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The English Middle Class and the Ideological Significance of Radicalism, 1760–1886

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

David Nicholls
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Extract

The noun “radical” as applied to reformers who held advanced views came into general use in the early nineteenth century. It was at first used in a derogatory sense, denoting, as Walter Scott wrote in 1819, “a set of blackguards.” However, it was taken up by the subjects of the intended abuse and quickly acquired a certain respectability—so much so that by 1830 one middle-class radical was recording that “the term Radical once employed as a name of low reproach, has found its way into high places, and is gone forth as the title of a class who glory in their designation.” Reformers from across the political spectrum were soon being designated “radical,” as can be seen from the application of the term to individuals as diverse in outlook as Lord Durham, Richard Oastler, and Bronterre O'Brien.

This eclecticism has led historians to pronounce the concept useless as a tool of historical analysis. If any tradition at all emerges from studies of English radicalism, then it is a tradition of liberal humanitarianism, a pattern of reform that is nonclass and nonideological. At best “radical” retains its original adjectival power of describing a root-and-branch reformer, an individual who worked to change quite substantially existing economic, political, or social structures by word or deed. But the evident contradictions and discontinuities in the so-called “radical tradition” have made historians balk at making further claims than these. This essay, however, is a provisional attempt to shift the focus away from the personalities and the specificities of reform movements in their peculiar conjunctural moments to the operation of radicalism as a powerful ideology that, far from being nonclass and nonideological and despite (or even possibly because of) its internal contradictions, has profoundly influenced class development and class relations.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , October 1985 , pp. 415 - 433
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1985

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References

1 For the sources of the quotations and the etymological history of “radical,” see the Oxford English Dictionary.

2 See, e.g., White, R. J., Radicalism and Its Results, 1760–1837 (London, 1965), p. 3Google Scholar; Royle, E. and Walvin, J., English Radicals and Reformers, 1760–1848 (Brighton, 1982), p. 9Google Scholar; and Hone, J. Ann, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London, 1796–1821 (Oxford, 1982), p. 1Google Scholar.

3 See, e.g., Morris's, A. J. A. introduction to Edwardian Radicalism, 1900–1914, ed. Morris, A. J. A. (London, 1974), pp. 1–12Google Scholar; and Parkin, F., Middle-Class Radicalism (Manchester, 1968)Google Scholar. Compare the discussion of definitional problems in Baylen, J. O. and Gossman, N. J., eds., Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals, vol. 1, 1770–1830 (Brighton, 1979), p. 5Google Scholar; and in Gossman, N. J., “Definitions of and Recent Writings on Modern British Radicalism, 1790–1914,” British Studies Monitor 4, no. 1 (1973): 3–11Google Scholar.

4 Poulantzas, N., Political Power and Social Classes (1968), trans. O'Hagan, Timothy (London, 1973), pp. 168–73Google Scholar.

5 Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963)Google Scholar.

6 Briggs, A., “Middle-Class Consciousness in English Politics, 1780–1846,” Past and Present, no. 9 (1956), pp. 65–74Google Scholar. One historian has gone so far as to deny the existence of any clearly defined middle class before 1870 (Nossiter, T., “The Middle Class and Nineteenth-Century Politics: Notes on the Literature,” in The Middle Class in Politics, ed. Garrard, J.et al. [London, 1978], pp. 80–81)Google Scholar.

7 Perkin, H., The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969)Google Scholar; Tholfsen, T. R., Working-Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England (London, 1976)Google Scholar.

8 The term “Old Corruption” was popularized by William Cobbett, but it can usefully be pushed back in time to describe eighteenth-century oligarchical government.

9 Halévy, E., The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1901–4), trans. Morris, Mary (London, 1934), p. 428Google Scholar. Mill's, James articles for the Encyclopaedia Brilannica (1820)Google Scholar (esp. his essay on government, which was reprinted as An Essay on Government, ed. Baker, E. [Cambridge, 1937])Google Scholar exude this supreme confidence in the middle class while at the same time providing a sustained and vitriolic attack on the existing aristocratic polity. His son was equally confident: “The motto of a radical politician,” he wrote in 1839, “should be government by means of the middle for the working classes” (quoted in Bradley, I., The Optimists: Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism [London, 1980], p. 22)Google Scholar.

10 Mill, J. S., Autobiography (1873; London, 1924), p. 196Google Scholar. Many artisans themselves preserved this sort of distinction. Francis Place, e.g., always preferred to talk of “the people,” and Thomas Hardy reflected on the composition of the corresponding societies: “They were of the lower and middling class of society called the people” (quoted in Jephson, H., The Platform: Its Rise and Progress, 2 vols. [1892; reprint, London, 1968], 1:194)Google Scholar.

11 The analysis for this period draws on Rudé, George, Hanoverian London, 1714–1808 (London, 1971)Google Scholar, Wilkes and Liberty (London, 1962)Google Scholar, and Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1970)Google Scholar; on Goodwin, A., The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London, 1979)Google Scholar; and on the several works of Brewer and Sutherland cited below.

12 Brewer, J., “English Radicalism in the Age of George III,” in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. Pocock, J. G. A. (Princeton, N.J., 1980), pp. 323–67Google Scholar.

13 Sutherland, L., “The City of London in Eighteenth-Century Politics,” in Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier, ed. Pares, R. and Taylor, A. J. P. (London, 1956), p. 55Google Scholar. See also Sutherland, L., The City of London and the Opposition to Government, 1768–74 (London, 1959)Google Scholar.

14 Robbins, C., The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (1959; 2d ed., New York, 1968)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Many radicals traced their descent to some mythical age of Anglo-Saxon democracy overlain, they believed, by the despotism of Anglo-Saxon and latter-day kings (see Hill, C., “The Norman Yoke,” in Democracy and the Labour Movement, ed. Saville, J. [London, 1954], pp. 11–16)Google Scholar.

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16 The large electorates of Westminster and Middlesex were important in sustaining early metropolitan radicalism. At Westminster, e.g., 10,000 often voted at elections, and the first attempts at constituency organization were made here to ensure the return of radical candidates. (See Main, J. M., “Radical Westminster, 1807–1820,” Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand 12, no. 46 [April 1966]: 186–204.Google Scholar)

17 Quoted in Brewer, J., Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (London, 1976), p. 168CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Brewer's monograph is an excellent account of the crisis in one-party rule and the emergence of an “alternative structure of politics” fed by the development of new sorts of journalism.

18 Quoted in Sutherland, , “The City of London in Eighteenth-Century Politics,” p. 66Google Scholar. Bentham used the same imagery (see Kent, C. B. Roylance, The English Radicals: An Historical Sketch [London, 1899], p. 187)Google Scholar.

19 It was the American debate, as Brewer has shown (Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III, pp. 19–20), focused as it was on such questions as “no taxation without representation,” that led in Britain to similar claims for enfranchisement and representation. The American example was to figure prominently in the radical tradition, emerging again in the writings of, among others, J. S. Mill, Richard Cobden, and Sir Charles Dilke.

20 Ibid., passim.

21 Roylance Kent, pp. 23–24, 92–93. Many radical M.P.s were, however, reluctant to be bound by pledges.

22 See Hamburger, J., James Mill and the Art of Revolution (New Haven, Conn., 1963)Google Scholar, and Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals (New Haven, Conn., 1965)Google Scholar; Thomas, W., The Philosophic Radicals (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar; and Halévy (n. 9 above).

23 Compare also the writings of William Cobbett and Robert Owen.

24 Hone (no. 2 above), pp. 145–46, argues that Burdett's election campaigns of 1802 and 1805 helped to promote the use of “legitimate” reform methods over and against the rather more seditious methods that characterized the previous decade.

25 For a stimulating discussion of the various capitalist fractions of the 1830s, the promotion of industrial capitalism as evidenced especially in the onslaught on handloom weaving, and the attenuation of liberal ideology in the face of the opposition such a policy created, see Richards, P., “State Formation and Class Struggle, 1832–48,” in Capitalism, State Formation and Marxist Theory, ed. Corrigan, P. (London, 1980), pp. 49–78Google Scholar. Tory radicals, of course, made their own countervailing appeals to the “people,” their suggested alliance being one of aristocracy and people. Indeed, on occasions they may have been more attuned to the interests of the working class than were the liberal radicals. Compare Joyce, P., Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (Brighton, 1980), for some interesting insights into working-class ToryismGoogle Scholar.

26 Quoted in Jephson (n. 10 above), 2:195.

27 Quoted in Jones, D., Chartism and the Chartists (London, 1975), p. 125Google Scholar.

28 Joseph Sturge, a Birmingham middle-class radical, wrot e a series of articles for the Nonconformist in the autumn of 1841 entitled “Reconciliation betwee n the Middle and Working Classes” that paved the wa y for the Birmingham conference. There are extracts in Hollis, P., ed., Class and Conflict in Nineteenth-Century England, 1815–1850 (London, 1973), pp. 268–79, where they are wrongly attributed to Edward Miall, the editor of the NonconformistGoogle Scholar.

29 The original program of objectives of the Birmingham Political Union of December 1829 emphasized the importance of a union of the industrious classes (Jephson, 2:48–49).

30 For the imbalance between the weaving and the spinning sectors of the textile industry and the consequences for social relations in Oldham, see Foster, J., Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1974), pp. 103 ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31 Hollis, P., The Pauper Press (Oxford, 1970), esp. pp. 288–89, 304Google Scholar.

32 Quoted in Trevelyan, G. M., The Life of John Bright (London, 1913), p. 141Google Scholar.

33 For a stimulating analysis of the centrality of the political program of the Chartists predicated by the individualist assumptions of the language of natural rights available to them, see Jones, G. Stedman, “The Language of Chartism,” in The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–60, ed. Epstein, J. and Thompson, D. (London, 1982), pp. 3–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34 Foster; G. Stedman Jones, review of Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, by Foster, J., New Left Review 90 (1975): 35–69 (which has greatly influenced my interpretation)Google Scholar; Hobsbawm, E. J., Industry and Empire (London, 1968), chap. 6Google Scholar.

35 Church, R. A., The Great Victorian Boom, 1850–73 (London, 1975), pp. 27, 30–34, 39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

36 The controversy surrounding the restabilizing “mechanism” is compounded by disagreement over the role of the labor aristocracy. See, e.g., Burgess, K., The Challenge of Labour: Shaping British Society, 1850–1930 (London, 1980)Google Scholar, chap. 1, which emphasizes the differentiation taking place within the working class as a result of the creation of a market for labor, which berrefited a privileged elite. By contrast, Joyce (n. 25 above) challenges the credibility of the labor aristocracy thesis. Gray, R., The Aristocracy of Labour in Nineteenth-Century Britain, c. 1850—1914 (London, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, provides a succinct introduction to the literature.

37 Charles Dickens's Hard Times was published in 1854. The process of ideological development is complex. Liberal culture was never internally consistent and universal but consisted of contradictions and tensions. For some sense, therefore, of the complexities of the ideological shifts within the bourgeoisie, see Seed, J., “Unitarianism, Political Economy and the Antinomies of Liberal Culture in Manchester, 1830–50,” Social History 1 (1982): 1–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38 The details of middle-class efforts to promote reconciliation with the working class can be found in Gillespie, F. E., Labor and Politics in England, 1850–67 (1927; reprint, London, 1966)Google Scholar. See also Harrison, R., Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861 to 1881 (London, 1965)Google Scholar.

39 Quoted in Read, D., codden and Bright (London, 1967), p. 30Google Scholar.

40 Quoted in Jephson (n. 10 above), 2:438. Certain Chartist leaders such as Ernest Jones were seen by some contemporaries and later historians as “selling out” to the middle class in lending their support to their campaign for parliamentary reform (see Jones [n. 27 above], pp. 180–81). However, it is not so much a case of their selling out as of the middle class once again genuinely desiring a radical reform of Parliament.

41 Guttsman, W. L., The British Political Elite (London, 1963), p. 91Google Scholar.

42 There is as yet no general history of this period that satisfactorily reconstructs these complex interconnections. The most useful studies are Cornford, J., “The Transformation of Conservatism in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Victorian Studies 7 (1963–1964): 35–66 (on changes in the Conservative party)Google Scholar; Jones, G. Stedman, Outcast London (Oxford, 1971) (on the shift in bourgeois ideology from the perspective of “demoralization” to “degeneration” in the crisis of the 1880s and social-imperialist “solutions” to the degeneration of the urban poor)Google Scholar; Semmel, B., Imperialism and Social Reform (London, 1960) (on the divisions between Liberal social imperialists and Conservative social imperialists)Google Scholar; and Freeden, M., The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar; and Clarke, P., Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978) (on the recognition of the imperative of social reform by the new liberals)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. L. T. Hobhouse summed up this dilemma when he observed that Liberalism occupied “an awkward position between two very active and energetically moving grindstones—the upper grindstone of plutocratic imperialism, and the nether grindstone of social democracy” (Liberalism [London, 1911], p. 214)Google Scholar.