose as their male comrades, friends, and family members.141 However, despite these signs of militancy and advocacy of female political emancipation women’s activism was largely hamstrung by paternalism and the wide acceptance of a ‘natural’ female role in the domestic sphere. Throughout the 1830s the Radical leadership had acknowledged the importance of female mobilisation. Nevertheless, this was discussed in patronising

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Politics and everyday life in early Chartism  65 and paternalistic tones. In 1831 Cleave had proposed in an NUWC meeting that wives of members be admitted to the Rotunda without charge, arguing that: ‘the meetings would be ornamented by the women and [he] was satisfied that there would be more peace and happiness at home. He was aware that women in general were Tories (a laugh); but if they could be induced to attend there, they would shortly become republicans (cheers) and they would then rear up the next generation not like the slaves of the present age. (Great cheering)’.142 Male Radicals viewed themselves as their educators in political and moral principles. As William Lovett wrote while discussing his marriage in his autobiography:  ‘Perceiving … that much of the bickerings and dissensions often found in the domestic circle had their origin in the wife’s not understanding and appreciating her husband’s political or literary pursuits … I  sought to interest my wife, by reading and explaining to her the various subjects that came before us, as well as the political topics of the day.’143 This not only penned in women’s activism but also undermined the Radical discourse of the reform of sexual behaviour. This paternalism possessed an obvious danger in matters of sexuality. In the Chartist period writings by men to women frequently adopted a similar tone which bestowed upon women important roles in the maintenance of the movement and the spread of Radical opinions, but did not perceive of them as possessing any autonomous interests. In March 1839, Vincent outlined these segregated but companionate roles: The object of the Working Classes in forming Female Associations, has been repeatedly declared, and is simply this:  –​they know the influence which women justly exercise over the other sex, and they are desirous, by extending them sound political knowledge, to give that influence in political matters a proper direction … They seek, too, in women, not mere machines to do their drudgery and satisfy their passions, but intelligent companions, capable of giving and receiving pleasure by the development of their ever acute, but too often uncultivated minds.144

Like many Chartists Vincent paternalistically venerated women’s domestic duties. In May, after seeing some female workers at a coal mine, he wrote that female wage labour ‘must be very prejudicial’ upon ‘civilization and knowledge’. This was largely because of the impact it had on children, who without the constant attention of a mother ‘run about where they please, with no one to train their minds or to administer to them sound moral and religious instruction’.145 This attitude of the family being denatured by the destitution and mechanisation brought about by industrial capitalism was not Vincent’s position alone. As one Welsh letter-​writer said of the female colliers: ‘women are not COMPELLED to do this work, they have actually their CHOICE; either to do it or starve, or something worse’. They continued: ‘they have only to work at making coke-​fires, surround by fire and smoke, exposed to all inclemencies of the weather on the bleak mountains of Wales, wrapped in a

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66 Popular virtue bundle of rags as black as the devil, and seen at a distance, they appear as ugly as his black majesty; but what is your astonishment on coming near them, behold! They are women!!’146 Contrasted to this was the familial, domestic, auxiliary role that was idealised by male Radicals. The Cheltenham Working Men’s Association wrote that only the ‘cheering smile, the endearing caress, the kind and benevolent entreaties, the affectionate voice of female loveliness’ could ‘nerve the arm of man’.147 To be ripped from this idealised family forced women into debasement, and this was one of the most emotive, and immoral, of the crimes of capital and the State. Early Chartist attitudes to women therefore accepted Owenite ideas about the demoralising nature of competition and the monopolisation of capital, but not the Owenite conclusions about the communalisation of domesticity. In the veneration of domesticity Chartists turned their backs on texts like the Vindication of the Rights of Women or William Thompson and Anna Wheeler’s Appeal of One Half of the Human Race which rooted female liberation in universal rationality.148 These were instead interpreted narrowly as proof that women were intelligent but lacked education, rather than as positing a universal humanity that could only be compatible with universal suffrage. Even men who advocated female suffrage failed to imagine women as anything other than wives and mothers. Linton’s strong advocacy of sexual equality, divorce, and contraception did not prevent him from considering it ‘absurd’ to suggest that the priority of women should not be domestic duties.149 Similarly, R.J. Richardson, a Salford Chartist, wrote The Rights of Women from a prison cell in 1840. He argued that because women partook in political and economic life they deserved the vote, but this should only be true of single women and widows and a politically active wife may disunite families.150 However, not all arguments were based on the veneration of domesticity. The Bristol Female Patriotic Association wrote that since women had been compelled to leave their homes to ‘toil within the walls of a manufactory’ for ‘the great landowners, and money-​makers’, they had every right to political participation.151 Vincent similarly sometimes adopted this argument, stating that it was the ‘atrocious cannibal system’ that exploited women’s labour that simultaneously justified their agitation.152 This rooting of political agency in wage labour never became a principle justification, and would not dislodge the domestic idyll in Chartist discourse. As Jutta Schwarzkopf has emphasised in her study of women within the movement, male and female Chartists accepted the auxiliary, domesticated position of women’s activism and seldom investigated any independent claim to political rights.153 The interpretation amongst Chartists of sexual liberty and heterodoxy being chiefly a justification for masculine, Byronic hedonism undercut its intended aims of fostering gender and sexual equality. Equally, the gallant and chivalrous depiction of women as intelligent companions who nevertheless were solely suited for domestic labour was a deep-​rooted aspect of British moral philosophy.154 By the end of the eighteenth century ‘the woman of benevolent virtue gradually overtook her hedonistic alter-​ego

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Politics and everyday life in early Chartism  67 to become the feminine archetype of post-​Enlightenment gender ideology’ and evidently this was not undermined by the enthusiasm amongst male Radicals for sexual freedom –​and titillation.155 The veneration of women’s domestic role within Chartism was a continuation of this ideology, and it was up to Radical women to transform the ‘brutish and bellicose sex into good citizens and polite gentlemen’.156 As a consequence Chartism could not become a movement in which women made independent demands for political or social reform which reflected their interests.157 At best, there existed a ‘muted’ acceptance of women’s right to be included in the suffrage, based upon the importance of their domestic labour.158

Conclusion The culture that Vincent drew from and inculcated on his tours was bonded by friendship, family, and emotional connections. Its ribald, carnivelsque touches were nevertheless infused with moralism, and Chartist politics was democratic and incorporated everyday life as a result. Early Chartism was defined by a sense of optimism, irreverence, and community that both bound the movement and set it on a collision with the State. It therefore bore much in common with the ideas, culture, and political strategies of its forebears. At the same time, this notion of community was never seriously challenged by its own heterodox ideas about sexuality and marriage. The politicisation of everyday life undertaken by men like Vincent was performed surprisingly conservatively, considering the rich and radical intellectual culture from which he emerged. Unable to dislodge chivalrous notions of gender relations, and in a climate of increasing fear of unwanted pregnancy, the full implications of sexual libertarianism and the Radical sexual morality were not realised. The complete failure of early Chartism’s sexual and gender heterodoxies to press for anything other than male sexual enjoyment, coupled with the adoption of this domestic, auxiliary position for women had important repercussions in the 1840s. The strategic reconsiderations that followed the repression of the movement in 1839 rejected all suggestions of sexual heterodoxy and gender equality in favour of a discourse of tight patriarchal control and a return to a ‘natural’ domestic order. The veneration of rigid family roles and the failure to press for female suffrage facilitated this shift towards an ascetic and reactionary rather than a libertarian politics of everyday life. Chartist culture was about festive confrontation in this early period, and the reform of everyday life remained a secondary concern, rather than a doctrine to be implemented wholesale. Soon, however, there would be a shift, as corporeal humour and rational and moderate sensual enjoyment gave way to a more severe attitude towards the quotidian. The mind, body, and home would become an increasing focal point for Chartist culture in the 1840s, as part of the fallout from the repression of the movement’s early stages. Much of the more caustic and festive aspects of the early culture of Chartism

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68 Popular virtue would not survive this new environment, but the integrity of everyday life to Chartist moral politics would remain.

Notes 1 D.J. Rowe, ‘The Failure of London Chartism’ The Historical Journal 11:3 (1968), pp. 427–​87, at p.  486; Malcolm Chase, Chartism:  A  New History (Manchester, 2007), p. 7. 2 On women in the Chartist movement, see: Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (London, 1991); Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London, 1990), p. 220, ‘The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language and Class in the 1830s and 1840s’ Journal of British Studies 31:1 (1992), pp. 62–​ 88; Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (London, 2013). 3 Robert Hall, ‘Hearts and Minds: The Politics of Everyday Life and Chartism, 1832–​1840’ Labour History Review 74:1 (2009), pp. 27–​43. 4 James Epstein, ‘Radical Dining, Toasting and Symbolic Expression in Early Nineteenth-​Century Lancashire:  Rituals of Solidarity’ Albion 20:2 (1988), pp. 271–​ 91, ‘Some Organisational and Cultural Aspects of the Chartist Movement in Nottingham’ in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience:  Studies in Working-​ Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–​60 (London, 1982), pp. 221–​68; Peter Brett, ‘Political Dinners in Early Nineteenth Century Britain:  Platform, Meeting Place and Battleground’ History 81:264 (1996), pp. 527–​52. 5 On violence and the relationship between the centre and the localities during this period see Kenneth Judge, ‘Early Chartist Organization and the Convention of 1839’ International Review of Social History 20:3 (1975), pp. 370–​ 97; D.J. Rowe, ‘The Chartist Convention and the Regions’ The Economic History Review 22:1 (1969), pp. 58–​74. 6 Labour History Archive and Study Centre, People’s History (hereafter LHASC): LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​1, Vincent to Minikin, 13 August 1837. 7 Albert Robert Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge:  A  Portrait of George Julian Harney (London, 1958), pp. 54–​77. 8 Alfred Plummer, Bronterre:  A  Political Biography of Bronterre O’Brien, 1804–1864 (London, 1971), pp. 73–​93. 9 Chase, Chartism, pp. 7–​22. 10 British Library, London (hereafter BL): Add. MS 34,245 A, ‘Correspondence and Papers of the General Convention of the Industrious Classes, Minutes of the Committee for Extending Political Information’, 23 February 1839. 11 BL: Add. MS 34,245 A, ‘Minutes of the Committee for Extending Political Information’, 23 February 1839. 12 For more on itinerant activism during this period, see the work of Janette Lisa Martin: ‘Popular Political Oratory and Itinerant Lecturing in Yorkshire and the North East in the Age of Chartism, 1837–​60’ (PhD thesis, University of York, 2010), and ‘Oratory, Itinerant Lecturing and Victorian Popular Politics: A Case Study of James Acland (1799–​1876)’ Historical Research 86 (2012), pp. 30–​52.

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Politics and everyday life in early Chartism  69 13 Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England, 1815–​72 (London, 1971), pp. 50–​2; Michael A. Smith, ‘Social Usages of the Public Drinking House: Changing Aspects of Class and Leisure’ The British Journal of Sociology 34:3 (1983), pp. 367–​85. 14 WesternVindicator, 23 March 1839; 6 March 1839; 6 April 1839; 27 March 1839. 15 Robert Lowery, ‘Passages in the Life of a Temperance Lecturer’ in Brian Harrison and Patricia Hollis (eds), Robert Lowery:  Radical and Chartist (London, 1979), pp. 39–​194, at p. 82. 16 David Black and Chris Ford, 1839:  The Chartist Insurrection (London, 2012), p. 19. 17 For the most recent work on the importance of local spaces such as pubs to Radical organisation, see Katrina Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–​1848 (Manchester, 2015). 18 Western Vindicator, 9 March 1839. 19 Western Vindicator, 9 March 1839. 20 Brian Harrison, ‘Teetotal Chartism’ History 58:193 (1973), pp. 193–​217. 21 Western Vindicator, 23 March 1839. 22 Bath Chronicle, 13 September 1838. 23 NA: HO 64/​12, 18 January and 13 May 1832. 24 Western Vindicator, 16 March 1839. 25 Western Vindicator, 9 March 1839. 26 Kate Bowan and Paul A. Pickering, ‘ “Songs for the Millions”: Chartist Music and Popular Aural Tradition’ Labour History Review 74:1 (2009), pp. 44–​63, at p. 49; Iowerth Prothero, Radical Artisans in England and France, 1830–​1870 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 290–​8. 27 Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, pp. 50–​4. 28 Western Vindicator, 23 March 1839. 29 Lowery, ‘Passages in the Life of a Temperance Lecturer’, p. 96. 30 William Dorling, Henry Vincent: A Biographical Sketch (London, 1879), p. ix. 31 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​11, Vincent to Minikin, 23 September 1838. 32 Cited in Asa Briggs (ed.), Chartist Studies (London, 1959), p. 10. 33 Plummer, Bronterre, p. 87. 34 Poor Man’s Guardian, 13 April 1833. 35 Bronterre O’Brien, The Life and Character of Maximillian Robespierre (London, 1837), p. 12. 36 Northern Star, 29 September 1838. 37 Owen Ashton, ‘The Western Vindicator and Early Chartism’ in Joan Allen and Owen Ashton (eds), Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press (Monmouth, 2005), pp. 54–​81. 38 Miles Taylor, ‘John Bull and the Iconography of Public Opinion in England c.1712–​1929’ Past and Present 134:1 (1992), pp. 93–​128, at pp. 108–​10. 39 Western Vindicator, 13 April 1839. 40 Tom Scriven, ‘Humour, Satire and Sexuality in the Culture of Early Chartism’ The Historical Journal 57:1 (2014), pp. 157–​78, ‘The Jim Crow Craze in London’s Press and Streets, 1836–​39’ Journal of Victorian Culture 19:1 (2014), pp. 93–​110; Taylor, ‘John Bull’. 41 Paul Pickering, ‘Class without Words:  Symbolic Communication in the Chartist Movement’ Past and Present 112:1 (1986), pp. 144–​62, at p. 151.

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70 Popular virtue 42 Epstein, ‘Radical Dining, Toasting and Symbolic’; Brett, ‘Political Dinners in Early Nineteenth Century Britain’. 43 Western Vindicator, 30 March 1839. 44 BL: Add. MS 34,245 A, William Morriss to Lovett, 23 March 1839. 45 BL: Add. MS 34,245 A, from Ledbury, Herefordshire to Lovett, 12 March 1839 and Thomas Farr to William Lovett, 25 April 1839. 46 Bath Chronicle, 13 September 1838. 47 See for example Prothero’s Radical Artisans in England and France for studies of sociability that does not just focus on symbolism. See also Peter Amann, Revolution and Mass Democracy: The Paris Club Movement in 1838 (London, 1975). 48 Judge, ‘Early Chartist Organization and the Convention of 1839’, pp. 370–​97. 49 BL: Add. MS 34,245 A, William Dunham to William Lovett, 7 April 1839; Illegible (from Blandford) to William Lovett, 23 March 1839. 50 BL: Add. MS 34,245 A, Joseph B. Smith to Lovett, 6 July 1839. 51 BL: Add. MS 34,245 A, Henry Hamlin to Lovett, 4 August 1839. 52 Judge, ‘Early Chartist Organization and the Convention of 1839’. 53 Rowe, ‘The Failure of London Chartism’, p. 486. 54 NA: HO 14/​13, Thomas Dyke to Russell, 23 March 1839. 55 R.B. Pugh, ‘Chartism in Somerset and Wiltshire’ in Asa Briggs (ed.), Chartist Studies (London, 1959), pp. 174–​219, at pp. 182–​3; NA: HO 40/​47. 56 Pugh, ‘Chartism in Somerset and Wiltshire’, p. 182. 57 BL: Add. MS 34,245 A, Henry Vincent to William Lovett, 23 March 1839. 58 Western Vindicator, 30 March 1839. 59 Chase, Chartism, p. 107. 60 NA: HO 40/​48, f. 302; HO 40/​48, f. 306; HO 40/​48, ff. 318–​19; HO 40/​48, f. 324. 61 NA: HO 40/​48, f. 329. 62 NA: HO 40/​49, f. 711. 63 NA: HO 40/​49, f. 717. 64 Jon Lawrence, Electing our Masters:  The Hustings in British Politics from Hogarth to Blair (Oxford, 2009), p.  3; Clark, ‘The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity’, p. 71. 65 Western Vindicator, 30 March 1839. 66 Ian Haywood, The Revolution in Popular Literature:  Print, Politics and the People, 1790–​1860 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 131–​3; Rob Breton, ‘Violence and the Radical Imagination’ Victorian Periodicals Review 44:1 (2011), pp. 24–​41. 67 Haywood, The Revolution in Popular Literature, pp. 117–​18. 68 Brighton Patriot and South of England Free Press, 26 March 1839. 69 Chartist, 12 May 1839; James Epstein, The Lion of Freedom: Feargus O’Connor and the Chartist Movement, 1832–​1842 (London, 1982), p. 104; Northern Star, 5 May 1838; Plummer, Bronterre, pp.  94–​138; Joel Weiner, William Lovett (Manchester, 1989). 70 Adrian Randall, ‘The Shearmen and the Wiltshire Outrages of 1802: Trade Unionism and Industrial Violence’ Social History 7:3 (1982), pp. 283–​304. 71 William Henry Maehl, ‘The Dynamics of Violence in Chartism:  A  Case Study in North-​East England’ Albion 7 (1975), pp. 101–​19.

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Politics and everyday life in early Chartism  71 72 Western Vindicator, 9 March 1839. 73 Western Vindicator, 6 April 1839. 74 Northern Star, 27 April 1839; Plumber, Bronterre, pp. 105–​6. 75 Operative, 5 May 1839; Epstein, Lion of Freedom, pp. 177–​9. For a biography of Harney which is an excellent insight into the left of the movement, see Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge. 76 Jeff Goodwin, James M. Jasper and Francesca Polletta (eds), Passionate Politics:  Emotions and Social Movements (Chicago, 2001); Colin Barker, ‘Crises and Turning Points in Revolutionary Development:  Emotion, Organisation and Strategy in Solidarnosck, 1980–​81’ Interface 2:1 (2010). 77 Barker, ‘Crises and Turning Points’, p.  6; Ron Eyerman, ‘How Social Movements Move:  Emotions in Social Movements’ in Helena and Debra King Flam (eds), Emotions and Social Movements (London, 2005), pp. 41–​56. 78 Western Vindicator, 23 March 1839. 79 Western Vindicator, 23 March 1839. 80 Western Vindicator, 23 March 1839. 81 Western Vindicator, 11 May 1839. 82 Western Vindicator, 13 April 1839. 83 Western Vindicator, 16 March 1839. 84 NA: HO 40/​47, ff. 890–​911; HO 41/​13, ff. 458–​9; HO 41/​13, ff. 461–​2. 85 Eileen Yeo, ‘Culture and Constraint in Working-​Class  Movements, 1830–​ 1855’ in Eileen Yeo and Stephen Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590–​1914 (Brighton, 1981), pp. 155–​86. 86 NA: HO 41/​13. 87 Western Vindicator, 18 May 1839. 88 Ashton, ‘The Western Vindicator’, p. 71. 89 Pugh, ‘Chartism in Somerset and Wiltshire’, pp.  186–​8; R.S. Neale, Bath 1680–​1850: A Social History (London, 1981), pp. 372–​3. 90 NA: HO 40/​47, ff. 1006–​9. 91 BL: Add. MS 34,245 B, G.M. Bartlett to the Council of the Convention, August 1839. 92 Chase, Chartism, p. 95. 93 Humphrey Southall, ‘Agitate! Agitate! Organize! Political Travellers and the Construction of a National Politics, 1839–​1880’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 21:1 (1996), pp. 177–​93. 94 Thompson, The Chartists, p. 92. 95 Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches, p. 220. 96 Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement. 97 Robert Gammage, A History of the Chartist Movement (London, 1854), p. 11. 98 Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, pp. 77–​8. 99 H.A. Bruce (ed.), Life of General Sir William Napier, Volume 1 (London, 1864), pp. 521–​2. 100 Mary Smith, The Autobiography of Mary Smith, Schoolmistress and Nonconformist, a Fragment of a Life (London, 1892), pp. 147–​8. See also Helen Rogers, Women and the People: Authority, Authorship and the Radical Tradition in Nineteenth-​Century England (Aldershot, 2000), p. 254. Thanks to Helen Rogers for pointing out this passage to me in an email.

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72 Popular virtue 101 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​11, Vincent to Minikin, 23 September 1838. 102 Cited in Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge, p. 47. 103 G.J. Holyoake, Sixty Years of an Agitator’s Life, Volume 1 (London, 1893), p. 106. 104 NA: Williams to Maule, 3 November 1840, HO 20/​10. 105 Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 5 January 1885. 106 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​11, Vincent to Minikin, 23 September 1838. 107 Cleave’s London Satirist and Gazette of Variety, 2 December 1837. 108 W.J. Linton, James Watson: A Memoir (Manchester, 1879), p. 66. 109 George Bernard Shaw, ‘Shaming the Devil about Shelley’ in Pen Portraits and Reviews by Bernard Shaw (London, 1949), pp. 236–​46. See also: Bouthaina Shaaban, ‘The Romantics in the Chartist Press’ Keats-​Shelley Journal 38 (1989), pp. 25–​ 46; Bouthaina Shaaban, ‘Shelley in the Chartist Press’, Keats-​Shelley Memorial Bulletin 34 (1983), pp. 41–​60. 110 F.B. Smith, Radical Artisan:  William James Linton 1812–​97 (Manchester, 1973), p. 21. 111 The National: A Library for the People (London, 1839), p. 100. 112 Radical Politics and the Working Man in England, Series Two (hereafter RPWME 2). The Francis Place Collection in the Department of Printed Books in the British Library, 1770–​1853 (Brighton, 1982): Henry Vincent to Francis Place, 20 June 1840, Reel 34. 113 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​15, Vincent to Minikin, 21 May 1839. 114 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​15, Vincent to Minikin, 2 October 1838. 115 Scriven, ‘Humour, Satire and Sexuality’. 116 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​3, Vincent to Minikin, 4 September 1837. 117 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​6, Vincent to Minikin, 18 June 1837. 118 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​10, Vincent to Minikin, 26 August 1838. 119 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​12, Vincent to Minikin, 2 October 1838. 120 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​16, Vincent to Minikin, 1 June 1839. 121 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​33, Vincent to Minikin, 11 August 1840. 122 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​34, Vincent to Minikin, 2 September 1840. 123 Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob, ‘The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain’ Eighteenth-​Century Studies 34:4 (2001), pp. 491–​521, at p. 497. 124 Robert Owen, Lectures on the Marriages of the Priesthood in the Old Immoral World (Leeds, 1840). 125 Owen, Lectures on the Marriages. 126 Place to Lovett, 30 March 1841, Radical Politics and the Working Man in England, Series One The Francis Place Papers in the British Library, Department of Manuscripts (Brighton, 1978), Reel 50. 127 Dorling, Henry Vincent, p. 30. 128 BL, Add. MS 46345: Burns Papers, Volume 65: Letters to Richard Moore the Chartist. E. Bell to James Watson, 1838. 129 David Vincent (ed.), Testaments of Radicalism:  Memoirs of Working Class Politicians, 1790–​1885 (London, 1977), p. 170. 130 Northern Star, 1 February 1845. 131 Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London, 1983), pp. 199–​200.

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Politics and everyday life in early Chartism  73 132 Thompson, The Chartists, pp. 225–​6. 133 Northern Star, 2 February 1839. 134 Western Vindicator, 27 July 1839. 135 Western Vindicator, 18 May 1839. 136 Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, pp. 192–​200. 137 Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, pp. 48, 205–​16. 138 For his support for Female Radical and Chartist Associations, and some of the space in the Vindicator given to their correspondence and addresses, see Western Vindicator, 15 June, 29 June, 20 July, 17 August, 24 August, 31 August, and 28 September 1839. 139 Thompson, The Chartists, p. 86; The People’s Charter (London, 1838), p. 9; William Lovett, Life and Struggles of William Lovett in his Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (London, 1920), p. 141. 140 Northern Star, 2 February 1839. 141 Northern Star, 11 May 1839; Chase, Chartism, pp. 184–​91. 142 Poor Man’s Guardian, 29 October 1831. 143 Lovett, Life and Struggles, pp. 38–​9. 144 Western Vindicator, 23 March 1839. 145 Western Vindicator, 4 May 1839. 146 Western Vindicator, 11 May 1839. 147 Western Vindicator, 17 August 1839. 148 Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (London, 1844); William Thompson and Anna Wheeler, Appeal of One Half of the Human Race: Against the Pretensions of the other Half, Men (London, 1825). 149 The National (London, 1839), pp. 148–​9. 150 R.J. Richardson, ‘The Rights of Women’ in Dorothy Thompson (ed.), The Early Chartists (London, 1971), pp. 115–​28; Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 230–​1. 151 Western Vindicator, 20 July 1839. 152 Western Vindicator, 28 September 1839. 153 Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement. 154 Barbara Taylor, ‘Feminists Versus Gallants:  Manners and Morals in Enlightenment Britain’ Representations 87:1 (2004), pp. 125–​48. 155 Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, p. 220; Barbara Taylor, ‘Enlightenment and the Uses of Woman’ History Workshop Journal 74:1 (2012), pp. 79–​87. 156 Taylor, ‘Enlightenment and the Uses of Woman’, p. 84. 157 Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement, pp. 89–​122; Thompson, The Chartists, p. 104. 158 Thompson, The Chartists, p. 105.

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3 From insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’

The ‘ulterior measures’ already under preparation in early 1839 seemed far more viable once the petition of that year had been rejected by Parliament, the Convention had broken apart and the ‘Sacred Month’ been abandoned. The growing list of prominent Chartist leaders arrested throughout 1839 convinced many that the government had set out to violently destroy the movement, further justifying the calls to arms. This perception was reinforced by the replacement of Lord Russell as Secretary of State by the Marquess of Normanby in August 1839, who pushed the treatment of Chartism away from Russell’s policy of containment towards a far more heavy-​handed and militant approach.1 By autumn the national leadership was in disarray and within the resulting void conspiratorial and insurrectionary plotting took place. The Newport rising of November 1839 was ostensibly conducted to forcibly release Vincent from Monmouth Gaol, although in reality it was part of an attempt to mount concurrent insurrections in south Wales and the north of England.2 It was followed by two attempted risings in January 1840, one in Sheffield and another two weeks later in Bradford, both of which were easily quashed. All of this contributed to a feeling of alarm and increasing antagonism between Chartists and the State, and by the end of the year nearly 500 men were imprisoned on a variety of charges, mostly conspiracy, riot, seditious libel, or illegal assembly. As a consequence Henry Vincent, Joseph Rayner Stephens, Peter McDouall, John Taylor, William Lovett, John Collins, George Julian Harney, Bronterre O’Brien, William Benbow, and Feargus O’Connor were all jailed over the course of 1839 and 1840, mainly for either conspiracy or the content of speeches.3 Henry Hetherington and John Cleave were both prosecuted for publishing blasphemous libels in 1840, with James Watson fleeing the country. This represented a sizeable and talented portion of the national leadership, but across the country the local and middling ranks were also depleted. As Francis Place noted, the last time Britain possessed as many political prisoners in its jails was following the rebellions of 1745.4

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Insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’  75 Chartism underwent clear change during this period. In the words of Malcolm Chase, ‘[v]‌ ery few Chartist prisoners renounced their political convictions, but most left prison intent on pursuing a different strategy to secure them’.5 Dorothy Thompson attributes the ‘de-​fusing’ of Chartism and its retreat from Jacobin style violence to the clemency the State granted to the Newport leaders –​John Frost, Zepheniah Williams, and William Jones –​ when their death sentences were commuted to transportation in June 1840. This had followed a campaign of protests and petitioning, and as a result constitutional forms of agitation seemed a far more feasible means of drawing concessions from the government.6 It is also evident, however, that the sort of emotive and intimate organisation that had proven so successful in 1838–​39 was a serious weakness during the subsequent period of imprisonment and repression. Many friendships collapsed under the strain, newspapers and activist groups fell apart, the separation of families caused anxiety, poverty, and often infidelity, and many ex-​prisoners, depressed and destitute, emigrated overseas. Amongst the activists who remained in the movement this evident trauma caused a serious intellectual and political recalibration that coloured how the Chartist constitutional politics of the 1840s developed. In particular the politics of everyday life became viewed as a direct means of achieving social improvement and through that political freedom, but this required a noticeable reformulation of what everyday life should look like. By focusing on William Lovett and Henry Vincent’s development of this strategy while in prison, it is possible to analyse the kernel of this new political strategy. Using medical discourse (particularly phrenology) and progressive ideas of human perfectibility (particularly from William Godwin), the pair outlined how the earlier festive and sensual political culture needed to be absolutely rejected in favour of an ascetics that simultaneously nurtured moral, physical, and mental improvement. The purpose of this was not to produce a working class deserving of the vote in the eyes of aristocrats, bourgeois, and Parliament, or even to blunt Chartism’s social and economic critiques or antagonistic class politics, but instead to re-​build the movement into an organisation capable of contending with elite power in a long-​term struggle. Although this was attacked by Feargus O’Connor as a ‘New Move’ that risked dividing the movement, this trend is instead illustrative of new directions in Chartist political culture which steadily came to became accepted throughout the movement –​and as Chapter 5 argues, was even adopted by O’Connor himself. The ‘New Move’ was not a factional secession by the moralist, moderate wing of Chartism, but instead a reformulation of political strategy which, as Chapter  4 will argue, became popular throughout the movement.

The experience of Chartist prisoners By the early Victorian period, the ill-​disciplined, corrupt, and harsh nature of Georgian prisons had begun to recede, buckling under the weight of a

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76 Popular virtue prison population growing thanks to Britain’s ballooning and draconian penal code.7 After the 1835 Prisons Act gaols were given a small degree of uniformity, regulation, and Home Office oversight, and although the newly formed inspectorate of prisons was initially ineffective in removing local autonomy from prison regimes, by the 1840s prisons were nevertheless slowly becoming organised according to two fundamental principles:  that of ‘less eligibility’, that prison should be so unpleasant a possibility that it would deter crime, and second that it would be a site of moral and religious instruction.8 To affect these ends prisons were unhygienic places with inmates granted poor food and in some, such as Millbank in London or Northallerton in Yorkshire, forced into hard labour. All denied reading materials other than Anglican religious tracts. These rules, regulations, and conditions shocked many Chartist prisoners, particularly since the government made a clear decision to treat Chartist prisoners as common criminals. The petitions and correspondence sent to Parliament on behalf of Lovett and John Collins, held together at Warwick, emphasised how in previous periods of repression political prisoners had been granted the same rights as debtors:  cells in a separate, more comfortable wing, the right to purchase provisions and comforts, greater freedom of movement and visitation from, or even accommodation with, their families.9 Figures like Hetherington, Watson, or Carlile had all been extended these privileges during their numerous imprisonments over the previous two decades. For most Chartists, who had never been imprisoned before and considered themselves to be morally and intellectually set apart from criminals, this was demeaning. Upon arrival in Warwick Lovett and Collins were shocked to be stripped naked, inspected, bathed with other criminals, and have their hair cut, acts almost identical to the ‘ceremony’ described by Bronterre O’Brien as he entered Lancaster Castle.10 O’Brien felt similarly demeaned and was extremely grateful that at the beginning of his sentence a subscription of £8 from Liverpool Chartists enabled him to avoid ‘wearing prison dress, living on felons’ fare, and picking cotton all day amongst thieves, house-​breakers, sodomists, and vagabonds of every sort’.11 Lovett and Collins were not so lucky, as their requests to be moved to the debtors’ wing was repeatedly denied. This was not just a matter of self-​importance but also of principle as William Martin, also held in Lancaster, pointed out in a letter to his brother: ‘I ought not to be treated as other prisoners, who have been convicted of crimes (for I  have always asserted that mere words ought not to degrade a man so as to place him on a level with a common felon).’12 As criminals, the prisoners were subject to all the rules of the prisons. Chief among these were severe limitations on correspondence and visitation from friends or family, which Joseph Crabtree, imprisoned in Wakefield, thought ‘cruel’.13 While in Monmouth Gaol awaiting trial Vincent was able to smuggle out letters to his family and addresses to the Vindicator.14 Similarly, O’Brien received from a fellow prisoner four pieces of paper and some writing materials ‘whereby I am enabled to steal a march on our worthy governor’,

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Insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’  77 upon which he wrote the first of a number of long, melancholic letters to his close friend, the Radical and financier Thomas Allsopp, which revealed that the tedium and isolation was devastating.15 Vincent also became isolated and lonely as a consequence of his conviction, telling Minikin that ‘The bird loves his mates the more when he is forcibly taken from them’.16 Married prisoners were particularly frustrated by their separation from their partners. Lovett and Collins could only see one visitor every three months, and even then for only a few minutes, divided by a gate and in the presence of two turnkeys. This angered Lovett, who resignedly told his wife Mary it would be ‘useless’ for her to visit unless he were moved to the debtors’ wing.17 This sharpened the anguish and anxiety these men felt over being separated from people they cared about and had responsibility for. Lovett was worried about his daughter’s illness while in jail, while Vincent had to rely on others to provide for his mother. The prison inspector reported that Timothy Higgins ‘shed tears when I spoke to him of his family’, and that his wife and four children were ‘about to be thrown upon the Parish’.18 William Brook had eight children and told the inspector that ‘if it was not for the love he bears his family he would not care a dram’ for his imprisonment.19 Similarly, James Burton from Stockport was worried that his wife was in a ‘poor way’, and that if she died ‘I would as well remain here. I am beggared and ruinated’.20 Vincent was saddened upon hearing of his friend W.P. Roberts sentence to two years, partly since he had a new wife who will ‘doubtless grieve much’.21 Other relationships could not cope with the strain. John Dickenson was bailed in May 1839 as according to Vincent he was a ‘family man’ whose ‘domestic concerns are in rather a precarious state otherwise he would have preferred our goodly company’.22 Another friend of Vincent’s, the key Wiltshire Chartist William Carrier, told the prison inspector that he ‘does not intend to live with his wife again, as he believes her to have been unfaithful to him’.23 To some extent this anguish could be relieved through practical and material acts of solidarity within the Chartist movement, which at the local and national level often supported the families of prisoners.24 Less often noted amongst the historiography, however, is the extent to which Chartist projects, collaborations, and friendships collapsed. This was particularly the case with newspapers, which formed the regional cores of Chartism during the early years yet were highly vulnerable during this period, not only due to direct government repression, as with the attacks on the Western Vindicator after the Newport rising, but also because the extremely fragile lines of credit that maintained the newspaper industry were broken by imprisonment. When in Monmouth Vincent regularly wrote material for the Chartist press alongside private letters to his friends and family, which were smuggled out by other prisoners. After his second conviction in March 1840 he was moved to the notoriously harsh Millbank Penitentiary. Francis Place told Lovett that he felt this was designed to cut him off from the movement so that he could ‘be prevented writing and abusing the Government’.25 The arrest of William Edwards caused serious problems for Francis Hill, the beleaguered manager

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78 Popular virtue of the Western Vindicator, since Edwards was a newsagent and owed ‘about £12 which we shall not get, as it is a sort of sunken debt’.26 The seizure of an entire edition of the Vindicator following the Newport rising in November 1839 did not help matters. Lovett endured similar problems. In January 1839 William Carpenter convinced him to become the secretary of the managing committee of the new Charter newspaper. The paper quickly developed financial difficulties, and in January 1840 Carpenter, who was paid £30 a week as editor, moved to Bronterre O’Brien’s Southern Star. By June 1840 the Chartist owed various parties £61, not including costs, of which Lovett was solely responsible since his name was lodged at the Stamp Commission as one of two sureties, the other of whom was not ‘so well known to the creditors as myself’.27 This infuriated Place, who felt that the paper had been ‘conducted in a most dishonest disgraceful, not to say swindling way’, and that it would likely not have collapsed had Lovett been free. He set about negotiating with the Commission for leniency while also trying to raise £100.28 The situation was eventually solved mainly through Lovett negotiating with the creditors after his release. Carpenter caused similar problems at the Southern Star. While in prison O’Brien became extremely anxious when he heard that he had asked Thomas Allsopp for money for the Star in O’Brien’s name. This led O’Brien to fear to the point of an obsession that his friendship with Allsopp was jeopardised: ‘I fancied –​I shall fancy –​(for what reason God only knows) that I had lost your friendship –​The thought pained me –​it was daggers to me. –​The loss of a friend, was always very, very painful to me –​The loss of your friendship I would not reconcile myself to, without a struggle.’29 The Star continued to plague him owing to a dispute between his wife Sophia and Thomas Smith, the paper’s new proprietor. Sophia wrote to The Times in June 1840 that the Star was claiming a connection with Bronterre even though his confinement meant he could not have any role, financial or otherwise, in its operation. ‘The most vexatious part of this unprincipled transaction’, Sophia wrote, was that Smith was claiming the proceeds of the paper were going to her, which was not true.30 This was angrily rebutted by Smith the next day.31 Bronterre was agitated by these proceedings, telling Allsopp that ‘this cold-​ hearted perfidy has nearly killed my poor wife & driven me mad’, and that he was convinced it was a conspiracy put together by Smith and Carpenter.32 By December the prison inspector reported that O’Brien was ‘in a state of absolute destitution’, and that a recent subscription of £6 8s 5d was insignificant since he was ‘so much in debt as to make liberation of little moment to him’. Since he was ‘entirely dependent on his pen for subsistence’ his inability to write from prison was a serious problem.33 More prominent in the historiography is the manner in which Chartist prisoners were lionised and eulogised.34 As an aristocrat and former MP O’Connor easily secured for himself through a petition relaxed prison regulations, which even went so far as to allow him to keep an aviary in his room. Despite this he presented himself as being at imminent risk of a

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Insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’  79 death that would be the result of a government conspiracy, melodramatically ending an address smuggled out of jail by listing the surgeons who should attend his autopsy.35 In this he helped establish himself as Chartism’s imprisoned chief, ‘the Chartist prisoner’.36 However, amongst the lower-​ class  Chartist prisoners the dangers were not just imagined and symbolic. Two Chartists did die while imprisoned, both having spent most of their time in Northallerton. John Clayton of Sheffield was the first, declared in a black-​bordered announcement in the Northern Star: ‘For six weeks he had been dying, and not till Thursday did his disconsolate family receive intimation even of his illness.’ His family reached him after he had died, ‘when it was too late for the wife or child to close the husband and the parent’s eye’.37 Samuel Hollberry predicted his own death two months before it happened, writing that ‘I am reduced to such a state of debility that I can hardly crawl … I  shall never serve two years more in prison; no, before half that time is expired, I  shall be in my grave’.38 A  third inmate of Northallerton, James Duffy, was described by the inspector as ‘a broken down man, the continuance of whose life from day to day is uncertain’. Suffering from rheumatism and the gravel (kidney stones) Duffy was moved to rope picking, but he died two years after his release, never regaining his health.39 These men became martyrs, and their deaths important opportunities for expressions of solidarity. Manchester Chartists arranged funds for the transportation of Clayton’s body, while an elaborate funeral was held for Holberry in Sheffield.40 These dead retained a special place in the wider pantheon of imprisoned Chartists, although notably it was O’Connor who came to be singled out for lionisation in the important poetry columns of the Northern Star.41 This presentation of the period as a heroic one obscures the extent to which it was also one of despair and fragmentation. Carrier was ‘suffering from a depression of spirits’ for most of his imprisonment, likely intensified by his family problems.42 Place had already been worried about Lovett’s tendencies towards ‘melancholy’ in 1837, attributing it to his chronic health concerns and his dwelling ‘too much on the misfortunes and miseries of your fellow man’, and when he was in prison he complained about Lovett’s ‘irritability’ and ‘nervous excitement’.43 A particular cause of such feelings was dissatisfaction with the conduct of individual activists and the wider movement. William Aitken criticised the ‘ingratitude’ of ‘the people’, and attacked the Radicals of Ashton-​under-​Lyne for neglecting McDouall and Timothy Higgins. The reward of the ‘high-​souled patriot’ was too often ‘penury and insult, and all the woes that human flesh is heir to’.44 Timothy Higgins criticised O’Connor for failing to set ‘a bold and magnanimous example’ at his trial and in prison. Similarly Edward Brown resented the lenient treatment of O’Connor in York Castle, telling the inspector that he was ‘angry because he hears Feargus O’Connor is more indulged than he is’.45 Vincent, although more cheerful once he had moved to Oakham and was allowed regular contact with his friends and family, was angry with his friends in the LWMA, who ‘did not so much as answer my letters’. He thought that they

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80 Popular virtue ‘above all others’ ought to help him pay the legal expenses for his upcoming prosecutions since ‘I was more active when in London than the whole of them put together. Perhaps they are secretly pleased to think that I am safely locked up!’46 Following the affair over the Chartist newspaper Lovett told Place:  ‘This, I  think, will sicken me of all newspapers, and of being again responsible for the proceedings of a committee.’ He clearly felt let down by the Committee, who he wrote had ‘left me to be victimized’, even though he had ‘never profited one farthing by the paper’ having ‘laboured for them as their secretary for months without the least remuneration!’47 Beyond the symbolism of martyrdom was serious anguish which would have important political ramifications. As Timothy Higgins said, striking a gloomy note at the tea party to celebrate his release: ‘The bodily sufferings while in prison were nothing to the suffering of the mind at seeing the cause for which they have been incarcerated, neglected, and the people divided among themselves.’48 Or as Peter McDoaull put it in an address penned from Chester Castle:  ‘the leaders have generously sacrificed themselves to poverty, to neglect, and to a dungeon, and many, most likely, to the scaffold, that they might thereby save a people who had promised much, but never intended to fulfil anything … The leaders were before the people, and the people were not, and are not, now ready’.49 Many had undergone severe privations for the cause of Chartism, and were confronted not only by the reality that the Charter may take a long time to become law, but also the bitterness of personal and political disappointment. The emotive and intimate nature of Chartism’s organisations and political culture served only to sharpen this. As O’Brien put it to Allsopp, ‘What a horrid world is this!’50 The experience of imprisonment had three main consequences: it led to a lack of national organisation and leadership, it discredited not only insurrectionary Chartism but also the optimism that Chartism would become law in a matter of years, and it prompted many Chartists to shy from overt and antagonistic political confrontation and seek instead constitutional alternatives. Some of the Jacobin leaders did not abandon their principles, but rather their belief that the people had a taste for revolutionary fighting. Looking back in 1846 G.J. Harney felt that ‘[n]‌otwithstanding all the talk in 1839 about “arming,” the people did not arm, and they will not arm’, a fact he attributed to ‘a long immunity from the presence of war … and the long suspension of the militia’ within Britain.51 Most of the Jacobins and revolutionaries moved to the United States, however, which they idealised as essentially a Republican version of Britain.52 The list is notably long. James Mitchel told the prison inspector he ‘would probably migrate’, as would Higgins, who called ‘himself a Republican’ and reported that ‘a very trifling encouragement would encourage him to emigrate to the U.S.’.53 John Broadbent had spent time in the United States where he ‘imbibed his political principles’, with the inspector thinking he would probably return.54 William Carrier migrated to the United States soon after he was released, leaving not only the wife he thought unfaithful but also his child

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Insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’  81 in Trowbridge. Bronterre O’Brien tried to raise the money to move there while still in prison, and he seriously considered the prospect after release, although the closest he ever came was moving to the Isle of Man. William Ashton’s ‘hatred of the government of his country is incredible’, and he went through on his proposal ‘to go to America upon his release’, although he would return to Britain and Chartism in 1842.55 Peter Bussey, a key leader in the Bradford rising, fled to the United States ‘in a hurry’ with some companions just before the rising was due to take place, allegedly taking the group’s funds with him.56 Similarly, Thomas Devyr, a co-​defendant of O’Brien’s in a trial earlier in 1840 for which he was acquitted, panicked and fled to the United States with another physical force Chartist ‘when I saw myself without means of resisting the Government. I had no disposition to submit to its vengeance’.57 John Rees, the leader of one of the columns at Newport, was a veteran of the Texan Revolution who fled back to the United States once a charge of high treason was brought against him.58 Some simply dropped out of the movement. William Potts, another leader of Wiltshire’s Chartists, disappeared from Chartism after his release.59 Many of those interviewed in prison informed the inspector that they would dissociate themselves from Chartism, such as William Barker, who was ‘very sick of his present situation’ and was ‘little likely to be in a similar predicament’, or Phineas Smithers who declared he would ‘take care when I  get out not to get in again!’60 Emanuel Hutton, Francis Rushworth, Daniel Ball, and Joseph Crabtree all similarly told the inspector that they would abandon politics upon their liberation, with Crabtree resolving to ‘keep from politics and look after my family’.61 However, the most notable shifts in the leadership were those who remained in the movement but changed the character of their politics considerably, and it was this group who led the transition to constitutional, moral politics. William Edwards wrote after his release from Oakham: ‘If I could, I would have the working people well rewarded for their labour, well educated, well lodged, well fed, wise and respectable. To accomplish this I will do all I can after I leave this prison. But I will not countenance any illegal proceedings. My aim will be to improve the condition of the whole people, and my motto shall be “Peace, Reform, and Religion”.’62 In a lecture following his release in 1843 Robert Peddie told his audience: ‘We will fight within the pale of the constitution, rotten though it may be, a peaceful, moral, and bloodless battle; and victory shall at last sit on our helmets, provided they be shielded with unity, peace, and order.’63 While in prison, the inspector described William Martin as ‘a most dangerous, violent and unprincipled man, advocating physical force, destruction of property and anarchy in its worst form’.64 However he was already speaking of acting ‘with none but sober men’, writing from prison that he would prefer ‘stopping the progress of agitation for the winter to that of encouraging sordid characters’.65 After his liberation a petition he helped draw up advocated the release of the remaining political prisoners, protesting that ‘we continue to ask, for no more than the renewal of our ancient institutions … and we solemnly disavow all

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82 Popular virtue intention of involving our country in anarchy, convulsion, and bloodshed’.66 Similarly William Brook became a teetotaller who advised Chartists to be ‘firm and temperate’, while Charles Neesom, a member of London’s insurrectionary Chartists, turned after his arrest to education, teetotalism, and eventually vegetarianism.67

New trajectories: the delineation of moral improvement after 1840 In spring 1840 the lack of a central leadership was resolved with the formation of the NCA, the ‘first national political party in history’, which went some way towards filling the power gulf that had existed following the collapse of the 1839 Convention and the subsequent wave of arrests.68 The task now was to repackage Chartism as a movement that remained independently working-​class and confrontational, without seeming illegal or encouraging the sort of actions that would re-​invite violence repression. To these ends the revolutionary outlook and actions of 1839–​40 became depicted, most notably by O’Connor, as an understandable consequence of Whig tyranny and obstinacy, but nevertheless politically unsound tactics. To learn this lesson the NCA therefore needed to be confrontational while also constitutional. One of the first prominent campaigns under this new approach was the Chartist intervention in the 1841 general election, with the objective of returning a number of Chartist or pro-​Chartist MPs to Parliament.69 This idea originated with O’Brien before he was imprisoned, when he argued that Chartists should stand in every seat in the forthcoming election.70 Since in elections Radical candidates very often won the show of hands which was open to non-​electors but then went on to lose the actual poll of electors, O’Brien’s plan would result in the formation of an anti-​ Parliament genuinely representative of the will of both electors and non-​ electors. As he put it, this would result in Westminster becoming the ‘mock parliament’, unable to repress the anti-​Parliament with any sort of moral legitimacy.71 This was, however, rejected by many Chartists who saw this proposal as being far too revolutionary and similar to the 1839 National Convention, which had ended in repression and disaster. In the event the plan was implemented in a far more pragmatic and watered-​down manner, as Chartist candidates were put forward in a number of constituencies and Radical candidates supported in others in a somewhat piecemeal fashion. However, the results were disappointing, as no Chartist candidates and few reliably pro-​Chartist Radicals were returned. This shift was complicated when in March 1841 Lovett, Watson, Cleave, and Hetherington established the ‘National Association of the United Kingdom for Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People’, based on the plans for a national educational Chartist organisation outlined in Chartism: A New Organisation of the People, a book written by Lovett and

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Insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’  83 Collins while in jail (although Lovett likely wrote most of it alone).72 This led to angry denunciations from O’Connor, who saw the National Association as potentially splitting the movement. The National Association followed the ‘Teetotal Pledge’ of November 1840, when Vincent, Hetherington, Cleave, Neesom, and William Hill (the editor of the Northern Star) all disseminated a pledge advocating complete abstinence from alcohol.73 Partly out of suspicion over projects that he did not have control over, and partly as a genuine fear of Chartists pulling in different directions, O’Connor lumped the ‘Education Chartism’ of the National Association with Teetotal Chartism, ‘Christian Chartism’, and ‘Household Chartism’ as the ‘New Move’ and vigorously attacked it. In particular, O’Connor sought to associate the constituent parts of the ‘New Move’ with middle-​class Radicalism, implying that its proponents were attempting to unite with middle-​class Liberals in a fatal blow to Chartism’s independence. There were signs that this was true. The formation in 1841 of the Leeds Parliamentary Reform Association (LPRA) was the first significant attempt to unite middle-​class Radicals with Chartists in one singular mass-​movement. However, the extent to which the LPRA would support the whole Charter, particularly universal suffrage, rather than household suffrage (suffrage granted to all male household heads, and thus precluding groups like lodgers) fatally undermined this project even amongst those Chartist most disposed towards middle-​class co-​operation.74 This strict loyalty to the Chartist name and agenda would return to scupper similar plans in 1842, underlining the extent to which O’Connor was engaging in fabrication. Across the movement there was a near-​universal desire for Chartism to remain independent and led by the working class. In reality the advocacy of teetotalism and education were part of a popular ethical turn within the movement, and O’Connor’s attempts to present the danger of a split movement was ‘artificial’.75 The extent and popularity of this ethical politics will be discussed in the next two chapters, but before this it is necessary to outline the intellectual basis of this shift by discussing the prison correspondence of William Lovett and Henry Vincent. Although the pair’s influence over the movement would fade during the 1840s they are important as two of the protagonists of the development of Chartism’s ethical politics, and exposition of the principles and strategies they developed during their imprisonment is crucial to understanding the political culture of the rest of the decade. While the failure of 1839–​40 prompted both to develop a new political culture for Chartism, these trajectories possessed clear points of continuity with Chartism’s early culture. Lovett’s pamphlet, Chartism, is notable for being a successor to earlier work he penned for the LWMA. The Association’s address to Queen Victoria upon her ascension complained that: by many monstrous anomalies springing out of the constitution of society, the corruptions of government, and the defective education of mankind, we find the bulk of the nation toiling slaves from birth til death –​thousands wanting food, or subsisting on the scantiest pittance, having neither time

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84 Popular virtue nor means to obtain instruction, much less of cultivating the higher faculties and brightest affections, but forced by their situation to engender enmity, jealousy, and contention, and too often to become the victims of intemperance and crime.76

In 1837 he wrote An Address from the Working Men’s Association to the Working Classes, on the Subject of National Education, an advocacy of a democratically run system of national education based on the principle that ‘if ignorance can be shown to be the most prolific source of evil, and knowledge the most efficient means of happiness, it is evidently the duty of Government to establish for all classes the best possible system of education’.77 The educational, moralistic and self-​improving aspects of early Chartism were not only expressed in Lovett’s lofty writing, but also the comedic and sensational stories in the Radical press. Alongside its satirical content Vincent’s Western Vindicator also regularly extolled education, stating that if national education were implemented ‘an intellectual revolution would occur, before which would be swept away every vestige of darkness and slavery’.78 Detailed excerpts of Republican history, classic Democratic texts such as Paine, and political biographies appeared alongside weekly columns encouraging parents how to set up simple experiments at home for their children. The novelty of Lovett and Vincent’s thinking and writing in 1840 was not that they were proposing ideas which had not yet appeared in Chartism’s intellectual culture, but instead that these ideas were the thrust of political interventions into the debates about the state of Chartism in 1840. They wanted education and self-​improvement, which had previously been important but subsidiary to Chartism’s political activity, to become the centrepiece of its politics and its strategy for the attainment of the Charter. This would necessarily require violence, festivity, and emotiveness to be displaced as core parts of the movement. Key to understanding this is the fact that at this time Lovett remained, as he always would, steadfastly defensive about the movement and its legitimacy. In May 1840, for instance, he angrily reproached Francis Place for a reference to Chartism in an Anti-​Corn Law leaflet which he considered to be a ‘smear’.79 Lovett was not critical of Chartism, but instead of its recent strategy of gaining power through overt confrontation with the State through the threat of open revolt. Chartism’s preface made clear that the National Association was proposed as an alternative to the insurrectionary attempts to accomplish the Charter, which had ‘hitherto greatly retarded’ Chartism.80 Chartism was a response to this point of crisis. This is also evident from the way in which in many respects Lovett’s attitude to violence was little different from the line being pursued by O’Connor. Although there had been proponents of violence within Chartism, Lovett felt that most prisoners were the victims of the Whigs’ ‘reeking swords and revengeful laws’.81 He still did not disavow the use of physical force if ‘moral energy’ has ‘been proved to be ineffectual’, and he made clear to state that he still believed that Englishmen

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Insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’  85 had a constitutional right to arm.82 He defended the 1839 Convention from Place by pointing out to him that during the pro-​Reform agitation of 1830–​32 threats and violent language were widely used, and that during the agitation many middle-​class men joined the National Political Union, of which Lovett was also a member, in the expectation that they would form a ‘National Guard’. Furthermore, he was still not only mistrustful of but angry at them for their short-​termism and constant treachery. They possessed ‘selfishness and cupidity’ which ‘wedded’ them to ‘all the absurdities of the present system’, and if during the 1830s they had joined with the working class and secured universal suffrage all that they complained about under the aristocratic system would be ended. Instead they ‘abetted their idols, the Whigs, in all their infamous encroachments on liberty’, out of a simple and obstinate refusal to accept the working class as equals.83 This was also present in Chartism, where he asked ‘fellow-​workmen’ to ‘mainly rely on our own energies to effect our own freedom’.84 The political argument of Chartism was therefore not a repudiation of any foundational aspect of the movement, nor was it in most respects a break with Lovett’s thinking before jail, and nor even was it a position on recent events at odds with O’Connor’s. Rather than a comprehensive intellectual and political disagreement, this was a strategic intervention targeting ‘the most sanguine in their theory of force’ for whom ‘recent experience has greatly served to lesson the faith’. Lovett hoped that they would now ‘review proposals they once spurned as visionary and contemptible’, making an organised, politicised drive towards self-​improvement a clear new direction for Chartism.85 Lovett’s Chartism was therefore a major political departure in only one sense, its proposal to replace within the Chartist programme insurrectionary, confrontational politics with a political culture of everyday life. In place of mass-​mobilisation of force an organisation that both improved the people politically and socially while also placing Chartists ‘in the best possible position to enforce our political claims’ was possible.86 Important to understanding this is being aware that ‘education’ for a man like Lovett, immersed in the Radical popular enlightenment of the previous two decades and particularly influenced by Owenism, did not simply mean the inculcation of knowledge through books or lectures. At the root of moral debasement were the social conditions which produced a deleterious environment. As the Manchester Radical and intellectual Rowland Detroisier explained in one of his many lectures reprinted by Cleave throughout the Chartist era: ‘The Knowledge of a disease is half its cure;’ and it is most important to the working classes of this country, that they should become convinced that political reform, to effect the regeneration of national happiness, must be supported by moral improvement … The wisest political institutions cannot avert the natural consequences of individual vice; but such is the force of individual virtue, that were a nation truly civilized, a vicious government could not exist.87

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86 Popular virtue A virtuous people could not let a bad government exist as none could be duped into supporting it, and the opposition against it would be (unlike in 1839)  united, directed, well-​paced, and level-​headed. Bad governments therefore benefited directly from the demoralisation of the people. To take the example of alcohol dependency, Lovett argued that the reasons for drunkenness being prevalent amongst workers should be obvious to anyone who witnessed the ‘mass of the population toiling from youth to age like beasts of burthen, with little means or time for intellectual or moral improvement, debarred by cruel and vexatious laws from cheerful exercise or joyous recreations’. This in turn possessed a political root, since the government benefited from the taxation on ‘intoxicating and poisonous ingredients’ and most Members of Parliament gained their seats through bribery, treating, and drunken debauchery at elections.88 The Charter was therefore a two-​ fold solution to this problem, by removing both socially harmful taxation and by creating a moral legislature that would ultimately lead to the social improvement of the working class. On this matter Lovett was explicit, denying that workers were ‘too ignorant for the franchise’ but that instead ‘we think the most effectual means to enlighten and improve them is to place them on a footing of political equality with other classes’.89 In Lovett’s analysis, the present political system caused destitution; an organisation of the working class which could improve their own condition was not only good in itself, but also a means of more efficiently securing political equality. This in turn would hasten and conclude that moral improvement, and with that continue the progress of humanity. Chartism was particularly concerned with health, medicine, and the body, and the prospective lesson cards for the National Association printed at the back of the book were dominated by medical topics.90 The predominance of these topics was in part likely due to Lovett’s chronic health problems, which were clearly exacerbated by his imprisonment. When Lovett was jailed he was just starting to recover from a serious illness that struck him in 1835. Early on in his imprisonment he complained of being taken ill with a ‘very severe attack in my bowels’ and his letters to Mary and the statements of his personal physician suggest a serious deterioration of his condition caused largely by the poor food. For Mary, ‘grievously afflicted in consequence of her husband’s sufferings’ and sure of ‘fatal consequences’, this was a particularly unpleasant process.91 Place was also convinced that the only ‘chance of saving Lovett’s life’ was moving him to the debtor’s side of the prison.92 Lovett recovered, but in the process he assembled a medical library, asking Mary for Andrew Combe’s Principles of Physiology and Physiology of Digestion, ‘or any thing of that caste … Mr Carpenter or Mr Place or other friends may have something new to lend me beyond what you may select from the library’.93 He noted that these were the few books the chaplain allowed him to read, but he had evidently possessed a large collection of medical works for some time, as a footnote in Chartism refers to Southwood Smith’s Philosophy of Health, Dr Thomas Hodgskin’s lectures at the London Mechanics’ Institute,

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Insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’  87 The Means of Promoting and Preserving Health, Dr Amariah Brigham on the Influence of Mental Cultivation and Mental Excitement on Health, and George Combe’s Constitution of Man.94 Importantly these texts all sympathised with phrenology, the theory that the brain was the organ of the mind, and that certain sections of the brain corresponded to functions of the mind. Developed by German physicians Franz Joseph Gall and Johann Spurzheim at the beginning of the century, by the end of the 1830s George Combe had successfully popularised the theory, and gained it some mainstream legitimacy. Phrenology was by no means new to Radicalism. In the mid-​1820s Richard Carlile saw it as the scientific underpinning of his atheism.95 It was adopted by Robert Owen, who became Combe’s friend, as well as by the working-​class Owenite Radicals, including Strange, Cleave, Hetherington, and Watson, who in the early 1830s enlisted it in their struggle against religious orthodoxy. In 1832, for instance, Watson published a lecture by Dr William Lawrence, a physiologist sympathetic to phrenology, which he titled Fact versus Fiction! An Essay on the Function of the Brain. In the preface Watson savaged belief in the immortality of the soul as a means by legislators of diverting ‘attention from the tangible pleasures yielded by the earth, and reconcile our miserable species to privations hardly to be endured’.96 Lovett, who became a friend of Combe’s, had been interested at least since the early 1830s, when he viewed the head of Jeremy Bentham with a friend ‘of a scientific turn of mind’.97 By the late 1830s the Radical use of phrenology shifted from a theological focus to an emphasis on its implications for the perfectibility of society through the physical and intellectual improvement of human individuals. A consequence of phrenology’s materialist notion of the mind was the idea that the physical exercise of particular regions of the brain would improve the corresponding faculty. In Chartism Lovett divided the faculties into Animal, Intellectual, and Moral, according to the phrenological theory that each was situated in a lobe within the brain. Over-​development of any one faculty would be ruinous; too much food or sex would lead to over-​development of the animal propensities, for instance. Each therefore needed to be healthy and balanced with the others. Since the mind was based in an organ, a general physical education was imperative, as was a good diet. A  very broad but simultaneously balanced and directed education would therefore ensure parity amongst each faculty:  ‘ “EDUCATION,” to be useful, such as will tend to make wise and worthy members of the community, must comprise the judicious development and training of ALL the human faculties, and not, as is generally supposed, the mere teaching of “reading, writing, and arithemetic,” or even the superior attainments of our colleges, “Greek, Latin, and polite literature” ’98 This education was not to be mental cultivation alone, but was defined instead as ‘the developing and training of all the faculties of mind and body’.99 Importantly, these faculties were not determined by inheritance, or any of the sort of strict determinism implied by the phrenologists’ linkage of form and function: ‘all have capacities for becoming intelligent, moral, and

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88 Popular virtue

Figure 4  The phrenological skull and brain as first laid out by George Combe. From Henry Dewhurst, A Guide to Human and Comparative Phrenology (London, 1830), which was published by William Strange. happy members of society; and if they are not, it is for want of their capacities being so properly cultivated.’100 Like all Chartists who adopted phrenology Lovett was a ‘practical Lockean’, since the ‘limits set by natural endowments were so broad as to be almost meaningless’.101 This interest in phrenology had already informed Lovett’s politics. His 1837 pamphlet on education argued that only national schooling would end crime and vice, but only through a curriculum that taught political and

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Insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’  89 social rights and equally valued physical, mental, and moral education. It was sent to the Phrenological Journal in 1838 by a member of the LWMA, most likely Lovett himself, and in their subsequent review they approved of its proposals but lambasted its belief that crime, vice, and poverty were caused by class legislation and economic exploitation.102 However, while Chartism clearly drew on this address it was also much more explicitly phrenological, relying on scientific rather than moral language. To be effective political actors Lovett now much more centrally believed that the people needed to be morally and mentally improved, and this was impossible without a good basis of physical health. The basis of moral and mental wellbeing in physical health was a common theme in the medical texts he read in prison, and likely a source of much of his anxiety. The preface for Combe’s Physiology of Digestion made clear the serious mental and physical consequences of digestive problems. The digestive system required focused study due to ‘the extensive influence which it exercises at every period of life over the whole of the bodily organization, –​the degree to which its morbid derangements undermine health, happiness, and social usefulness, and especially the share which they have in the production of scrofulous and consumptive, as well as of nervous and mental affections’.103 The conditions and diets in prisons like Warwick were seen to be particularly harmful. In Hodgskin’s second lecture, on diet, he advocated the benefits of meat since it was ‘characterized by the abundance and substantial character of its nutritious principles, and by the facility with which … it is appropriated to supply the wants of the system’.104 Diets of mostly vegetables not only caused the bowel problems of which Lovett complained, but were also held to be particularly dangerous in ‘low, damp, and marshy situations, and crowded, ill-​ventilated towns’, since these conditions encouraged parasites.105 O’Brien, on the other hand, felt that his health had improved during his imprisonment because Lancaster Castle was well-​aired and on a hill.106 Lovett was therefore relieved when, following a ‘severe attack’ of diarrhoea, he was granted the new diet of mutton, rice pudding, and port, ‘which as you may suppose have done me great good’.107 The most banal aspects of everyday life consequently became highly politicised. Lovett now saw it as the duty of the Chartist movement to remodel the working-​class environment in a manner conducive to better physical and mental health, and with that intellectual and moral improvement. Lovett’s exposition of the benefits of bathing and the requirement of the National Association’s halls to possess baths is illustrative of this: The advantages of HOT AND COLD BATHS being attached to such an establishment must be obvious. The difficulties our labouring population meet with in large towns and inland districts, in getting access to convenient bathing-​places, are productive of more serious consequences than many persons imagine. We are told by medical men that the perspiration of the body, which is continually going on, causes a species of incrustation

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90 Popular virtue on the skin, which materially interferes with its functions, which, if not removed by frequent ablutions, occasions a weakness of body and depression of mind; and, further, that the evil is greatly increased when persons have to work at dusty employments in unhealthy atmospheres. Hot or cold bathing, then, according to the state of the person’s health or constitution, will be found a great preservative of health, independently of the habit of cleanliness it would serve to generate. And when the great benefit of the hot bath, in many kinds of disorder, is considered, its importance will still be further appreciated.

Bawdiness and inebriety had to be replaced by healthy, sober forms of ‘rational recreation’. Lovett argued that it was important that people still had fun, so long as that fun was good for the physical and moral health. Interaction between the sexes should be encouraged, although limited to dancing as it was good for the body, or chess or drafts, since both were instructive. Gambling and alcohol were to be strictly prohibited within the halls.108 This was rooted in phrenological understandings of the mind and body, and the application of this to the cause of human perfectibility. Hence when the National Association sent out its prospectus, thereby igniting the ‘New Move’ controversy, it emphasised how Chartism’s political culture had to move away from a reliance upon the bestial and sensual: ‘We have wasted glorious means of usefulness in foolish displays and gaudy trappings, seeking to captivate the sense rather than inform the mind, and aping the proceedings of the tinselled and corrupt aristocracy rather than aspiring to the mental and moral dignity of pure Democracy. Our public meetings have, on too many occasions, been arenas of passionate invectiv [sic], party spirit, and personal idolatry.’109 The Northern Star reacted with justified anger to this, pointing out that John Collins himself had been fêted in such a meeting after his release from prison, and that Feargus O’Connor had idolised Lovett and Collins when he had organised support for them and campaigned for their release. Regardless of this initial hostility, Chartism after 1841 was marked by a shift away from bawdiness and populism towards a culture and strategy similar to the one that Lovett outlined in prison. While Lovett and the National Association would remain isolated throughout the decade, the principles of rational recreation, sobriety, physical health, and mental improvement came to dominate the movement. This was largely owing to the popularisation of teetotalism by John Cleave and Henry Vincent, who propagated their ideas with a populist touch that Lovett lacked.

Vincent, Godwin, and teetotalism Henry Vincent was undertaking a remarkably similar intellectual project in Oakham which drew him to many of the same conclusions as Lovett. In

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Insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’  91 September Lovett had sent him a copy of Chartism and wrote to ask if he had received it. He had not, but excitedly told him that the movement needed ‘a plan of organisation which, while it aims at investing the people with political power, will moralise, soberise, and intellectualise them’.110 This conversion from Vincent’s earlier festive, bawdy pot-​house politics was a direct consequence of his imprisonment. In May 1839, when he was first arrested, Vincent had made a declaration to Minikin that was typically tongue-​in-​cheek: You may be sure I shall not lay on my back and count the cobwebs that hang from the ceiling, and as I have no sweet young lasses here to wile away my time with, or with whom I  might fall away from the staid and sober regions of studious solitude into the pleasing, yet, I fear, naughty Elysium of young love’s reliefs, there is but little dought I shall make an effort to climb the steep hill of improvement.111

There was little evidence of this for most of the first year of his imprisonment. As his miseries mounted, however, like Lovett Vincent began to become preoccupied with health, morality, and mortality. In February 1840 he was confined to the infirmary at Monmouth and instructed to take ‘a bucket full of medicine’.112 Two weeks later he had to ‘undergo the operation of cupping to relieve the over-​flooded blood vessels of my head’, which most likely made him far worse.113 A month later after hearing of his friend W.P. Roberts’ conviction, he told Minikin that ‘I very much fear that two years will be the death of Roberts’.114 In June he told Minikin that ‘had I not been blessed with the best of constitutions I should have barely survived the first nine-​months confined in the cell at Monmouth’, and later in the year he was particularly moved by the death from starvation of a button-​maker who stole a spoon simply to go to jail and receive regular food.115 On top of this, he was evidently highly distressed by the regime at Millbank, which denied him letters or visits from his loved ones, as well as the numerous indictments which hung over him, threatening recurring jail sentences. While these were the motivations for Vincent’s political transition, it was executed under the influence of Francis Place, who continued corresponding with Vincent after he helped secure him a move from Millbank to Oakham in June 1840. The bulk of their discourse was on the social conditions of the people, which Vincent studied through a box of books Place had sent him. Vincent was particularly taken by Sir Francis Palgrave’s History of the Anglo-​ Saxons and a book the pair referred to as the ‘History of Europe’, most likely Archibald Alison’s History of Europe from the Commencement of the French Revolution to the Restoration of the Bourbons, a detailed political history of France and Britain.116 This reading focused Vincent’s thinking on the relationship between individual morality, society, and politics. Palgrave’s book suggested to him that ‘there was not such an amount of poverty and vice among the people … as there are in the present times’. This he compared to Peter Gaskell’s The Manufacturing Population of England, aghast at the ‘scenes

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92 Popular virtue of wretchedness, poverty, drunkenness, debauchery, and prostitution’ that could be ‘traced in our Manufacturing Districts’. This disjuncture between Saxon and modern England fascinated Vincent, who requested from Place a general history of how the world around him had become one of ‘poverty, misery, and vice’.117 Place disagreed, arguing that since the peace of 1815 ‘every class’ of people had been rapidly improving. The idea of a recent degeneration was because although ‘the animal man has never yet been any thing better than a beast … “Ignorant Philosophers” set him up as an angel and then ask, how is it he has gone on degenerating’. This was a typically Benthamite shot at purveyors of Painite theories of universal natural rights, of which Vincent had been a strong advocate for most of his youth. Place argued that rather than the contravention of natural rights, the problem was the ‘ignorant subserviency’ of the people to reformers amongst whom ‘the more degraded and villainous he is, the more he is held out as the very man to regenerate the world’. He pointed to the History of Europe as showing how obedient the people ‘were to any and every species of despotism founded upon their ignorance and perverseness’ and how impossible it was ‘by any kind of coercion set up by one portion of the people to … bring into unison the whole for any purpose whatsoever’, defects of which he claimed Chartism had been guilty from the outset. His solution was to send Vincent William Godwin’s Enquiry into Political Justice, telling him bluntly that he would lose his ‘vanity’ if he read the book and learn ‘the art of reasoning … on a broad scale, as I hope you will’.118 Vincent duly did this, writing back to claim that ‘I know not that I have ever derived more pleasure –​and I hope instruction than from this book’.119 Political Justice had been of some influence within London Radicalism in the early 1830s, with Watson holding reading classes for NUWC members and bringing out with Cleave a pamphlet abridged from the book. It had also been an influential work within the London Corresponding Society in the 1790s, of which Place was a member. Place continued expounding it in the 1830s, telling a carpenter who asked for his help in forming an educational society that it should be their core text. Buying and reading it was evidently a logistical difficulty as it was published in eight books which cost over £1, and so Place recommended they bought two copies and cut one up to circulate the chapters amongst the members, who would read each for two nights only before then passing them on.120 The interest in Godwin amongst earlier generations of Radicals was passed on to the younger generation represented by Vincent, who in 1839 advised workers to read him alongside ‘Cobbett, Bentham, Barlow, Paine, Cartwright, Algernon Sidney, Smith, and others’ in order to ‘acquire the habit of thinking for yourselves’.121 Ironically his later comments to Place suggest he had never have actually read Political Justice himself, although he had probably read abridgements such as Watson and Cleave’s pamphlet. After 1840 Godwin became notably prevalent in Chartist thought, particularly in both the Chartist Circular and the English Chartist Circular where he was regularly quoted.122 This was fostered by Watson’s

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Insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’  93 publication of Enquiry Concerning Political Justice in eleven parts at 6d each, prior to a 12d single version in 1842.123 In the same year Abel Heywood published An Essay on Trades & Professions taken from Godwin’s series of essays ‘on education, manners, and literature’, The Enquirer. Heywood set it in a socialist and Chartist intellectual context by subtitling it ‘a forcible exposure of the demoralizing tendencies of competition’.124 There was therefore some justification in Engel’s claim in 1844 that Godwin was now ‘exclusively the property of the proletariat’.125 Political Justice allowed Vincent to develop a politics that connected bodies, minds, and society in an intellectual parallel to Lovett’s use of his medical library to develop Chartism. Fundamental to Political Justice was Godwin’s belief that there was no intrinsic limit to the development of human understanding and enlightenment, a belief analogous to similar phrenological notions of the unending potential for the improvement of human intellect. While Godwin held, like most Radicals, that character was a product of experience, and that bad government was a particularly pernicious influence on character, Political Justice went on to argue that political and moral improvement is consequent of people’s ability to apprehend political and moral truth. Since the mind has no intrinsic limits to its appreciation of such truths, it is only encumbrances to this appreciation (such as all government) that impede human development and improvement. A good society should therefore act to unleash this progress implicit in humanity: What is it that society is bound to do for its members? Everything that can contribute to their welfare. But the nature of their welfare is defined by the nature of mind. That will most contribute to it, which enlarges the understanding, supplies incitements to virtue, fills us with a generous consciousness of our independence, and carefully removes whatever can impede our exertions.126

The influence of this on Vincent’s turn towards teetotalism is clear from a letter he soon sent Minikin: My aim shall be to remove all those restraints which prevent the human mind from attaining its genuine strength. Implicit faith, blind submission to authority, timid fear, a distrust of our own powers, an inattention to our own importance and the good purposes we are all able to effect –​these are the chief obstacles to human improvement.

Vincent planned to show ‘the people their own powers, and that the right use of those powers will place them above the reach of our damnable system’. He asserted that this would inevitably lead to the Charter becoming law, concluding that the ‘time now spent in drinking will then be spent in thinking, and … thought is Democracy!’127 This was a personal commitment, with Vincent deciding to wholly change his character from that of his youth, and

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94 Popular virtue by December, just prior to his release, Vincent declared himself to Minikin ‘a real down, upright, slanting, and octagonal Tee-​totaller’, and claimed that ‘mind is appearing where previously all was mud –​drunken mud!’128 He even went as far as to criticise Lovett for continuing to drink porter as part of his recuperation from prison in Cornwall.129 Like Lovett, Vincent posed teetotalism as a response to the repression of Chartism, the failure of open confrontation, and as a means of advancing the general progress of the intellect until Chartism was unassailable. In an open letter to Charles Bolwell, the imprisoned eighteen-​year-​old son of two of Bath’s principle Chartist leaders, Vincent advised him that the recent defeats of Chartism were because the aristocracy was more cunning and better organised than the people. Because of this, ‘the mere passions of the multitude  –​the wild outburst of popular phrensy  –​are easily dealt with’. However ‘wisdom steadily advances’ and Godwin’s notion of each generation being a moral, intellectual, and political improvement on the one before it is evident in Vincent’s advice: ‘Britain is hourly growing its fitness –​the events of the last few years have greatly accelerated its growth; and it remains for young men, like yourself, to cultivate your minds, and to acquire habits of virtue and sobriety, so that you may not merely be the advocates of great political change, but glorious examples for the young men of your country to follow!’130 Vincent saw this everywhere. In his letter to Lovett he celebrated Father Mathew’s success in advocating temperance amongst Irish Londoners:  ‘This change in the habits of the most desolate portion of our countrymen is the precursor of other important changes. Everything appears to me to be tending in a Democratic direction.’131 He similarly told Minikin that sobriety ‘will lead to thinking and reading’.132 The reform of the mind itself was a key motor in this progressive view of human improvement and political history, but in order to guarantee this role surroundings conducive to improvement needed to be secured. As with Lovett, this was about making the working class effective political and moral agents. By unleashing the progressive powers of the mind in this manner, society and politics would be reformed. Like education and self-​improvement temperance and abstinence had already been a presence within Radical politics prior to Chartism, and so it was not a completely alien concept as Vincent and Cleave wrote their address in late 1840.133 However, the address was remarkable for being a complete rejection of all forms of alcohol and tobacco consumption, replacing the older Radical tendency towards moderation and temperance only. This complete reform of everyday life sought to put the mental cultivation and health of Chartists at the centre of the struggle for political emancipation. It opened by stating that: ‘the ignorance and vices of the people are the chief impediments in the way of all political and social improvement, and being convinced that no revolution can be permanently successful unless achieved by the mind of a nation, we are led to address ourselves to you, in order to point out what we conceive to be the mainstay of oppression, and the weakness of the oppressed.’

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Insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’  95 This was not an abandonment of Chartist politics, but instead a re-​rooting of where aristocratic power lay, from the state to the heart of working-​class life: ‘the love of intoxicating drinks is the mainstay of aristocracy, tending, as it does, to debase and still further pauperise a politically oppressed and pauperized people’.134 Drunkenness degraded the mind and body, and retarded the education of the family. The aristocratic system not only incapacitated the working class in this way, but also gained its money through taxation. The effect of this was circular, as the aristocratic system, left unchallenged, perpetuated drunkenness and misery. The only solution was to recapture what Vincent and Cleave labelled ‘the little republic of home’. The mind, body and domestic consumption were now means of immediately contributing to the fight for the Charter. As Cleave put it at the dinner to celebrate Vincent’s liberation, ‘No friend to the People’s Charter would spend that upon poison, which he ought to devote to the regeneration of his country’.135 Despite this transplantation of political reform onto the family unit, Vincent remained committed to democracy and popular politics. He disagreed strongly with Place and Godwin’s assumptions that political associations were dangerous, since they facilitated demagoguery and the exploitation of the ignorant population. Vincent trenchantly argued against this, holding instead that in his experience ‘the intelligent few in each town’ uniting was in fact the best way of guarding against demagogues. By this point he had likely read Chartism, as he proposed to Place that he sought to raise ‘Halls in which the members may meet for the acquisition of Political –​Moral and Scientific Information of course at the same time, losing no opportunity of pressing their claims upon the Legislature’.136 However, this defence of political unions only extended to a point, as he was extremely reluctant to be drawn towards anything seeming illegal or irresponsible. He claimed to be firmly opposed to the NCA, considering it ‘illegal’ and ‘childish’, and wrote that upon hearing that his name had been put forward for a position on the Executive he had told one of the ‘Managers’ in Manchester that he wanted nothing to do with it.137 With up to three new indictments hanging over him, Vincent was being very careful to present himself as a man of no threat to the State and deserving of not only early release but no further prosecutions. In correspondence with the Home Office Place gave assurances that Vincent was a reformed character, and planned to forward Vincent’s letters to him to Normanby in order that he see for himself.138 Although in February 1840 he had resolved to never plead guilty or ‘give heavy bail for my good behaviour’, standing instead in defiance ‘like a man’, by the following January Vincent was arranging the bail that would secure his release.139 As he told Place in the letter requesting he appeal to Normanby: ‘If the other indictments are dropped, I will give no just cause for further proceedings. If I am proceeded against, therefore it will be from a sheer love of persecution. I shall act as the law allows every englishman [sic] to act. I am sure you would spit upon me if I act otherwise.’140 Vincent’s political transition while in jail, although no doubt genuine, was fuelled by a desire to both use incarceration as an opportunity

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96 Popular virtue for self-​improvement and to adopt a political position that would help him secure liberty. Like Lovett’s plan for the National Association it was also a conscious effort to fill the gap left by the failure of insurrectionary Chartism in a manner that would maintain the organisational structure of the movement and the integrity of its political culture.

Conclusion Lovett and Vincent shared with O’Connor and the NCA several fundamental principles: that the Charter should be implemented in full, that it should be a national mass-​movement formed from associations, and that the movement should remain independent and under working-​class leadership. Onto this, Lovett and Vincent had grafted a politics that saw the reform of everyday life as a contributing to a broad, society-​wide progression to the Charter. The pivot of this was an important change in the way that education was presented and practised in the movement. In the 1830s the culture of working-​class education saw it as the democratisation of reason, disseminated to individuals through moral populism’s conjunction of knowledge and entertainment. The consequence of this was moral and political heterodoxy, as enlightened men and women challenged all manner of institutions and conventions.141 After 1840, however, education became bound with the reform of the individual’s body, immediate environment, and entire society in the perception that this was the only way for it to truly succeed. The events of 1839 had convinced many influential Chartists that they needed to go further than inculcating a culture of criticism and scepticism within individuals, but to instead encourage a collective ethos that included changing not only what people read but also what they ate or drank, the physical space in which they lived, worked or enjoyed themselves, and how they interacted with others. The progress of human society lived or died depending on whether or not this culture could be universalised, and as a consequence enjoyment of individual excesses (or tolerance of it in others) needed to be combatted. After this point there arrived a marked marginalisation of corporeal festivity, alternate domestic or sexual arrangements, and coarseness within the movement. It is therefore wrong to conclude, as Roger Cooter does, that the National Association can be taken as evidence of Lovett having ‘abandoned political Chartism’ for education and popular science.142 Lovett and Vincent remained as ‘radical as any O’Connorite’.143 As Godwin put it in his exposition of the formation of character, ‘our virtues and our vices may be traced to the incidents which make the history of our lives, and if these incidents could be divested of every improper tendency, vice would be extirpated from the world’.144 This was now Lovett and Vincent’s primary strategy. It is true that Lovett remained hostile towards what he and Place called ‘the two O’s’, Feargus O’Connor and Bronterre O’Brien, who they felt were

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Insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’  97 simply demagogues inciting the people for their own ends. Nevertheless Lovett was defensive about the events of 1839, arguing to Place that the leadership had little choice in their actions as the ‘means and power of the masses were felt to be desirable towards effecting political change’ and that ‘wandering agitators’ were the only effective means of organisation.145 While Lovett and Vincent argued that 1839 had been a misstep they were still Chartists seeking to propose a new direction that would re-​build the movement rather than anything contradictory to Chartism’s aims or political independence. The factionalism that arose in 1841 was not a dispute over fundamental principles or even strategy, but primarily one between Lovett and O’Connor. The National Association itself never really grew thanks to sustained opposition from O’Connorite Chartists, and despite being one of the earliest supporters of the proposals set out in Chartism, Vincent distanced himself from Lovett when in May 1841 he publicly admitted that the National Association was ‘impracticable when opposed by the majority of the Chartist body’.146 However, these initiatives were not isolated to a ‘New Move’, but were instead a form of ethical Radicalism that encompassed the entire Chartist movement, where particular actions and modes of living were presented as morally correct ones which would directly lead to political change. While visionary and even utopian in their belief in the political ramifications of social and individual reform, these attempts to extirpate vice through the inculcation of a new ethos were not schemes divorced from either wider working-​class culture or the broader Chartist movement. In fact, this ethical Radicalism quickly became delinked from faction and emerged as a major aspect of the entire Chartist movement throughout the 1840s.

Notes 1 Neil Pye, The Home Office & the Chartists: Protest and Repression in the West Riding of Yorkshire (Pontypool, 2013). 2 David Jones, The Last Rising: The Newport Insurrection of 1839 (Oxford, 1985). 3 Christopher Godfrey, ‘The Chartist Prisoners, 1839–​41’ International Review of Social History 24 (1979), pp. 189–​236. 4 Radical Politics and the Working Man in England, Series Two (hereafter RPWME 2). The Francis Place Collection in the Department of Printed Books in the British Library, 1770–​1853 (Brighton, 1982), Francis Place to William Lovett, 24 May 1840, Reel 33. 5 Malcolm Chase, Chartism:  A  New History (Manchester, 2007), p.  188; Godfrey, ‘Chartist Prisoners’, p. 223. 6 Dorothy Thompson, ‘Chartism as a Historical Subject’ in Stephen Roberts (ed.), The Dignity of Chartism: Essays by Dorothy Thompson (London, 2015), pp. 10–​11. 7 Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain:  The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–​1850 (London, 1978); Alyson Brown, English Society and the Prison: Time, Culture and Politics in the Development of the Modern Prison, 1850–​1920 (Woodbridge, 2003).

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98 Popular virtue 8 Richard J. Butler, ‘Rethinking the Origins of the British Prisons Act of 1835: Ireland and the Development of Central-​ Government Prison Inspection, 1820–​35’ Historical Journal 59:3 (2016), pp. 721–​46. 9 Copies of memorials or correspondence relating to the treatment of William Lovett and John Collins, now prisoners in Warwick Gaol, Volume 44 of Accounts and papers, House of Commons, Parliament (Session 1840). 10 London School of Economics Archives (hereafter LSE):  Thomas Allsop correspondence, COLL MISC 0525/​PA1680, Bronterre O’Brien to Thomas Allsop, 17 June 1840. For Lovett and Collins, see: ‘Petition of William Lovett and John Collins’, in RPWME 2, Reel 33. 11 LSE: Thomas Allsop Correspondence, O’Brien to Allsop, 17 June 1840. 12 Northern Star, 22 August 1840. 13 NA: HO 20/​10: Interviews with Chartist Prisoners, 1840–​41, Interview with Joseph Crabtree. 14 Owen Ashton, ‘The Western Vindicator and Early Chartism’ in Joan Allen and Owen Ashton (eds), Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press (Monmouth, 2005), pp. 54–​81, at p. 70. 15 LSE: Thomas Allsop Correspondence, O’Brien to Allsop, 17 June 1840. 16 Labour History Archive and Study Centre (hereafter LHASC): LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​ 15, Vincent to Minikin, 21 May 1839. 17 RPWME 2: William Lovett to Mary Lovett, 21 September 1839, Reel 33. 18 NA: HO 20/​10: Interview with Timothy Higgins. 19 NA: HO 20/​10: Interview with William Brook. 20 NA: HO 20/​10: Interview with James Burton. 21 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​26, Vincent to Minikin, 20 March 1840. 22 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​15, Vincent to Minikin, 21 May 1839. 23 NA: HO 20/​10: Interview with William Carrier. 24 Godfrey, ‘Chartist Prisoners’, pp. 209–​15. 25 RPWME 2: Francis Place to William Lovett, 4 June 1840, Reel 33. 26 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​3/​5/​1, Francis Hill to John Minikin, 28 August 1839. 27 William Lovett, Life and Struggles of William Lovett in his Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (London, 1876), p. 243. 28 British Library (hereafter BL), Add. MS 46345:  Burns Papers, Volume 65: Letters to Richard Moore the Chartist. Francis Place to Richard Moore, 11 June 1840; RPWME 2: Francis Place to William Lovett, 21 and 30 July 1840, Reel 33. 29 LSE: Thomas Allsop Correspondence, O’Brien to Allsop, 17 June 1840. 30 The Times, 2 June 1840. 31 The Times, 3 June 1840. 32 LSE: Thomas Allsop Correspondence, O’Brien to Allsop, 23 June 1840. 33 NA: HO 20/​10: Interview with Bronterre O’Brien. 34 James Epstein, The Lion of Freedom:  Feargus O’Connor and the Chartist Movement, 1832–​1842 (London, 1982), p. 217; Chase, Chartism, pp. 164–​8. 35 Hansard, Volume 54 (May 1840), cc. 647–​8. 36 Epstein, The Lion of Freedom, p. 217. 37 Northern Star, 6 February 1841. 38 Northern Star, 30 April 1842; Chase, Chartism, pp. 152–​7.

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Insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’  99 39 NA: HO 20/​10: Interview with James Duffy. 40 Northern Star, 13 February 1841. 41 Michael Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism:  Aesthetic, Politics, History (Cambridge, 2009), p. 138. 42 NA: HO 20/​10: Interview with William Carrier. 43 RPWME 2: Francis Place to William Lovett, 15 June 1840, Reel 33. 44 Cited in Robert Hall, ‘A United People? Leaders and Followers in a Chartist Locality, 1838–​1848’ Journal of Social History 38:1 (2004), pp. 179–​203, at p. 185. 45 NA: HO 20/​10: Interview with James Duffy. 46 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​25.ii, Vincent to Minikin (n.d.). 47 RPWME 2: William Lovett to Francis Place, 20 July 1840, Reel 33. 48 Northern Star, 17 April 1841. 49 Hall, ‘A United People?’; Northern Star, 21 December 1839. 50 LSE: Thomas Allsop Correspondence, O’Brien to Allsop, 17 June 1840. 51 Harney to Engels, 30 March 1846, in Frank Gees Black and Renee Métivier Black (eds), The Harney Papers (Assen, 1969), p. 239. 52 Ray Boston, British Chartists in America, 1839–​1900 (Lanham, 1971). 53 NA: HO 20/​10: Interviews with James Mitchel and Timothy Higgins. 54 NA: HO 20/​10: Interview with John Broadbent. 55 NA: HO 20/​10: Interview with William Aitken. 56 A. Peacock, Bradford Chartism (York, 1969). 57 Alfred Plummer, Bronterre: A Political Biography of Bronterre O’Brien, 1804–​ 1864 (London, 1971), pp. 148–​9. 58 Chase, Chartism, p. 57. 59 R.B. Pugh, ‘Chartism in Somerset and Wiltshire’ in Asa Briggs (ed.), Chartist Studies (London, 1959), p. 217. 60 NA: HO 20/​10: Interviews with William Barker and Phineas Smithers. 61 NA: HO 20/​10: Interviews with Emanuel Hutton, Francis Rushworth, Daniel Ball and Joseph Crabtree. 62 Midland Counties Illuminator, 20 February 1841. 63 Northern Star, 26 August 1843. 64 NA: HO 20/​10: Interviews with William Martin. 65 Northern Star, 26 September 1840. 66 Northern Star, 5 June 1841. 67 Northern Star, 9 April 1842. For Neesom see Chase, Chartism, pp. 184–​91. 68 Chase, Chartism, p. 163. 69 Malcolm Chase, ‘ “Labour’s Candidates”: Chartist Challenges at Parliamentary Polls, 1839–​1860’ Labour History Review 74:1 (2009), pp. 64–​89. 70 Chase, Chartism, p. 161. 71 Southern Star, 23 February 1840. 72 William Lovett and John Collins, Chartism: A New Organisation of the People (London, 1840). 73 Northern Star, 28 November 1840. 74 Chase, Chartism, pp. 168–​78. 75 Chase, Chartism, p. 189. 76 Lovett, Life and Struggles, p. 124.

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100 Popular virtue 77 Lovett, Life and Struggles, p. 136. 78 Western Vindicator, 4 May 1839. 79 RPWME 2: William Lovett to Francis Place, 1 June 1840, Reel 33. 80 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, p. v. 81 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, p. 16. 82 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, p. 22. 83 RPWME 2: William Lovett to Francis Place, 24 May 1840, Reel 33. 84 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, p. 26. 85 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, p. 22. 86 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, p. 23. 87 Rowland Detroisier, A Lecture Delivered to the New Mechanics’ Institution, Manchester … on the Necessity of Moral and Political Instruction Among the Working Classes (Manchester, n.d.), p. 14. 88 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, p. 7. 89 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, p. 55. 90 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, pp. 112–​24. 91 RPWME 2:  William Lovett to Mary Lovett, 17 August 1839, Reel 33; Copies of memorials or correspondence relating to the treatment of William Lovett and John Collins, pp. 6, 10. 92 RPWME 2: Francis Place to William Collins, 1 September 1839, Reel 33. 93 RPWME 2:  William Lovett to Mary Lovett, 17 August 1839, Reel 33; RPWME 2: Mary Lovett to Francis Place, 11 October 1839, Reel 33. 94 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, p. 80. 95 Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Cambridge, 1984), p. 207. 96 Fact versus Fiction! An Essay on the Function of the Brain (London, 1832), p. iii. 97 Lovett, Life and Struggles, p. 90. 98 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, p. 67. 99 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, p. 64. 100 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, p. 67. 101 David Stack, ‘William Lovett and the National Association for the Political and Social Improvement of the People’ Historical Journal 42:4 (1999), pp. 1027–​50, at p. 1032. 102 Phrenological Journal and Magazine of Moral Science XI (1838), pp. 307–​12. 103 Andrew Combe, The Physiology of Digestion: Considered with Relation to the Principles of Dietetics (Boston, 1840), pp. iv–​v. 104 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, p. 88. 105 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, p. 87. 106 Plummer, Bronterre, p. 155. 107 RPWME 2: William Lovett to Francis Place, 5 July 1840, Reel 33. 108 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, pp. 53–​4. 109 Northern Star, 17 April 1841. 110 BL Add. MS 78161:  Lovett Album and Papers, Volume 1:  Album of Letters, mainly to Lovett, 1828–​1876 n.d. Henry Vincent to William Lovett, 18 September 1840.

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Insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’  101 111 LHSAC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​15, Vincent to Minikin, 21 May 1839. 112 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​21, Vincent to Minikin, 15 February 1840. 113 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​23.i, Vincent to Minikin, 28 February 1840. 114 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​26, Vincent to Minikin, 20 March 1840. 115 RPWME 2: Vincent to Place, 22 June 1840, Reel 34; LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​ 35, Vincent to Minikin, 28 September 1840. 116 Francis Palgrave, History of the Anglo-​Saxons (London, 1831); Archibald Alison, History of Europe: From the Commencement of the French Revolution … to the Restoration of the Bourbons (London, 1839). 117 Peter Gaskell, The Manufacturing Population of England:  Its Moral, Social and Physical Conditions… (London, 1833); RPWME 2: Henry Vincent to Francis Place, 29 August 1840, Reel 35. 118 Jeremy Waldron, Nonsense upon Stilts: Bentham, Burke and Marx on the Rights of Man (Florence, 2014); RPWME 2:  Francis Place to Henry Vincent, 9 September 1840, Reel 35. 119 RPWME 2: Henry Vincent to Francis Place, 25 September 1840, Reel 35. 120 D.J. Rowe (ed.), London Radicalism: A Selection from the Papers of Francis Place (Chatham, 1970), pp. 156–​8. 121 Western Vindicator, 10 August 1839; 6 June 1839. 122 William Marshall, William Godwin (London, 1984), pp. 390–​1. 123 Northern Star, 14 May 1842. 124 William Godwin, An Essay on Trades and Professions: Containing a Forcible Exposure of the Demoralizing Tendencies of Competition (Manchester, 1842). 125 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford, 2009), p. 247. 126 William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Oxford, 2013), p. 58. 127 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​36, Vincent to Minikin, 5 October 1840. 128 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​40, Vincent to Minikin, 1 December 1840. 129 BL Add. MS 78161: Vincent to William Lovett, 18 September 1840. 130 Northern Star, 19 September 1840. 131 BL Add. MS 78161: Henry Vincent to William Lovett, 18 September 1840. 132 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​40, Vincent to Minikin, 1 December 1840. 133 Brian Harrison, ‘Teetotal Chartism’ History 58:193 (1973), pp. 193–​203, at p. 207. 134 Northern Star, 28 November 1840. 135 Northern Star, 6 March 1841. 136 RPWME 2:  Vincent to Place, 10 November 1840, 31 December 1840, Reel 36. 137 RPWME 2: Vincent to Place, 31 December 1840, Reel 36. 138 RPWME 2: Place to Talfourd, 1 January 1841, Reel 36. 139 LHASC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​21, Vincent to Minikin, 15 February 1840; RPWME 2: Vincent to Place, 26 January 1841, Reel 36. 140 RPWME 2: Vincent to Place, 31 December 1840, Reel 36. 141 Jonathon Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (London, 2001), pp. 58–​91; Richard Johnson, ‘ “Really useful knowledge”:  Radical

 102

102 Popular virtue Education and Working-​Class  Culture, 1790–​1848’ in John Clarke, Chas Critcher, and Richard Johnson (eds), Working-​Class  Culture:  Studies in History and Theory (London, 1979), pp. 75–​ 102; Trygve R. Tholfsen, Working Class Radicalism in Mid-​Victorian England (London, 1976), p. 72. 142 Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science, p. 252. 143 Harrison, ‘Teetotal Chartism’, p. 207. 144 Godwin, Enquiry, p. 20. 145 RPWME 2: William Lovett to Francis Place, 19 May 1840, Francis Place to William Lovett, 24 May 1840, Reel 33. 146 Northern Star, 15 May 1841.

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4 Medicine, popular science, and Chartism’s improvement culture

The principles and strategies that Lovett and Vincent developed over the course of 1840 were never marginalised within the ‘New Move’ but instead became accepted as a core aspect of Chartist political culture. This chapter will outline how by 1842 it is clear that Chartists across the movement highly valued moral, physical, and mental improvement and saw it as a prerequisite for any meaningful social or political change. Universal improvement would not just make for better Chartists, but would make opposition to the government so extensive as to make it impossible to continue denying reform. However, an important aspect of this culture was its central social critique. Moral improvement was dominated by a discourse and practices that sought to combat the corrupting influence of the working-​class environment through improvement of physical health. As Gregory Claeys has suggested, the decline of the Owenite movement after the mid-​1840s was accompanied by a rise in both individualistic forms of self-​help and the development of collectivist political socialism as Owenites and Chartists increasingly fused.1 However, this self-​help culture had evidently also been taking form within Chartism since the early 1840s. Rather than solely being a sign of bifurcation it is also evident that this culture, and the intellectual influences underlying it, helped bring social concerns to the forefront of the movement and thereby helped develop political socialism. The issue was not a division between individual and collective proposals for self-​improvement (and as the next chapter will illustrate these were in fact conjoined in the Land Plan’s attempt to create a petit-​bourgeois ideal community), but rather the question of whether social and moral improvement was a prerequisite of political change, or something that could only happen after it. Between 1842 and 1848, the dominant belief amongst Chartists was that moral and social improvement would bring political power. After 1848 this became inverted as many Chartists turned to revolutionary socialism and thought only political power and then economic nationalisation could bring improvement. The next three chapters will outline this development and the manner in which it left a complicated legacy.

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104 Popular virtue Historians have generally regarded moral improvement culture in this period in terms of intellectual and literary aspirations.2 Case studies of the leaders of working-​class political movements similarly emphasise a distance between themselves and their constituencies engendered by a desire to escape and a sense of intellectual or cultural superiority. Jacques Rancieré, in his study of French artisans during the 1830s, argued that worker-​intellectuals ‘were seeking intellectual growth, an escape from the worker’s world’.3 In a study of the Chartist leadership of Ashton-​under-​Lyne, Robert Hall argues against this notion by pointing out that, despite their existential anxieties and musings that demarcated them as different, the local Chartist leadership fundamentally remained within the same social and economic bracket as the rest of the Chartist community, even if they did not share their culture.4 This chapter will argue that by being primarily a response to social and economic conditions, moral improvement was less elitist and aspirational and instead about directly improving the conditions of the working class. The conclusions that Lovett and Vincent had come to in prison became popularly held, largely through the efforts of John Cleave but also because they expressed ideas that were core to Radical moral philosophy. Improvement, largely focused upon politicised forms of healthcare, was the means of combating an industrialised, competitive society while also building the hegemony of Chartism within both the working class and eventually wider society.

‘Self-​culture’ and teetotalism Lovett and Vincent were only two of the more prominent participants in what became a larger project within Chartism, and within the Radical press between 1840 and 1842 the new strategy and culture of ethical Radicalism was outlined and promulgated. Central to this was the belief in mankind’s perfectibility, largely driven by the emerging popularity of Godwin, and this became merged with phrenological depictions of the mind as a material organ that was corrupted by bad health and improved by good health. The political strategy largely followed Godwin’s outlining of societal reform emanating from individual improvement, but also Volney’s teleological depiction of the inevitability of the victory of Liberty once the people were, as a mass, enlightened. While these were not new ideas within Radicalism, their coalescing into a singular, long-​term strategy which rejected violence was novel, as was the hardening of attitudes against sensual enjoyments and for tight patriarchal control of families. Nevertheless, important continuities with early Chartism remained. Godwin’s hostility towards political associations was rejected outright, while the critique of capitalism and aspirations for social equality of social Radicalism were retained. Wage labour, the exploitation of capitalists, and the alliance between fiscal monopolists and landed monopolists formed a major aspect of the developing moral politics, as it was these systems that comprised the degradations that had to be overcome.

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Chartism’s improvement culture  105 A key document that formed the intellectual basis for self-​improvement was Self-​Culture, published by Cleave in 1839. The pamphlet was a transcript of a lecture given by William Ellery Channing, an American Unitarian minister who, influenced by Godwin, advocated the perfectibility of mankind.5 This quickly became one of the most important Chartist texts, as the firm O’Connorite and Chartist poet Thomas Cooper recalled in his autobiography.6 After 1840, it regular appeared as the topic of discussions or lectures in meetings throughout the nation in the Northern Star, and it became a key concept in Chartist ideas about education.7 Channing himself became a venerated thinker amongst Chartists, and two months after his death in 1842 a long article appeared in Cleave’s English Chartist Circular extolling his life and publications.8 Central to Self-​Culture was the unique human ability to critique one’s own behaviour and adapt and improve it. As Channing wrote, ‘self-​culture is possible, not only because we can enter into and search ourselves; we have a still nobler power, that of acting on, determining, and forming ourselves’.9 Channing was too strong an idealist to accept phrenology, telling George Combe that he had a ‘strong aversion to theories which subject the mind to the body’ when Combe sent him a copy of The Constitution of Man. Despite this he expressed to him many points of agreement, including Combe’s notion of obedience to natural law guaranteeing health and happiness, his belief in progress, and the ‘supremacy of the moral faculties’ in his thought.10 In a following letter Channing told Combe that he ‘fully’ agreed that ‘our physical nature has been too much overlooked’.11 His Lectures on the Improvement of the Labouring Portion of the Community, published by Heywood in 1840 and sold by all the major Chartist vendors, advocated bodily improvement as the basis of societal progress. It was through hard work and self-​denial that mankind improved: ‘Easy, pleasant work does not make robust minds, does not give men a consciousness of their powers, does not train them to endurance, to perseverance, to steady force of will; that force without which all other acquisitions avail nothing.’12 For Channing the mind was the dominant partner in the mind/​body compound. ‘Matter was made for spirit, body for mind’ and in the ‘laws and phenomena of outward nature’ existed ‘the means of awakening mind’. Improvement was to be brought through mastery of the mind over the body, and by extension the wider material world. Most clearly, temperate consumption of food and abstinence from alcohol was required for genuine self-​cultivation: Whoever would cultivate the soul, must restrain the appetites. I am not an advocate for the doctrine, that animal food was not meant for man; but that this is used among us to excess; that as a people, we should gain much cheerfulness, activity, and buoyancy of mind, by less gross and stimulating food, I am strongly inclined to believe. Above all, let me urge on those who would bring out and elevate their higher nature, to abstain from the use of spirituous liquors. This bad habit is distinguished from all others by the

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106 Popular virtue ravages it makes on the reason, the intellect; and this effect is produced to a mournful extent, even when drunkenness is escaped.13

Although Chartist thinking on improvement was rooted in Combe’s prioritising of the body in practical terms this made little difference. For Chartist self-​culture, ascetic control over the bestial, animal faculties became a fundamental first step in society’s perfection. Teetotalism was initially Chartism’s most clearly popular politicisation of healthcare and attempt to build a ‘self-​culture’ and ‘elevate a higher nature’. It was by no means alien to O’Connor, and in April 1840 he was praised by teetotallers in the Northern Star for having advocated abstinence.14 A  year later London Chartists on both sides of the divide wrought by O’Connor ‘were, for the most part, self-​educating, earnest, sober and responsible’, and this was largely true of the movement as a whole.15 Vincent and Cleave’s pledge was signed by 135 other Chartists from a broad array of positions, including the editor of the Northern Star, William Hill, and the President of the NCA, James Leach. Alongside this were numerous men involved in the NCA and local Chartist Associations, such as Thomas Cooper who became a teetotaller upon his arrival in Leicester, administering the pledge to ‘several hundreds’.16 Vincent’s business partner in Bath, Robert Kemp Philp, was a teetotaller and NCA executive close to O’Connor. For all these reasons the vituperative attacks launched by O’Connor on teetotallers in 1841 were unsustainable and a year later opposition to it was tempered. When a proposal was made that the 1842 Chartist Convention adopt a resolution to recommend the people of the country abstain from all intoxicating drinks, Peter McDouall responded that he ‘admired the principle in the abstract’ but was fearful it would lead to people confusing Chartism and teetotalism in places where Chartism was unknown. O’Connor similarly stated that ‘nothing would give him greater pleasure’ than to see this carried into practice, and that temperance had ‘done much good in Ireland’, but that he was concerned with the political consequences of Chartism becoming intermixed with teetotalism. He then moved an amendment, in which rather than recommend teetotalism the Convention delegates would abstain from all intoxicants as an example to the population.17 As the 1840s progressed, both men would come to explicitly advocate teetotalism. The popularity of teetotalism within the NCA is evident from the material and commodity culture that surrounded it. Both the NCA and the Northern Star encouraged and benefited from a key aspect of teetotal culture, the trade of the ‘Chartist Beverage’. Beverages or ‘Breakfast Powders’ were not new, having been sold by Henry Hunt in the 1820s along with a remarkable range of other commodities, such as ink, blacking, and ale.18 Chartist beverages, however, were remarkable for the extent of their manufacture and trade, with many businesses in many towns producing powders that were distributed around the country. So too were they important for their role in the developing culture of political teetotalism. The beverages were intended to replace

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Chartism’s improvement culture  107 tea and coffee, both excisable articles, with a drink produced from ingredients not subject to taxation, some of the proceeds of which were donated to the NCA Executive. It was therefore marketed as a useful replacement for the teetotal staples of tea and coffee, while also healthy and medicinal. Crow and Tyrell, the Leicester proprietors of the original Chartist Beverage, asserted its ‘nutritious quality’ and ‘tonic power’, while ‘its mode of Preparation renders it vastly superior to the Trash offered for Sale by those who regard not the health of the Consumer’.19 The offices of the Northern Star promptly became one of its main wholesale agents while a competitor, Jackson’s Family Beverage, offered any teetotal or Chartist society a reward of 26s per one hundredweight purchased, with 5s going to the Executive.20 This vibrant political and commercial culture was underpinned by the English Chartist Circular, a new newspaper started in 1841 by Cleave which copied the format of the Chartist Circular published in Glasgow. Its full title, The English Chartist Circular and Temperance Record for England and Wales, reveals its partial nature as a temperance journal. At one half-​penny it was cheap enough for wide distribution, and was supportive of O’Connor and the NCA with Cleave pledging in 1842 to donate 10 per cent of its profits to the NCA Executive and missionary fund.21 It possessed a notable editorial interest in ethics and health, but in this respect was little different from any of its contemporary Chartist journals, which after 1840 had moved from satire and muckraking to poetry and fiction and considerably upped their philosophical and directly instructive content. Even Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement dropped the corporeal and scatological tone of its comic content and increasingly became a journal about health, improvement, and education. A notable recurring topic throughout this press was the interaction between the government, society, and the individual. An article by the Bath Chartist G.M. Bartlett on the rise of crime since the end of the Napoleonic Wars attributed it to increasing poverty and the new Poor Laws, but also the rise in drunkenness. However, and in almost identical language to Lovett’s writings on alcohol in Chartism, drunkenness was not an inherent or individual character flaw: If we study the human system, we shall find that owing to physical exhaustion, caused by excessive labour, the animal juices get dried up, the body and limbs become weak and languid and lose that exhilarated spirit so necessary to keep the system in a health and vigorous state. Under these circumstances men resort to the use of stimulants to recruit their flagging spirits, to obtain a little excitement, in which, for the time being, they find relief from worldly cares. Were labour light and the means of living afforded to all, there would be less drunkenness and consequently less crime.

Such beliefs drove sales of Chartist herbal remedies or beverages, as workers sought to expel both exhaustion and their own vices. The only lasting solution, however, was to tackle the problem at its root. As Bartlett concluded,

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108 Popular virtue ‘[crime] exists in consequence of our anti-​social state. Reform society, and you reform the human character, for the state of the former affects the morality of the latter’.22 In the National Vindicator Bartlett outlined how this ‘anti-​ social state’ was rooted in the monopoly on property, through which the aristocracy ‘not only rob me of the means whereby I  live, but prevent me from cultivating my moral and intellectual faculties; and thereby lower me in the scale of social worth’.23 As with Vincent and Lovett’s analysis, the only way to combat this was through an ethical politicisation of everyday life. Only then would men be able to challenge society and cut out the disease at its roots. The most fundamental location for all political action, Bartlett concluded, was the family: ‘as being necessary to all political and social reform, improvement should be begun at home’.24 This point marked the end of any possibility of Chartism advocating novel, non-​patriarchal familial relations. The veneration of domesticity and rigid gender roles discussed in Chapter  2 was affixed by the discourse on teetotalism, which highlighted the damage done to families by drinking. In 1838 Cleave had printed ‘The Drunkards Coat of Arms’ as the front-​page woodcut for Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety, the symbolism of which illustrated the various physical, moral, financial, and legal results of intemperance on a family. The female supporter of the arms was described as being ‘lost to every sense of decency, letting her infant fall from her arms’.25 In 1840 he re-​published this in The Drunkards Cloak and Coat of Arms, which also included texts on teetotalism and another illustration depicting the effects of alcoholism on the liver, all taken from the Penny Gazette of Variety.26 While this critique rested on the depiction of a perversion of motherhood by alcohol, it was superseded by a discourse of male brutality and female innocence and passivity. Whereas the Radical critique of working-​class morality in the 1830s highlighted a general culture of avarice, sexual exploitation, and physical violence, in the 1840s this became gendered as a primarily masculine problem. As the Chartist Circular argued, the ‘parent’s character affects his whole family, and ultimately a wider circle is affected by his moral deficiencies’.27 The teetotal pledge attacked the ‘unhappy drunkard reeling home to his ragged and starving wife and children’, and with this set the Chartist rhetoric of domesticity in the 1840s, in which women and children suffered due to their dependency on their husbands and fathers. The acknowledgement of female wage labour and the legitimacy of women’s activism before 1840 were replaced by unrealistic depictions of women as being entirely dependent upon men. The central tenet of teetotal Chartism –​and with that, Chartism’s discourse on moral improvement –​was that to be effective political actors men needed to assert patriarchal control over the family. As the pledge continued: ‘His own health undermined and his morals corrupted –​his vicious example poisoning the minds and morals of his children … Can such a man be free?’ It was not possible to reconcile this with independent female political activism, explicit advocacy of contraception or free love, communal gender relations, or a festive political culture. Disingenuously, considering the

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Chartism’s improvement culture  109

Figure 5  ‘The Drunkard’s Coat of Arms’, from Cleave’s Penny Gazette and Variety of Amusement, 17 March 1838.

importance to pubs and alcohol in the early stages of Chartism, the pledge complained about ‘moderate’ drinkers ‘lounging away whole hours over the pot and pipe at the time their wives and children were craving with hunger at home’.28 A man’s place was now very clearly controlling the political and moral environment of his home. As with Lovett and Vincent’s analysis this was not intended as a non-​ political offshoot from Chartism, but instead a fundamentally necessary strategic move. Moral improvement was considered the only way that Chartists could be effective activists and that more people could be enlisted to the cause. Improvement and education were deliberately held back from the poor, the Chartist Circular argued, because uneducated men were easier to dupe and threaten.29 Improvement allowed Chartists to develop ‘those habits of co-​ operation, steady energy, and self-​restraint –​in short, that moral and intellectual training, discipline, and organization’ to ‘effect beneficent reforms’, and allowed them to comprehensively understand society and how to remedy its problems.30 As the pledge argued, men who were ‘sulky and brutal in their homes’, whose knowledge was ‘confined to the tap-​tub and the gin-​cask’ were the most ‘serfish of slaves’.31 The rectification of this was important not just

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110 Popular virtue for individuals but for the entire prospect of liberty in Britain. The Chartist Circular argued that Republicanism was spreading throughout Portugal, Spain, and France because the people of those nations drank far less.32 T.B. Smith was a member of the Leeds NCA as well as the city’s Total Abstinence Charter Association and vice-​president of the National Anti-​Tobacco and Temperance Association, and regularly wrote to the English Chartist Circular on matters of social degradation and individual reform: We are told that before the political rights of the people can be gained a social and moral regeneration must be effected … I  deem individual improvement … of indisputable importance. No political change can be of permanent or practical advantage to an individually vicious and degraded people. But, I ask, is not one of the most prolific sources of our national vices, the vicious political and social institutions of the country? And, if it be, then, is it not clear that political and social changes are a necessary means to the accomplishment of the contemplated and desired end? Individual virtue must accomplish the political changes sought.33

Smith was evidently drawing from Godwin’s progressive ideas of simultaneous individual and societal improvement: ‘In this age we may lay, and I trust we shall lay, the foundation of a new social edifice; but it would be the height of folly to expect, in this age, to rear the superstructure.’ In advocating individual improvement now it would be possible to challenge the ruling class at a later date in a confrontation that the people would inevitably win, and it was only this central notion that prevented these arguments from becoming ruinously circular. However, Chartists remained antagonistic to Godwin’s hostility to itinerancy and organisational politics. Individual reform did not necessary mean an atomized movement, as Vincent made clear in an address in the Vindicator. In a passage derivative of Chapter XV of Volney’s Ruins Vincent argued that an intelligent working class would unite to enforce their own interests: Just fancy for one moment what would be the result if the mechanics, the agriculturists, the shopkeepers, the soldiers, the policemen, the servant men and women; in short, all who have to earn their daily bread, were to enter into a combination that next Monday they would bid the Priesthood and Aristocracy stand to the side, for they were resolved to take their affairs into their own hands … The system would be changed, and we should have either a better or a worse one (if that were possible,) according to the intelligence of the People.34

For Volney, the confrontation between the productive classes and the aristocracy and clergy took the form of a dialogue that ends with the latter group exclaiming ‘it is over with us; the multitude are enlightened’.35 To ensure that Chartism did represent an enlightened working class which could act

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Chartism’s improvement culture  111 as the agents of social change the members of the movement needed to be sober, healthy, and educated. As Hetherington wrote in one of his essays in Halfpenny Magazine, a ‘moral and intellectual people can never be enslaved; whilst an ignorant and immoral multitude are, and must be slaves  –​even without a tyrant to trample upon them. Their vices are their tyrants!’36 This position clearly drew from the social Radicalism of the 1830s. Individual moral behaviour was only perceived as causing poverty in the indirect sense that it allowed the perpetuation of political inequality and economic exploitation. The English Chartist Circular still subscribed to the critique of competitive society, the necessity of political reform to be followed by socialism, and William Thompson’s analysis of capitalism that defined the 1830s.37 Both the English and the original Chartist Circular published essays of Bronterre O’Brien’s in which he attacked capitalism, the theft of surplus value, and analysed the political system formed from a compound of the aristocracy and middle class.38 Lovett was clear that poverty was caused by wage labour and exploitation, which in turn caused ignorance and alcoholism.39 Excerpts from the Chartist and socialist John Francis Bray’s 1839 analysis of the relationship between capital and labour, Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedies, were printed in the English Chartist Circular, which enthusiastically encouraged readers to seek out his writings.40 Such analysis was completely compatible with Chartist moral improvement politics. Bray asserted that since labour was self-​evidently the source of all wealth, the rampant inequality within society could only be the result of ‘a fearful perversion of “equal justice” somewhere’. This was a conclusion that neatly correlated with Godwinian arguments for communism. A quote from Political Justice regularly appeared on the title page of the English Chartist Circular: ‘Every man is entitled, so far as the general stock will suffice, not only to the means of being, but of well being. It is unjust, if one man labour to the destruction of his health, that another may abound in luxuries; it is unjust, if one man be deprived of leisure to cultivate his rational powers, while another man contributes not a single effort to add to the common stock.’41 The only regulative basis for property was justice, and therefore everything should go to the people who needed it most. A just society, however, required political reform as a prerequisite and as Bray argued this could only be brought about if the ruling class’s monopoly on knowledge was overthrown.42 By 1842 Chartism’s social and political critique was largely unchanged from the 1830s. The movement was still interested in the overthrow of an elite formed from landowners and capitalists, and advocated the implementation of wealth redistribution following the seizure of political power. The novelty was a new strategy, largely the one outlined by Lovett and Vincent while in prison. Rather than Jacobinism Chartists needed to intervene in the cycle of exploitation and demoralisation by improving the working class until they would no longer function as slaves, but instead as Chartists. Liberty would be the inevitable result.

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112 Popular virtue

The democratisation of medicine, 1838–​42 Beyond teetotalism, the most important and visible means of inculcating the sorts of behaviour required by the new strategy was a broader culture of self-​care, which was designed to improve the body and mind through sobriety and moderation in all things and the judicious use of medicine. A central part of this trajectory was the compound nature of humans, as explained by T.B. Smith:  ‘Man has an external and an internal part, that is, he is a compound substance, possessing a body, which is connected with the world of sense, and a soul, which is, in like manner, connected with the world of mind. In order, therefore, for the development of his bodily power, and mental perceptions and affections, so as to produce happiness in his present state of existence, it is necessary, first, that they should act reciprocally upon each other.’43 The seeds of the association between physical, moral and intellectual improvement had already been sewn by the widespread acceptance of phrenology amongst Radicals in the early 1830s. Consequently, the early Chartist press had already made attempts to democratise medicine through the dissemination of essays by orthodox medical professionals. By the beginning of the 1840s there was a discernible change in this content, and anti-​establishment heterodox medicine by people with no formal training became an increasingly visible and prominent aspect of Chartist culture. The movement was therefore a major part in the development of what Logie Barrow has referred to as an anti-​elitist ‘democratic epistemology’ that developed around heterodox medicines during the decade.44 These enterprises were not simply palliatives, but sought to overcome the effects of demoralisation by realigning individual bodies with the natural laws broken by the aristocracy and capitalists. The effect of this was the solidification of the move away from a politics of festivity, and its replacement by a politics of individual pathology. By the early 1840s phrenology had ‘made its way in general society’, as one 1842 pamphlet published by Hetherington and Watson and written by the Mancunian Owenite John Watts suggested.45 Whereas in pre-​Chartist publications such as The Poor Man’s Guardian and Cleave’s Weekly Police Gazette phrenology never appeared, by 1840 there had been a clear upsurge in its appearances in the Chartist press. In 1838 Cleave propagated phrenology in his Gazette of Variety by publishing columns of lectures by E.J. Hytch, who would go on to run phrenology classes at the London Mechanics’ Institute and was a regular contributor to the phrenological press. This was given a lurid edge by articles such as one that discussed the casts of skulls of famous murderers.46 Throughout its run the Northern Star advertised and reviewed phrenological publications and publicised numerous lectures, including one in Bath where a professor of phrenology explained the character of the middle class to the local branch of the NCA.47 The list of Chartist phrenologists was extensive, including Thomas Cooper, who incorporated it into his regular lectures in Leicestershire.48 By 1840, Abel Heywood’s advertisements

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Chartism’s improvement culture  113 contained seven books and pamphlets on phrenology, enough to warrant its own distinct section.49 This turn to phrenology was accompanied by the politicisation of health and self-​care. The British medical market was notably strong and prosperous throughout the eighteenth century, and self-​care was practised widely by all classes of society through home remedies or by purchasing medicines from shops or by post.50 From the outset, Chartist newspapers were dominated by medical advertisements, most often for health pills which purported to cure all manner of digestive complaints and sexual diseases. A single 1839 issue of the Northern Star advertised ten different oitments, pills, tracts, and potions, as well as ‘Incorrodible Mineral Teeth’.51 This was a lucrative field, as healthcare was one area that even the poorest would be willing to spend money on. These products were often based on folkish vitalist notions of physiology and disease, where the mind and body of any animal was motivated by a vital energy, usually associated with a particular fluid or organ. Such products exploited the view common to such thinking that disorders of a handful of organs would cause wider mental and physical problems. The extremely successful Morison’s pills, for instance, were based on the notion that ‘the vital principle is contained in blood’, that blood could only be restored through vegetable pills and that the restoration of blood cured all diseases.52 Common to all of these adverts was the prompt and cheap nature of the remedy, whether in the form of pills, ointments, liquid medicines, or even a system of curing tumours without ‘resorting to the knife’.53 Cleave was the first of the Chartist publishers to fully commit to recurring columns educating people about physiology, disease, and medicine in the form of a regular ‘Medical Adviser’ column in his Penny Gazette of Variety between 1837 and 1838. The intentions behind it were clearly political and democratic, as he made clear in the introduction to the first column: As health is the first and best blessing we can enjoy here below, it ought to be a primary consideration how to preserve it; and when injured or deranged, how to restore it. The science which treats of this has been hitherto a closed book, a mystery to the uninitiated, a veiled sanctuary to the unprivileged … we have engaged the services of a medical gentleman … who will, in a series of short, pithy, and original contributions, divested of all technicalities, and in plain intelligible language … form a system of popular physiology, which every one who ‘runs may read,’ and all may understand.54

Healthcare was another way that the poor were disenfranchised under the aristocratic system. This would be combatted by access to the plain truth, a continuation of the empiricist foundation of Cleave’s Weekly Police Gazette or Destructive, and hence the columns dealt with common ailments amongst the working class, such as indigestion, constipation, worms, diarrhoea, dysentery, and cholera. This quickly became a common aspect of Chartist culture. In

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114 Popular virtue 1839 Anne Cobbett, the daughter of William Cobbett, published The People’s Medical Adviser by Mathew Fletcher, a physician who was the delegate for Bury at the 1839 National Convention. This was advertised in Cleave’s press and the Northern Star, with its offices in Leeds one of the locations for its sale.55 Hetherington’s Odd Fellow would publish a health column throughout 1842 written exclusively for them by ‘a medical man, a member of an English College and of several scientific societies’.56 This health advice was complemented by the provision of medicines direct from the shops of Chartist publishers. In 1839 Abel Heywood was selling the ‘Poor Man’s Pill’ from his Manchester shop, claiming that 10,000 boxes were sold monthly.57 The offices of the Northern Star sold ‘Parr’s Life Pills’, which were supposedly based upon the re-​discovered secret recipe of folk legend ‘Old Tom Parr’, who died in 1635 claiming to be 152 years old. A number of adverts featured a prominent and lengthy testimonial written by the O’Connorite Leeds Chartist, teetotaler, and poet William Hick, addressed from the Star’s offices, in which he informed the medicine’s proprietors of the ‘great good your pills are doing in Leeds and its neighbourhood’.58 While the provision of patent medicines from booksellers was not new, pre-​dating Chartism by at least two centuries, the direct politicisation of medicine was novel.59 Importantly, the nature of the politicisation also changed over the course of the first five years of Chartism. The first appearance of medical advisers argued that medical knowledge should not be held in monopoly but should be disseminated for the greater good, and while this moral motivation still held it is apparent that after 1841 medicine was perceived most importantly as a direct means of improving the working class. The most prominent of the Chartist medicines was produced by Cleave along with Peter McDoaull. McDouall was a friend of Fletcher’s and an Edinburgh-​trained physician, and had been a key leader within the NCA on the Republican and insurrectionary wing of the movement. His ‘Florida Medicine’ and the pamphlet that he produced alongside it, The People’s Medical Tract, are important for illustrating how medicine and the imperative to restore natural law were not sectional aspects of the movement, as well as how improvement was not divorced from Chartism’s social analysis or the experience of the working class. The appalling conditions of the factory operatives in Ashton-​under-​Lyne had drawn McDouall into Chartism, and his medical training convinced him that the working-​class’s environment was leaving serious physical and mental consequences. As he stated in the introduction to his People’s Medical Tract, which Cleave published and sold alongside the pills: Society, as at present constituted, rests upon an artificial foundation. The habits and customs of the people, their lengthened hours of labour, their insufficient food, their scanty dress, their comfortless houses, all have their origin in the violation of nature’s laws, and in the establishment of others which pay no regard to the mental elevation and physical well-​being of the

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Chartism’s improvement culture  115 people. Need we be surprised that nature imposes a penalty for the least breach of her laws … Let a man eat, work, or drink more than is necessary, and again the pains of indigestion, the distortion of the frame, and the gradual failing of strength, or the horrors of the drunkard overtake him.60

McDouall had been dismissed as a quack by William Benbow, who stated that ‘as a surgeon I would not trust him with a dog’s leg to cure –​and as a Chartist his only principle is money’.61 This was not a fair assessment. While his pills were unlikely to have much medical merit, his pamphlet’s description of physiology, pathology, and remedies was a simplified version of the mainstream texts that featured in Lovett’s prison reading. McDoaull is one of the best illustrations of the degree of overlap between quacks and ‘regular’ practitioners that Roy Porter has highlighted.62 As a trained doctor he subscribed to orthodox early-​Victorian theories of disease. He attributed it to repetitive work in environments rendered unhealthy by the heat or bad air, and like the more respectable authors read by Lovett he prioritised the role of the stomach in regulating both the body and the mind. To restore health he advised temperance, regular eating, and consumption of his pills as a way of restoring ‘nature’s laws’. This distinction between artifice and nature was fundamental, as it was the ‘artificial state of our society [that] has given rise to the diseases alluded to’.63 This was not an unusual position within phrenological and medical thought; Combe’s Constitution of Man posited that natural laws were fixed by the creator and that: ‘Obedience to each of them is attended with its own reward, and disobedience with its own punishment … They are universal, unbending, and invariable in their operation … They are in harmony with the constitution of man.’64 Like other middle-​class reformers Southwood Smith’s social campaigning drew from a belief that the societal breaking of these laws was causing serious physical and moral degeneration.65 The solution, McDouall held, were those medicines ‘recommended by nature, proved by reason, and tried by experience’, which could be found in ‘the storehouse of nature’.66 As well as being consistent with medical thought it was also consistent with McDouall’s political thought. The name ‘Florida Medicine’ and McDouall’s argument that Native Americans were healthy through living according to nature’s laws indicates that he was one of the Britons influenced by American herbalism, which itself had developed in Jacksonian America amongst radicals who saw herbal treatments as invocative of the self-​reliant common man ‘free from the corrupting influence of elitist institutions’.67 Similarly, the nature/​artifice distinction at the root of McDouall’s medical advice was analogous to the political critique repeatedly stated in McDouall’s Chartist and Republican Journal. McDouall clearly saw Republicanism as the natural form of government and system of organizing society, since the ‘government, and even the laws of society, if nature is let alone, spring from the habits and will of the whole people, therefore they are congenial to the taste, the mind, and the customs of all’. His theory of revolution was identical to his ideas about

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116 Popular virtue pathology, which held that diseases were caused by the breaking of natural laws and could only be cured by the restoration of those laws or death. If government grows ‘old and uneasy’ and society ‘crooked and unfair’, ‘nature immediately stirs up complaint’: The same power cuts of the cumbrous branch of a tree when useless –​the limb even of an animal when torn or diseased –​corrects, destroys, and remodels; changing soils by the earthquake, purifying atmospheres by the tempest, or renewing the vigour of democratic and natural governments by convulsing society to its basis, and shaking off the old and oppressive slough of misrule.

Chartism was a movement motivated by nature to govern society according to its natural laws and principles, expressed through the will of the people: Man, the tyrant of his kind, has shut out by artifice his brother from the garden of liberty; but nature, the monitor of the just, speaks through the instinctive reason of the man, and declares that this exclusive privilege of the despot shall no longer be. Its death-​knell is tolling even now, and a voice proclaims that nature made mankind to govern themselves, to resist, to reason, and to revolutionize.68

Chartism’s medical material and commodity culture was a clear expression of a moral politics that sought to restore natural law in order to undermine the conditions in which tyranny flourished. An essay by ‘a Medical Student’ that appeared in Hetherington’s Halfpenny Magazine argued that medicine and moral philosophy were two branches of the ‘Science of Man’. Physical malady led to moral corruption, since ‘disordered or irregular emotions of the mind have the same origin as the diseases or the health of the body; and this source of the moral affection is in the organization of the human frame’. Equality, liberty, virtue, and happiness were ‘imprinted in indelible character … by the hands of Nature herself’ on humans, whilst tyranny, vice, and misfortune were produced by ‘the subversion of the relations that are established between man and his fellow-​creatures, by their common organization’.69 Only by following nature’s plan for the human body and human society could liberty and progress be assured. As the National Association Gazette argued, ‘the great struggle of our time’ was to ‘harmonise the laws of man with the laws of nature’.70 These were increasingly popular notions amongst Chartists by the beginning of the 1840s, and seen as a viable area of political action.

Phreno-​mesmerism and popular science after 1842 Disease’s role in causing immorality in turn allowed tyranny to function through the perversion of the natural laws of society. An important influence

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Chartism’s improvement culture  117 on Chartist thinking in this area was the essayist Vicesimus Knox, whose 1795 Spirit of Despotism became a Radical staple after its republication by William Hone in 1821 and was later regularly reprinted in excerpts in the Chartist press.71 Knox argued that commerce, wealth, and avarice corrupted manners, and that this in itself inevitably led to despotism as the demoralised elite sought to secure more power and wealth and the expense of others. Because of this inevitability, the elite endeavoured ‘to contaminate every healthy climate, to destroy the vital salubrity of the liberal air, and diffuse corruption with systematic industry’. Since ‘public corruption must produce private’ it therefore became a political imperative to prevent this demoralisation, so that a movement for freedom would be numerous and organised enough for the people to attain the Charter and thereby restore natural law.72 To these ends physical improvement and amelioration became crucial aspects of Radical political culture in the 1840s. In 1849 after visiting Abel Heywood’s shop and discussing with him the literary tastes of Manchester’s workers the journalist Angus Reach concluded that ‘all quackeries, moral and physical … equally find a clear stage and very great favour’.73 Chartism’s engagement with heterodox medicine and popular science after 1842 was the origin of this, and this will be the concluding focus of this chapter. One of the causes of this expansion was political. The failure of an outbreak of politicised labour militancy in the summer of 1842 (which will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter) re-​energised the Radical ‘colonisation’ schemes that sought to establish various types of alternative communities. This encouraged counter-​cultural exploration which Chartist publishers and leaders were happy to indulge. The last periodical put out by Hetherington before his death was the Morning Star; or Herald of Progression, ‘a weekly journal of industrial organization, moral improvement, and educational reform’. Edited for a time by the Chartist poet James Elmslie Duncan, known for his vegetarian and teetotal poetry, the Morning Star was the official journal of the Tropical Emigration Society (TES), which sought to found communal colonies in Venezuala which would rely on fully automated production processes.74 More eccentric was the ‘Concordium’, a community established at Alcott House on Ham Common in Surrey by the ‘sacred socialist’ James Pierrepoint Greaves in 1838.75 The Concordium’s members prioritised individual self-​improvement through an extreme asceticism, which included celibacy, abstinence from meat (or any animal products), the consumption of only raw food, and complete rejection of stimulants. One of their early publications, The Healthian, was published from 1842 first by Cleave and then by William Strange, while The Healthian’s successor, The New Age, Concordium Gazette and Temperance Advertiser, was published by Cleave alone from 1844. Both publications advocated the moral improvement of mankind through a simple diet and by shunning orthodox medicine. The Chartist Thomas Frost considered joining the Concordium during a period of intense disillusionment following the defeats of 1842, but was put off by its vegetarianism and commitment to celibacy.76 This ultra-​asceticism

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118 Popular virtue was also too far off the spectrum for the Owenite and Chartist G.J. Holyoake, but he nevertheless admired the Concordium’s aims and wrote in a review of The Healthian that he ‘may be an enthusiast who expects to reform mankind, but he fails in his first and most important duty who neglects to reform himself’.77 The forms that this ‘duty’ took during the decade multiplied notably after 1842, and Chartists and Owenites came to incorporate mesmerism, hydropathy, homeopathy, medical botany, and vegetarianism into their improvement culture. A crucial intellectual change was the emergence of ‘phreno-​mesmerism’. This marriage of phrenology to mesmerism unshackled Chartist thought from the rigid materialism of infidelism, undermining any wariness of ‘quackery’ and propelling a remarkable embrace of any ‘rationalist’ pseudo-​ science, medicine, or regime. Mesmeric theory was developed in the 1770s by Franz Anton Mesmer, a German physician resident in Paris, who posited that ‘Heavenly bodies, the Earth, and Animate Bodies’ were controlled by mechanical laws acting through a ‘universally distributed and continuous fluid’. As a consequence all matter and organic bodies possessed a mutual influence over one another (which was often popularly referred to as ‘animal magnetism’), which may sometimes lead to obstructions of the vital fluid which led to pathologies of the mind or body. Only mesmeric ‘operators’ could remove these blockages, through an arcane and fairly intimate treatment in which the operators ran their hands over the patients.78 Although mesmerism found popularity in pre-​Revolutionary France and soon spread across the continent and the United States, it was not until the prominent phrenologist John Elliotson advocated the theory and was forced to give up his professorship at the University of London that it received widespread attention in Britain.79 Initially this attention was overwhelmingly hostile, with Thomas Wakley and The Lancet attacking it unremittingly. Following this lead discussion of the theory in Chartist circles before 1843 was subdued and mixed. Cleave’s Penny Gazette printed in 1837 a serialised article taken from Fraser’s Magazine which argued the practice was a superstition more fitting for the age before the Reformation.80 Subsequently ‘animal magnetism’ appeared as the punchline of jokes and the front-​page satirical woodcuts, culminating in a lengthy article in 1841 on how the theory was ‘exploded’ by recent experiments which proved it ‘hocus-​pocus’.81 The Odd-​Fellow adopted a similar attitude, while Feargus O’Connor repeatedly utilised ‘animal magnetism’ as a jocular means of expressing trans-​Atlantic unity.82 One of the few positive references in this period was in John Watt’s pamphlet, where Elliotson was celebrated as a martyr.83 The Northern Star was generally ambivalent, although in 1841 it did report on an ‘extraordinary exhibition’ of mesmeric practice and noted its apparent rigour and openness.84 Interest in mesmerism was not new amongst the phrenologists read by Chartists, as Franz Gall had advocated the theory and Amariah Brigham argued that ‘no one will doubt’ that its therapeutics cured stomach complaints and nervous diseases.85 However, Radicals only seriously adopted

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Chartism’s improvement culture  119 mesmerism after Elliotson claimed to observe that the stimulation of certain regions of the brain on a patient in a mesmeric trance elicited certain behaviours. He was joined in 1842 by Dr William Engledue, who gave a lecture that advocated mesmerism and phrenology as proof of a theory of the mind and body governed by the same universal Newtonian laws.86 As a consequence Engledue was dismissed from the British Phrenological Association, but both men gained popularity amongst Chartists and Owenites for their iconoclasm and perceived martyrdom. Their status as two of the most prominent advocates of phrenology granted phreno-​mesmerism weight. Amongst working-​ class rationalists Engledue’s address became a celebrated statement of materialism, and James Watson published the speech along with a letter from Elliotson under the title Cerebral Physiology and Materialism at the end of 1842, which was sold by Cleave along with Hetherington and Heywood.87 The point at which most doubts would have been settled was when George Combe himself acknowledged mesmerism in the 1843 edition of The Constitution of Man. In his report on Heywood’s shop Reach singled out ‘the remedies of Professor Mesmer’ as one of the most prominent of the popular quackeries, underlining the rapid expansion of mesmerism’s popularity since 1842.88 After this point Cleave condemned how mesmerism’s introduction to Britain was met with ‘the language of abuse’ or ‘a smile of derisive doubt’, before claiming that it was ‘calculated to ameliorate many physical evils, and to throw some light upon the mode whereby moral evils are to be removed’.89 The biggest influence on Cleave was Elliotson and Engledue’s The Zoist: A Journal of Cerebral Physiology and Mesmerism, and Their Application to Human Welfare, which began publication in April 1843. This journal presented phrenology and mesmerism as a unified materialist science attacked by ‘that spirit of conservatism, the sworn foe of all progress and improvement, which is as apt to intrude itself into science as into politics, and with equally injurious results’.90 Two months after the first edition of The Zoist Cleave stated in his first article advocating mesmerism that the journal was ‘an exceedingly talented quarterly work’.91 He then proceeded over the following six weeks to serialise a history of mesmerism which had appeared in the first volume of The Zoist. He accompanied this with ‘The Mesmerists’s Gazette’, a running feature documenting experiments and demonstrations of mesmerism taken from Elliotson’s newly published Numerous Cases of Surgical Operation without Pain in the Mesmeric State.92 Following this the Star began regularly reporting on lectures and demonstrations, with one having ‘completely removed the doubts of your correspondent’.93 T.B. Smith toured Yorkshire that summer discussing mesmerism, while in London phreno-​mesmerism was a recurring topic at the City of London Political and Scientific Institute, a regular location for Chartist and Owenite meetings, as well as the South London Chartist Hall.94 William John Vernon, one of the Chartists arrested and imprisoned in 1848, was a phrenology lecturer and briefly the editor of The People’s Phrenological Journal before turning to phreno-​mesmerism in

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120 Popular virtue 1843 and establishing a Regent Street practice in 1845. James Williams from Sunderland was an Owenite and one of the Chartist prisoners of 1839, as well as a teetotaller, phreno-​mesmerist lecturer, and Land Plan subscriber.95 The Owenite lecturer and author James Napier Bailey’s advocacy of phreno-​ mesmerism coincided with his attempts to ally socialism with Chartism.96 Throughout the decade the Star advertised mesmerist publications, including Cleave and Watson’s. All of this accompanied the large number of Owenite lecturers who Holyoake reported had turned to extolling phrenology and mesmerism.97 Cleave was evidently drawn to mesmerism because of its potential for healthcare and popular self-​care. He gave as proof of his assertions that mesmerism was medically useful a long account of a leg amputation performed without pain on a mesmerised patient.98 Following this he became keen to encourage a demotic practice, by printing articles on the methods of mesmerising and de-​mesmerising and publishing an English translation of Joseph Phillipe Francis Deleuze’s Instruction Pratique sur le Magnétisme Animal, which he advertised in his Gazette and the Northern Star.99 Alongside this he published cautionary tales such as the story of a young baker in Glasgow who allowed ‘all and sundry’ to mesmerise him before falling into a solid ‘mesmeric sleep’ for two days until revived by a mesmeric lecturer.100 The Northern Star was also increasingly fascinated by the medical implications of the practice, reporting in detail on an operation on a squint performed under mesmerism, and on a lecturer in Tiverton who introduced ‘upwards of forty individuals’ who swore mesmerism had cured ‘chronic rheumatism, tic doloreux, palpitation of the heart, spinal complaints, paralysis, &c.’101 The development of phreno-​mesmerism and its acceptance amongst plebeian Radicals had important implications, due to the consequent dilution of phrenology’s materialism. Since it undermined phrenology’s atheist implications, phrenological theory and practices were part of the revival in the 1840s of spiritualist and idealist notions about God, the innateness of veneration, or intangible forces such as the ‘love-​spirit’ outlined by Greaves and his followers in the Concordium.102 It also helped fundamentally change how Radicals perceived themselves in relation to the medical establishment. In the 1830s the Chartist publishers largely shadowed Wakley and The Lancet, viewing him first as an ally in Parliament and then supporting his attempts to democratise medicine by disseminating professional knowledge.103 In the mid-​1840s these roles were taken by publications like The Phreno-​Magnet and The Zoist and by figures like Elliotson and Engledue. In part this shift was due to the pair’s successful self-​presentation as simultaneously popular martyrs and accredited medical experts. They were careful to pitch The Zoist to working-​class reformers as a legitimate, anti-​populist journal that nevertheless possessed an anti-​establishment and popular progressive tone, and its articles about vice, moral improvement, and governmental corruption were enthusiastically reprinted by Cleave in the English Chartist Circular.104 If Radicals now accepted phreno-​mesmerism as the new orthodoxy, then

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Chartism’s improvement culture  121 distinctions between orthodoxy and heterodoxy, materialism and spiritualism, and mechanism and vitalism were weakened. Just as phreno-​mesmerism provided a means of ‘naturalizing the supernatural’ then it also strengthened the claims of folkish vitalisms or humorisms to restore the body to equilibrium or purity by legitimising theories of circulating vital forces within the body.105 Most importantly, if the medical establishment was jaundiced against mesmerism then by implication many other heretical physicians or folk remedies were validated. Phreno-​mesmerism therefore opened the door for homeopathy, hydropathy, and botanic medicine to become aspects of working-​class counter-​ culture. All of these practices shared similar vague but fundamental vitalist notions, but importantly were easy methods for either aspiring professionals or self-​practice. Even for an alternate therapy homeopathy was remarkable for completely rejecting mainstream medicine, which homeopaths referred to dismissively as ‘allopathy’. Central to homeopathy was the belief that diseases could only be cured through the application of substances that produced similar effects as the disease’s symptoms, unlike the conventions of ‘allopathy’ which sought to apply drugs that removed the symptoms of diseases. One of homeopathy’s earliest and most prominent advocates was Dr John Epps, a Chartist, noted phrenologist, close friend of Lovett’s, and doctor for the pro-​ Chartist MP, Thomas Slingsby Duncombe. Epps’ exposition of homeopathy brought him the ire of the medical establishment, and like Elliotson he was attacked by Wakley through The Lancet. Despite being trained in Edinburgh Epps criticised the professionalisation of medicine, arguing that most common and effective medicines ‘were simply domestic remedies used by the common people long before the medical men recognised them’, and that the public had a right to ‘not be shut out from these benefits’.106 This attitude reflected the extent to which lapsed or martyred medical professionals were lionised by Radicals who saw then as underdogs fighting a corrupt establishment. In 1839 many rallied around him after a coroner’s report concluded that his patient had died due to his homeopathic treatments, and he went on to regularly lecture to Owenites and Chartists.107 Hydropathy or ‘the water-​ cure’ was invented by a Silesian peasant, Vincent Priessnitz, who believed that the application of water both internally and externally by a variety of means would return diseased bodies to a natural equilibrium. Cleave was once again a patron of the therapy, presenting it as an ancient and effective traditional medicine. In 1842 he reprinted Sir John Floyer’s Psychrolousia: or, the History of Cold-​bathing, both Ancient and Modern, which had been published in five editions between 1700 and 1722, claiming that despite being over a century old it outlined Priessnitz’s system. Floyer’s book was similarly used by the dietary reformer William Horsell in his Hydropathy for the People as a means of rooting Priessnitz in a medical tradition that stretched back to the ancient Greeks and Romans.108 In the same year William Strange published Priessnitz’s own Cold Water Cure and the man whose recent itinerant tours had driven hydropathy’s surge in

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122 Popular virtue popularity, Captain Claridge, published his first book.109 Cleave again saw in this theory the potential for demotic self-​care. Printed in exclamation at the beginning of the advert for Pyschrolousia was the line ‘Throw physic to the dogs’, a quote from Macbeth after Macbeth has been advised by his doctor that Lady Macbeth’s madness cannot be cured by medicines but only by herself. In March 1843 he published a lengthy editorial quoting from Claridge’s book, in which Cleave concluded:  ‘How beautiful in theory is that science which would teach us to regard nature as bestowing the means of renewing health, wherever it has caused the fountains to spring or the streams to run! How much more beautiful if perfectible in practice!’ He finished that people should not dismiss it at the ‘dicta of Professors and Members of Royal Colleges’ but instead examine it and judge it for themselves. To facilitate this he brought out The Cold Water Cure Tested! Or, the Hydropathic Treatment of Diseases Established, which he promised would not only cure a very long list of illnesses but could also be used to treat horses.110 The Cold Water Cure Tested! followed the familiar format of Cleave’s self-​care texts. It was relatively cheap at sixpence, was advertised as being devoid of jargon and was specifically targeted at working men ‘for if they lose their strength their wages cease’. In its review of this pamphlet the Northern Star claimed that ‘doctors, druggists and dispensing chemists’ were now redundant as ‘Hydropathy bids fair to rout them fairly from the field’.111 No matter how elaborate and idiosyncratic these systems were on paper, practitioners actively endorsed and explored the links between various theories, medicines and treatments. A  prominent London homeopath, Dr Joseph Graf von Viettinghoff, twice wrote to the progressive health journal The Pioneer to argue that any ‘remedial agent’, including mesmerism or water, was an effective cure as long as it was applied ‘in accordance with the same laws upon which homeopathy is established’.112 Epps was most associated with phrenology and homeopathy but also defended mesmerists and hydropaths as fellow ‘empirics’ who derived medical expertise from experience rather than scholarship. Exemplary of the sort of lay-​practitioners that Epps defended were Martha and Joseph Schellviettinghoff. Like Charles and Elizabeth Neesom, this couple were involved in the LDA before turning to moral improvement after 1840. In 1850 they were advertising their Homeopathic and Mesmeric Medical Establishment in Clerkenwell, and in 1861 Joseph treated Charles Neesom as he died.113 The Truth Seeker and Temperance Advocate and Journal of the Water Cure saw hydropathy as an integral part of teetotalism and also advocated vegetarianism.114 William Horsell published numerous journals and pamphlets on teetotalism, hydropathy, vegetarianism, and veganism, including the Truth Tester, which incorporated The Healthian and was replaced by TheVegetarian Advocate. In the same edition of The Reasoner in which he printed his funeral oration at Hetherington’s graveside, Holyoake advocated Horsell’s Cholera Prevented, by a Vegetarian Diet, in which he claimed that vegetarians survived the 1832 cholera epidemic in New York by ignoring medical advice to eat more meat.115 There were also

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Chartism’s improvement culture  123 grounds for hydropathy and homeopathy to be practised together. In his publication The Journal of Health and Disease Epps claimed that hydropathy ‘could be used with success’ if deployed according to ‘the homeopathic principle’.116 Hydropathic texts were hostile to the use of drugs, arguing that they caused rather than solved diseases and that water was the only natural cure, while homeopaths believed that extensive dilution of materials would unlock their ‘vital energy’ and improve their effectiveness on the body.117 T.B. Smith turned to mesmerism and in an article in the English Chartist Circular advocated vegetarianism since food mixes into the blood ‘and as that is the organ by which the mind acts, it being in disorder must produce an unhealthy state of the mind itself … Those who live mostly upon animal food and strong liquors, are generally gross, stupid, and brutal’.118 In Ancoats the Chartist Reverend James Scholefield was a teetotaller, vegetarian, and apothecary, one of the small but influential ‘Bible Christian’ community –​essentially primitive Christians who advocated rationalism and moral and physical improvement.119 The long and largely favourable discussion of various heterodox practices in the former O’Connorite Chartist John Skelton’s 1853 A Plea for the Botanic Practice of Medicine, published by Watson, illustrates the extent to which many practitioners of fringe medicines considered the various alternatives to be in dialogue with the others, even if they prioritised one system or theory as Skelton did with herbal remedies.120 By the late 1840s fringe medicine existed largely as a synthesised form of numerous different practices. Surveying these figures it is notable that they shared beliefs in teetotalism, or at least moderation, and their first interest in health surrounded the explosion in teetotal advocacy at the turn of the decade. On an intellectual level a shared ill-​defined vitalism allowed this easy permeability. Harriet Martineau’s autobiographical account of her mesmeric treatments illustrates that she believed it to be a ‘vital force’ which fortified ‘the principle of life itself’, a belief she likely picked up from her French copy of Deleuze’s book which opens with similar language.121 Epps similarly believed that the key to homoeopathy was the use of vital forces to restore natural equilibriums and functions, as did Cleave’s Water Cure Tested! and John Skelton’s Plea.122 Common to all of these theories of disease was the notion that it was caused by the breaking of natural laws. In Skelton’s words, since ‘all violation or transgression of the natural laws or conditions of health necessarily lead to suffering, wherever there is suffering or pain there also is disease’.123 It was equally the case that God provided within nature the means of rectifying pain, suffering and disease and re-​asserting natural law. Being ‘progressive, i.e. tending towards improvement’, mankind benefited from this experience, knowing as a consequence which laws not to break and how to remedy future illnesses. It was from the Chartism and Owenism of the 1840s that Skelton had adopted these notions.124 As Lovett had argued in 1840, ‘all have capacities for becoming intelligent, moral, and happy members of society; and if they are not, it is for want of their capacities being so properly cultivated, as to cause them to live in accordance with the physical laws of their nature, the

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124 Popular virtue social institutions of man, and the moral laws of God’.125 Similarly, William Channing argued that ‘a state of society which leaves the mass of men to be crushed and famished in soul by excessive toils on matter, is at war with God’s designs, and turns into means of bondage what was meant to free and expand the soul’.126 Whereas in the 1830s the distinction between nature and artifice was the basis for critiques of organised religion, politics and economics, in the 1840s nature and artifice became the basis for a host of politicised ethical lifestyles designed to overcome societal corruption. The point of the People’s Charter was to reform British politics so that it corresponded with natural law.127 To effectively agitate for this, the social and moral consequences of a society that contravened natural law needed to be remedied.

Conclusion The rise of medical heterodoxy in the mid-​nineteenth century has drawn comment from historians, variously rooting it in temperance, Methodism, or infidel culture.128 While John Harrison noted that motivations for advocating such practices likely varied widely, it is clear that by the early 1840s Chartists across the movement were beginning to unite a coherent practical and politicised culture of self-​care that saw bodily, mental, and moral health in unison.129 Intellectual influence alone does not explain the extent of the Chartist adaptation of medicine and popular science, and the fact that these beliefs came to the forefront of the movement in the 1839–​42 period is not a coincidence. Materialist and environmental theories of character formation removed all distinctions between public and private morality. A re-​reading of the progressive texts of the 1790s, in particular Volney and Godwin, presented a political strategy in which individual improvement would remove the conditions that allowed tyranny to function, thereby making Liberty inevitable. One indicator of this is the tone of militancy that remained in the addresses of the early 1840s, even though they emphasised improvement and de-​emphasised violence and insurrection. As an address from the Young Men’s Charter Association of Birmingham outlined, utilising the famous quote of Lafayette’s which recurred in the pages of the Chartist press during this period: ‘ “For a nation to be free it is sufficient that she wills it;” but she must WILL. Once concentrate into one combined phalanx the moral and intellectual powers of the mass, then soon they will be able to hurl into eternal oblivion a monopolising class representing oligarchy. Tyranny exists only be sufferance.’130 The point of improvement was to mobilise and organise a people whose disunity and impatience in 1839 had caused ruin. Importantly, this improvement was not limited to solely educational and autodidactic achievements. More than ‘an escape from the worker’s world’, improvement was about directly contesting the political and social corruptions which undermined any effective opposition to tyranny.131 This is why the amelioration of social problems was a concern shared by artisanal moralists like Lovett and

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Chartism’s improvement culture  125 figures like McDouall, a revolutionary whose base of support was within the industrial working class of Lancashire. The focus on health, environment, and diet simultaneously served as a critique of industrial labour, repetitive work, poor food, poor housing, and medical neglect. Through this the culture of moral improvement was a continuation of social Radicalism, and as the next chapter will argue was a major aspect of the Chartist Land Plan.

Notes 1 Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-​Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989), p. 261. 2 David Vincent, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom:  A  Study of Nineteenth-​ Century Working Class Autobiographies (London, 1981), Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–​1914 (Cambridge, 1989), Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working-​ Class Politicians, 1790–​ 1885 (London, 1977); Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (New Haven, 2013). 3 Jacques Rancieré, ‘The Myth of the Artisan: Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History’ International Labour andWorking-​Class History 24:3 (1983), pp. 1–​16, at p. 5; James Epstein, ‘ “Bred as a Mechanic”: Plebeian Intellectuals and Popular Politics in Early Nineteenth-​Century England’ in Leon Fink, Stephen T. Leonard, and Donald M. Reid (eds), Intellectuals and Public Life: Between Radicalism and Reform (Ithaca, 1996), pp. 53–​58. 4 Robert Hall, ‘A United People? Leaders and Followers in a Chartist Locality, 1838–​1848’ Journal of Social History 38 (2004), pp. 179–​203, at p. 193. 5 William Channing, Self-​ Culture:  An Address Introductory to the Franklin Lectures (London, 1839); William Marshall, William Godwin (London, 1984), p. 391. 6 Thomas Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper (London, 1872), p. 164. 7 Northern Star, 22 August 1840; 29 January 1842; 25 September 1842; 22 November 1845; 28 March 1846. 8 English Chartist Circular, Volume 1, No. 99. 9 Channing, Self-​Culture, p. 5. 10 William Ellory Channing, Memoir of William Ellery Channing, Volume 2 (Boston, 1860), p. 408. 11 Channing, Memoir, p. 411. 12 William E. Channing, Lectures on the Elevation of the Labouring Portion of the Community (Manchester, 1840), p. 6. 13 Channing, Self-​Culture, p. 11. 14 Northern Star, 18 April 1840. 15 David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–​1848 (Cambridge, 1982), p. 42. 16 Cooper, Life, p. 165. 17 Northern Star, 30 April 1842. 18 Paul Pickering, ‘Chartism and the “Trade of Agitation” in Early Victorian Britain’ History 76:247 (1991), pp. 221–​37.

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126 Popular virtue 19 Northern Star, 11 June 1842. 20 Northern Star, 28 May 1842. 21 Northern Star, 15 January 1842. 22 English Chartist Circular, Volume 1, No. 16. 23 National Vindicator, 1 December 1841. 24 English Chartist Circular, Volume 2, No. 90. 25 Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety, 17 March 1838. 26 The Teetotaller, 22 August 1840. 27 Chartist Circular, 1 January 1842. 28 Northern Star, 28 November 1840. 29 Chartist Circular, 1 January 1842. 30 English Chartist Circular, Volume 1, No. 103. 31 Northern Star, 28 November 1840. 32 Chartist Circular, 26 December 1840. 33 English Chartist Circular, Volume 1, No. 41. 34 National Vindicator, 13 November 1841. 35 M. Volney, The Ruins:  or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires, to which is added the Laws of Nature (London, 1833), p. 72. 36 Half-​Penny Magazine, 19 September 1840. 37 English Chartist Circular, Volume 1, Nos 37, 39. 38 Chartist Circular, 14 May 1842; English Chartist Circular, Volume 1, No. 24. 39 English Chartist Circular, Volume 1, No. 11. 40 John Francis Bray, Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedies (Leeds, 1839). 41 William Godwin, An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (Oxford, 2013), pp. 415–​16; English Chartist Circular, Volume 1, No. 41. 42 English Chartist Circular, Volume 1, No. 79. 43 English Chartist Circular, Volume 1, No. 35. 44 Logie Barow, ‘Why Were Most Medical Heretics at Their Most Confident Around the 1840s? (The Other Side of Mid-​ Victorian Medicine)’ in Roger French and Andrew Wear (eds), British Medicine in an Age of Reform (Abingdon, 1991), pp. 165–​85, at p. 182. 45 John Watts, Metaphysical Parallels; or, Arguments in Juxta-​ position for and against the Existence of God and the Immateriality and Immortality of the Soul, &c (London, 1842?), p. 6. 46 Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science:  Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Cambridge, 1984), p. 287; Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement, 31 October 1840. 47 Northern Star, 2 April 1842. 48 Cooper, Life, p.  169; Joseph McCabe, Life and Letters of George Jacob Holyoake, Volume 1 (London, 1908), p.  26; George Jacob Holyoake, Sixty Years an Agitators Life, Volume 1 (London, 1893), pp. 47–​9, 60–​8. 49 See for instance the advertisements in J. Green, The Emigrants:  A  Lecture Delivered in the Social Institution, Tarlton Street, Liverpool (Manchester, 1840). 50 Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter, Patient’s Progress: Doctors and Doctoring in 18th-​Century England (Cambridge, 1989); Steven King, A Fylde Country

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Chartism’s improvement culture  127 Practice: Medicine and Society in Lancashire, c.1760–​1840 (Lancaster, 2001), pp. 42–​58. 51 Northern Star, 27 October 1839. 52 James Morison, The Practical Proofs of the Soundness of the Hygeian System of Physiology… (New  York, 1832); Michael Brown, ‘Medicine, Quackery and the Free Market: The “War” Against Morison’s Pills and the Construction of the Medical Profession, c1830–​c1850’ in Mark S.R. Jenner and Patrick Wallis (eds), Medicine and the Market in England and its Colonies, c.1450–​c.1850 (New York, 2007). 53 Northern Star, 6 January 1838. 54 Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety, 28 October 1837. 55 Northern Star, 6 April 1839. 56 Odd Fellow, 6 August 1842. 57 Cleave’s Gazette of Variety, 19 January 1839. 58 Northern Star, 25 June 1842. 59 Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds), Medicine, Mortality and the Book Trade (London, 1998); P.S. Brown, ‘The Venders of Medicines Advertised in Eighteenth-​ Century Bath Newspapers’ Medical History 19:4 (1975), pp. 352–​ 69, and ‘Medicines Advertised in Eighteenth-​ Century Bath Newspapers’ Medical History 20:2 (1976), pp. 152–​68. 60 Dr P.M. McDouall, The People’s Medical Tract (London, 1841?), p. 3. 61 National Archives: HO 20/​10: Interview with William Benbow. 62 Roy Porter, Health for Sale:  Quackery in England 1660–​1850 (Manchester, 1989), p. 238. 63 McDouall, People’s Medical Tract, p. 7. 64 George Combe, The Constitution of Man Considered in Relation to External Objects (Edinburgh, 1835), p. 39. 65 R.K. Webb, ‘Southwood Smith: The Intellectual Sources of Public Service’ in Dorothy Porter and Roy Porter (eds), Doctors, Politics and Society: Historical Essays (Amsterdam, 1993), pp. 46–​80. 66 McDouall, People’s Medical Tract, p. 7. 67 Michael Flannery, ‘The Early Botanical Medical Movement as a Reflection of Life, Liberty, and Literacy in Jacksonian America’ Journal of the Medical Library Association 90 (2002), pp. 449–​ 50; Alison M. Denham, ‘Herbal Medicine in Nineteenth Century England:  The Career of John Skelton’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of York, 2013). 68 McDouall’s Chartist and Republican Journal, 3 July 1841. 69 Halfpenny Magazine, 9 May 1840. 70 National Association Gazette, 1 January 1842. 71 Vicesimus Knox, The Spirit of Despotism:  Dedicated to Lord Castlereagh (London, 1821). 72 English Chartist Circular, Volume 1, Nos 122, 95, 17; Chartist Circular, 18 April 1840. 73 Angus Bethune Reach, Manchester and the Textile Districts in 1849 (Helmshore, 1972), p. 30.

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128 Popular virtue 74 On Duncan, see James Gregory, The Poetry and the Politics: Radical Reform in Victorian England (London, 2014). For the TES see:  Malcolm Chase, ‘Exporting the Owenite Utopia: Thomas Powell and the Tropical Emigration Society’ in Noel Thompson and Chris Williams (eds), Robert Owen and his Legacy (Cardiff, 2011), pp. 198–​217. 75 J.E.M. Latham, Search for a New Eden:  James Pierrepoint Greaves (1877–​ 1842): The Sacred Socialist and his Followers (Madison, 2000). 76 Thomas Frost, Forty Years Recollections:  Literary and Political (London, 1880), pp. 40–​54. 77 Oracle of Reason, Volume 1, No. 43. 78 Alison Winter, Mesmerized:  Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain (London, 1998), pp. 1–​5. 79 Robert Darnton, Mesmerism and the End of the Enlightenment in France (London, 1968). 80 Cleave’s London Satirist and Gazette of Variety, 2, 9 December 1837; Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety, 16, 23, 30 December 1837. 81 Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement, 25 December 1841. 82 Northern Star, 15 September 1838. 83 Watts, Metaphysical Parallels, p. 10. 84 Northern Star, 18 September 1841. 85 Amariah Brigham, Remarks on the influence of mental cultivation and mental excitement upon health (London, 1839), p. 44. 86 Jennifer Ruth, ‘ “Gross Humbug” or “The Language of Truth”? The Case of the “Zoist” ’ Victorian Periodicals Review 32:4 (1999), pp. 299–​323. 87 Cerebral Physiology and Materialism:  With the Result of the Application of Animal Magnetism to the Cerebral Organs (London, 1842). 88 Reach, Manchester and the Textile Districts, p. 30. 89 Cleave’s Gazette of Variety, 10 June 1843. 90 The Zoist, No. I (April 1843). 91 Cleave’s Penny Gazette, 10 June 1843. 92 John Elliotson, Numerous Cases of Surgical Operation without Pain in the Mesmeric State (London, 1843). 93 Northern Star, 10 June 1843. 94 Northern Star, 8 July 1843; Northern Star, 5 August 1843. 95 Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science, pp. 298–​9; Northern Star, 8 July 1848; 24 July 1847. 96 Claeys, Citizens and Saints, pp. 233–​5. 97 The Reasoner, Volume 1 (1846), p. 11. 98 Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety, 17 June 1843. 99 J.P.F. Deleuze, Practical Instruction in Animal Magnetism, or, Mesmerism… (London, 1843). 100 Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety, 26 August 1843. 101 Northern Star, 21 October 1848. 102 Latham, Search for a New Eden, pp. 175–​6. 103 Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety, 8 September 1838. 104 Ruth, ‘Gross Humbug’; English Chartist Circular, Volume 3, No. 153.

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Chartism’s improvement culture  129 105 Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science, p. 267. 106 John Epps, Diary of the Late John Epps (London, 1877), p. 364. 107 The Weekly True Sun, 22 December 1839. 108 Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement, 4 June 1842. 109 Vincent Priessnitz, The Cold Water Cure: Its Principles, Theory, and Practice (London, 1842); R.T. Claridge, Hydropathy; Or The Cold Water Cure, as Practised by Vincent Priessnitz, at Graefenberg, Silesia (London, 1842). 110 The Cold Water Cure Tested! Or, the Hydropathic Treatment of Diseases Established (London, 1843). 111 Northern Star, 10 May 1843. 112 The Pioneer; and Weekly Record of Movements, 28 June 1851. 113 Chase, Chartism, p. 190. 114 The Truth Seeker and Temperance Advocate and Journal of the Water Cure. 115 The Reasoner, Volume 7, No. 9. 116 Epps, Diary, p. 364; The Journal of Health and Disease (August 1846). 117 The Healthian, Volume 1, No. 4 (March 1842). 118 English Chartist Circular, Volume 1, No. 35. 119 Owen Ashton and Paul Pickering, Friends of the People: Uneasy Radicals in the Age of the Chartists (London, 2002), pp. 101–​26. 120 John Skelton, A Plea for the Botanic Practice of Medicine (London, 1853). 121 Harriet Martineau, Letters on Mesmerism (London, 1845), p. 12; Deleuze, Practical Instruction, p. 9. This line appears as ‘le principe qui nous anime et nous fait vivre’ in the 1825 French edition –​a principle that animates us and makes us live. 122 Epps, Diary, p.  317; Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement, 30 September 1843; Skelton, Plea, p. 127. 123 Skelton, Plea, p. 12. 124 Denham, ‘Herbal Medicine’, p. 41. 125 William Lovett and John Collins, Chartism: A New Organization of the People (London, 1840), p. 67. 126 Channing, Lectures, p. 17. 127 Chartist Circular, 12 October 1839. 128 Ursula Miley and JohnV. Pickstone, ‘Medical Botany Around 1850: American Medicine in Industrial Britain’ in Roger Cooter (ed.), Studies in the History of Alternative Medicine (Oxford, 1988), pp. 139–​53; Barow, ‘Why Were Most Medical Heretics at Their Most Confident Around the 1840s?’; Ian A. Burney, ‘Medicine in the Age of Reform’ in Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–​1850 (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 163–​81. 129 J.F.C. Harrison, ‘Early Victorian Radicals and the Medical Fringe’ in W.F. Bynum and Roy Porter (eds), Medical Fringe and Medical Orthodoxy (London, 1987), pp. 198–​215. 130 English Chartist Circular, Volume 2, No. 62. 131 Rancieré, ‘The Myth of the Artisan’, p. 5.

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5 Communal self-​improvement after the ‘disasters of the Strike’

Although ethical Radicalism was initially elucidated as a response to the failure of the strategies of 1839, it became hegemonic within the movement after 1842 largely because of the constitutional, peaceful, and moral politics of electoral interventions and ‘home colonisation’ that became centrepieces of the NCA’s strategy.1 This chapter will outline how this was seriously challenged by the vast strikewaves of July and August 1842, in which thousands of workers largely in the Potteries and north west withdrew their labour initially in opposition to wage cuts but ultimately to demand the Charter. This conflicted with the leadership’s aversion to violence and favouring of peaceful constitutional political action after the events of 1840. As a consequence a conflict opened up between the national leadership and the movement’s body. Following the collapse of this militancy the field was open for Feargus O’Connor to implement the Land Plan –​an ambitious attempt to relocate the urban, industrial working class to rural smallholdings –​as both a centrepiece of this constitutional strategy and an attempt to address the social grievances made evident in the demands of the grassroots in 1842. The ideological and theoretical aspects of the Land Plan have been neglected and largely treated as under-​developed and ‘reactionary’. This chapter will outline how the Land Plan came to incorporate Chartism’s improvement culture, largely because of their shared basis in social Radicalism’s critique of industrial capitalism, societal degradation, and urban living conditions. As much as it was an attempt to relocate urban workers onto the land, the Land Plan also sought to provide for the working class autonomous spaces in which they could live ‘naturally’. As a consequence of this the Land Plan came to expound an ethos of improvement, while also playing an important role in the dissolution of progressive gender politics, moral heterodoxy, and festivity. An ascetic politics of everyday life focused on restoring men and their families to their natural state dominated the movement until the emergence of democratic socialism after 1848.

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Communal self-improvement  131

The 1842 strikewave After the steady release of the Chartist prisoners in 1840–​41 and the subsequent stabilisation of the movement with the formation of the NCA and assertion of its central role during the ‘New Move’ dispute, Chartism was returning to a position of strength yet faced difficult questions about how to progress. The general mood was for peaceful agitation and a cautious attitude towards the State. The period between 1840 and 1843 was one of intense discussion in how to build the movement over the long term and improve the people so as to combat the debilitating impact of the political and economic systems. The electoral strategy deployed in 1841 provided activists with few concrete political achievements, but nevertheless was an effective way of mobilising Chartists, which became a core strategy of the decade.2 In early 1842 the Complete Suffrage Union (CSU), a middle-​class Radical organisation led by the well-​respected abolitionist Joseph Sturge, sought an alliance with Chartism. This was met positively by a substantial number within the movement, but strongly resisted by O’Connor who feared the movement’s class basis and independence would be in jeopardy and declared the CSU to be ‘the most delusive form in which treachery has been as yet attempted’.3 Despite the at times violent nature of the dispute between O’Connor and those receptive to the CSU, the Chartist participants in the organisation’s first conference felt similarly, since they demanded that it accept not only all the points of the Charter but also the name.4 When that conference recessed until December, the NCA presented the second National Petition to Parliament. In preparation since November 1841, the final result was a remarkable 6 miles of paper consisting of 3,317,752 signatures that was delivered on 2 May by a grand demonstration of 50,000 workers who ‘paraded Chartism in open day, and brought us under the eye of the hitherto blind’.5 It was so large that when the march delivered it to Parliament, the doors to the Commons had to be removed so that it could be discussed.6 Almost immediately after its rejection O’Connor and the NCA were once again engaged in electoral politics, supporting Joseph Sturge as he stood in the Nottingham by-​election. This had been called because of excessive corruption during the 1841 election, when in the words of the visiting Peter McDouall the ‘two Whigs cut the end of their purses, and poured out the contents upon the streets’.7 A deal in May 1842 between the sitting Whigs and their Tory opponents, which would replace one Whig with one Tory without a contest, drew anger from constituents who felt disenfranchised.8 O’Connor’s interest in supporting a man he had been bitterly opposed to only the month before was consistent with both his electoral strategy, which sought to return pro-​Chartist MPs whenever possible, but also his commitment to demonstrating both the effective and independent power of Chartism and its ability to act in a peaceful and constitutional manner. Sturge narrowly lost after a remarkable campaign in which the local Chartists provided one half of his

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132 Popular virtue election committee and abandoned all of the customs traditionally associated with elections  –​including not only corruption but also violence, drinking, pageantry, feasting, and even flag-​waving and banner-​bearing.9 Afterwards the contest was immortalised in the Chartist press, and the ‘glorious minority of 1801’ were celebrated for stamping the contest ‘with a moral dignity which is unfortunately too rare in the history of elections’.10 Chartist associations regularly held meetings in the following weeks to thank Sturge but particularly the ‘liberal and unbought electors of Nottingham’.11 The English Chartist Circular celebrated the ‘formidable minority … who recorded their unbiased and unbought suffrages in favour of the man who advocates the adoption of the whole Charter’.12 O’Connor utilised his participation to emphasise not only his attachment to the constitution but also his personal moral probity and incorruptibility.13 Throughout the contest, independence, temperance, and humility were the virtues expected of individual Chartists, from the leaders to the body. While these events illustrate the commitment to legal, constitutional forms of agitation that retained working-​class political independence, the year would become marked by a contradiction within the movement between the cautious leadership and a far more militant grassroots. 1842 was also marked by a trade depression which gripped the whole country.14 The National Petition had reflected this with a list of social and economic grievances, ranging from the wages of industrial and agricultural workers, high taxation, the cost of the monarchy, the Poor Laws, and the long working day. As the text had warned, ‘unless immediate remedial measures by adopted, your petitioners fear the increasing distress of the people will lead to results fearful to contemplate’.15 Tensions had already been obvious from the trade disputes and strikes evident throughout the year, with a stone mason’s strike in London prominent during the spring and eliciting support from the English Chartist Circular.16 These only intensified as the year progressed. Strikes of coal miners in the Black Country in July invoked the support of a number of Chartists, including Thomas Cooper and Arthur O’Neill, the leader of the Birmingham Chartist Church, who had been denounced by O’Connor the previous year as a supposed ‘New Mover’.17 Over the course of July these strikes spread through the Potteries, where many workers were already idle due to the lack of coal, and then on to Lancashire and Yorkshire. By August, just as the Nottingham election was ending, the north was engulfed in numerous inter-​connected strikes which were united in their opposition not only to the wage reductions and lay-​offs that were being implemented by manufacturers during the depression, but also to the provisions of the Poor Laws, the high price of bread, payment in truck, and the long working hours.18 These grievances were translated once again into demands for intervention from Parliament, which in turn led to renewed impetus for political reform. Following the failure of the National Petition at the beginning of the year labour militancy was seen amongst the Chartist grassroots as one of the few liable means of eliciting a response from Parliament. By the end of July

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Communal self-improvement  133 and beginning of August, meetings were beginning to discuss the necessity of securing the Charter as a prerequisite of a ‘fair day’s wage’. It was likely after Richard Pilling, who would come to be known as the ‘father’ of the strike wave, explicitly called at a meeting in Dukinfield for the workers to ‘stop out, till they got a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work, and until the Charter became the law of the land’ that the Charter became generalised as a demand of all strikes.19 It was men like Pilling, an important leader of both the Chartists and his trade union in the area around Ashton-​under-​ Lyne, who motivated the politicisation of the strikes. The politicisation was therefore not a Chartist plot, but instead, as a Sheffield striker argued, arose from that fact that ‘four out of every five of the working classes’ were either Chartists or held Chartist principles, and therefore it was ‘impossible’ for a strike not to contain Chartists.20 This grassroots initiative proved problematic for the national leadership, who found themselves at the head of the sort of outburst of militancy they had sought to avoid since 1840. One cause of the leadership’s resulting ambivalence was a deep scepticism about the causes of the strikes. A belief expressed by O’Connor and much of the NCA Executive was that the strikes were actually an Anti-​Corn-​Law League (ACLL) plot.21 Factory owners did materially benefit from strikes in conditions such as those gripping the economy in 1842: low demand for goods and high cost of raw materials. Cutting wages could provoke a strike, which would remove all costs from unproductive factories. Some members and leaders of the ACLL hoped that if such a general rising occurred then the government would be forced to adopt free trade so as to flood the country with cheap food and return the strikers to work, and a resolution that was defeated at the ACLL conference in July proposed just such a strategy. Much was made of this fact by Chartists, and in particular the ACLL lecturer James Acland’s claim to O’Connor that either free trade or the Charter would be law by August because the masters were ‘planning on stopping all the mills on a given day’.22 By the middle of August the strikes had become increasingly political, confrontational, and were often accompanied by violence. Skirmishes with cavalry and riots were common, and politicians and newspapers began openly talking about the events as being ‘risings’ on a par with 1839 or the Swing riots of 1830. In response to this intensification the Chartist leadership warned the strikers that they were stepping into a trap, with Cleave’s English Chartist Circular detailing the evidence and hoping that ‘no Chartist will be entrapped into such evil company, and pray heaven to avert a second Peterloo!’23 The opposition within the pages of the Northern Star and the English Chartist Circular reflected the extent to which the NCA Executive were reactive and led by events. By coincidence the Executive was planning on holding its annual conference in Manchester in the middle of August, a key feature of which was to be the commemoration of Peterloo on the anniversary of the massacre, 16 August. The Executive was largely oblivious to the strikes as illustrated by the reaction of its secretary, John Campbell,

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134 Popular virtue as his London train pulled into Manchester:  ‘So soon as the City of Long Chimneys came in sight, and every chimney was beheld smokeless, Campbell’s face changed, and with an oath he said, “Not a single mill at work! something must come out of this, and something serious too!”.’24 This realisation did not, however, press the Executive into militancy. One historian of the strikes argues that despite the opposition of O’Connor those NCA leaders favouring industrial action ‘took the initiative’, with McDouall penning two powerful addresses that called for a national, total strike which demanded the Charter.25 In a narrative published in 1843 during his self-​imposed exile in France McDouall presented a different version of events, in which he was largely responsive to the will of the people. As he pointed out, he had been ‘against all strikes’ in previous speeches. Furthermore, since his release from prison he had ceased making the sort of exhortations to physical force he had been famous for in 1839. He recalled that the first of these addresses, entitled ‘To the People’, was amended after the trenchant opposition of William Hill, the editor of the Northern Star, and a small minority who were opposed to the strikes, believing them to be an ACLL plot.’26 McDouall along with O’Connor, who opposed the strikes, took on the task of amending the addresses, with O’Connor particularly keen to remove anything that could be construed as illegal. However when McDouall took the corrected proof to the printers he discovered that the original address had been disseminated and read to a trades’ meeting regardless. This, he wrote, ‘was melancholy proof of that indecision, want of union, and absence of all energy which characterised the chartist proceedings during the strike’.27 ‘To the People’ was a call for unity which firmly rooted the legitimacy of the ‘holiday’ in the labour theory of value.28 It also clearly instructed NCA delegates to support the strike, although it went into little detail and promised vaguely that ‘your cause will, in three days, be impelled onward by all the intellect we can summon to its aid’. It was also careful to encourage the strike to be peaceful and orderly. This tone was further pressed in the second address that day in which the Executive emphasised the extent to which events were forced upon them: ‘While we have not been the originators of, we are yet bold enough to say to those who adopt the oppressor’s remedy, stick to it rather than become tools of your own destruction.’ The address again specified the peaceful nature of the strikes: ‘We counsel you against waging warfare against recognised authority, while we believe the moral strength of a united people to be sufficiently powerful, when well directed, to overcome all the physical force that tyranny can summon to its aid.’29 The final, shortest address was even more tepid: That whilst the Chartist body did not originate the present cessation from labour, this conference of delegates from various parts of England, express their deep sympathy with their constituents, the working men now on

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Communal self-improvement  135 strike, and that we strongly approve the extension and continuance of their present struggle till the People’s Charter becomes a legislative enactment, and decided forthwith to issue an address to that effect, and pledge ourselves, on our return to our respective localities, to give a proper direction to the people’s efforts.30

The reluctant, defensive, and peaceful tone of these addresses is not surprising considering that the decision to support the strikes was, in McDouall’s account, arrived at in an entirely passive manner: ‘The question of having or not having a strike was already decided, because the strike had taken place: the question of making that strike political was also decided, because the trades had resolved, almost unanimously, to cease labour for the charter alone … What had we do to?’31 If the NCA opposed the strikes, he continued, the Chartist leadership would lose its legitimacy and self-​presentation as a democratic body. In particular there was a serious danger that if the Chartists did not act, then it would leave the ACLL, who McDouall believed most likely responsible for sowing the seeds of the strike, in complete control of events. Many leaders were nevertheless reluctant to commit to this position. According to one account O’Connor appeared frightened before the Executive meeting, but voted with the majority even though he opposed the prospect of violence. William Hill luridly outlined how he thought the workers would be massacred by artillery. G.J. Harney’s opposition to the strikes shocked Cooper, considering his Jacobinism in 1839. Harney’s argument was nevertheless consistent with his militancy, as he held that the people were in no way prepared or united enough for a fight with the army.32 From McDouall and O’Connor’s superficial support to Harney and Hill’s outright opposition, it is clear that the NCA conference declined a position of political leadership over the strikewave. This lack of any coherent and central leadership was made worse when the authorities began searching for the Executive, forcing many to flee Manchester. Hill’s opposition to the strikes meant that the Northern Star, the only other clear point of leadership, barely reported them. On 20 August it devoted its front pages to the Peterloo commemorations, and in an editorial reiterated that the strikes were an ACLL plot, reprinting in detail the evidence.33 O’Connor was in London, preoccupied with his attempt to get a daily Chartist newspaper, the Evening Star, into operation but besides this Cooper alleged that he ‘meant to do nothing in support of the strike, although he voted for it!’34 This had clear ramifications for regional Chartist bodies who were expecting instruction. A letter from Trowbridge in Wiltshire, a region of high activity in 1838 and 1839, complained ‘that there is no public body sitting, either in London or Manchester, to direct the movement … The men of this place want to strike’.35 Other chartists, however, began to accept the argument that the strikes were an ACLL plot and sought to de-​escalate them. At Birstal Chartists believed ‘that

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136 Popular virtue this reconsiderate and sectional strike is only a Corn Law plot to serve the designs of the masters, and to throw the Charter cause as much back as possible’. In Heckmondwike the strikes were ‘considered a plot of the League’, while in Dewsbury speakers warned the crowds of the dangers of ‘any attempt at a breach of the peace’.36 In some places this convinced labourers to return to work but in others, such as Carlisle, this caused Chartist bodies to split.37 When Harney made his case against striking to his constituency in Sheffield, which was divided on the issue, he was interrupted by cries of ‘Cut it short and run home’, and although he won the show of hands at the end of the meeting the atmosphere was muted.38 An angry letter signed by ‘An Old Chartist’ was sent to Bronterre O’Brien’s British Statesman, decrying that the people were ‘deluded, deceived, and abandoned’ by the leadership. The author continued that the entire Executive ‘ran away and left the complete machinery and arrangements like a self-​actor to do the work … the people are thoroughly disgusted with the conduct of O’Connor’, and claimed that when the Northern Star came out against the strikes it was ‘kicked about the Chartist room in Manchester’, and that in Oldham it was burned along with portraits of O’Connor.39 This disunity was so great that there were even reports of Chartists and strikers committing violence against one another. In August 1842 some of Oldham’s Chartists swore in as Special Constables, while a Chartist lecturer at Cleckheaton was ‘dashed on the ground’ after ‘doing all in his power to keep the excited mob from committing acts of violence’.40 By the end of August men began returning to work, many of them starved out and unable and unwilling to confront a mobilisation of the army which was greatly facilitated by the new railway connections. Those strikes that did resume in September were exclusively economic in nature. The State responded in the same vindictive spirit as in 1839, with 1,500 arrests made in the north west alone, with hundreds sentenced in York and Stafford. Dozens more arrested were to be tried in spring 1843, including almost all of the NCA Executive. While McDouall and his family fled to France, O’Connor stood trial in February 1843 with fifty-​eight others, each on nine different counts. The prosecution failed miserably, with the handful of men convicted never being called for sentencing. This was a major victory, especially considering that in earlier mass-​prosecutions for the 1842 risings the punishments had been harsh, and recently Cooper, O’Neil, and John Richards had been sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.41 As much capital was made of this as possible, with the trial transcript printed and sold, the centrepiece of which was Pilling’s elegant and intelligent defence speech. Pilling was on trial on the charge of conspiracy, serious not only because of its harsh sentences but also its ambiguous nature. He therefore had to argue that the strikes were political without being a political ‘plot’, a position he managed to navigate with some rhetorical skill. This rested on his opening argument that the political nature of the strikes was not authored by him but by Parliament’s refusal to ‘redress our grievances’.42 As a consequence the strikes were for the Charter

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Communal self-improvement  137 because economic and political questions were admixed, but not because of any deliberate strategy of fermenting a general rising. Pilling had been arrested in 1839 and charged along with other Chartists from Stockport, although he was ultimately acquitted. In a speech in May of that year which he was aware was being watched by spies, he said that he hoped the ‘working people will stand by the convention to obtain the Charter, morally if they can’, before euphemistically referring to arms while making clear that he was not explicitly recommending them. He more clearly recommended ulterior measures once the Petition was rejected.43 The 1843 trial is important for illustrating the shift that had occurred in the framing of Chartist strategy and discourse. In 1839 Chartist defences tended to revolve around the constitutional right to meet, protest, and bear arms.44 The defences in 1843 tended to focus instead on a more intensely emotive and domestic discourse which overwhelmed legal arguments with affective appeals, most exemplified by Pilling’s discussion of his own family: My Lord, and gentlemen of the jury, it was then a hard case for me to support myself and family. My eldest son but one, who was sixteen years of age, had fallen into a consumption last Easter and left his work. We were then reduced to 9 ¾ d a cut, which brought out earnings down to something like sixteen shillings a week. This is all I had to live on, with my nine in family, three shillings a week going out of that for rent, and a sick son lying helpless before me. I have gone home and seen that son –​[here Pilling was moved to tears, and unable to proceed for some time.] I have seen that son lying on a sick bed and dying pillow, and having nothing to eat but potatoes and salt. Now, gentlemen of the jury, just put yourself in this situation, and ask yourselves whether seeing a sick son that had worked twelve hours a day for six years, in a factory –​a good and industrious lad –​I ask you, gentlemen, how you would feel if you saw your son lying on a sick bed and dying pillow, with neither medical aid, nor any of the common necessaries of life? –​Yea, I recollect some one going to a gentleman’s house in Ashton, to ask for a bottle of wine for him; and it was said, ‘Oh, he is a chartist, he must have none.’ [Great sensation in court].45

This invocation of family and masculine duty was mirrored by other defendants. Albert Wolfenden, also from Ashton, said that owing to the large family he was responsible for ‘I should think myself unworthy of the name of man’ if he jeopardised their welfare by engaging in conspiracy or violence. He concluded by pointing out that the only ‘agitation’ of a ‘violent character’ came from the special constables.46 Like the Nottingham election, the aftermath of the strikes came to emphasise individual character and masculine responsibility and probity. This was reiterated by the testimony of Jonathon Bairstow, a young Chartist from the West Riding who had been active since 1839. The working class, he argued, ‘desire no blessings as a class, but those that proceed from the supreme providence

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138 Popular virtue and labour of our hands; and if we have an interest in any thing, it is cultivating industry, fostering enterprise, giving additional elasticity to commerce, and striving to inculcate on the present and rising generation a strict love of justice, morality and virtue’.47 This followed rhetoric also evident during the strikes themselves. On 13 August, the Northern Star described miners as ‘entombed alive’ for ‘half their mortal career’. Because of this their ‘zest for the pleasures of domestic comfort [is] diminished, in fact the system to which they are inured, completely unmans them, and they are gradually degenerate from the human to the brute species, if not in form, yet in habit’.48 The chair at a meeting of turnouts in Manchester told the crowd:  ‘as a working man, and a power-​loom weaver, he would rather die than go to work, until he had a far renumeration for his labour. His was not a solitary case. He had three children and a wife. He dare not go home; for if he did, these children world ask him for bread, and he had none to give them; and he was sure that thousands of those who now heard him were in the same condition. (Loud cries of “Yes, we are”).’49 The emotive discourse of patriarchal domesticity that surrounded the 1842 strikes reflected the wider emphasise upon masculine character and morality that had encompassed the movement’s culture by 1842. The ideological nature of this overwhelming emphasis on male moral responsibility is underscored by the fact that witnesses recalled ‘thousands’ of women workers amongst the turnouts, yet these only figured in Chartist depictions of the strikewave as starving wives and mothers, not as fellow strikers or activists.50 While this aspect of the strikes was therefore consistent with the wider changes within Chartism, the militancy was not. The trial was significant as an opportunity for the leadership to draw a firm dividing line between the movement’s future and its association with physical force and insurrectionary politics. O’Connor presented the victory in the trial not only as a narrow escape from an ACLL trap, but also proof of Chartism’s constitutional and peaceful nature. The first pages of the trial report, published by Heywood and Cleave, contained a portrait of the judge, Baron Rolfe, who was celebrated throughout the text for upholding the constitution. In the preface written by O’Connor and addressed to Rolfe, O’Connor made an important public commitment: Anxious to push the principles contained in the People’s Charter by all the zeal and energy I possess, and considering myself constitutionally entitled to do so, provided I  should not violate the law, I  have nevertheless been constrained upon many occasions to fall short of my duty to my party from a conviction that the law would be strained against me. You, however, have prescribed the exact limits by which agitation should be bound, and beyond these limits I will never stray; and I feel satisfied that I may include the leaders of the Chartist party in this bond and covenant.51

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Communal self-improvement  139 This was a clear public promise to keep Chartist agitation constitutional in return for an end to its repression. The leadership’s rejection of labour militancy as a political weapon marked the complete abandonment of the arsenal of physical force bequeathed to it by earlier Radical agitations. However, with another national petition likely to be ignored and the next general election possibly as far away as 1848 there were few purely political constitutional strategies left. Compounding this was the fact, evident from the events of 1842, that the Chartist grassroots demanded far more immediate solutions to their social and economic grievances. This predicament for the NCA occurred during the same period that many activists, including many within the NCA and close to O’Connor, turned towards various forms of social and moral improvement as one way of maintaining the momentum towards political reform and social progress. O’Connor’s solution to all of these problems was the ‘Land Plan’. Land reform had been central to his thought since 1840, when he began writing a pamphlet from prison that advocated the land as ‘the only remedy for national poverty and impending national ruin’.52 There had been little scope for this to become the centrepiece of Chartist politics until 1843, when it was not only clear that no form of insurrection would work but also that Chartism needed both a social and political programme to retain its base. In November of that year O’Connor wrote that the ‘disasters of the Strike paralysed the Chartist body’ and threatened an exodus of Chartists into the ranks of the ACLL and CSU.53 In the introduction to the transcripts of the trial O’Connor made clear that the Land Plan was the only solution to the void that had opened within Chartist strategy: ‘I do not think that I could select a more fitting opportunity than the present for briefly submitting my reasons for preferring the small farm system to the present factory system, as a means of insuring a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work, and which, after all, is the aim and end of the People’s Charter.’54 His plans for land reform provided a constitutional, peaceful, and non-​confrontational means of pursuing the objectives of the Charter. When adopted by the NCA it became the focal point of the movement, pitched as a solution for the social and wider existential problems with urban, industrial life and labour that the trade depression and strikes had thrown into sharp focus. In attempting to solve these problems the Land Plan is notable for drawing on the same intellectual and counter-​cultural tenets as the ethical Radicalism that had developed across Chartism after 1840. While it was intended as a political and social project that would solve political and social problems, the Land Plan became a systematic attempt to overcome moral degradation and improve society through individual improvement. The Land Plan managed to channel social and economic grievances, in particular the moral critique of capitalism and the aristocracy, into a direction compatible with peaceful moral politics.

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The Land Plan and ethical Radicalism The emphasis of this constitutional moral politics was the ‘Land Plan’. Many British Radicals of the period since the French Revolution had considered land ownership a crucial aspect of both their critique of society and their political programmes. Thomas Paine in his pamphlet Agrarian Justice advocated a property tax that would be redistributed to non-​landowners in the form of a universal basic income, while land socialisation had been a major part of Thomas Spence’s politics and remained a key part of Spencianism after the war years.55 During the early 1840s there was a revival of interest in schemes to establish Radical communities upon the land. ‘Home colonisation’ was an important aspect of Owenism in the early 1830s and a prominent Owenite community named ‘Harmony Hall’ was established in Hampshire in 1839, wherein everything was communalised, including childcare, domestic work, and the agricultural work on the surrounding estate.56 Land reform was therefore not an alien or irrelevant concept to Chartists when O’Connor turned to it in 1840 at the beginning of a revival of interest in ‘back to the Land’ schemes, which included not only Harmony Hall but also the Concordium and the TES, the ambitious attempt to form a communist society in Venezuela. Nominally, this community would utilise the machinery of Johann Etzler, a German-​American inventor whose designs proposed to abolish labour and form a fully automated communist society.57 John Cleave became one of the chief proponents of Etzler’s scheme, publishing, selling, and advertising his books and extolling his projects such as the ‘naval automaton’, a self-​propelled boat that in practice sank in the Thames, nearly drowning Etzler’s friend and patron Conrad Stollmeyer.58 Another was the Welsh Owenite and Chartist Thomas Powell. Powell was in the London Co-​operative Trading Association with Lovett and Watson, lived with Lovett for a period, and toured Wales with Henry Hetherington in 1837. After being arrested and imprisoned for his part in a riot in Llanidloes in 1839, by 1844 he chiefly advocated the TES and was one of the editors of its journal, the Morning Star, which for a period was published by Hetherington.59 Just as Cleave publicised the TES while also supporting the Land Plan, other links were evident between these projects; Etzler was resident at the Concordium for a period, and Thomas Frost reported that many of the community’s members moved on to join the TES.60 The Land Plan therefore came into being as part of this broader interest which Frost reported appealed to ‘Chartist-​socialists’ disillusioned by the failure of the National Petition and the strikes.61 It was not until 1843 that O’Connor finally had the scope to pursue land reform as a Chartist project, when the failure of the 1842 Petition and the defeat of the strike wave opened its viability to jaded Chartists. Initial attempts to register the NCA as a friendly society which could legally buy and sell land failed. Illustrative of how fundamental the Land Plan was seen to the movement is the fact that the 1843 Chartist convention went to the remarkable step of stripping all mention of the Charter from the organisation in order to facilitate this

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Communal self-improvement  141 process. This was reverted in 1844 and the ‘Chartist Co-​operative Land Company’ was founded in 1846, soon renamed the ‘National Co-​operative Land Company’. At its peak 70,000 people in 600 branches subscribed to the scheme, but only a tiny number of these were ever resettled before the Company was wound up in 1851, following a Select Committee ruling that the scheme actually functioned as a lottery and was therefore illegal. Less interest was shown in the TES, although with numerous publications, considerable popular interest and 1,557 shareholders representing 7,000 people when their families were included it was hardly a fringe scheme.62 The Land Plan sought to create communities of smallholders, who would reside in a cottage and work a small plot of land. These were selected from the tens of thousands of individual shareholders who were entered into a ballot for 4, 3, or 2 acres depending on the size of their share. The land was then cleared, roads and drainage implemented, cottages erected, and cash loans granted to those allotted land, who would then pay back this loan through rent charged to the company. This was wholeheartedly an attempt to distribute land to individuals rather than socialising it, despite the notions of critics like Alexander Somerville who saw this as a backdoor means of nationalising land and confiscating private property.63 If anything, O’Connor’s scheme put a brake on such proposals and encouraged Chartists to anticipate becoming property owners. The Land Plan was also not an attempt to utilise industrial machinery or methods to make agricultural produced easier and less labour-​ intensive. O’Connor (following both Robert Owen and William Cobbett) sought to demonstrate the efficiency of spade husbandry within small acreages worked by families, rather than the mechanised methods used by large farms. These methods were shared by Harmony Hall, the Concordium, and even in practice the TES, a necessity since Etlzer’s machines had not been built and would never have worked anyway. In O’Connor’s scheme the creation of numerous smallholders would prove the obsolescence of primogeniture, which he viewed as the cause of the large estates that in turn allowed the formation of the large farms run by tenant farmers. The other main objective of the plan was the rebalancing of the labour market. The intended mass-​ migration of urban workers to the countryside would deplete the population of surplus labour in industrial regions, forcing wages to set at their ‘natural’ level. If the resettled labourers produced not only subsistence but also annual profits at local markets, then urban wages would have to rise to take account of this alongside the new labour scarcity. The Land Plan’s objective was therefore to return labour and property markets to their ‘natural’ state.64 This was fundamentally a moral critique of industrial capitalism, for which was proposed an idealised moral solution. O’Connor was heavily influenced by Owenite thought from his partnership with Thomas Martin Wheeler. Wheeler was a London schoolteacher and Owenite who had participated in the 1839 Chartist Convention, before becoming the Northern Star’s London correspondent and an NCA executive. His biographer claimed that he ‘may be said to have been almost, if not entirely, the originator’ of the scheme

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142 Popular virtue and that he probably co-​authored O’Connor’s On the Management of Small Farms.65 Through Wheeler the movement’s moralism was deeply rooted in the distinction between nature and artifice core to plebeian intellectualism, although O’Connor also subscribed to similar thinking.66 In his earliest pamphlet written independently of Wheeler O’Connor wrote that ‘Nature’s field’ was the ‘only means whereby in this world [the poor] can live upon their labour, their health, and their industry, which are their resources … freed from more artificial constraint than is absolutely necessary for the existing state of society’.67 This notion of the Plan as the solution for the ‘artificial state of the labour market’ recurred frequently in writings from working-​ class correspondents in the Northern Star.68 The appeal of this critical thrust was its familiarity, since the nature/​artifice distinction was not only core to Radical moral philosophy but also its political economy. The anti-​capitalism of the 1830s popularised the notion that labour was the natural source of all wealth, and that artificial forms of property relations such as taxes, rent, and profit essentially stole ‘surplus value’ from the producers.69 This analysis can be reduced to a simple but commonly held distinction between natural laws, which produced in abundance, and artificial laws, which extracted wealth for a very few. This thinking amongst Radical political economists led to a popular understanding of exploitation as being due to force and fraud, later criticised by Engels as ‘simply an application of morality to economics’.70 The Land Plan was clearly part of this wider, pre-​Marxist moral critique of capitalism, and in that sense was part of the numerous moral solutions to social grievances outlined in the previous chapter. From the outset, O’Connor explicitly presented the Land Plan as a Chartist response to not only industrial wage labour but also political economy more generally. The introduction to the Trial of Feargus O’Connor was mainly a lengthy exposition of the Land Plan, in which he stated that the free market in labour failed to provide new opportunities for surplus labour, a fact which contradicted the doctrines ‘so pompously relied upon by political economists’. His plan was therefore to provide agricultural land to workers otherwise rendered surplus by the ‘artificial market’.71 Unlike figures like William Thompson, this did not advocate an erosion of the distinction between industrial labourers and capitalists by those labourers receiving the full value of the products of their labour. It also did not advocate utilising machinery to shorten the working week or day, a familiar argument in the 1830s, and it rejected those schemes that sought to hold land or property in common.72 Nevertheless, the Land Plan shared with these anti-​capitalisms the imperative to contest modern industrial capitalism through a return to ‘natural’ laws and the social relations produced by living by those laws. It was reactionary in the (not necessarily pejorative) sense that it sought to ‘roll back the wheel of history’ by envisioning these ‘natural’ social relations in terms of agrarian-​ based small units of production utilising family labour, a form of production which was disappearing in Britain.73 Importantly, a key aspect of this

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Communal self-improvement  143 nature/​artifice distinction was the way that artifice corrupted individual health and character, and therefore the Land Plan came to advocate the same political culture which O’Connor had initially attacked as the ‘New Move’.74 It is not surprising then that one of the most prominent early supporters of the Land Plan was Cleave’s English Chartist Circular, where O’Connor wrote numerous essays on the land and one correspondent succinctly outlined the Land Plan’s critique of capitalism: ‘the system as it is in reality, working only for the benefit of a mere crafty monopolizing section of the community, producing them princely fortunes; enabling them to erect superb mansions and maintain costly establishments; and all at the price of your liberty, your morals, your health, nay, your very existence –​it is bad.’75 This cleared the path for moral improvement politics to become hegemonic within the movement. The main vehicle for this process was Chartism’s rich literary culture. Chartist print culture was mobilised to propagate the Land Plan and drive home the contrast between the immorality of artificial society and the innate morality of society organised according to natural laws. The Labourer, edited by Ernest Jones, a young aristocratic poet who was drawn into Chartism in 1846 and quickly became O’Connor’s lieutenant, was a weekly magazine of prose, poetry, and serialisations founded in 1847, in which a recurring theme was the land. One of Jones’s most famous early Chartist works was his poem ‘The Factory Town’.76 Jones’s factory town was a bleak, Dante-​esque seen of hellish torture, where in a permanent night ‘man’s volcanoes never rest’ and workers and machinery stand ‘side by side in deadly strife’. Within this there existed no subjectivity, individuality, or agency for workers, since ‘red Mammon’s hand was robbing/​God’s thought-​treasure from their brain!’ This intellectual alienation was one component of a more fundamental alienation of labourers from their humanity: Yet the master proudly shows To foreign strangers factory scenes: ‘These are men –​and engines those –​’ ‘I see nothing but –​machines!’

This was not isolated to Land Plan propaganda but was a recurring motif in Chartist improvement tracts. William Channing’s Lectures on the Elevation of the Labouring Portion of the Community argued that labourers needed to understand ‘his importance as an individual … He is not a mere part of a machine … He is not simply a means, but an end’.77 However, the Land Plan posited the return to the land as the means of ending alienation, setting humanity free and back on its path to progress. For Jones, this would be secured only when workers rose up and ‘broke the chains of your own fear’. Reflecting on this poem Anne Janowitz has emphasised Jones’s role in transmuting ‘custom-​based communitarian poetry’ into an industrial, class-​based

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144 Popular virtue poetics of solidarity, in which subjectivity could only be resumed through liberation by the working class’s own agency.78 The character of this liberation is important to note. Once resettled onto the land the people would destroy all artifice: And flowers will grow in blooming-​time, Where prison-​doors their jarring cease: For liberty will banish crime –​ Contentment is the best Police.

So too would the ‘palaces … moulder’ as the ‘nations, growing older’ would be too ‘wise for royal toys’. The nobility and army would similarly disappear, with arms ‘converted into hoe and spade’. Art and international trade, no longer captured by the elite, would flourish. The settlement of the land and the destruction of the factory system would usher in a period of progressive improvement as the nation returned to its natural state, under labourers guided by ‘God and Nature’. Therefore while Jones may represent the point at which Chartist poetry and its wider political culture had come to represent Chartism and labour primarily in industrial terms, this was nevertheless presented within a more traditional Radical moralism that rested on the nature/​artifice distinction. Industrial society needed to be eclipsed for individuals to be free, because they could only be free if they lived according to nature’s laws. The imagined natural state of the Land Plan was resolutely patriarchal, and it did not share any of the heterodox notions about gender or sexuality which characterised Owenism and the early stages of Chartism. One of the clearest points of distinction between the Land Plan and the TES is the way that the latter sought to ‘emancipate the weaker from the stronger sex’, with proposals even being discussed for the Society’s elected officers to always be at least one-​third women.79 O’Connor and Land Plan proponents instead outlined how the system of ‘artifice’ perverted the family in various means. Women’s labour meant that ‘the house loses its greatest ornament, and the family its greatest support, the children being deprived of their natural and most interested protector and adviser just at that time when they stand most in need of a mother’s care’. What could be more degrading than a husband taking ‘the babe to the charnel house at stated periods, to be suckled by its toiling mother?’ Married couples were debased ‘by reversing their natural positions’, inviting disunion between them and corrupting their children.80 This was fictionalised in The Labourer in ‘The Charter and the Land’, the story of William and Betsy Wright, a couple from Stockport. William was fired for his participation during the 1842 strikes, leading him into alcoholism and disappointing his nagging, anti-​Chartist wife. He was reformed by the establishment of the Land Plan, which gave him enough hope to cease drinking and use the money instead for a subscription. The family’s eventual

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Communal self-improvement  145

Figure 6  ‘The English Town’, drawing by Ernest Jones c. 1848. Sketched during his imprisonment, this image gives a sense of the degradation, demoralisation, and alienation Chartists perceived as dominating the life of the factory proletariat. relocation to an allotment not only elevates their social position but restores William’s control over his wife and children and fatally undermines her anti-​ Chartism. The story ends with the family relaxed and optimistic now that they have been returned to their natural division of labour. Only in this patriarchal smallholding, it is made clear, can each family member act as a human rather than an automaton.81 Similarly Wheeler’s novel Sunshine and Shadow, which was serialised in the Northern Star in 1849–​50, advocated the Land Plan settlements as the

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Figure 7  ‘The Grecian City’, drawing by Ernest Jones c. 1848. By contrast, a Republican idyll that abolished urban and industrial misery was possible. solution to industrial labour and urban living conditions, and their resulting crises of masculinity and domesticity. Sunshine and Shadow was a proletarianisation of the Bildungsroman, the coming-​of-​age genre common to Victorian realist fiction, intended as a moral guide for young Chartists.82 The protagonist, Arthur Morton, was a working-​class perennial underdog, in part due to his childhood as an orphan but mainly because of his consistent advocacy from 1839 onwards of physical force Chartism. As Jutta Schwarzkopf has outlined, Arthur’s marriage to Mary is resolutely patriarchal and collapses the novel’s realist aspirations, instead venerating a highly patriarchal notion of domesticity with clearly demarcated gender roles.83 Although when

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Communal self-improvement  147 the pair meet Mary is a Chartist activist and speaker, this becomes improper once they are married, and in a transition that mirrors reality for Chartist women over the course of the 1840s she withdraws from organised politics. The treatment of Mary undercuts the radical potential of Wheeler’s critique of middle-​class marriage relations early in the novel, where he depicts Arthur’s childhood sweetheart being married off to a titled colonial governor by her brother, who is also complicit in the rape which ensures their engagement. This artificial and corrupt form of ‘love’ is directly contrasted with its natural state in a working-​class cottage, where in the family’s perfect form benign male control is assured. O’Connor was explicit on this matter. In contrast to male industrial workers, the ‘free labourer’ of the Land Plan possessed numerous liberties defined by his relation to his family: If he should be overworked, or even drowsy, he dreads not the awful sound of the morning toll of the factory bell. He is not deprived of the comfort of the society of his wife; he is not degraded by living as a prostitute upon her and his children’s labour. He is not reduced to the humiliating necessity of shaking his slumbering babe into a kind of artificial life, in order that she may obey the capitalist’s morning summons.84

This was not just a consequence of O’Connor’s paternalism but was shared by Wheeler, as expressed in one of his earliest statements extolling the Land Plan: The order of nature is at present entirely reversed. The mother, whose duty it is to attend to the affairs of her household, and the education of her children, is constrained to toil from twelve to fourteen hours a day in a nauseous and unearthly cotton mill, or, more properly speaking, a wholesale slaughterhouse. There the child of thirteen years of age is compelled to labour the same number of hours as the mother, while the father, who is destined by the Author of the universe to watch over and protect the interests of his family, is compelled to walk the streets an unwilling idler, living by the sacrifice of those whom he holds most dear.85

In Sunshine and Shadow a period of unemployment ruptures Arthur and Mary’s domestic bliss, with Mary thinking Arthur was ‘no longer the perfect being her young heart had worshipped’, and the family move from their cottage to a poor quality home in Chelsea. Their roles are subsequently inverted with Mary seeking work and money and Arthur staying at home to look after the children. This state of artifice strains both, with Mary collapsing from the work, and Arthur’s isolation and introversion ‘endanger[ing] the sanity of his intellect’.86 Men and women who had been tainted by the factory system

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148 Popular virtue needed, for the sake of their moral, mental, and physical health, to return to a natural state of clearly defined gender roles. At its basis this required male control of his own labour. This was a position which would have appealed to the factory operatives active during the strikewave whose testimony during the 1843 trial make clear their anxieties about matters of gender and sexuality. As Richard Pilling, who would go on to become a strong supporter of the Land Plan, stated during his famed defence speech: I have seen husbands carrying their children to the mill to be suckled by their mothers, and carrying their wives’ breakfasts to them. I  have seen this in Bradshaw’s mills, where females are employed instead of men … One female requested most earnestly that her husband might be allowed to go and work alongside of her, but she was refused … In consequence of females being employed under these circumstances, the overlooked, managers, and other tools, take most scandalous liberties with them. If I were to detail to you what I have seen myself done by men of that description you would not be astonished that fathers and husbands should have a feeling for factory operatives –​you would not be astonished at any one endeavouring to reform the system.87

O’Connor argued in the introduction to the Trial that one of the core evils of the industrial capitalism was ‘the stern virtue of your wives and daughters is the only guarantee you have for their protection’.88 The invocations for women to become activists outside of the home and the advocacy of ‘moral marriages’ and other forms of sexual liberty in the 1830s were no longer an aspect of Chartism. Men like Pilling instead sought the tightening of patriarchal control not only to end the sexual coercion of women but also, as the first lines make clear, to restore natural gender roles. This sort of reaction against female wage labour was a core rather than incidental aspect of the Land Plan. As O’Connor explicitly stated in a speech from the steps of the community schoolhouse in O’Connorville, the foremost of the Land Plan settlements, ‘this is a portion of a great feature of my plan to give the found wife back to her husband, and the innocent babe back to its fond mother’.89 The Land Plan’s politics of nature and artifice saw procreation as the only natural end of sex, non-​domestic or waged female labour as artificial, and held that men possessed natural suzerainty over their families. As Chase notes, the Land Plan was a ‘key part’ of the rolling-​back of autonomous female participation that marked early Chartism.90 The assertion of patriarchal control over the nuclear family was not just incidental to the Land Plan, but integral to its opposition to industrial capitalism and theory of human agency and emancipation.

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Food and health in the Land Plan Patriarchal familial relations were to be the environment in which the minutiae of everyday life were to be politicised and reformed, returning individuals to nature and with that reforming society. Reflecting Cleave and Vincent’s description of the ‘little Republic of the home’ in their teetotal pledge, O’Connor defined the ‘free labourer’ as ‘a Socialist in the true acceptation of the word, fitting things to that small society of which he is the head’.91 Whereas they differed on conceptualisations of sexuality and gender relations, health, temperance, and diet were points of convergence for the Land Plan, the TES, Harmony Hall, and the Concordium. The newspaper of the TES, the Morning Star, was initially edited by the vegetarian poet James Emslie Duncan. Etzler and Stollmeyer were also both vegetarians, and consequently TES propaganda had a strong tone of temperance and dietary reform. Nevertheless, unlike the Concordium the TES did not put forward vegetarianism as a mandatory or exclusive diet, and the Morning Star printed articles on the abundance of cheap fish and meat in Venezuela alongside expositions of the virtue of breadfruit, a tropical staple. This mirrored the quotidian nature of much Land Plan propaganda. John Sillett was a Sussex smallholder who authored popular texts on agricultural matters. When he appeared as a witness for the parliamentary Select Committee that scrutinised the National Land Company O’Connor (after 1847 the MP for Nottingham) repeatedly drew from him evidence about the good health, diet, and happiness of him and his family since he had moved to the countryside. Proof of this was the fact that Sillett’s family drank milk every morning and evening and ate a meal of meat and vegetables for dinner. This testimony was subsequently published in a pamphlet by James Watson and Abel Heywood.92 Supposedly ‘natural’ peasant diets were often invoked by vegetarians as proof of the virtue of little or no meat, but this argument was also evident amongst omnivores.93 A  correspondent from Harmony Hall wrote in the Northern Star that they ate a ‘plain, simple diet at regular intervals’, with those who ate animal food taking it three times a week, along with a profusion of garden vegetables ‘of very superior kinds’, milk, eggs, bread, butter, and tea and coffee.94 The politicisation of the quotidian aspects of life at home, common to Chartist teetotal, health, and Land Plan literature, reflects both the increasing attention Chartists were paying to social conditions and the misery within which many labourers lived. During his investigations in Manchester Angus Reach argued that the housing was far poorer and unhealthier than the factories which were generally newer and for which capitalists accepted a degree of responsibility for good ventilation and comfort. While emphasising the dangerous and unhealthy work of the factory-​hands Engels also vividly described the poor housing conditions of in the industrial towns. An 1845

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150 Popular virtue report on the sanitary conditions in Bradford produced by a committee of wool-​combers highlighted the cramped, unhealthy, and ‘revolting’ nature of the housing.95 Peter McDoaull, who became a vocal supporter of the Land Plan, argued in his People’s Medical Tract that the time-​discipline of industrial capitalism forced workers to rush meals and often labour for several hours on empty stomachs, having breakfasted on coffee or tea, or nothing at all.96 Through low pay, fraud, and the inconvenient hours of commerce the odds were stacked against workers in food markets. Besides being expensive the best quality food had often been sold many hours before workers were paid on Saturday evenings, while the poorest resorted to buying from the market between 10 p.m. and midnight for food that would go off before the markets re-​opened on Monday. As Engels observed, even workers who did not have to resort to these scraps ate ‘wilted’, ‘old’, and ‘rancid’ food, and noted the enormous extent of adulteration of foodstuffs within Manchester and Liverpool.97 Good food was evidently a matter of self-​worth and respectability, as Richard Pilling made clear in his defence speech: ‘I would put an end to my existence sooner than kill myself working twelve hours a day in a cotton factory, and eating potatoes and salt.’98 Such a diet would place him at the lowest rung of a ladder Engels identified, with the best-​paid workers eating meat and cheese daily and the worst, Irish migrants, eating nothing but potatoes. Poor food and starvation diets were important aspects of politics in the 1840s, and a motivator in the 1842 strikes. Frank Peel remembered a striker collapsing dead in front of him after having eaten nothing for two days but some raw potatoes.99 As Peter Gurney has outlined, conflicting attitudes to the food market was an important division between the Chartists, who favoured democratic control, and the ACLL, which was suspected of seeking middle-​class commercial hegemony.100 Food and diet were therefore important aspects of land schemes, but not only to provide abundance where capitalism failed or a direct relationship between a family and their food without unscrupulous middle-​men. The widespread belief outlined in the previous chapter that diet and bodily health possessed crucial ramifications for moral and mental ability was important within these communities. James Pierrepoint Greaves developed a form of phrenology evident in the Concordium’s rules on veganism and marital celibacy, so as to avoid the overstimulation of bestial faculties through too much sex or the consumption of ‘animal food’.101 The Rational Society, the main Owenite body of the 1840s, considered making a phrenological test the means ‘to ascertain the principles of character’ for any applicants for residency at Harmony Hall.102 Like many Chartists, by the mid-​1840s Duncan was a phrenologist.103 He also subscribed to rhetoric of a pathological society familiar from Chartist healthcare literature as well as Land Plan propaganda, writing in an editorial in the Morning Star that while ‘a class of landlords and capitalists exist separated from the rest of the people in interest and possession, society must continue in a diseased condition’.104 Alongside political and social inequality, Britain’s diseased state was also due

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Communal self-improvement  151 to the ‘mixture of coal-​smoke, foul air, and abominations unnumbered accumulating on all sides, from cesspools, gutters, mud, and filth’, which when combined with the climate caused all manner of illnesses. The moral consequence of all this was robberies, murders, suicides, and prostitution.105 These expressions also recur in literature on the Land Plan. The link between health and moral conduct was most explicitly stated in Sunshine and Shadow when Wheeler described the results of the poverty forced on Arthur’s family by a period of unemployment:  ‘the body being unhealthy and debased, the soul of the victim becomes stupefied, –​the type of humanity is lost, and a dull state of animalism takes its place’.106 In On the Practical Work on the Management of Small Farms phrenological language repeatedly features: ‘Never lose sight of this one irrefutable fact, that man is born with propensities which may be nourished into virtues, or thwarted into vices, according to his training. That system which I propose would nourish those propensities into virtues.’107 The father of a resettled family, according to another passage, ‘sees no cripple at his board, no dwarf in his family. All are straight, erect, and healthy, because each has been trained according to his strength’.108 The Land Plan sought to nurture virtues and combat vices by creating an environment where bestial impulses were kept in check and intellectual and moral improvement was paramount. Restoring families to a ‘natural’ world of hard but independent work, in fresh air with a good diet and few stimulants was clearly a keystone of this objective. In a series of articles in the Northern Star early in 1848 Wheeler documented a number of journeys he himself took between the various Chartist settlements. The old ages on the gravestones in a churchyard near O’Connorville were testament to why workers should return ‘to a natural state of life; inhale once more the pure air, and your days shall be long in the land’. His first walk after a period of sickness ‘cast off the langeur and depression … inseparable from illness’.109 Similarly, in 1846 O’Connor moved to a farmhouse on site and began sending regular dispatches: ‘My pale face is turned into a good, sound, sun-​burnt ruddy complexion. I  can jump over the gates without opening them. I am up every morning at 6 o’clock, and when I look out happy, I feel myself a giant.’110 A few months later, in October 1846, O’Connor banned alcohol from the settlements, referring in a speech to drinks as the ‘drugs of prostitution’ and declaring ‘if I was monarch for twenty-​four hours, I’d level every gin palace with the dust … and in less than a month I’d produce a wise representation of a sober and thoughtful national mind’.111 O’Connor had quietly given up alcohol in 1842 probably due to occasional bouts of poor health, but from the outset of the Land Plan he had envisaged the emancipated labourer of the Land Plan not being ‘haunted during the day with the galling and heartsickening reflection that he is compelled to wander in idleness from beer house to beer house’.112 In 1847 in an article addressed to the inhabitants of O’Connorville he declared that drunkenness was ‘the first step to poverty, to crime and disgrace’, adding in language that reflected exactly the style of

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Figure 8  O’Connorville, The Northern Star, 22 August 1846. The communities of the Land Plan were designed to facilitate the ideal of petit-​bourgeois, patriarchal landowning while also putting into practice the moral politics of the 1840s. In contradistinction to wage labour in industrial cities each plot was a component of a wider sober, healthy, ‘natural’ community.

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Communal self-improvement  153 teetotal activists that ‘You never see a teetotaller being convicted of a crime, you never see a teetotaller starving, or his family in misery’.113 A speaker at the grand demonstration at O’Connorville in May 1847 argued that if ‘the people had but brains’ they would stop spending millions of pounds a year on ‘pernicious drink’ and instead spend it on land purchases.114 It is notable that meetings of branches of the Chartist Land Company frequently met in temperance establishments or schoolhouses, and during these lectures the Chartist settlements were unanimously envisioned as temperate communities.115 Peter McDouall, who toured the country in 1847 and 1848 extolling the Land Plan, told one meeting in Preston that ‘when employed on the land they would have time to improve their minds, and the body would not be fatigued so as to require artificial stimulants to support it, which was one cause of the intemperance which prevailed’.116 Given that their support for teetotalism was lukewarm in 1842 it is significant that O’Connor and McDouaull had so firmly placed it within Land Plan ideology by the end of the decade. While poor diets and living conditions animated activists’ fears about moral and intellectual degeneration, it is clear that health and the land were discernibly linked within working-​class culture. Historians of the Land Plan have highlighted how the relatively easy access to rural areas led to familiarity with the countryside amongst industrial workers, and as Angus Reach noted of Manchester in 1849, a ‘great number’ of workers were interested in botany, meaning that ‘Every holiday sees hundreds of peaceful wanderers in the woods and fields around, busily engaged in cutting specimens of grasses and flowers’. In Ashton-​under-​Lyne he discovered a pub owned by an enthusiast named the ‘Botanical Tavern’.117 In Mary Barton Elizabeth Gaskell described working men who ‘know the name and habitat of every plant within a day’s walk from their dwellings; who steal the holiday of a day or two when any particular plant should be in flower, and … set off with single purpose to fetch home the humble-​looking weed’.118 Richard Buxton, an Ancoats shoemaker, found some local fame as a botanist and published through Abel Heywood a guide to plants in the area 16 miles around Manchester, which was in part a guide to producing botanical medicines. In the preface he claimed the hobby ‘has preserved my health, if not my life, and afforded me a fair share of happiness’. Later he recalled numerous other working-​class botanists, naturalists, and geologists in Lancashire, but complained that to ‘the poor, as a class, it is to be feared that the possession of land in this country is not generally attainable’, and expressed hope that the landowners would open up their land to working-​class ramblers.119 The fact that Heywood was Buxton’s publisher underlines the Radical interest in working-​class naturalism and the perceived health benefits of rural recreations, not only due to the clean air and exercise but also from the knowledge of herbal remedies. John Skelton was a prominent supporter of the Land Plan throughout the 1840s, appearing at meetings with Wheeler and O’Connor. He fell away from the movement and became a professional

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154 Popular virtue botanist in 1848, an interest that originated in his childhood in Devon and survived life in Plymouth, London, and Manchester.120 In his Family Medical Adviser, published in 1852, he advised workers that: ‘every day at the conclusion of your work, you should seek the green fields, for the purpose of discharging the impure matter which has been engendered during your work; for this purpose climb up a hill, jump, sing, shout, run or do anything that will promote a quickened circulation of the blood.’121 The Mancunian Chartist leader and O’Connor ally James Scholefield supported the Land Plan, the Bible Christian Building Society, a scheme to relocate some of Ancoat’s workers to Chat Moss, and the campaign for public parks in the city. He was also noted as an apothecary, surgeon, and doctor, gaining fame for treating sufferers of the 1830 cholera epidemic. A patented mixture he produced known colloquially as ‘Scholefield’s Bottle’ was popular around Ancoats and was still sold as late as 1904.122 McDouall also retained his interest in herbal remedies upon his return to Britain, producing ‘Mainwaring’s Pills’ and selling them through John Cleave in London and Heywood in Manchester. For him the Land Plan possessed clear ramifications for health, as expressed in the Preston meeting when he ‘contrasted the health of a tiller of the land with the health of a person employed under the factory system, and stated that if ever the people must improve themselves, they must act under co-​operation’.123

The Land, education, and improvement If the negative impact of poor food, intoxicants, stimulants, and bad living conditions was to be negated by the Land Plan, it also offered an opportunity to directly develop the moral and intellectual capacities of Chartists. O’Connorville’s central building was the schoolhouse, a ‘handsome building with a tower’ containing a bell and clock which a correspondent from the Glasgow Saturday Post argued was far more comfortable than any urban working-​class home. Within the schoolhouse was a lecture room and library.124 Settlement schoolhouses were important symbolic venues, serving for Chartist communities the roles that would be performed by a church or alehouse in a more traditional village. Occupying the roles that inns had played in the first years of Chartism, these structures were the primary location for meetings and lectures and served as the focal points for the mass-​ meetings held at settlements. At the 1846 conference of the Chartist Land Company it was agreed that every settlement should have a similar structure, which would be the property of the Company rather than the estates so that it would not add to their rental expenses. The schoolmaster was to have agricultural experience so that the children spent three hours a day working ‘according to their strength’ on a model farm in which the master lived.125 This was based on the ‘Agricultural School’ at Willingdon in Kent, where the day was split between a general education in the morning, and then an

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Communal self-improvement  155 afternoon of agricultural work for boys and sewing for girls.126 In a letter from the conference to the Leicester branch of the Land Company the veteran Chartist Thomas Rayner Smart extolled the Willingdon model since it transformed ‘labour into recreation’, and outlined the rounded nature of the education:  ‘their sports shall be principally gymnastic, giving strength and pliability to the limbs and the rosy hue of health to the countenance … the rudiments taught shall be those fitted to the station in society … their moral conduct be strictly attended to; the social duties regularly inculcated.’127 Smart was not unusual for being interested in pedagogy. He had been a supporter of Lovett’s National Association in 1841, within which education was presented as central. When the controversy over the ‘New Move’ erupted Smart wrote to the Northern Star explaining that he had ‘for some time known, and very much admired the grand, the magnificent conception, so ably developed by the great philanthropist Pestalozzi’, and he had signalled his support for the National Association because its schooling was to be based on his principles.128 Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi was a Swizz pedagogue who emphasised that every aspect of a child’s life influenced their education and that it followed that schooling should be broken down into discrete aspects, each of which was seen to influence the others. Physical education was central to this method since it not only made children healthier and proved that they could improve any activity through practice but also improved their moral character, by making them ‘cheerful and healthy’ and promoting among them ‘a certain spirit of union, and a brotherly feeling’ along with ‘habits of industry, openness and frankness of character, personal conduct, and a manly conduct in suffering pain’.129 Pestalozzi’s writings on education were popular amongst both Radicals and Whig educational reformers, and Lovett’s Chartism had cited him.130 James Pierrepoint Greaves was a notable friend of Pestalozzi’s and proponent of his theories. Pestalozzi’s Letters on Early Education were addressed to Greaves and after they were translated in 1827 became the most notable English publications on his writings, with Watson publishing an edition in 1842.131 Although the National Association was confined to Holborn and Lovett remained adrift from the Chartist mainstream, the ideas in Chartism were still influential. The Christian Chartist Henry Solly helped establish a Mutual Improvement Society amongst Yeovil’s Chartists in 1842, a ‘bona fide attempt to work out Lovett’s aims and principles’.132 T.B. Smith, the teetotaller, mesmeric lecturer, and vegetarian, was a member of the NCA and sought to establish Sunday schools attached to each branch. G.J. Holyoake produced his own guide on grammar in the 1840s, arguing that a literate and educated working-​class could liberate itself and be independent of all other influences.133 This broad interest in politicised education meant that the Land Plan’s schools and those proposed by Lovett in 1840 overlapped in more ways than just shared teaching techniques. In Chartism Lovett made clear that schools should be secular and supported but not controlled by government, with superintendents and teachers elected by local communities.134

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156 Popular virtue After the 1846 conference the Land Plan similarly allowed some democratic control to the settlements through the ability to recall schoolteachers if a two-​ thirds majority demanded it, although the Company’s directors made the initial decision of who was hired. This was controversial, and some branches of the Company complained that the decision of who to hire ‘belongs to the allottees and guardians of children on the Company’s estate where the school is situated’.135 The debate over the matter at the 1847 conference reveals disagreement amongst Chartists over what democracy meant in practice. A number of delegates argued that election from the community was the only means of choosing consistent with Chartist principles, while some voiced concern that the Land Plan directors could use the power to give jobs to relatives, and others were angry that the allottees were apparently not considered capable enough to choose a good candidate themselves. O’Connor’s faction won the debate, arguing that the school was Company property and that only the directors had the means, knowledge, and disinterest to select teachers.136 In 1842, while waiting with Henry Vincent in Bath prior to a speech, O’Connor had reportedly shouted ‘D–​n their education!’ at a young Chartist who attempted to discuss with him their plans for the ‘education of the people’.137 The extent to which O’Connor’s attitude had changed is noteworthy, but hardly surprising. Education had always been an important aspect of working-​class culture, and in seeking to emphasise and politicise this after 1840 Lovett was closer to grassroots opinion. Education of children was a major concern amongst Radicals eager to propagate their principles amongst their offspring and avoid the corrupting influence of the dissolute, largely Tory Anglican clergy. This hostility was shared amongst Chartist infidels, Dissenters, and Anglicans who were united by strongly held anti-​ clerical beliefs. An essay in the Northern Star argued that schooling should be divorced from religion entirely: ‘For our part we think the less children are pestered with what even grown-​up people are puzzled to comprehend, the better. The elements of morality are to be found in connexion with all religions and independent of all religions.’138 W.E. Adams, a youth in Cheltenham during the 1840s, wrote that his only recollection of his education at a Wesleyan Sunday school were the sermons in the chapel, which he described as being an incomprehensible ‘time of purgatory’. He was later taught at an academy run by a fiddler, dancing-​master, and penmen for sixpence a week which supplied him with the basic ‘tools of knowledge’, although being from the poorest class of students he received the least attention. Like many other Chartists he recalled that his political education was from autodidactism, workmates, and the influence of his family.139 The opportunity to put Chartist schooling into practice in the Land Plan was therefore envisaged as facilitating these influences rather than replacing them. At the demonstration in O’Connorville in May 1847 a speaker pointed to the schoolhouse and described it as a place ‘not for teaching bigotry or intolerance, or despotism, but true knowledge. Was not that then a peaceful and moral triumph?’140 Standing on the steps of the

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Communal self-improvement  157 O’Connorville schoolhouse, O’Connor argued that the schools would be a means of ensuring an impartial education that would not conflict with home-​schooling: I open the sanctuary of free instruction for the unbiased training of youth, and woe to the firebrand parson who shall dare to frighten the susceptible mind of infancy, by the hobgoblin of religious preference. (Tremendous cheering, and waving of hats.) Let the father nourish, and the fond mother nurture, their own offspring –​(cheers) and then we shall have a generation of FREE CHRISTIANS. (Loud cheers.)

‘Food, education and instruction in the arts of industry’, argued the Northern Star, ‘are the grand requisites for popular schools, leaving the scholars to study the Bible or Koran when they have their minds brought to something near the standard of rationality’.141 By overturning artifice the Land Plan offered autonomy, health, and unhindered mental and moral improvement. As O’Connor had stated in On the Management of Small Farms: The system which I propose would at once develope all the virtues of our nature, while I defy the devil to invent one so well calculated to foster and encourage all those vices to which man is here, as that which I labour to destroy … That the system which I propose would nourish those propensities into virtues, which would constitute the characteristic of Englishmen, while the slave system now in operation, thwarts the propensities into vices, and gives to our code of laws the appearance of enactments made upon a general scale of prison discipline, rather than laws for the proper government of society.142

Conclusion Bronterre O’Brien was damning when he criticised O’Connor for inverting his previous arguments that ‘social happiness was to proceed from political equality’ by now arguing with the Land Plan that ‘political equality can only spring from social happiness’.143 O’Connor was, in fact, part of a broader shift within the Chartist movement that had begun in 1840, and which he had initially denounced. The Land Plan was born of the rejection of revolutionary politics after 1840 and the failure of militancy in 1842. It came to intersect with the moral improvement culture that had been elaborated between 1840 and 1842, a fact that is not surprising considering the wide interest within the movement in both the Land Plan and improvement. This resulted in the Chartist movement becoming by the end of the 1840s largely centred on a counter-​culture that sought the moral, physical, and social improvement of the people. Like its cousins, Harmony Hall, the TES, and the Concordium, the Land Plan sought the improvement

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158 Popular virtue of its constituency through the development of a healthier environment and the removal of artificial ‘toxic’ elements. In its day-​to-​day operation it emphasised health, cleanliness, temperance, and education as both a means of halting the degradations of urban life and of ultimately morally improving the entire working class. While it was therefore ‘reactionary’ in the sense that it sought to return labour and production to an idealised pre-​industrial form of patriarchal, agrarian, smallholder capitalism, it was clearly ‘utopian’ in its aspirations for social and moral regeneration and the potential for alternative communities to become a base for both amelioration and political emancipation. However by 1848 the failure of the Land Plan, the third Petition, and the apparent success of Revolutionary politics in Paris undermined the legitimacy of constitutional and moral improvement politics, and set Chartism’s moral culture and social critique in divergent directions.

Notes 1 Malcolm Chase, Chartism:  A  New History (Manchester, 2007). For Chase’s exposition of the importance of the Land Plan and its ideas see:  ‘ “We wish only to work for ourselves”: The Chartist Land Plan’ in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (eds), Living and Learning:  Essays in Honour of J.  F. C.  Harrison (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 133–​48. See his ‘ “Wholesome Object Lessons”:  The Chartist Land Plan in Retrospect’ English Historical Review 188:475 (2003), pp. 59–​85. Jamie L. Bronstein’s Land Reform and Working-​Class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–​1862 (Stanford, 1999) is another excellent account of the social critique and ideological foundations of land reform politics. 2 Malcolm Chase ‘ “Labour’s Candidates”: Chartist Challenges at Parliamentary Polls, 1839–​1860’ Labour History Review 74:1 (2009), pp. 64–​89. 3 Northern Star, 2 April 1842. 4 Chase, Chartism, pp. 195–​201; Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists:  Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (London, 2013), pp. 183–​9; Alex Tyrall, Joseph Sturge and the Moral Radical Party in Early Victorian Britain (London, 1987); Mark Hovell, The Chartist Movement (Manchester, 1918), pp. 243–​44. 5 Northern Star, 8 May 1842. 6 Chase, Chartism, pp. 201–​7. 7 McDouall’s Chartist and Republican Journal, 24 July 1841. 8 Non-​Conformist, 3 May 1842. 9 Frank O’Gorman, ‘Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: The Social Meaning of Elections in England 1780–​ 1860’ Past and Present 135:1 (1992), pp. 79–​115, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734–​1832 (Oxford, 1989). 10 Thomas Beggs, History of the Election for the Borough of Nottingham, 1842 (Nottingham, 1842), p. iii. 11 Northern Star, 13 August 1842; 10 September 1842.

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Communal self-improvement  159 12 English Chartist Circular, Volume 2, No. 80. 13 For O’Connor’s incorruptibility see: Northern Star, 28 May 1842; 27 August 1842; 10 June 1843. 14 Mick Jenkins, The General Strike of 1842 (London, 1980), pp. 41–​59. 15 Hansard, Volume 62 (May 1842), cc. 1373–​1381. 16 English Chartist Circular, Volume 1, No. 44. 17 Stephen Roberts, The Chartist Prisoners: The Radical Lives of Thomas Cooper and Arthur O’Neill (Oxford, 2008). 18 Jenkins, General Strike; Chase, Chartism, pp. 210–​12. 19 The Trial of Feargus O’Connor and Fifty-​Eight Others on a Charge of Sedition, Conspiracy, Tumult and Riot (London, 1843), p. 77. 20 Cited in Chase, Chartism, p. 213. 21 Chase, Chartism, pp. 213–​14; Northern Star, 16 July 1842. 22 Northern Star, 20 August 1842. 23 English Chartist Circular, Volume 2, No. 80. 24 Thomas Cooper, The Life of Thomas Cooper (London, 1872), p. 206. 25 Jenkins, General Strike, p. 163. 26 Peter McDouall, Letters to the Manchester Chartists (Manchester, 1844), p. 3, pp. 7–​8. 27 McDouall, Letters, p. 8. 28 Jenkins, General Strike, pp. 270–​2. 29 Jenkins, General Strike, p. 274. 30 Jenkins, General Strike, p. 275. 31 McDouall, Letters, p. 9. 32 Albert Robert Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge:  A  Portrait of George Julian Harney (London, 1958), pp. 115–​16. 33 Northern Star, 20 August 1842. 34 Cooper, Life, p. 211. 35 Northern Star, 27 August 1842. 36 Northern Star, 20 August 1842. 37 Chase, Chartism, p. 223. 38 Schoyen, Chartist Challenge, pp. 117–​18; Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 20 August 1842; Trial of Feargus O’Connor, pp. 236–​7. 39 Northern Star, 3 September 1842. 40 Michael Winstanley, ‘Oldham Radicalism and the Origins of Popular Liberalism, 1830–​52’ Historical Journal 36:3 (1993), pp. 619–​643, at p. 636; Northern Star, 20 August 1842. 41 Roberts, The Chartist Prisoners. 42 Trial of Feargus O’Connor, p. 249. 43 NA: HO 40/​41, f. 108; Chase, Chartism, p. 231. 44 See for instance O’Brien’s successful defence at Newcastle in 1840: Alfred Plummer, Bronterre:  A  Political Biography of Bronterre O’Brien, 1804–​1864 (London, 1971), p. 147. 45 Trial of Feargus O’Connor, pp. 250–​1. 46 Trial of Feargus O’Connor, p. 283. 47 Trial of Feargus O’Connor, p. 275. 48 Northern Star, 13 August 1842.

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160 Popular virtue 49 Northern Star, 13 August 1842. 50 Frank Peel, The Risings of the Luddites, Chartists and Plugdrawers (Heckwondwicke, 1888), p. 341. 51 Trial of Feargus O’Connor, p. i. 52 Feargus O’Connor, ‘The Land’ the Only Remedy for National Poverty and Impending National Ruin (Leeds, 1842). 53 Northern Star, 11 November 1843. 54 Trial of Feargus O’Connor, p. viii. 55 Malcolm Chase, The People’s Farm: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775–​1840 (Oxford, 1988). 56 Edward Royle, Robert Owen and the Commencement of the Millennium: A Study of the Harmony Community (Manchester, 1998). 57 On the TES see:  Malcolm Chase, ‘Exporting the Owenite Utopia:  Thomas Powell and the Tropical Emigration Society’ in Noel Thompson and Chris Williams (eds), Robert Owen and his Legacy (Cardiff, 2011), pp. 198–​217; Gregory Claeys, ‘John Adolphus Etzler, Technological Utopianism, and British Socialism:  The Tropical Emigration Society’s Venezualan Mission and its Social Context, 1833–​1848’ English Historical Review 101 (1986), pp. 351–​75. On the Concordium see: J.E.M. Latham, Search for a New Eden: James Pierrepoint Greaves (1877–​1842): The Sacred Socialist and his Followers (Madison, 2000). 58 J.A. Etzler, The ParadiseWithin the Reach of all Men,Without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery (London, 1842), TwoVisions of J.A. Etzler: A Revelation in Futurity (London, 1844), Emigration to the Tropical World, for the Melioration of all Classes of People of All Nations (London, 1844); Cleave’s Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement, 13 August 1842; 19 August 1843; 6 January 1844. 59 See Chase, ‘Exporting the Owenite Utopia’ for Powell. See James Gregory, The Poetry and the Politics:  Radical Reform in Victorian England (London, 2014) for the TES and Morning Star. 60 Thomas Frost, Forty Years Recollections:  Literary and Political (London, 1880), p. 49. 61 Frost, Forty Years, p. 40. 62 Chase, ‘Exporting the Owenite Utopia’. 63 Alexander Somerville, The O’Connor Land Scheme Examined (London, 1847). 64 Chase, Chartism, pp. 254–​70. 65 William Stevens, A Memoir of Thomas Wheeler, Founder of the Friend-​in-​Need Life and Sick Assurance Society, Domestic, Political, and Industrial, with extracts from his Letters, Speeches, and Writings (London, 1862), pp. 25–​6. 66 Chase, ‘We wish only to work for ourselves’, pp. 140–​1. 67 O’Connor, The Land, p. 15. 68 Northern Star, 1 January 1848; 18 March 1848. 69 J.E. King, ‘Utopian or Scientific? A  Reconsideration of the Ricardian Socialists’ History of Political Economy 15:3 (1983), pp. 345–​73. 70 David Stack, Nature and Artifice:  The Life and Thought of Thomas Hodgskin (Woodbridge, 1998); Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow, n.d.), p. 11. 71 Trial of Feargus O’Connor, p. viii. 72 Noel Thompson, The People’s Science:  The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis, 1816–​1834 (Cambridge, 1984).

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Communal self-improvement  161 73 See Hal Draper, Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution Volume IV: Critique of Other Socialisms (New York, 1990), p. 177 for the multifarious ‘socialist’ projects in Europe in the 1840s. 74 Aspects emphasised by Chase in Chartism, pp. 254–​70 and ‘We wish only to work for ourselves’. 75 English Chartist Circular, Volume 1, No. 112. 76 Miles Taylor, Ernest Jone, Chartism and the Romance of Politics, 1819–​1869 (Oxford, 2003); The Labourer, Volume 1 (Manchester, 1847), pp. 49–​52. 77 William E. Channing, Lectures on the Elevation of the Labouring Portion of the Community (Manchester, 1840), p. 15. 78 Anna Janowitz, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge, 1998), p. 183. 79 Chase, ‘Exporting the Owenite Utopia’, p. 210. 80 Feargus O’Connor, A Practical Work on the Management of Small Farms (London, 1843), p. 19. 81 The Labourer, Volume 1, pp. 225–​34. 82 Ian Haywood (ed.), Chartist Fiction:  Thomas Doubleday, ‘The Political Pilgrim’s Progress’; Thomas Martin Wheeler, ‘Sunshine and Shadow’ (London, 1999), p. 67. 83 Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (London, 1991), pp. 52–​3. 84 O’Connor, A Practical Work, p. 20. 85 Cited in Stevens, A Memoir of Thomas Wheeler, p. 30. 86 Haywood, Chartist Fiction, p. 161. 87 Trial of Feargus O’Connor, p. 253. 88 Trial of Feagus O’Connor, p. vii. 89 Northern Star, 8 May 1847. 90 Chase, ‘We wish only to work for ourselves’, p. 140. 91 O’Connor, On the Practical Management, p. 20. 92 The Evidence of John Sillett, on his Examination Before a Committee of the House of Commons Appointed to Enquire into the Affairs of The National Land Company, Clearly Proving that a Man May Live Well and Save on Two Acres of Land (London, 1848). 93 James Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians:  The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (London, 2007). 94 Northern Star, 15 April 1843. 95 Angus Bethune Reach, Manchester and the Textile Districts in 1849 (Helmshore, 1972). The Woolcomber’s report was reprinted in 1991 as Mechanization and Misery: The Bradford Woolcombers’ Report of 1845 (Halifax, 1991), p. 16. 96 P.M. McDouall, The People’s Medical Tract (London, 1841?), p.  3. For the impact of capitalist time discipline during the period see E.P. Thompson, ‘Time, Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism’ Past and Present 38:1 (1967), pp. 56–​97. 97 Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Oxford, 2009), p. 80. 98 Trial of Feargus O’Connor, p. 254. 99 Peel, Risings of the Luddites, pp. 342–​3.

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162 Popular virtue 100 Peter Gurney, ‘ “Rejoicing in Potatoes”:  The Politics of Consumption in England during the “Hungry Forties” ’ Past and Present 203:1 (2009), pp. 99–​136. 101 Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (Cambridge, 1984), p. 242. 102 The Phrenological Journal, Volume 16 (1843), p. 315. 103 See for instance the language used in his description of Etzler. Morning Star, 1 March 1845. 104 Morning Star, 8 March 1845. 105 Morning Star, 1 March 1845. 106 Haywood, Chartist Fiction, p. 162. 107 Chase, ‘We wish only to work for ourselves’, pp. 140–​1; O’Connor, On the Practical Management, p. 20. 108 O’Connor, On the Practical Management, p. 120. 109 Northern Star, 5 February 1848; 1 April 1848. 110 Northern Star, 23 May 1846; 13 June 1846; 11 July 1846. 111 Northern Star, 10 October 1846. 112 Chase, Chartism, p. 207; Trial of Feargus O’Connor, p. 9. 113 Northern Star, 8 May 1847. 114 Northern Star, 29 May 1847. 115 For instance see the adverts in the Northern Star, 6 February 1847. 116 Preston Chronicle, 16 January 1847. 117 Reach, Manchester and the Textile Districts, pp.  20, 78; Bronstein, Land Reform, p. 191; Chase, People’s Farm, p. 9. 118 Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton:  A  Tale of Manchester Life (London, 2008), p. 47. 119 Richard Buxton, A Botanical Guide to the Flowering Plants, Ferns Mosses and Algae, found indigenous within sixteen miles of Manchester (Manchester, 1849), p. xii. 120 Alison M. Denham, ‘Herbal Medicine in Nineteenth Century England: The Career of John Skelton’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of York, 2013), pp. 29–​31; John Skelton, A Plea for the Botanic Practice of Medicine (London, 1853), pp. 51–​4. 121 John Skelton, Family Medical Adviser (Leeds, 1852), p. 19. 122 Owen Ashton and Paul Pickering, Friends of the People: Uneasy Radicals in the Age of the Chartists (London, 2002), p. 110. 123 Preston Guardian, 16 January 1847. 124 Northern Star, 26 June 1847; 12 December 1846. 125 Northern Star, 12 December 1846; 19 December 1846. 126 Poor Rates Reduced by Self-​ Supporting, Reading Writing, and Agricultural Schools (London, 1844). 127 Northern Star, 2 January 1847. 128 Northern Star, 24 April 1841. 129 Pestalozzi, Letters on Early Education: Addressed to J.P. Greaves, Esq. (London, 1851), p. 106.

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Communal self-improvement  163 130 William Lovett and John Collins, Chartism: A New Organization of the People (London, 1840), p. 91. 131 Jackie E.M. Latham, ‘Pestalozzi and James Pierrepoint Greaves: A Shared Educational Philosophy’ History of Education 31:1 (2002), pp. 59–​70. 132 Henry Solly, ‘These Eighty Years’: or, The Story of an Unfinished Life, Volume 1 (London, 1893), pp. 398–​9. 133 Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels:  The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–​1866 (Manchester, 1974), p. 129. 134 Lovett and Collins, Chartism, pp. 63–​75. 135 Northern Star, 16 January 1847. 136 Northern Star, 21 August 1847. 137 Solly, These Eighty Years, p. 399. 138 Northern Star, 13 March 1847. 139 W.E. Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom (New York, 1968), pp. 71–​80. 140 Northern Star, 29 May 1847. 141 Northern Star, 13 March 1847. 142 O’Connor, On the Practical Management, p. 20. 143 Plummer, Bronterre, pp. 187–​8.

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6 The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics

The legacy of Chartism’s culture of moral improvement has been a major point of debate for several decades. Initially, Marxist historiography subscribed to the ‘labour aristocracy’ thesis that the elite of the working class were ‘embourgeoised’ by middle-​class Liberals who provided them with increased wages and the vote in order to create a compliant bulwark against other sections of the working class. While the existence of a labour aristocracy as either an elite or a cohesive body has been debunked it is also clear that working-​ class moral politics was a product of working-​class Radicalism in the first half of the century rather than a post-​Chartist imposition.1 Nevertheless, the advocacy of a clear continuity between Chartism and the Popular Liberalism that united middle-​class  Liberals with working-​class Radicals by the mid-​ 1860s is equally problematic. Studies suggesting such continuity frequently suggest that moral improvement provided a point of convergence for middle-​ class  Liberals and working-​class reformers, and therefore as Gladstonian Liberalism came into being many working-​class Radicals organically came to support the Liberal Party.2 A number of historians have highlighted how the remembrance and memorialisation of Chartism amongst Popular Liberals in fact required the expunging of inconvenient facts –​such as women’s activism, violence, and class conflict –​in order to construct a clear line of inheritance.3 While these arguments usually revolve around political principles, language, and strategies, this chapter will supplement this line of argument by tracing out some of the trajectories for moral improvement in three different areas. By looking at late Chartism, the reform agitation of the 1860s, and the self-​ help culture that developed after the 1850s, it is very difficult to suggest anything like a pure, continuous inheritance. Just as the beginning of the 1840s saw a breach with many aspects of earlier Radical culture, the beginning of the 1850s saw a breach between a Chartist rump and the counter-​cultural movements that had grown within Chartism over the course of the decade.

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The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics  165

La république démocratique et social: late Chartism and the return to moral populism After 1848 Chartism became strained by tensions between a democratic socialist wing and the far less militant and non-​Republican O’Connorites. These tensions had been building since the mid-​1840s, when G.J. Harney became the editor of the Northern Star in 1845. The following year he became a member of the Fraternal Democrats, a large society of European exiles based in Soho in London that in 1847 became part of the Communist League, an internationalist socialist party. In Thomas Frost’s recollections O’Connor was ‘strictly a constitutional monarchist, and he firmly repressed all tendencies towards a republic, especially la république démocratique et social, to which Harney evinced an unmistakable leaning’.4 In private, Harney eviscerated O’Connor to Engels: ‘The fact is he is a thorough aristocrat masquerading in the outward profession of democracy. More still; he is worse than an aristocrat, he has all the vulgarism, the money-​grubbing (in spite of his boasting to the contrary) of a dirty bourgeois.’5 The same period witnessed the fading of O’Connor’s popularity as leader, alongside his ability to perform as one. The 1848 February Revolution in France, led by working-​ class socialists, inspired an upturn in Chartist mobilisation and a renewed optimism in revolutionary politics. A mass demonstration (significantly of both Chartists and Irish Nationalists) met in Kennington Common in central London in May for the purposes of delivering another national petition to Parliament, but in an environment of enormous state mobilisation O’Connor refused to allow the crowd, possibly as large as 300,000 people, to cross the river into Westminster. The demonstration ended with angry Chartists dispersing in torrential rain while shouting ‘No More Petitions!’ at O’Connor. The petition itself was derided and discredited by Parliament for supposedly containing numerous fake signatures, although even under these hostile estimates it would have contained more legitimate signatures than in 1842. O’Connor then fumbled the petition’s defence in Parliament, behaving erratically and aggressively and twice challenging another MP to a duel.6 After this failure many Chartists, particularly Londoners, turned once again to insurrectionism, inspired by a workers’ uprising against the Liberal government in Paris in June. In the ensuing repression many were tried, jailed, or transported.7 After this the gap between the social democrats and O’Connorites widened. The failed June Days Uprising in Paris destroyed French socialism and was followed by the election under universal manhood suffrage of Louis Napoleon in December, who then ensured the complete repression of working-​class organisation. This, along with the failures of revolutions elsewhere in Europe, disappointed Harney but also galvanised his commitment to socialism. Of the French socialists he argued that only ‘by the immediate reorganization of society could they have ensured their triumph’, and therefore for Chartism to succeed it needed to be simultaneously a political and social revolutionary movement. Only awareness amongst the

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166 Popular virtue working class of economic exploitation and social rights would obstruct the sort of populism that had allowed in Napoleon.8 O’Connor was however heading in the opposite direction. In March 1849 he pledged Chartists to support the National Parliamentary and Financial Reform Association, a middle-​class reforming organisation that possessed a far less radical programme of franchise extension than the CSU had in 1842.9 Harney opposed this, believing that rather than wishing the gradual extension of the franchise the middle-​class Radicals simply wanted ‘to make use of the proletarians to establish bourgeois supremacy’ in a repeat of 1832.10 In 1849 O’Connor publicly criticised Harney for his republicanism and internationalism, but it was evident from the response that O’Connor no longer possessed a strong enough following to crush factions in the way he had in 1841. In part this was due to his resumed heavy drinking and erratic behaviour, likely early symptoms of the mental collapse that was to come in 1852.11 O’Connor’s strategy was seen largely as a failure, while in a transition that mirrored the shift in 1840 former prisoners found the experience propelled them ‘from Chartism to Red Republicanism’.12 After a campaign to gather support from the Chartist rank-​and-​file the ‘Red Republicans’ came to dominate the NCA’s Provisional Executive, prompting those favouring collaboration with the middle class to split and form the National Charter League (NCL). This possessed tacit approval from O’Connor and the open support of the Northern Star. In the fallout Harney resigned as editor, complaining that O’Connor would not let him voice his opinions. The NCL was successfully opposed, and in the Executive elections later in the year the left possessed a majority on the Executive of the NCA. Lack of confidence in O’Connor’s leadership was underscored by the winding up of the Land Plan in 1851. One impact on this transition was a shift in the centrality of moral politics within Chartism. Ernest Jones had been a firm O’Connorite before his imprisonment but was one of those who emerged a Red Republican. Whereas in June 1848 he was arrested for declaring that the green flag of Chartism would soon be flying over Downing Street, when he was released in 1850 he gave a speech in Manchester declaring that ‘it shall be a red one now’. He also directed some of his attacks at the moral improvement strain of the movement:  ‘Some tell you that teetotalism will get you the Charter: The Charter don’t lie at the bottom of a glass of water. Some tell you social co-​operation will do it; co-​operation is at the mercy of those who hold political power.’13 When in 1850 he argued the Charter meant ‘bread, beef, and beer’ he returned to a discourse reminiscent of the festivity and promises of abundance that circulated in 1839.14 His journal Notes to the People increasingly published economic articles heavily influenced by his friend Karl Marx expounding socialism and highly critical of the Chartist and Owenite schemes of the 1840s. In ‘A letter to the advocates of the co-​ operative principle, and to the members of co-​operative societies’ he attacked various co-​operative schemes, including the Land Plan, for creating isolated and vulnerable groups of landowners and small capitalists rather than the

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The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics  167 united political force afforded by land nationalisation.15 This position opened a divide between Jones and Harney, as the latter adopted a pragmatic strategy of drawing together co-​operators and trade unionists under a Chartist banner. After 1848 these two groups were the best organised aspects of the working class, but Harney believed that they needed a political direction so that a revolutionary organisation existed during the next trade depression. Jones was intractably opposed to this position, believing that the ‘aristocracy of labour’ represented by co-​operatives and trade unions were only interested in immediate gains.16 The result of this was the final Chartist schism, as from 1852 Jones was essentially a dictatorial leader within the NCA while Harney abandoned the official Chartist organisation. Despite his outreach to co-​operators Harney was still sceptical of improvement politics, and did not pander to improvement in his attempts to form a broad church. In 1850 he attacked the hectoring of the working class by middle-​class teetotallers: ‘I protest against the insolence of those who dare to lecture the working classes on their “immorality” while they themselves live by the most immoral system that ever this earth was afflicted with-​a system which bases the wealth, luxuries, and pleasures of the few, upon the poverty, crime, and misery of the many.’17 This reflected evident division amongst rank-​and-​file Chartists. George White, an Irish wool-​comber who supported Harney and was ‘quite at home in battering the head of a policeman’ and who during a trial ‘impudently forced the magistrates to supply him with sandwiches and sherry during his defence’ reported that teetotal Chartists imprisoned with him in Kirkdale Gaol in 1849 refused to share the food and gifts they received with his group because they drank ale. Harney sympathetically published his letters of complaint in the Northern Star.18 Similarly, his Red Republican and Friend of the People contained very little improving material. Articles on health or temperance seldom appeared, while ‘progress’ did not mean individual reform but the ending of wage labour and land monopolies and the subsequent improvement of society directed by the State.19 In the prospectus of the Friend of the People Harney resolved that ‘ “Quack Advertisements,” and other offensive matter to be found in nearly every existing journal, will be rigorously excluded from the columns’ of the paper’.20 While Red Republicanism was new, in other ways late Chartism was redolent of the 1830s. For a brief period between 1848 and 1851 the Chartist movement possessed a culture evocative of earlier Radicalism, illustrated by the moralistic populism of G.W.M. Reynolds. Reynolds had spent some time in the 1830s in Paris, where he became a republican influenced by the principles of the 1830 Revolution and Parisian print culture. Returning to England in 1836 he became a journeyman journalist and editor, with his most successful work at this time being The Mysteries of London, an imitation of the French serialisation Les Mystères de Paris by the socialist Eugene Sue published between 1844 and 1848. This was followed by the Mysteries of the Court of London which ran to 1856. The Mysteries series were realist

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168 Popular virtue depictions of the city’s underbelly, in the mould of the police and court news that dominated Cleave and Hetherington’s publications until the end of the 1830s. They were similarly frank in their detailing of criminality and sexuality, and equally moralistic, depicting a dissolute aristocracy and offering moral cautions and instructions for readers who had to navigate the corrupting environment of the metropolis. At the same time they were also semi-​pornographic, containing numerous sexualised portraits of the female characters along with scenes of dissolution. In 1846 Reynolds founded the popular Reynolds’ Miscellany, and followed this in 1849 with his Political Instructor, which became Reynolds’ Weekly Newspaper, a Journal of Democratic Progress and General Intelligence in 1850. These journals combined light entertainment with police news, democratic politics, moral instruction and demotic healthcare (although the Miscellany stopped being political once Reynolds’ Weekly Newspaper appeared). Angus Reach reported that in 1849 Abel Heywood sold one thousand copies of Mysteries of London a week, and 3,700 copies of Reynolds’ Miscellany (before the appearance of the Political Instructor).21 By the point of Reynolds’s ascendency both Cleave and Hetherington were dead, with Reynolds successfully stepping into the gap in the market. This status as heir of Cleave and Hetherington’s early output was however somewhat circuitous, as for most of the Chartist period Reynolds was only at the fringes of Radicalism. In the early 1840s he was prominent as an active teetotaller, being the Chairman of the London United Temperance Association, the editor of The Teetotaller and the author of The Anatomy of Intemperance, a pamphlet that argued that spontaneous human combustion was one of the many physical and moral dangers of alcohol consumption.22 In September 1841 he ended The Teetotaller and on the same day started The Anti-​Teetotaller, apparently the publication of the United Kingdom Anti-​ Teetotal Society, of which he was the Director-​General. Both the journal and the organisation ended a few weeks later.23 He spent most of the rest of the decade under the patronage of London publishers who straddled the line between Radical respectability and obscenity and illegality. When Reynolds applied to the Royal Literary Fund in 1844 during one his frequent periods of bankruptcy William Strange, the publisher of The Teetotaller, signed the declaration that he was of ‘good moral character’ and noted that he had known him for six years.24 Strange had remained a Radical publisher but did not follow his former colleagues Hetherington, Cleave, and Watson into Chartist activism, choosing instead to remain in London’s publishing demi-​monde. In 1844 Charles Dickens brought an injunction against him for selling a pirated and expurgated version of A Christmas Carol, and in 1848 Prince Albert successfully brought an injunction against him for trying to print a number of etchings that he and Queen Victoria had privately produced. When Strange was in court for publishing two obscene libels in 1857 it was the pornographer George Vickers, the publisher of The Mysteries of London, who gave him his character reference.25

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The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics  169 Reynolds was not a Chartist until 1848, when in February he spontaneously spoke at a meeting in Trafalgar Square to express solidarity with the French socialist Louis Blanc during the Revolution in Paris. After this he became a prominent Chartist speaker, an important ally of Harney, Bronterre O’Brien (who had returned to a leadership position within Chartism after years of fighting with O’Connor) and the ‘Red Republicans’, and in 1851 was elected onto the Executive of the NCA with the largest vote. Reynolds’s role in Chartism was recalled almost unanimously negatively. In his history R.G. Gammage suggested that by speaking at the Trafalgar Square meeting Reynolds put himself at the head of a revolutionary movement that could have seen him become part of a Chartist government, although he shied from explicitly claiming this was his sole motivation.26 Thomas Frost argued that Reynolds ‘seized’ the ‘opportunity of achieving demagogic fame’ and suggested that the violence when the police broke the meeting up had ‘no better result than the elevation to temporary popularity of the author of the “Mysteries of London” ’.27 W.E. Adams recalled Reynolds as foremost a successful writer of sensation who was ‘to certain extent … before his time’, but his involvement in Chartism was ‘another adventure’ prompted by the February Revolution. He went on to diminish his position as a leader: ‘I do not think, however, that any large number of the Chartists accepted him seriously. O’Connor and O’Brien, Jones and Harney, all had their followers; but Reynolds had no such distinction. Indeed it was rather as a charlatan and a trader than as a genuine politician that G.W.M. was regarded by the rank and file.’28 In later years W.J. Linton, another leader of late Chartism, dubbed him ‘the tin-​kettle at the mad mob’s tail’.29 The most vituperative attack came from Thomas Clark, who had previously been on the NCA Executive and an important manager of the Land Plan, but had now become the Secretary to the NCL. After Reynolds accused him of seeking aristocratic money in order to break up the NCA, Clark published a pamphlet attacking the ‘violent idiots and knaves’ who surrounded ‘that stupid Bedlamite Harney’, and quoted from Reynolds’s publications, highlighting his description of Chartism as ‘humbug’ in 1843 and reprinting extensive passages from the sex scenes from his Mysteries of London series.30 For most of the 1850s Jones and Reynolds were also not on good terms, with Reynolds repeatedly attacking Jones in his Newspaper until Jones successfully sued him in 1859. The alliance between Harney and Reynolds was illuminative of a shared taste. Under Harney the Northern Star was notably inclusive of the various sects, projects and eccentricities emerging within the movement. However, he was known to include irreverent or critical commentaries on such material, and in his personal life he resisted improving culture. Despite signing the pledge in 1840 he did not stick to it and regularly enjoyed convivial drinking, such as when the poet William Thom invited Harney and his wife to ‘assist in the concealment of an indefinite quantity of … Scotch Whisky’.31 When Holyoake sent him a copy of his self-​help book Practical Grammar he joked that ‘I know no more of grammar than does a cow of handling a musket’.32

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170 Popular virtue As a fan of Byron he drove the resurging interest and emulation of him in the Northern Star after 1845, and preferred the socialist semi-​pornography of Les Mystères de Paris over the moralism evident amongst other Chartist leaders.33 This was clearly a culture shared within the late-​ Chartist left. Throughout his life and journalistic career Thomas Frost lived and wrote in a liminal space between ‘respectability and roughness’ reminiscent of figures like Vincent in the early Chartist period. After briefly working in the Holywell Street shop of William Dugdale, the Radical infidel and pornographer, Frost produced his own imitation of the works of Sue, Emma Mayfield, an obscene morality tale of a woman abused by the aristocracy during the Regency. In his post-​Chartist career he was a ‘Liberal’ journalist and author, although as he argued this Liberalism was ‘elastic’ and often succumbed to the demands of ‘respectable’, more moderate editors and publishers.34 Similarly John Bedford Leno, an activist from late Chartism until the 1880s, was frank in his autobiography about his enjoyment of drinking culture. During the ‘nigh forty years’ he spent in a cluster of London pubs where he was ‘one of the fixtures’ he described his motley collection of companions:  ‘Broken down showmen, wild beast collectors, bankrupt country managers, coaches for the universities, scene painters, comic artists, chorus masters, dictionary compilers, theatrical property makers, play-​rights, private detectives, broken down orators, wild animal tampers, circus masters, and nondescripts of all kinds  –​liberal-​hearted men who, when in clover, thought of little else but getting rid of the money they had collected.’ For Leno tavern culture was simultaneously jovial and intellectual, and the conversations ranged from politics to drama to those of a ‘bantering nature’. An informal group headed by Leno who frequently met in the Windsor Castle pub in Holborn in the 1850s formed part of the political apprenticeship of later working-​class leaders, such as the trade unionist, secretary to the Reform League and later MP George Howell who believed his teetotalism made him come out best in the group’s debates.35 Later in life Leno targeted a moral lesson at his teetotal contemporaries when he noted that collections for regulars who had fallen on hard times were common, citing one man receiving £20 from a whip round; ‘charity is or rather was not confined to the goody goody race’.36 Reynolds was therefore not simply a purveyor of illicit literature who strayed into Chartism as a means of making money, but was consistent with a distinct strain of Radicalism which existed largely outside of the movement during the 1840s. As Rohan McWilliam has argued, despite his earlier inconsistencies Reynolds’s politics remained unswerving for the rest of the lives of both him and Reynolds’ Newspaper. His rejection and then retreat from the movement in 1851, likely due to health and fiscal concerns, ‘represents an opportunity lost for the left’.37 A more serious shift was Reynolds’s and Harney’s attitude to moral improvement. In an 1850 editorial Reynolds, like Harney, argued that the entire social system needed to change in order to improve society, while the next year he argued that only the nationalisation

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The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics  171

Figure  9  ‘Louisa Stanley’, from George W.M. Reynolds, Mysteries of the Court of London, Volume III (London, 1851). Unlike the male characters, sexualised images of female characters recurred throughout Mysteries of the Court of London.

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172 Popular virtue

Figure 10  ‘Venetia’s Lovers’, from George W.M. Reynolds, Mysteries of the Court of London, Volume III (London, 1851). Scenes of sexual deprivation were common in Reynolds’s publications. These cautionary tales were designed to titillate and instruct readers in a similar manner as the sexual content in the Radical press of the 1830s.

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The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics  173 of factories and machinery would enable ‘ample leisure for intellectual culture, moral improvement, and innocent recreation’.38 O’Brien repeatedly wrote about the corruption of health in industrial capitalism in his Power of the Pence, but similarly held that physical and mental improvement could only follow political and economic control.39 Therefore like many other Red Republicans Reynolds was ambivalent about the various improvement cultures and heterodoxies within working-​class and Radical culture. One of the few rare mentions of fringe medicines in Reynolds’ Newspaper, ‘How a Doctor Obtained a Degree’, reported a trial in which a homoeopathist and hydropathist was exposed for fraudulently writing a patient’s will as well as possessing false medical credentials.40 While his Newspaper did report on temperance meetings and groups, this was not to the exclusion of criticism and negative articles. The paper also reported on the spat between Ernest Jones and a teetotal lecturer who Jones complained had ‘sown division’ at a meeting in Coventry ‘by stating that teetotalism was the real way to gain the Charter’, and on the inaugural meeting of the Anti-​Brewery League, a group of labourers who complained that beer was too expensive and proposed co-​ operatively purchasing a brewery that would reclaim many ‘teetotallers from their absurd opinions’ through the provision of cheap ale.41 Jones, conversely, would go on to adopt a more positive position towards teetotallers as he came to dominate the NCA in the mid-​1850s. In 1854 he clearly accepted the moral arguments of teetotalism, defending alcohol consumption amongst workers by writing that ‘extreme privation breeds extreme indulgence. Had he not been cast so low yesterday he would not cast himself so low to-​day. Had you not denied him bread last week, he would have denied himself gin in this. But those FATAL FLUCTUATIONS are ruinous to the moral character of a man’.42 This sympathetic justification for alcoholism was little different from the writings of teetotallers like William Lovett or G.M. Bartlett a decade before, and this shared moralism became the basis of his attempts to rekindle the union between temperance activists and Chartism. When in 1858 Jones decided that union with the middle classes was the best direction for Chartism he explicitly cleaved the working class between the sober and the undeserving: ‘We leave aside the beer-​besotted and unthinking of the working classes.’43 The danger of Chartism’s improvement culture and discourse had always been that it could engender such disunion and elitism, a danger only averted in the 1840s by consistent association of improvement with class unity and expressions of sympathy for the dissolute. By the 1860s such sentiments were much less likely to be expressed.

Moral improvement and the Reform League While social democratic Chartist publications possessed an ambivalent attitude to improvement culture it was still an important factor for a number of

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174 Popular virtue Chartists, co-​operators, socialists, and Liberals. The Leader was founded by Holyoake and Thornton Leigh Hunt in 1850 for a co-​operative and trade unionist audience, and advocated a position of class conciliation. The contributor George Henry Lewes was fascinated by scientific topics and consequently the paper often discussed fringe medicines and popular science.44 The Chartist poet and mesmerist Gerald Massey and Leno contributed to The Christian Socialist, which advocated co-​operation and moral improvement and perceived fringe medicine and dietary reform as an integral part of this, with topics such as vegetarianism and teetotalism regularly discussed in the paper. Both of these groups had a problematic relationship with Harney and late Chartism. While Harney elicited the support of Hunt and The Leader during his outreach to trade unions and co-​operators, it nevertheless launched an attack on his ‘Red Republicanism’ which irritated W.J. Linton, a Republican friend of Harney’s who was also a founder of The Leader. The Christian Socialists were far more hostile; one of the founders of the movement, John Ludlow, wrote in his autobiography that he created the Christian Socialist in order to poach men like Massey away from Harney and his ‘patently treasonable’ Red Republican. Despite calling himself a democrat and socialist, Ludlow had even considered swearing in as a special constable in April 1848.45 This was however largely unsuccessful, as Leno and Massey remained loyal to Harney. The Republican former prisoner John James Brezer refused to denounce revolutionary Chartism in his autobiography, even though it was printed in the Christian Socialist, of which he was also the publisher.46 Improvement and demotic medicine were far more evident amongst this group. Ludlow learned mesmeric practice and ‘had on several occasions a remarkable confirmation of mesmerism as a curative force’.47 The philologist and lecturer at the Christian Socialist’s Working Men’s College, F.J. Furnivall, was a vegetarian who mainly ate figs, although Leno concluded upon looking at him that ‘he would be all the better for a few chops and steaks’.48 The Pioneer was produced by William Horsell between 1851 and 1859, which continued his earlier Vegetarian Advocate but also now sought to advocate co-​operation alongside ‘Peace, Phrenology, Vital Magnetism, Homoeopathy, and Hydropathy’.49 Like The Pioneer and The Leader the Christian Socialist posited an implicit connection between mental, physical and moral health, and included material on physiology and healthcare as well as moral improvement. Dietary reform and healthcare were major occupations of former Chartists in the 1850s, and the various sects of what commentators dubbed ‘physical puritanism’ after 1850 can be interpreted as non-​political successors to Chartism.50 Some of the more notable mentioned in previous chapters were John Skelton, Charles and Elizabeth Neesom, and Martha and Joseph Schellviettinghoff, all of whom seem to have abandoned political Radicalism for medicine. In the 1850s Robert Lowery worked solely as a temperance lecturer, and in 1851 William Lovett published Elementary Anatomy and Physiology … With Lessons on Diet, Intoxicating Drinks, Tobacco,

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The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics  175 and Disease, in which he presented the familiar Radical argument that disease was caused by ‘the neglect or infringement of some of the great physical and moral laws of the universe’ and that it was preferable to observe these laws than rely on the ‘exalted wisdom of others’ to cure disease.51 James Watson and Abel Heywood pitched themselves as health and self-​culture specialists by advertising their ‘works on physiology, phrenology, and theology’ in 1853, in a catalogue that ranged from numerous cheap pamphlets on phrenology, self-​ care, and hydropathy to the six-​volume complete works of William Channing, which cost 8s. Holyoake bought Watson’s catalogue in 1853 and continued to publish his texts on health, physiology, and improvement. Between 1864 and 1867 he edited the English Leader, which published defences of homeopathy, detailed depictions of the ‘physiological actions of alcohol’, and articles on the dangers of the consumption of diseased meat alongside regular adverts for medicines and medical texts. In 1868 he outlined the tendency that had driven the acceptance since the 1840s of all manner of fringe medicines and beliefs: ‘Better even be eccentric than false. It is sometimes dangerous to dissent from the public … but the partizan of truth must be content to brave many penalties.’ Such truth-​telling guaranteed independence, which he defined as ‘freedom from vice, from ignorance and superstition, from the tyranny of all power and all opinion which violate reason and nature’.52 When in the 1860s these co-​operators and trade unionists returned to political reform and initiated the agitation that would culminate in the Reform League, improvement remained integral aspects of their culture. Similarities to Chartism were clear. The Bee-​Hive was founded in 1861 to serve as the journal of the London Trades Council, but became over the course of the 1860s the mouthpiece for working-​class political reformers. It was edited by Robert Hartwell, the former LWMA member and editor of The Charter, and shared many of the concerns and content of the earlier Chartist press.53 One article argued that poor housing was ‘productive of a large amount of social, moral, and physical evil’ and that temperance societies should build housing tenements to improve the condition of the people. Another complained that female labour was inverting natural gender roles and familial relations.54 Such material was evocative of the Land Plan, but the continued presence of figures like Reverend Henry Solly, who remained an advocate of the mutual improvement societies he had founded when a Chartist in 1840, provided more direct links.55 This was also evident amongst more rank-​and-​file members of the League, such as the correspondent who in 1868 recollected taking part in the mass demonstrations at O’Connorville, and argued that the Land Plan should be re-​attempted as a limited liability company, legal since 1855.56 In George Howell’s recollections of his politicisation during his youth in the late 1850s, the influence of Chartism is clear. He was friends with Richard Moore and James Watson, and became acquainted with numerous other figures including Bronterre O’Brien, Thomas Cooper, Ernest Jones, Henry Vincent, Holyoake, and Lowery, largely through hearing them speak. His reading lists during

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176 Popular virtue this period would also have been familiar to most Chartists in the 1840s, including the books and pamphlets of the French Revolution debate (including Burke, Paine, and James Makintosh’s Vindiciae Gallicae), John Milton, Jeremy Bentham, Dr Knox’s Spirit of Despotism, Locke, William Howitt, and William Blackstone’s legal commentaries. Notably Howell was also taken by popular science and in particular physiology, including George Combe’s Constitution of Man. All of these texts and topics were part of the Chartist canon within publishers’ catalogues as well as the pages of publications such as the Northern Star or English Chartist Circular.57 Chartist moral politics were therefore an important practical, ideological, and symbolic link between the 1840s and the era of the Reform League. The politicisation of character and environment remained key issues. George Potter, one of the founders of the Bee-​Hive and until 1865 an executive on the London Trades Council, authored an article entitled ‘First Point of the New Charter’ demanding better homes for the working class since: ‘Without a healthy body, there cannot be a healthy mind; and how can there be a healthy body in the case of persons, infantile or adult, huddled together in houses and rooms ill-​drained, ill-​aired, ill-​lighted, ill-​supplied with means of order and cleanliness … Such places are nests of disease, hotbeds of immorality, provocatives to gin-​drinking.’58 Similarly, Holyoake was drawing on familiar Chartist arguments when he stated that true temperance required both self-​discipline and state intervention, as: ‘There are causes of intemperance in bad air, bad food, in over-​working, in excrement, in over-​eating, in animal food, in the want of recreation, in the want of art in life, in the want of credit for abstinence, in the want of self-​reliance which is never encouraged, better homes, better prospects for the working classes.’59 As with Chartism and Owenism, fringe medicines sat alongside co-​ operation, temperance, dietary reform, and education as immediate means of overcoming these influences. Adverts for co-​operatives, assurance, and building societies were placed alongside those for ‘PHRENOLOGY AND PHYSIOLOGY’, stating that Mr Butcher in New Oxford Street was available to be ‘consulted by the working classes every evening’, as well as the ubiquitous adverts for Frampton’s or Blair’s Pills.60 Later editions advertised ‘Dr Coffins Indian Pills’ and free consultations with his ‘partner and successor’ J.M. Brookes MD at lunchtime and in the evenings, or expounded the benefits of ‘Epps Homeopathic Cocoa’, which was produced and sold by James Epps, the brother of John Epps.61 Malcolm Chase has outlined how mutualist societies and associations facilitating home and land ownership were an important aspect of the self-​help culture which valued developed out of Chartism, and this was closely related to the continued interest in demotic medicine and self-​care evident in the Bee-​Hive.62 Equally, this concern with improvement and environment contributed to what Reynolds’ Newspaper named ‘The New Social Movement’ of working-​class activists lobbying for government intervention to promote the ‘physical, moral and intellectual welfare’ of the working class following the Reform Act.63 The working-​class

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The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics  177 activism during this period therefore illustrates a fusion of a culture of self-​ care with demands for political power and government intervention very similar to Chartism in the 1840s. While the moral politics of the post-​Chartist period was rooted in that of the 1840s, the similarities should not be overstated and the points of distinction should be underlined. If the persistence of self-​culture and demands for progressive social policies indicate the influence of both the ethical Radicalism of the 1840s and the social democracy of the 1850s, the Chartist inheritance could also be elitist and callously individualistic. William Lovett’s Social and Political Morality, published in 1853, was only superficially similar to 1840’s Chartism. His aim, as he set out in the preface, was to ‘show my fellow countrymen in what way their conduct, social and political, influences their well-​ being, as well as that of their fellow citizens’. This view was heavily influenced by the Liberal theorists of individualism and political economy, William Ellis and J.S. Mill, two of the middle-​class figures who had come to patronise Lovett after his break from mainstream Chartism in the 1840s. The basis of this thinking about humans as moral actors remained the same. The link between physiology and morality remained since he still perceived the mind to be a perfectible organ, and society’s improvement was predicated on and aggregated from the improvement of its individual members. However while his science of morality remained largely unchanged since 1840, his political ethics were distinctly different. The competitive society that Lovett and others had attacked since the early 1830s as corrupting and demoralising to all was reformulated as a contract between the buyers and sellers of labour, who possessed mutual obligations but also drew mutual benefits. Consequently ‘the only inferior human beings to be found are those whose own vices have degraded them’.64 Under such thinking charity caused only an ‘idle, dissolute, and vicious life’, as people could only morally improve through the fulfilment of their obligation to labour. Remaining healthy was a similar moral obligation to society, so that individuals were not a draw on resources, could contribute to its overall improvement, and did not pass on moral, physical, and mental defects to their children.65 These obligations hinged on female affective labour and a patriarchal nuclear family. Imprudent sexuality was one of the worst bestial influences on humanity, and the clean and respectable demeanour of wives and mothers was a crucial influence on the overall improvement of society.66 For others Chartist moral politics provided guidebooks for solitary improvement rather than the sort of moral hegemony that figures like Cleave, Vincent, or Lovett outlined in the 1840s. Although George Howell’s politicisation and intellectual culture clearly drew from Chartism, his improvement ideology was in many ways different from that elaborated in the 1840s –​as he himself made clear. In many pages of his autobiography Howell states his admiration for Robert Owen, and in particular his theory of character formation. However he clarifies this repeatedly, stating that he ‘never did altogether’ agree with Owen’s view that ‘man is wholly’ the creature of circumstances.

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178 Popular virtue One reason for this was his evident belief in racial characteristics which he took from Darwin, who he regretted was not read by enough workers. He also argued that ‘Communistic Communities’ required a religious and spiritual dimension, and as part of this argued that Owen’s outlook was best when he turned to spiritualism in the 1850s after having found ‘human nature too strong’. Overall Howell’s brand of improvement was heavily tinged by his Wesleyanism. Reading Volney and Paine in his youth had never shaken his faith, and despite being friends with prominent freethinkers like Watson and Holyoake ‘I was never one of them in so far as theological tenets are concerned’. His interest in ‘political or industrial’ questions came long after his interest in ‘social and literary’ matters, especially temperance and education, and in one passage of his autobiography he clearly stated that he thought himself as continuing the work of the bourgeois social reformers of the 1840s. Howell’s ideas about improvement clearly overlapped and drew from Chartism’s in a number of areas, but it lacked the primacy of class-​ based political independence that was evident in Chartist ideas of improvement and which had its roots in Freethought.67 Howell thought improvement would deliver workers to respectability and social advancement, whereas in 1841 Chartists had thought improvement would ensure victory in the contest for political power. Because of this revolutionary aspect to Chartism’s improvement culture, the Chartist inheritance was also inconvenient for some participants in the agitation of the 1860s. Opponents to further suffrage extension, such as the MP Robert Lowe, argued that workers were unintelligent drunkards who were vulnerable to demagogues and could not be trusted with political power, and as the agitation leading to the 1867 Reform Act grew it became imperative for many working-​class reformers to prove that this was not the case.68 It was because of such assumptions that members of the Reform League objected to the possibility of Reynolds joining the association, causing him to tell Howell he would work independently and ‘smile at all petty jealousies and narrow minded actions’.69 Some went further, repudiating not just figures like Reynolds but Chartism in its entirety in order to vindicate the working class of the 1860s. Ludlow and Lloyd Jones’s The Progress of theWorking Class, 1832–​1867 argued that since the Chartist period there had been a broad improvement of the working class owing to temperance, co-​operation, and education.70 They included a lengthy testimony from a reformer in Norwich who argued that ‘the leaders of the people in working class agitation, for instance in the Reform movement, are different men from the old Chartist leaders; more moderate, more reasonable, more moral, less violent in temper and language’.71 The son of a Chartist pub-​owner who was buying pikes in 1849 when ‘the Chartist movement was at its worst’ had later become ‘the best of our local preachers, and a Sunday-​school teacher’.72 The ‘progress’ that they celebrated had seen revolutionary, infidel, and anti-​clerical Chartism replaced with patriotism and Christianity. This line was followed by sections of the liberal press. Partly thanks to government intervention but

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The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics  179 also due to its own agency Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper argued that the ‘physical, intellectual, and social conditions of the wage-​classes has been raised’. Elsewhere, Lloyd’s argued that the improving strategies employed by workers since the Chartist period had improved society immeasurably and proven their entitlement to the vote.73 Holyoake was also drawn to such positions, writing in his hagiographic history of the Rochdale Pioneers, Self-​Help by the People, that co-​operatives had brought the sort of meaningful social and individual improvement that Chartism’s purely political project could never have brought about.74 Some activists during the Reform League era often expressed their moral politics in a manner that would have been problematic even for moderate Chartists. Robert Applegarth argued in 1869 that there were two classes of working men, one ‘careless and indifferent’ due to being ‘so long neglected and degraded’, which the ‘better class’ had to ‘carry on their backs’.75 Similarly, when Lloyd’s Newspaper argued that ‘the workman of 1867 is in every respect the superior to the workman of 1832’ and therefore deserved the vote, it was asserting that the working class did not deserve the vote during the Chartist agitation.76 As they put it in an earlier article, referring to the workers of the Chartist era: ‘Had Mr. Lowe’s descriptive speeches been applied to this compact mass of ignorance, suffering and vice, few would have quarrelled with them.’77 In Self-​Help by the People Holyoake suggested that workers ‘make things bad for themselves and for their masters by their want of knowledge’. By 1860 he had come to advocate educational qualifications for the vote as a provisional step towards universal suffrage. While this aligned him with Radical-​Liberals like J.S. Mill it initiated an argument with W.E. Adams, who defended Complete Suffrage and repeated the familiar Chartist argument that educational reforms should come after franchise reform, not operate as a precondition for it.78 Ludlow similarly argued that Manhood Suffrage should be ‘subject to some limits of education, morality & self-​dependence’ and argued that the agricultural population were ‘far too ignorant and dependent upon its employers’ for the vote to be extended to them.79 As we have seen, the Chartist leadership frequently criticised the people, particularly after 1840. Lovett was often elitist about other sections of the working class, and his Address and Rules of the London Working Men’s Association, written in 1836, specified sober, intelligent, and, by implication, artisanal men as the group’s constituency, an attitude he repeated in 1840 when he described Chartists as the ‘elite’ of the working class.80 Nevertheless he often tempered this attitude, most notably in Chartism when he explicitly stated that he was not arguing sections of the working class needed to ‘improve’ in order to deserve the vote. Likely because this was an accusation being flung around by O’Connor, Cleave also repeated this point in his English Chartist Circular.81 While Hetherington mused in his Half-​Penny Magazine in 1840 that immoral workers as much as immoral aristocrats were untrustworthy with political power, he still concluded that

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180 Popular virtue nothing less than universal suffrage would be just.82 Despite occasionally venting frustrations or revealing disdain towards certain sections of workers –​a vice of left-​wing leaders of factory workers, such as Peter McDouall and William Aitken, as much as artisanal moderates such as Lovett or Vincent –​it is notable that Chartist leaders held true to universal suffrage. Similarly, while Chartists would have agreed with Applegarth’s belief that education and improvement would prove ‘a wholesome check on [working-​class] vices, and confer a blessing on posterity’, they would not agree with his advocacy of compulsory State education and attacks on ‘the cant which has too long been preached about the “liberty of the subject”’.83 This was a point reiterated by Lovett in the Bee-​Hive in 1868.84 As was evident in both the National Association and the Land Plan democratic control and secular education were integral to Chartist ideas of schooling, and very few Chartist parents in the 1840s would have supported State education. This was not a position limited to Lovett’s ‘strand’ of Chartism, as Eugenio Biagini suggests, but something important to the entire movement and a matter that O’Connor came to take a close interest in.85 The period between 1848 and the 1870s therefore illustrates a problematic continuity between Chartism and Liberalism. The social democratic influence on the Reform League and subsequently popular Liberalism has been well-​outlined by Margot Finn.86 This led to the retention amongst working-​class reformers of a sense of political participation and social reform as being prerequisites of widespread improvement. Nevertheless, as the pages of the Bee-​Hive indicate, many of this group of reformers were amiable to the gradualism of individual self-​help and self-​improvement, rejecting the earlier outright hostility of Harney and Reynolds. However, those who promoted moral improvement as a prerequisite of political participation stripped from the legacy of Chartism’s improvement culture its antagonistic class analysis, revolutionary teleology, and very often its demands for universal suffrage. For such Liberals moral improvement was a process that allowed the working class to be demarcated between those capable of political responsibility and those incapable, a piecemeal implementation of the Charter that was moralistic rather than strategic. Furthermore, many former Chartists became advocates of self-​help positions that decisively rejected and repudiated the original Chartist vision, and which originated not in social democracy but free trade.

Self-​help, moral improvement, and capital Self-​help was one of the most popular but overlooked legacies of Chartism’s improvement culture, most closely associated with Samuel Smiles, the author of the wildly successful book Self-​Help in 1859.87 Smiles was a Chartist supporter during his period as editor of the Leeds Times in the early 1840s and identified closely with its moderate leadership and improving aspirations. He

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The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics  181 offered Lovett an editorial position in 1840 upon leaving prison which he chose to decline, likely owing to the problems he had had with the Charter. Like most Chartists during this period Smiles argued that education should involve ‘the development of man’s whole constitution, physical, moral and intellectual’ and through this develop the progressive potential inherent to mankind through its rationality.88 Smiles was also drawn to William Channing between 1839 and 1842, taking from Channing’s acolyte Ralph Waldo Emerson the phrase ‘self-​help’. However, the violence inflicted upon the Chartist movement in 1842 convinced Smiles that progress could not be brought about through debate and the co-​operative dissemination of knowledge. Unwilling to accept the proposition that capitalists and labourers had fundamentally different interests Smiles instead turned towards small self-​improvement societies, such as temperance groups and co-​operatives, as the means of improving individuals and with that society. Smiles’s advocacy of thrift, self-​reliance, and self-​improvement in the 1850s therefore grew from an indigenous position within working-​class politics rather than an abrupt transition into crass materialism and apologetics for capitalism. In this view, self-​help was a form of ‘middle-​class utopianism’ which grew from the frustrated political ambitions of the lower middle-​class in the 1840s.89 However, one of the most successful ex-​Chartist proponents of self-​help, Henry Vincent, reveals a far less linear transition. Vincent developed an ethos of Liberal individualism which fetishised capitalist social relations and decisively broke from the class critique which had born the culture and practices of moral improvement. His analysis of societal and individual improvement bore core similarities with Chartism’s, but became harnessed to the apparently unstoppable progressive force of mid-​Victorian capital. After Chartism Henry Vincent had become one of the ‘most eminent professional lecturers in the kingdom’ according to an American magazine in 1869, while in 1892 Leno described him as ‘possibly the greatest lecturer that England has yet produced’.90 He visited the United States in 1866, 1867, 1869, and finally in 1875–​76, where he commanded fees of up to $150 per lecture.91 In a June 1877 letter to William Lloyd Garrison, the American abolitionist with whom Vincent became close friends on the first of these trips, he claimed that ‘I need a little rest for myself –​for I have lectured five nights a week since 25th of last August –​I spoke at Chesterfield [and] Chatsworth last week –​and am at Cardiff next Monday to Tuesday’.92 This is illustrated by the near-​constant presence of reports about Vincent’s lectures in British newspapers between the 1840s and his death in 1879. Vincent’s success was based on his perfection of the methods of popular speaking which he had built up from his youth, and various audience members from his Chartist to his post-​Chartist days commented on both his vocal and physical abilities. Robert Gammage recalled that as a Chartist it was ‘his attitude, his voice, his gesture, and his enthusiasm, rather than his language, which contained the summary of his power’.93 A journalist reminisced that the older Vincent still possessed a sense of humour, and that despite his small stature which

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182 Popular virtue required him to stand on a stool he presented a ‘rugged, picturesque figure, with a merry twinkle in his own eye, or a curl of scorn upon his lip’.94 As lecturing became a major form of commercialised entertainment after the 1840s it increasingly incorporated this sort of showmanship and careful choreography.95 While the methods illustrated skills honed by long experience, the content and context of his messages were notably different from his Chartist youth, most clearly in terms of format and composition. In later life he charged for lectures, something unthinkable within the Chartist movement where such a practice would have been seen as exploitative and anti-​democratic. This shift to professional lecturing occurred in early 1842, when his printing business had collapsed, he had acrimoniously broken with his business partner Robert Kemp Philp, and he was liable for extensive debts with a wife and baby to support. His ‘treasonous’ support for the CSU had forced him from organised Chartism and exiled him from his home in Bath, where most Chartists turned against him in a vicious split. After arriving in Nottingham that summer to support Joseph Sturge’s campaign he described the change in the composition of his audience to John Minikin in a glum joke: ‘On Monday night here I had a chapel full –​chiefly middle men … I am sort of … Punch among them, a knowing kind of fellow –​some cheesemonger was heard to say “I likes to hear his blessed voice” … But why boast? “all that’s bright must fade”; and even popularity based on cheesemen may perish.’96 Vincent remained an advocate of suffrage extension and stood for Chartist principles at eight election contests between 1842 and 1852, and he was partially rehabilitated when Feargus O’Connor stated in 1846 that he thought he was still a Chartist. By the end of the decade Vincent had however stopped explicitly advocating the Charter and presented himself as a Liberal. As he told a meeting at York after his failed election attempt in 1848: ‘By the really Liberal party, I do not mean any insane demagogues who would sanction violence or turbulence. By the really Liberal party, I do not mean those who believe that the sword is a regenerator. No … I believe in moral power, and moral power alone … by the really Liberal party I mean the virtuous and really intelligent portion of the middle and working classes.’97 In this he was distancing himself from the Chartists during a period in which many had returned to insurrectionary politics and were undergoing repression similar to those of 1842 and 1839, the year of Vincent’s own arrest. The notion put forward by Brian Harrison that he illustrates continuity between Chartism and Liberalism is therefore problematic, and the same is true of his moral politics and advocacy of moral improvement.98 After the late 1840s Vincent retained his Godwinian belief in societal progress and human perfectibility. The force of this change had shifted in his thought from working-​ class improvement through political organisation to capitalist expansion and the inevitable consequent improvement amongst the working-​class. Technological topics and metaphors permeated his lectures until his death. In 1847 during a lecture on the Early Closing Movement,

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The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics  183 a largely evangelical-​led campaign to shorten the opening hours of shops, Vincent described the railway as ‘extending its mighty arms east, west, north, south, threatening annihilation to space and time’. However alongside material expansion Vincent saw in this ‘a higher, more spiritual meaning … a glorious future, when the principles of human brotherhood shall become a practical reality, knitting the nations closer together’.99 In 1855 he gave a lecture in Preston where he stated: if a stranger were to write a criticism of the English constitution, he could not say that England consisted of crowned lords and commons only. Now, let them contemplate this material growth; think of the great influence exercised to-​day by the manufacturers and middle class of England, and contrast the great progressive forces of the present with the difficulties that confronted our fathers some centuries ago.100

In a letter written a month before his death in 1878 he wrote ‘No more in the history of the human race, with electric telegraphs and printing presses, shall the power of absolutist authority dominate the world. No more shall it cast its frowning shadow even for a moment over the glories of modern civilization’.101 These were common sentiments in mid-​century Liberalism, and another prominent advocate of them was Philp, who ranked with Smiles as one of the most successful producers of self-​help literature. In his The History of Progress in Great Britain Philp argued that merely looking at the range of commodities in shop windows would improve the population, a position reminiscent of the Radical press’s faith in the 1830s that wide reading would ensure individual and political progress. For Philp in 1859 the ‘great charters of modern freedom and improvement’ were not written texts but were instead ‘engraved in lines of iron over the whole face of our land … traced in a million track-​ways upon the seas … in electric wires, nerves that are everywhere ready to stir the nation’s heart’.102 These positions were rooted in the ACLL’s fusing of societal improvement, social and international peace, and economic expansion as the inevitable consequences of free trade. As Peter Gurney has outlined, during the National Anti-​Corn-​Law League Bazaar of 1845 free traders utilised consumption as a political force that harmonised ‘individual desire and the collective progress of “the people” ’.103 It was these beliefs that drew Vincent into supporting the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Central Working Class Committee (CWCC) of the Exhibition was put together over April and May 1851 in order to encourage labourers to attend. The Committee included three former Chartists, all of whom had come to believe that labour possessed obligations to capital –​Vincent, William Lovett, and Robert Hartwell –​and a number of other figures involved in broader Radicalism. Many were enthusiastic about the potential of the Exhibition for educating workers that the growth of capital, the profusion of commodities, and general economy improvement was fuelling social progress.104 Commentators such as Henry Mayhew in his novel 1851 claimed

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184 Popular virtue that to this end it was successful, while The Leader described the CWCC’s composition as a ‘striking example of the fusion of parties’ that resulted from the Exhibition.105 In 1852 the Exhibition’s Commissioners were similarly sanguine about its benefits, noting the downturn in crime in the region around the Crystal Palace between 1850 and 1851, and a complete absence of political offences. They attributed this to good policing and prosperous social conditions, but also noted that while the Exhibition ‘directly addressed itself to the improvement of habits and diminution of wants, it was no less calculated to influence the mind and the better feelings’.106 The CWCC, however, possessed no part in this and had collapsed a few months into its existence due to the reality of elitism and social relations. Later in life Lovett recalled that this was due to ‘some aristocratic prejudice’ and at the time Colonel Reid, the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Exhibition, reported that he feared that the patron of the Exhibition, Prince Albert, ‘should put himself at the head of a democratic movement’.107 With no official recognition the Committee voted to dissolve itself, although Vincent remained an enthusiastic promulgator of the Exhibition in his lectures. Vincent was nevertheless conscious of the fact that working-​class Radicals did not agree with his views on the Exhibition. He told one of the chief organisers that the ‘working classes regarded [it] as a movement to wean them from politics’ and the workers in the north were ‘hanging back and suspicious’.108 The response of the Chartist press was also increasingly hostile. Before Harney had left as editor the Northern Star attacked it as a display of ‘selfish and degraded individualism’ while Reynolds’ Newspaper argued that although the working class was the only reason the Exhibition existed they were ‘only recognised as human machines in the hands of hereditary tyrants … or by capitalists to add to their accumulated wealth’.109 In his Friend of the People Harney argued that an exhibition should be about the supremacy of labour rather than capital: I can imagine a rich array of material wealth, which would testify to the enjoyment, as well as skill and industry of the workers, of which the profit and the glory would be theirs, untouched by useless distribution and exploiting capitalists. Lastly, I can imagine that such a fete –​such an Exhibition –​ will be only when the working classes shall first have … substituted for the rule of masters, and royalty of a degenerated monarchy, –​‘the supremacy of Labour, and the sovereignty of the Nation’.110

This was similar to Reynolds’ Newspaper’s argument that the Exhibition illustrated the aristocracy and middle class as the ‘The Imposter Representatives of England’s Labour’. Vincent, on the other hand, travelled the nation during the Exhibition lecturing on ‘ “the liberal and progressive tendencies of the present age,” influence of the press, railways, free commerce, and public meetings upon our character as a people,  –​on the facts and principles

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The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics  185 illustrated by the Great Exhibition, and the point towards which England the world are tending’.111 Vincent’s involvement in the Exhibition overlapped with his peace activism, through which he became close to a number of men who had been Chartism’s antagonists a decade before. Many free traders believed that the eradication of commercial boundaries would engender a world of brotherly love and harmony propelled by trade, and the internationalist nature of the Exhibition, which was officially titled the ‘Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’, attracted support from this quarter. Many prominent figures in the ACLL turned to peace activism after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 –​ most notably Richard Cobden, John Bright, and Joseph Sturge. Like Bright and Sturge, Vincent had become a Quaker at some point after his Chartist career, although he never took formal membership.112 This informed his beliefs in religious toleration and the importance of self-​improvement through fidelity to truth and knowledge rather than scriptural authority. It also gave a prophetic nature to his belief in the expansion of capital driving social change. When tested by ‘the power of pure religion’ the forces of commerce and accumulation fostered a divine spirit of universal love that would break down national antagonisms, and ‘we may rejoice in a common God, and a common love will triumph over a common foe’.113 For Vincent this process began not with the birth of Chartism, but instead with the birth of free trade. He regularly heaped praise on his new chief, Cobden, and toured Cobden’s Constituency, the West Riding, in 1849 to gather support for his parliamentary motion to establish international arbitration as the means of settling disputes. Speaking in Sheffield Vincent said that it was evident that when Cobden ‘commenced the Free Trade movement, he regarded that merely as a first step in a most important march that was to improve the social and political condition of the world’.114 This infuriated Chartists like W.J. Linton, who saw the participation of Vincent and Robert Lowery in the 1849 Congress alongside men like Cobden as a betrayal. In particular he denounced their resolutions proposing arbitration for international disputes and non-​intervention in internal conflicts in Italy and Hungary, writing that ‘Non-​intervention between States is the same as Lasser-​faire between individuals: the liberty of the stronger –​the right of ruffianism –​ANARCHY’.115 Vincent, however, firmly believed that free trade was the only means of securing both social and international unity and order. Guided by these beliefs, Vincent taught himself French, which he utilised when he hosted the delegation of French workers to the 1851 Peace Conference in London. A  year later he was sent by Cobden to present a commemorative medal to the working-​men of Paris. In his account of the meeting Vincent reported that the workers ‘spoke with rapture of the Peace Congress, and of the World’s Exhibition of Industry –​the principles of the one, the material and intellectual wealth and beauty of the other –​as combining to indicate a brighter future –​a future of freedom, industry, and peace’.116 Central to Vincent’s post-​Chartist lectures on progress was the argument that

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186 Popular virtue ‘[c]‌ommerce creates necessity for travelling’, and that this recurring contact was the root of human understanding and common cause.117 Importantly, this was distinct not only from Vincent’s revolutionary zeal prior to 1839, but also from his moralistic turn after his imprisonment. In 1841 the agent of this progress was an intelligent working class which, borrowing from Volney, was enlightening itself until the point of a final confrontation with the unproductive classes within society. Improvement meant becoming better Chartists to make this confrontation a reality. After Chartism, Vincent saw industrial capitalism as society’s improving agency. Considering this, it is difficult to consent to the argument that Vincent’s teetotal Chartism was a clear forerunner of Popular Liberalism. This is crucial context to how Vincent understood poverty and presented it to his audiences. From 1843 onwards he effectively depoliticised poverty, presenting it in his post-​Chartist career unambiguously and consistently as the consequence of poor individual character. Whereas at the beginning of the 1840s Vincent saw the demoralisation of the working class as being due to the systematic nature of corruption and its use as the foundation of the aristocracy’s rule, he rejected this outright in his later Liberalism. As his biographer wrote after his death:  ‘He had it as the deep unspeakable yearning of his heart to do whatever he could to raise the working classes to a higher level of life, and to inspire them with loftier purposes and aims. He knew –​none better than he –​that their degradation and suffering was more owing to their low tastes and vices, than to any political disadvantage.’ As he stated in his 1855 lecture on moral progress, ‘many of the sorrows endured by working men might often be traced to their intemperate and ignorant habits … [they] … squandered their wages away in thoughtlessness, in folly, in dissipation’. These men should turn to education, ‘sobriety, truthfulness of character, and purity of manners’ to become ‘the best of husbands … the best of fathers … they would be beginning at home with a great reformation’.118 In a lecture in Leicester in 1857 he stated that poverty ‘never did come upon any but the idle, the dreamy, the intemperate, and the improvident’.119 In Hampshire in 1871 he claimed that provision of alms ‘encouraged pauperism, if not crime’, in Northampton in 1869 he encouraged his audience to accommodate themselves to the fact that ‘as long as vice and ignorance exist there will be poverty in this world’, and in York in 1877 he posited that ‘petty extravagances … led to poverty, while small savings tended to increase our comforts’.120 All of this was diametrically opposed to Chartist arguments about the causes of poverty, not least those expressed by a young Vincent. Such positions also reflected a wider belief, held by Lovett in Social and Political Morality and Philp in his morality tale How a Penny Became a Thousand Pounds, that thrift and saving could turn even workers into investors and even creditors. For Lovett, saving and investing was one of the obligations for societal improvement. For Philp, it was the fulfilment of a natural law as organic as those that regulated the yearly reproduction and multiplication of ears of corn. Such attitudes were

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The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics  187 alien to the period of Chartism, which encouraged saving so that the money could be subscribed to the movement or denied from the government, and which repeatedly eviscerated finance capitalists and the various forms of ‘money-​jobbers’.121

Conclusion It is difficult to cast a clear trajectory for Chartism’s moral improvement culture. After 1848 the distance placed between social-​democratic Chartism and the counter-​culture of the 1840s illustrates that Chartism’s legacy was not just one of moral probity. The often-​coarse populism that defined early Chartism returned to it in the end, and as Leno’s robust defence of tavern culture, Reynolds’s racy populism, or Frost’s post-​Chartist ‘elastic’ Liberalism and liminal literary career suggest, Chartism possessed less ‘respectable’ descendants. Equally, while the moral politics of the Reform League inherited Chartism’s concern with moral, social, and physical improvement, both through self-​culture and demands for government intervention, this was predicated on a repudiation of many aspects of Chartism and a fundamental redrawing of Chartism’s improving culture. Improvement was contextualised quite differently during the 1840s, being envisioned by Chartists as an integral component in a long period of conflict with the middle class and aristocracy which would culminate in a victory for the enlightened working class. It did not mean gradual improvement until a section of the working class could achieve the vote, or the implementation of singular aspects of the Charter. Finally, the self-​help culture of the mid-​Victorian period was a crucial descendent of Chartism’s counter-​culture. After the 1850s some Radicals no longer viewed the working class as the agents of progress and improvement, seeing this role instead in capitalism itself. This rather apolitical form of Liberalism was part of the Chartist heritage, but was again substantially different from Chartism.

Notes 1 Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London, 1964), p.  272, ‘Artisan or labour aristocrat?’ Economic History Review 37 (1984), pp. 355–​72; Robert Gray, The Aristocracy of Labour in Nineteenth-​ Century Britain c.1850–​1914 (London, 1981). 2 Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid (eds), Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organized Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–​ 1914 (Cambridge, 1991); Eugenio F. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–​1880 (Cambridge, 1992); Michael Winstanley, ‘Oldham Radicalism and the Origins of Popular Liberalism, 1830–​52’ Historical Journal 36:3 (1993), pp. 619–​43.

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188 Popular virtue 3 Anthony Taylor, ‘ “The Best Way to Get What He Wanted”:  Ernest Jones and the Boundaries of Liberalism in the Manchester Election of 1868’ Parliamentary History 16:2 (1999), pp. 185–​204; Robert Hall, ‘Chartism Remembered:  William Aitken, Liberalism, and the Politics of Memory’ Journal of British Studies 38:4 (1999), pp. 445–​70. 4 Thomas Frost, FortyYears Recollections: Literary and Political (London, 1880), p. 184. 5 G.J. Harney to Frederick Engels, 19 March 1849, in Frank Gees Black and Renee Métivier Black (eds), The Harney Papers (Assen, 1969), p. 249. 6 Malcolm Chase, Chartism:  A  New History (Manchester, 2007), pp.  300–​3, 312–​17. 7 David Goodway, London Chartism (Cambridge, 1982). 8 Albert Robert Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge:  A  Portrait of George Julian Harney (London, 1958), p. 178. 9 Chase, Chartism, p. 332. 10 Cited in Schoyen, Chartist Challenge, p. 183. 11 Chase, Chartism, p. 334; Frost, Forty Years Recollections, p. 183. 12 Red Republican, 13 July 1850. 13 Northern Star, 26 October 1850. 14 Schoyen, Chartist Challenge, p. 198. 15 ‘A Letter to the Advocates of the Co-​operative Principle, and to the Members of Co-​operative Societies’ in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Volume 11 (2010), pp. 573–​81. 16 Schoyen, Chartist Challenge, p. 220. 17 Red Republican, 5 October 1850, p. 122. 18 Robert Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement (London, 1854), pp. 154, 230; George White to Mark Norman, 30 May 1849, in Black and Black, Harney Papers, pp. 82–​5; Northern Star, 16 June 1849. 19 The Friend of the People, 19 July 1851. 20 The Friend of the People, 19 April 1851. 21 Angus Bethune Reach, Manchester and the Textile Districts in 1849 (Helmshore, 1972), pp. 38–​9. 22 Notes and Queries, March 2010, pp. 1–​2. 23 Samuel Couling, History of the Temperance Movement in Britain and Ireland (London, 1862), p. 162. 24 British Library, Royal Literary Fund Archives, Loan 96 RLF 1 Volume 19, No. 957 G.W.M. Reynolds June 1844. 25 The Times, 5 April 1851; 11 May 1857. 26 Gammage, History, p. 294. 27 Thomas Frost, Reminiscences of a Country Journalist (London, 1886), p. 31. 28 W.E. Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom (New York, 1968), p. 235. 29 W.J. Linton, James Watson: A Memoir (New Haven, 1879), p. 53. 30 Thomas Clark, A Letter Addressed to G.W.M. Reynolds, Reviewing his Conduct as a Professed Chartist… (London, 1850), pp. 4, 12. 31 William Thom to G.  Julian Harney, 1846, in Black and Black, Harney Papers, p. 74.

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The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics  189 32 National Co-​ operative Archive, Manchester. Collection of George Jacob Holyoake Documents, 1835–​ 1917:  G.J. Harney to G.J. Holyoake, 22 March 1844. 33 Schoyen, Chartist Challenge, p. 127. 34 Peter Gurney, ‘Working-​Class Writers and the Art of Escapology in Victorian England: The Case of Thomas Frost’ Journal of British Studies 45:1 (2012), pp. 51–​71, at p. 60. 35 F.M. Leventhal, Respectable Radical: George Howell and Victorian Working Class Politics (Cambridge, 1971), p. 22. 36 John Bedford Leno, The Aftermath: With Autobiography of the Author (London, 1892), pp. 74–​5. 37 Rohan McWilliam, ‘The Mysteries of G.W.M. Reynolds:  Radicalism and Melodrama in Victorian Britain’ in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (eds), Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J.F.C. Harrison (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 182–​199, at p. 195. 38 Reynolds’ Newspaper, 23 March 1851. 39 See for instance the long essay on the evils of the division of society into rich and poor in Power of the Pence, 17 March 1849. 40 Reynolds’ Newspaper, 7 July 1861. 41 Reynolds’ Newspaper, 7 September 1851; 14 December 1851. 42 People’s Paper, 30 September 1854. 43 People’s Paper, 4 September 1858. 44 The Leader, 4 October 1851; Gammage, History, pp.  409–​10; Rosemary Ashton (ed.), Versatile Victorian:  Selected Writings of George Henry Lewes (Bristol, 1992). 45 John Ludlow, The Autobiography of a Christian Socialist (London, 1981), p.  189; Charles Raven, Christian Socialism, 1848–​ 1854 (London, 1920), p. 105. 46 David Vincent, Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working-​Class Politicians, 1790–​1885 (London, 1977), pp. 149–​87. 47 Ludlow, Autobiography, p. 332. 48 Leno, Aftermath, p. 60. 49 Friend of the People, 12 April 1851. 50 Samuel Brown, Lectures on the Atomic Theory and Essays Scientific and Literary, Volume 2 (Edinburgh, 1858), pp. 194–​ 250; James Gregory, Of Victorians and Vegetarians:  The Vegetarian Movement in Nineteenth-​Century Britain (London, 2007). 51 William Lovett, Elementary Anatomy and Physiology … With Lessons on Diet, Intoxicating Drinks, Tobacco, and Disease (London, 1851), p. 159. 52 G.J. Holyoake, The Logic of Life, Deduced from the Principle of Freethought (London, 1868), pp. 8, 11. 53 Leno, Aftermath, p. 71. 54 Bee-​Hive, 13 June 1863. 55 Bee-​Hive, 21 March 1863. On Solly see: Owen Ashton and Paul Pickering, Friends of the People:  Uneasy Radicals in the Age of the Chartists (London, 2002), pp. 29–​54.

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190 Popular virtue 56 Bee-​Hive, 15 February 1868. 57 Bishopsgate Institute, Papers of George Howell, ‘Memoirs of a Busy Life’. Note that Howell’s autobiographical material has inconsistent or missing pagination, making identification of individual pages difficult. This material was consulted via the collection ‘Selected Papers of George Howell, 1833–​ 1910’ located online at:  www.britishonlinearchives.co.uk/​collection. php?cid=9781851172757 [accessed 16 June 2016]. 58 The Contemporary Review (November 1871), p. 554. 59 Cited in Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels: The Origins of the British Secularist Movement, 1791–​1866 (Manchester, 1974), p. 129. 60 Bee-​Hive, 4 October 1862. 61 Bee-​Hive, 18 January 1868. 62 Malcolm Chase, The Chartists:  Perspectives and Legacies (London, 2015), pp. 212–​44. 63 Reynolds’ Newspaper, 29 October 1871. 64 William Lovett, Social and Political Morality (London, 1853), p. 125. 65 Lovett, Social and Political Morality, p. 37. 66 Joel H. Weiner, William Lovett (Manchester, 1989), pp. 129–​34. 67 Howell, ‘Memoirs of a Busy Life’. 68 Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, p. 259. 69 Selected Papers of George Howell:  Letters to Howell (1865), GW.M. Reynolds to Howell, 28 November 1865. 70 J.M. Ludlow and Lloyd Jones, The Progress of the Working Class, 1832–​1867 (London, 1867). 71 Ludlow and Jones, Progress, p. 294. 72 Ludlow and Jones, Progress, p. 290. 73 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 6 October 1867; Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 29 September 1867. 74 G.J. Holyoake, Self-​Help by the People:  Thirty-​Three Years of Co-​operation in Rochdale, Part 1 (London, 1867), pp. 9–​10. 75 A.W. Humphrey, Robert Applegarth, Trade Unionist, Educationist, Reformer (Manchester, 1913), p. 212. 76 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 6 October 1867. 77 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper, 22 September 1867. 78 Holyoake, Self-​Help, p.  6; W.E. Adams, An Argument for Complete Suffrage (Manchester, 1860). 79 Letters to Howell (1865), Ludlow to Howell, 26 June 1865. 80 Address and Rules of the London Working Men’s Association (London, 1836), p. 2; William Lovett and John Collins, Chartism: A New Organisation of the People (London, 1840), p. 17. 81 See for instance the attack on the ‘Educational Suffrage Fallacy’ in English Chartist Circular, Volume 1, No. 29. 82 Half-​Penny Magazine, 19 September 1840. 83 Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 12 February 1870. 84 Bee-​Hive, 4 July 1868. 85 Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform, p. 194. 86 Margot Finn, After Chartism:  Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–​1874 (Cambridge, 1993).

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The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics  191 87 Samuel Smiles, Self-​ Help:  With Illustrations of Conduct and Character (London, 1859). 88 R.J. Morris, ‘Samuel Smiles and the Genesis of Self-​Help: The Retreat to a Petit Bourgeois Utopia’ Historical Jouranl 24:1 (1981), pp. 89–​109, at p. 92; Leeds Times, 11 May 1839. 89 Morris, ‘Samuel Smiles’, p. 108. 90 Leno, Aftermath, p. 79. 91 Putnam’s Magazine (January 1869), p. 101. 92 Boston Public Library Anti-​Slavery Collection, Henry Vincent to William Lloyd Garrison, 7 June 1877. Online at:  http://​archive.org/​details/​bplscas/​ [accessed 24 April 2016]. 93 Gammage, History, p. 12. 94 H.J. Jennings, Chestnuts and Small Beer (London, 1920), pp. 38–​9. 95 See for instance Martin Hewitt, Popular Exhibitions, Science and Showmanship (London, 2012), ‘Aspects of Platform Culture in Nineteenth-​ Century Britain’ Nineteenth Century Prose 29:1 (2002), pp. 1–​32, ‘The Emigration Lecturer: James Brown’s Lecture Tour of Great Britain and Ireland, 1861–​62’ British Journal of Canadian Studies 10:1 (1995), pp. 103–​ 19, ‘Popular Platform Religion:  Arthur Mursell at the Free Trade Hall, 1857–​ 1866’ Manchester Region History Review 10 (1996), pp. 29–​39. 96 LHSAC: LP/​VIN/​1/​1/​49, Vincent to Minikin, 13 July 1842. 97 York Herald, 22 July 1848. 98 Brian Harrison, ‘Teetotal Chartism’ History 58:193 (1973), pp. 193–​203. 99 Henry Vincent, Early Closing Movement:  A  Lecture, Delivered on Thursday Evening, January 14, 1847 (London[?]‌, 1847), p. 2. 100 Preston Guardian, 17 February 1855. 101 Staffordshire University Library Special Collections and Archives, Dorothy Thompson Collection. Letter of Henry Vincent, November 1878. Thanks to Paul Pickering, who emailed me a copy of this transcribed by Robert Fyson. 102 Robert Kemp Philp, The History of Progress in Great Britain (London, 1859), pp. 272, 6. 103 Peter Gurney, Wanting and Having: Popular Politics and Liberal Consumerism in England, 1830–​70 (Manchester, 2015), pp. 220–​56. 104 Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England:  Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–​ 1885 (London, 1978), p.  113; Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, c.1780–​1880 (London, 1980), p. 140. 105 The Leader, 4 May 1850. 106 First Report of the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851 (London, 1852), p. 125. 107 William Lovett, The Life and Struggles of William Lovett, in his Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom (London, 1876), pp. 364–​5. 108 Henry Cole, Fifty Years of Public Work of Sir Henry Cole K.C.B. (London, 1884), p. 192. 109 Northern Star, 14 June 1851; Reynold’s Newspaper, 24 August 1851. 110 Friend of the People, 10 May 1851. 111 Newcastle Courant, 5 September 1851.

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192 Popular virtue 112 William Dorling, Henry Vincent:  A  Biographical Sketch (London, 1879), p. 54. 113 Preston Guardian, 17 February 1855. 114 Sheffield and Rotherham Independent, 27 January 1849. 115 Cited in F.B. Smith, Radical Artisan:  William James Linton 1812–​ 97 (Manchester, 1973), p. 90. 116 Advocate of Peace, Volume 10, No. 11 (November 1852), pp. 186–​9. 117 Preston Guardian, 17 February 1855. 118 Preston Guardian, 17 February 1855. 119 Leicester Chronicle, October 7 1857. 120 Hampshire Telegraph, 2 December 1871; Northampton Mercury, 25 September 1869; York Herald, 7 December 1877. 121 How a Penny Became a Thousand Pounds (London, 1856). See for example R.J. Richardson’s essays on banking: Northern Star, 14 March 1840; Chartist Circular, 10 July 1841.

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Conclusion

Chartism’s moral politics and improvement culture were strategic interventions rather than dilutions of the movement’s objectives and aspirations. Those Chartist leaders who turned to the politics of improvement did so to build the movement towards a position of Radical working-​class hegemony. In the process, this moral politics and its associated culture would grapple with and thereby alleviate social grievances in a way that did not incorporate the plotting and revolutionary violence which had failed in 1839. However, this approach proved to be problematic. It abandoned much of an established Radical culture that clearly was capable of enticing mass support (including, significantly, many women, not just as wives and mothers but as wage labourers), turned to regressive ideas about sexuality and the family, and opened up the dangerous possibility that the working class could be divided along lines of moral entitlement or intellectual attainment. It also possessed a degree of intellectual and strategic incoherence and circularity. Advocates of improvement in the 1840s were clear that it did not mean producing workers deserving of the vote, but despite this important caveat they were not clear how exactly power would be granted to the working class once they were improved –​or, indeed, how ‘improvement’ was quantifiable and what an improved worker would actually look like. Being vague on this point may have helped rebuild and stabilise the movement in the 1840s and avoided repeating the tired arguments about revolution and violence from 1839, but the stated aims of the ‘Charter and something more’ were unlikely to be delivered by the counter-​culture that the movement largely settled into for most of the 1840s. Indeed, by 1847 and before the rejuvenation of social-​ democratic Chartism the movement seemed to offer little direction beyond the immediate palliatives of prefigurative and improvement politics. Despite this, ethical Radicalism aided the retention and nurturing of ‘social Radicalism’s’ social critique within the movement. The argument that society was systematically unhealthy and destructive, and that this was directly related to social stratification, was a more robust analysis than the

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194 Popular virtue purely constitutionalist discourse of the older Radical tradition. Increasingly, Chartists saw industrial capitalism in itself as a serious obstruction to any sort of free, happy, or progressive society, and developed a moral critique of capitalism which shared much of its content with Owenism and the social Radicalism which had tentatively been developed in the 1830s.1 Historians have already noted how the proponents of the ‘constitutional idiom’ have neglected not only the class language of Chartism but also the movement’s evident interest in political economy, Painite democracy, the labour theory of value, and an embryonic popular critique of capitalism.2 It was this tradition that Chartists built on when they advocated dietary reform, medicine, or home colonisation as the solution to the demoralisation caused by the land and capital monopolies. These were counter-​cultural moves to limit the destruction caused by industrial capitalism after open revolt had apparently failed. Furthermore, all of these solutions were built on the philosophy and scientific beliefs bequeathed to Chartism by the infidel Radicalism of the 1820s and 1830s. Through this, Chartism’s moral improvement culture was one form in which social concerns became increasingly crucial to the movement prior to social d ​ emocratic Chartism, which in turn was a touchstone for both the working-​class pressure for social and economic reforms during the 1860s and 1870s and the development of late-​Victorian socialism. At the same time it was the foundation of a whole host of sects within the broad church of ‘physical puritanism’ as well as the cultures of co-​operation and trade unionism that enabled the development of populist social Liberalism, as well as the more cut-​throat individualist Liberalism of figures like Henry Vincent and Robert Philp. A fuller and more detailed genealogy of this divergence and development is necessary, but a central point to emphasise is that there is no one singular successor to Chartism’s moral politics or improvement culture, just as there is no uninterrupted continuity drawing from Chartism’s politics and economic critique. Moral politics is important to studies of Chartism and political Radicalism not only because of its evident centrality to those movements. The moral politics outlined in this study highlights the ambitions for wholesale reform integral to working-​class political activism during the early-​Victorian period. Chartism’s incorporation of the infidel, Owenite, and Radical traditions made it far more than simply a protest against ‘Old Corruption’. Chartism is not part of a continuous Liberal tradition that has stretched into the twenty-​first century and which limits its objectives to political reform and half-​hearted attempts to relieve suffering. Chartists saw the Charter as the political starting point of widespread economic and moral reform, as a competitive and systemically corrupt society would be replaced with one founded upon wholly different principles. Even if its moral politics changed, with festivity being replaced with dietary reform and gender equality with more acute patriarchal control, the aspiration of Chartism was for a widespread rejuvenation of society, and a reformulation of politics, economics, and everyday life in a wholly different image. This was true of early, mid, and late Chartism, and

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Conclusion 195 is an important visionary (if frequently flawed and problematic) aspect of nineteenth-​century Radicalism in Britain which is often forgotten.

Notes 1 Gregory Claeys, Citzens and Saints:  Politics and Anti-​Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989); Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press:  A  Study in Working Class Radicalism of the 1830s (London, 1970); Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (London, 1984); Alfred Plummer, Bronterre:  A  Political Biography of Bronterre O’Brien, 1804–​1864 (London, 1971). 2 Malcolm Chase, The Chartists:  Perspectives and Legacies (London, 2015), p.  172; Noel Thompson, The People’s Science:  The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis, 1816–​1834 (Cambridge, 1984); Peter Gurney, ‘The Democratic Idiom:  Languages of Democracy in the Chartist Movement’ Journal of Modern History 86:3 (2014), pp. 566–​602, at p. 602.

 196

Bibliography

Archival sources Online archives Boston Public Library Anti-​Slavery Collection. Correspondence between Henry Vincent and William Lloyd Garrison, 1867–​78. Available online at: http://​ archive.org/​details/​bplscas/​ [accessed 24 April 2016]. Selected Papers of George Howell, 1833–​1910. Available online at:  www.britishonlinearchives.co.uk/​collection.php?cid=9781851172757 [accessed 16 June  2016]. The original material is located at the Bishopsgate Institute, London.

British Library, London Add. MS 34,245 A, ‘Correspondence and Papers of the General Convention of the Industrious Classes, Minutes of the Committee for Extending Political Information’. Add. MS 34,245 B, ‘Miscellaneous Papers of the Chartist General Convention’. Add. 37773, ‘Minutes of the London Working Men’s Association’. Add. MS 46345:  Burns Papers, Volume LXV:  Letters to Richard Moore the Chartist. BL Add. MS 78161:  Lovett Album and Papers, Volume 1:  Album of Letters, mainly to Lovett, 1828–​76 Royal Literary Fund Archives, Loan 96 RLF 1.

Labour History Archive and Study Centre, People’s History Museum, Manchester LP/​VIN, Correspondence between Henry Vincent and John Minikin, 1837–​42.

 197

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London School of Economics, London COLL MISC 0525/​PA1680, Thomas Allsop correspondence. Correspondence between Allsop and Bronterre O’Brien, 1839–​61.

National Archives, Kew HO 20/​10: Interviews of Chartist Prisoners, 1840–​41.

Correspondence sent to the Home Secretary concerning disturbances HO 40/​42: Derbyshire, Devon, Durham, Gloucestershire and Hampshire, 1839. HO 40/​47: Nottinghamshire, Shropshire, Somerset, Gloucestershire, Montgom­ eryshire, Wiltshire and Yorkshire, 1839. HO 40/​48: Stafford, Suffolk, Sussex, and Worcestershire, 1839. HO 40/​49: Warwick part one, 1839.

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Index ACLL (Anti-​Corn-​Law League) 133–​5, 138–​9, 150, 183, 185 Adams, William 156, 169, 179 Aitken, William 79, 180 anti-​clericalism, 6, 14–​24 arming by Chartists 52–​5, 58, 80 Barrow, Logie 112 Bartlett, G.M. 107–​8, 173 Bee-​Hive, the 175–​6, 180 Benbow, William 23–​4, 57, 74, 115 Blanc, Lois 169 botanic medicine 1, 118, 121, 123, 153–​4 Bray, John Francis 111 Brigham, Amariah 87, 118 Byron, Lord George 59–​60, 66, 170 Carlile, Richard 6, 15, 17, 18, 20–​1, 32–​3, 35–​6, 54, 76, 87 Carpenter, William 19–​20, 23, 25, 63, 78, 86, 92 Carrier, William 49, 54, 63, 77, 79, 80 Channing, William Ellery 7, 105, 124, 143, 175, 181 Chartism attitude to alcohol 8, 45, 47–​51, 93–​4, 106–​9, 115, 132, 144, 151, 153, 166, 169–​70, 174, 176 and Owenism/​socialism 2, 5–​8, 38, 62–​4, 66, 85, 103, 118–​20, 123, 140–​2, 144, 166–​7, 194 repression of 9–​10, 45, 56–​8, 67, 75–​7, 82, 94, 136–​9, 165, 182 and sexuality 3, 5, 8–​10, 45, 49–​50, 58–​68, 87, 90, 96, 108, 113, 144, 148–​50, 168–​9, 171–​2, 177, 193

women’s role within 9, 58–​68, 96, 108–​9, 138, 144–​8, 164, 193 Chartist Circular 92, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111 Chase, Malcolm 8, 53, 57, 75, 148, 176 Christianity Bible Christians 123, 154 primitive Christianity 14, 20, 22, 123 relationship between Dissenters and infidels 22–​3 Christian Socialism 174 Christian Socialist, The 174 Claeys, Gregory 5, 103 Clark, Anna 35–​7 Clark, Thomas  169 Cleave, John 13–​14, 19, 20, 25, 26, 29–​30, 44–​6, 54, 74, 85, 92, 104, 105, 107, 117, 133, 138, 140, 143, 149, 168, 177, 179 attitude to women, 65 and freethought 14, 22 and heterodox medicine 113–​16, 121–​3, 154 ‘new move’ 82–​3 and Owenism 33, 38 and popular science 87, 112, 118–​20 and satire 22–​3, 50, 60 and sexuality 33, 35, 62 and teetotalism 83, 90, 94–​5, 106, 108–​9 Cleave’s London Satirist, 50, 60 Cleave’s Penny Gazette 118 Cleave’s Weekly Police Gazette 29–​30, 36, 112 Cobden, Richard 185

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Index  219 Collins, John 74, 76–​7, 83, 90 Combe, Andrew 86, 89 Combe, George 87–​8, 105–​6, 115, 119 Communism 9, 23, 27, 111, 140, 178 Communist League 165 competition, Radical critique of 18–​19, 26–​8, 30, 34–​8, 66, 93 Concordium, The 117–​18, 120, 140–​1, 149–​50, 157 contraception 33–​6, 60, 66, 108 see also family; sexuality co-​operation 3, 6, 18–​20, 32, 140, 154, 166–​7, 174–​6, 178, 179, 181, 194 see also Owenism; socialism Cooper, Thomas 1–​2, 21, 105, 106, 112, 132, 135–​6, 175

English Chartist Circular 92, 105, 107, 120, 132, 133, 143, 179 enlightenment, influence on Radicals 6, 7, 14, 18, 20, 30, 31, 85 Epps, Dr John 121, 122, 123, 176 ethical Radicalism 6, 45, 83, 97, 104, 107, 124, 130, 139, 140, 177, 193 Etzler, Johann 140, 149

Deism 2, 15–​19, 22, 23, 32 see also Christianity; Freethought/‘infidelism’, demoralisation, Chartist concerns of 116–​17, 124, 173 Destructive, or Poor Man’s Conservative 28–​31, 33, 36, 113 diet dietary reform 1, 9, 117, 121, 149, 174, 176, 194 health and morality 87, 89, 117–​18 poor quality 149–​51 see also vegetarianism drinking, role in Radical culture 3, 8, 45, 47–​9, 51 see also teetotalism; temperance Duncan, James Emslie 117, 149, 150

family Chartist veneration of 49, 64–​7, 137, 177, 193 effects of imprisonment on 76–​7, 79, 81 Owenite attitudes towards 32–​8, 62 and Teetotal Chartism 95, 108 see also Land Plan Figaro in London 25–​6, 30 Finn, Margot 180 Fletcher, Mathew 114 France 16, 91, 104, 110, 118, 123, 134, 136, 167, 185 French Revolution (1789) 17, 20, 27, 61, 140, 176 French Revolution (1830) 20, 60 French Revolution (1848) 165–​6, 169 Fraternal Democrats 165 Freethinking Christians 15, 22 Freethought/​‘infidelism’ 6–​10, 14–​18, 20–​3, 33, 58, 75, 118, 124, 156, 170, 178, 194 Friend of the People 167, 184 friendship 48–​9, 75, 77–​8 Frost, Thomas 117, 140, 165, 169, 170, 187

education 3, 5, 7, 17, 31–​2, 48, 66, 82, 83–​9, 92–​6, 105, 107, 109, 117, 124, 147, 154–​8, 176, 178–​80, 181, 186 Elliotson, Dr John 118–​21 emigration 75, 80–​1 Engels, Frederick 8–​9, 142, 149, 150, 165 Engledue, Dr William  119–​20

Gall, Franz 87, 118 Gammage, Robert 59, 63, 169, 181 Garrison, William Lloyd  181 Godwin, William 7, 12n16, 17, 32, 34, 75, 90–​6, 104, 110–​11, 124, 182 ‘Grand National Holiday’ 57 Great Exhibition of 1851 183–​5 Greaves, James Pierrepoint 117, 120, 150, 155

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220  Index Half-​Penny Magazine 179 Hall, Able 22, 47 Hall, Robert 44, 104 Harmony Hall 140–​1, 149–​50, 157 Harney, George Julian 23, 45, 54, 55, 57, 59, 60, 64, 74, 80, 135–​6, 165–​70, 174, 180, 184 Hartwell, Robert 175, 183 Harrison, Brian 182 Harrison, John 124 Healthian, The 117 Hetherington, Henry 1–​2, 44, 45, 46, 74, 76, 140 and heterodox medicine 1, 87, 111–​12, 114, 116, 117, 119, 122 and humour 2, 21–​2, 25–​9 and moral Populism 31–​9, 168 ‘new move’ 82–​3, 179–​80 and religion 14–​16, 18, 23, 87 and republicanism 54 and socialism 1–​2, 18–​20 and women 33 Heywood, Abel 38, 93, 105, 112, 114, 117, 119, 138, 149, 153, 154, 168, 175 Hibbert, Dr Julian 19–​20 Higgins, Timothy 77, 79, 80 Hill, William 83, 106, 134–​5 Holberry, Samuel 79 Holyoake, George Jacob 1, 21, 23, 118, 120, 122, 155, 169, 174, 175, 176, 178, 179 homeopathy 1, 118, 121–​3, 175, 176 Howell, George 170, 175–​8 Hume, David 16, 22 hydropathy 5, 118, 121–​3, 173, 174–​5 Jones, Ernest 143–​6, 166–​7, 169, 173, 175 Jones, Gareth Stedman 4–​5 Jones, Lloyd 178 Kennington Common 165 Knowlton, Dr Charles 35–​6, 62 Knox, Vicesimus 117, 176

Labourer, The 143 labour theory of value 5, 7, 20, 32, 49, 134, 194 Land Plan 120, 125, 130, 139, 166, 169, 175, 180 and education 154–​7 and the family 144–​9 and health 149–​154 similarities to ‘new move’ 8, 143 and socialism 140–​2 LDA (London Democratic Association) 45, 64, 122 Leader, The 174, 184 Leno, John Bedford 170, 174, 181, 187 Liberals/​Liberalism 3–​6, 18, 27, 83, 132, 164, 165, 170, 174, 177–​87, 194 Linton, William James 15, 21, 30, 60, 66, 169, 174, 185 Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper 179 London Dispatch and Social Reformer 36 Lovett, William 20, 21, 23–​4, 45, 51–​3, 62, 74–​97, 124, 140, 173 attitude to violence 54, 85 and drink 48, 86, 94, 107, 111 and education 18, 111, 155–​6, 180 and health 77, 79, 86–​7, 89–​90, 93, 111, 115, 174–​5 imprisonment of 57, 74–​97 and improvement 109, 111, 121, 123 later liberalism 177, 179, 183–​4, 186 ‘new move’ 82–​5, 96–​7, 103–​4,155 and Owenism 19 paternal attitude to women 65, 108 and popular science 87–​9 and religion 13, 18 Lowery, Robert 46, 48, 64, 174, 175, 185 Ludlow, John Maurice 174, 179 LWMA (London Working Men’s Association) 13–​14, 34, 44–​5, 47, 51, 64, 79, 83, 89, 175, 179

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Index  221 Malthusianism 34–​5 Martineau, Harriet 123 Marx, Karl 8–​9, 166 Marxism 4, 142, 164 Massey, Gerald 174 McCalman, Iain 6, 21 McDouall, Peter Murray 54, 59, 74, 79, 106, 114–​16, 125, 131, 134–​6, 153, 154 medicine 1–​5, 8, 10, 86, 91, 112–​18, 120–​4, 153–​4, 173–​6, 194 mesmerism 5, 118–​23, 174 see also phreno-​mesmerism moral improvement 1, 3, 5, 7–​9, 18, 31, 58, 64, 82, 85, 86, 89, 93, 103–​4, 108–​9, 111, 117, 120, 122, 125, 139, 143, 151, 157–​8, 164, 166, 170, 173–​4, 180–​2, 187, 194 moral populism 14, 20, 96, 165 Morning Star; or Herald of Progression 117, 140, 149, 150 Mysteries of London 167–​8, 169, 171–​2 National Association Gazette 116 National Association of the United Kingdom for Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People 82–​4, 86, 89, 90, 96, 97, 155, 180 see also ‘new move’ National Convention of the Industrious Classes (1839) 2, 46, 54, 57, 82, 114 National Petition 1839 2, 46, 51, 52, 57 1842 131–​2, 139–​40 1848 165 National Vindicator 108 natural law 16–​19, 105, 112, 114–​17, 123–​4, 142–​3, 186–​7 NCA (National Charter Association) 8, 82, 95, 96, 106–​7, 110, 112, 114, 117, 130, 131–​6, 139–​41, 155, 166, 167, 169, 173 NCL (National Charter League) 166, 169

Neesom, Charles 82, 83, 122, 174 Neesom, Elizabeth 64, 122, 174 New Age, Concordium Gazette and Temperance Advertiser, The 117 ‘new move’ 8, 75, 83, 90, 97, 103, 131–​2, 143, 155 Newport Rising 51, 74–​5, 77–​8, 81 Northern Star 13, 38, 45, 48, 51, 63, 79, 83, 90, 105, 106, 107, 118, 120, 122, 138, 141, 142, 145, 149, 151, 152, 155, 156, 157, 165, 166, 167, 169–​70, 176, 184 and the 1842 strikes 132–​6 and popular medicine 112–​14 Notes to the People 166 NUWC (National Union of the Working Classes) 13, 17, 20, 22–​4, 47, 54, 65, 92 O’Brien, James ‘Bronterre’ 7, 26–​8, 34, 45, 49, 54–​5, 57, 64, 74, 76–​7, 78, 80, 81, 82, 89, 97, 111, 136, 157, 169, 173, 175 O’Connor, Feargus and 1842 strikes 132–​9 attitude to drink 106, 153 attitude to education 156–​7, 180 attitude to health 151 critique of industrial capitalism 143, 147–​8 hostility to ‘Red Republicanism’ 165–​6 imprisonment 74, 78–​9 and Land Plan 130, 140–​4 leadership 8, 13, 45–​6, 52, 166 and ‘new move’ 75, 82–​5, 90, 96–​7, 179 and violence 52, 54, 82, 84 O’Connorville 148, 151–​4, 156–​7, 175 Odd-​Fellow, The 118 Old Corruption 4–​5, 194 O’Neill, Arthur 132 Owen, Robert 2, 18–​19, 32, 34, 62, 87, 141, 177–​8 Owen, Robert Dale 34–​8

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222  Index Owenism 2, 5–​8, 18–​21, 23, 26–​8, 30, 31, 32–​3, 36–​8, 62–​4, 66, 85, 87, 103, 112, 118–​21, 123, 140–​1, 144, 150, 166, 176, 194 see also socialism Paine, Thomas 15, 20, 29, 33, 84, 92, 140, 176, 178 perfectibility, doctrine of human 7, 17, 75, 87, 90, 104–​5, 182 Pestalozzi, Johann Heinrich 155 Philp, Robert Kemp 106, 182–​3, 186 phrenology 5, 7, 75, 87–​8, 105, 112–​13, 118–​20, 122, 150, 174–​6 phreno-​mesmerism 116, 118–​21 see also mesmerism Pilling, Richard 133, 136–​7, 148, 150 Place, Francis 34, 36, 60, 62, 74, 77–​9, 80, 84–​6, 91–​5, 97 political corruption 3–​6, 7, 22, 23, 38, 83, 120, 131–​2, 186, 194 Poor Laws 2, 34–​6, 44, 45, 49, 56, 64, 107, 132 Poor Man’s Guardian 7, 24–​7, 36, 54, 112 pornography 6, 21, 23, 168, 170 Priessnitz, Vincent  121 prison and imprisonment 9, 13, 15–​16, 22, 30, 59, 62, 66, 74–​82, 83–​4, 86, 89–​91, 94, 104, 111, 115, 119, 120, 131, 134, 136, 139, 140, 144–​5, 157, 166–​7, 174, 181, 186 Reach, Angus 117, 149, 153, 168 Red Republican 166–​7, 174 ‘Red Republicanism’ 3, 166–​9, 173, 174 Reform Crisis 14, 20, 26, 54 Reform League 3, 170, 173, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 187 Republicanism 6, 14, 20, 26, 27, 29, 54, 55, 57–​8, 59, 65, 80, 84, 95, 110, 114–​15, 146, 165–​6, 167, 174 revolution, Chartist and Radical attitudes towards 2–​3, 20, 27, 45, 52, 54–​6, 58, 80, 82, 94, 103,

115–​17, 125, 157, 158, 165, 167, 169, 174, 178, 180, 186, 193 Reynolds, George William MacArthur 167–​73, 176, 178, 180, 187 Reynolds’ Miscellany 168 Reynolds’ Newspaper 170, 173, 176, 184 Reynolds’Weekly Newspaper 168 Richardson, Reginald John 66 Roberts, William Prowting 47, 53, 77, 91 Rotunda, the 20–​1, 33, 65 ‘sacred month’ 2, 74 Saint-​Simonianism 28, 33, 36 Scholefield, Reverend James 123, 154 Schwartzkopf, Jutta 58, 66, 146 self-​help 3, 103, 169, 176, 179–​83 sexuality 2, 5, 7–​8, 13, 21, 28, 32–​9, 45, 49–​51, 58–​68, 108–​9, 144, 147–​9, 170–​3, 177, 193 see also contraception; family; pornography Sharples, Eliza 33 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 17, 32–​3, 60 Skelton, John 123, 153, 174 Slap at the Church! A 23–​5 Smart, Thomas Rayner  155 Smiles, Samuel 180–​1, 183 Smith, T.B. 110, 112, 119, 123, 155 socialism 2, 3, 5, 6, 8–​10, 18–​19, 23, 26–​8, 32–​3, 93, 103, 111, 117, 120, 130, 140, 141, 149, 165–​9, 170, 174, 194 social Radicalism 5–​7, 10, 26, 38, 45, 58, 104, 111, 125, 130, 193–​4 Solly, Henry 155, 175 Spence, Thomas 29, 140 Spencianism 17, 21, 140 Spurzheim, Johann 87 Stephens, Joseph Rayner 49, 74 Strange, William 22–​3, 25, 30, 33, 87, 88, 117, 121, 168 strike-​wave of 1842 3, 130–​9, 140, 144, 148, 150 Sturge, Joseph 131–​2, 182, 185

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Index  223 Taylor, Barbara 36, 64 Taylor, John 59–​60, 74 Taylor, Robert 18, 21 teetotalism 1, 3, 47, 82–​97, 104–​11, 112, 114, 117, 120, 122, 123, 149, 153, 155, 166–​8, 170, 173, 174, 186 temperance 1, 9, 30, 84, 94, 106–​8, 110, 115, 117, 122, 124, 132, 149, 153, 158, 167–​8, 173–​8, 181 TES (Tropical Emigration Society) 117, 140–​1, 144, 149, 157 Thackeray, William Makepeace  13–​14 Thief, The 25 Thompson, Dorothy 8, 63, 75 Thompson, William 20, 27, 32, 66, 111, 142 unstamped press 13, 15, 19, 20, 23, 25 see also individual titles vegetarianism 1, 5, 82, 117–​18, 122, 123, 149, 155, 174 Viettinghoff, Joseph 122, 174 Viettinghoff, Martha 122, 174 Vincent, Henry and alcohol 46–​8, 83, 90, 92–​5, 106 and humour 49–​51, 63, 91 imprisonment of 74–​7, 79, 95 Liberalism 181–​6, 194

and moral improvement 84, 92–​5, 96–​7, 103–​4, 109–​10 and sexuality 58–​62, 64, 91 and violence 52–​8 and women 64–​7 Volney, Count Constantin de 7, 16–​17, 30, 104, 110–​11, 124, 178, 186 Watson, James 13–​25, 31, 33, 34, 35, 38, 48, 54, 60, 62, 74, 76, 82, 87, 92, 112, 119, 120, 123, 140, 149, 155, 168, 175, 178 Western Vindicator 47, 49, 64, 77, 78, 84 Wheeler, Anna 32, 66 Wheeler, Thomas Martin 141–​2, 145, 147, 151, 153 Wollstonecraft, Mary 33 women as activists 58–​9, 64–​6, 138, 147–​8, 164, 193 attitude of male Radicals towards 62, 65–​7, 108, 147–​8 employment 65–​6, 108, 138, 144 and Owenism 32–​3, 62, 144 and sexuality 35–​6, 63–​4 see also contraception; family; sexuality work, hostility towards 49–​50 Working Man’s Friend 17, 25 Zoist, The 119–​20

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