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The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language, and Class in the 1830s and 1840s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Anna Clark
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Extract

Who are compelling women and tender babes to procure the means of subsistence in the cotton factories—to be nipt in the bud, to be sacrificed at the shrine of Moloch? They are the rich, the capitalists. [Speech by Mr. Deegan, Chartist, at Stalybridge, 1839]

A [Malthusian] pretended philosophy . . . crushes, through the bitter privations it inflicts upon us, the energies of our manhood, making our hearths desolate, our homes wretched, inflicting upon our heart's companions an eternal round of sorrow and despair. [Letter from George Harney to Yorkshire Chartists, 1838]

Toryism just means ignorant children in rags, a drunken husband, and an unhappy wife. Chartism is to have a happy home, and smiling, intelligent, and happy families. [Speech by Mr. Macfarlane to Glasgow Chartists, 1839]

Chartist political rhetoric was pervaded by images of domestic misery typified in these quotes. Historians have traditionally understood this stress on domesticity as a simple response to the Industrial Revolution's disruption of the home, either denigrating it as inchoate proletarian rage or celebrating it as a heroic defense of the working-class family. But domestic discontent was nothing new in the 1830s, for drink, wife beating, and sexual competition in the workplace had plagued plebeians for decades—if not centuries. Why then did it become such a potent political issue in the 1830s and 1840s? Following Gareth Stedman Jones, the question must be answered by analyzing Chartist domesticity not just as a reflection of social and economic changes, but as a trope that performed specific political functions in Chartist language.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , January 1992 , pp. 62 - 88
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1992

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References

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4 Smelser, Neil, Social Change and the Industrial Revolution (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1959), p. 264Google Scholar; Craig Calhoun points out that his timing was off in directly linking unrest in the 1830s to changes in factory families; see his Question of Class Struggle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 191–96Google Scholar. For “heroic defense,” see Humphries, Jane, “The Working-Class Family: A Marxist Perspective,” in The Family in Political Thought, ed. Elshtain, Jean (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), pp. 204–13Google Scholar.

5 See Clark, Anna, “Womanhood and Manhood in the Transition from Plebeian to Working-Class Culture: London, 1780–1845” (Ph.D. thesis, Rutgers University, 1987)Google Scholar, for development of this theme. It will be explored further in Anna Clark, “The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class” (work in progress), which will compare workers in Glasgow, London, and Lancashire. Working independently, Patricia Seleski came to similar conclusions about plebeian domestic confusion—see her “Women of the Laboring Poor: Love, Work and Poverty in London, 1750–1820” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1989), pp. 262–326Google Scholar.

6 In this I am following Gareth Stedman Jones, who has repudiated the reading of Chartist rhetoric as a simple reflection of economic discontent; instead, he declares, we must regard it as a political language, embodying a rational political analysis rooted in traditions of radicalism rather than working-class experience. See Jones, Gareth Stedman, “Rethinking Chartism,” in his Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 90–95Google Scholar.

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29 Massey, Gerald, Poems and Ballads (New York, 1854), p. 147Google Scholar. Another classic narrative could be found in a tale, “English Life,” from the Northern Star (June 5, 1847), in which a happy family is evicted from a cottage and must move to a factory town. The son is crippled in the army, while the beautiful daughter is seduced by the factory master, deserted, becomes a prostitute, and dies.

30 Massey, p. 76. For other examples of golden age rhetoric, see the Northern Star (May 16, 1840) letter by Feargus O'Connor; the Northern Star (June 13, 1840) address from J. Lomax; the Northern Star (January 9, 1841) poem by William Hick, “My Five-Acre Cottage that Stands by the Green.”

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35 Southern Star (January 19, 1840); see a similar motif in the anonymous poem The Doom of Toil (Sunderland, 1841), p. 10Google Scholar. Also see the contrast of upper-class immorality to the virtue of the poor in the Northern Star (January 27, 1838) speech by Mr. William Thornton at a Halifax anti-Poor Law meeting. Also see the Northern Star (October 6, 1838); a similar speech in the Northern Star (September 29, 1838) by Mr. Beal, at a Sheffield demonstration; and an editorial in the Northern Star (February 17, 1838).

36 For anti-Malthusian rhetoric, an affirmation of humanity, see the Scottish Patriot (August 31, 1839; February 1, 1840); see similar rhetoric in the Chartist (May 16, 1839); Northern Star (February 17, 1838; February 16, 1839).

37 Northern Star (December 8, 1838); see similar rhetoric in another Northern Star (January 2, 1841).

38 This originated with Gammage, R. G., History of the Chartist Movement, 1837–1854 (1894; reprint, New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969)Google Scholar; Sofer, Renee, “Attitudes and Allegiances in the Unskilled North,” International Review of Social History 10, no. 1 (1965): 429–54Google Scholar; Ward, J. T., Chartism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), pp. 111–42Google Scholar.

39 Behagg, Clive, Politics and Production in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1990), p. 212Google Scholar; Thompson, Dorothy, The Chartists (Aldershot, Hampshire: Wildwood House, 1984), p. 58Google Scholar; Epstein, James, The Lion of Freedom: Feargus O'Connor and the Chartist Movement (London: Croom Helm, 1982), p. 239Google Scholar. However, the fact remains that this was an important debate in Chartism, although it often concerned notions of organization and authority rather than the question of violence. For evidence of this debate, see Northern Star (January 27, 1838; March 24, 1838; June 23, 1838; September 28, 1838; July 7, 1838; November 17, 1838; November 3, 1838; October 13, 1838; December 29, 1838; December 22, 1838); Wilson, Alexander, The Chartist Movement in Scotland (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1970), p. 101Google Scholar. Robert Sykes points out that there was an overlap in tactics between the two wings; see his “Physical Force Chartism: The Cotton District and the Chartist Crisis of 1839,” International Review of Social History 30 (1985): 211Google Scholar.

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46 Kremitz, Thomas Milton, “Approaches to the Chartist Movement: Feargus O'Connor and Chartist Strategy,” Albion 5 (1973): 57–73Google Scholar; Maehl, William Henry Jr., “The Dynamics of Violence in Chartism: A Case Study in North-east England,” Albion 7 (1975): 102CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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48 Northern Star (October 16, 1838; December 22, 1838).

49 Speech at Wigan Chartist meeting in Northern Star (November 17, 1838); see also D. Jones (n. 27 above), p. 115.

50 Northern Star (June 1, 1839).

51 Northern Star (May 18, 1839). While Stephens's support of universal suffrage was ephemeral, fading by 1840, he had very strong support among the Chartists in the first years of Chartism. See Thompson, D., The Chartists (n. 39 above), p. 265Google Scholar.

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62 Foster (n. 7 above), p. 221, tends to portray temperance as part of “liberalization” and the co-optation of the working class. For another view, see Harrison, Brian, “Teetotal Chartism,” History 58, no. 2 (1973): 193–203CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Temperance had been advocated in the 1820s for political reasons by trade unionist John Gast; see Prothero, Iorwerth, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 216Google Scholar.

63 See Trades Newspaper (October 30, 1825; August 28, 1825) on domestic mis-treatment.

64 Carlisle Journal (October 6, 1838), quoted in Harrison and Hollis, eds., p. 33.

65 Lifeboat (December 9, 1843).

66 True Scotsman (April 25, 1840); Vincent, Henry and others, An Address to the Working Men of England, Scotland and Wales (London: Five a Penny Tracts for the People, [1840])Google Scholar.

67 Perhaps this is what Hans Medick means when he writes, “The long-term needs of the household had a relatively low priority in the monetary sphere. By contrast, the demand for public consumption in the monetary sphere was extraordinarily high.” See “Plebeian Culture in the Transition to Capitalism,” in Culture, Ideology and Politics, ed. Samuel, Raphael and Jones, Gareth Stedman (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 91Google Scholar.

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87 Northern Star (February 2, 1839).

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89 Scots Times (November 18, 1840).

90 Scots Times (December 30, 1840).

91 True Scotsman (December 22, 1838).

92 Mary Grassby, a Yorkshire agitator, was attacked by the Globe newspaper for her critique of workhouse marital separation on the grounds that she herself was separated (quoted in the London Dispatch [April 1, 1838]).

93 National Association Gazette (April 30, 1842; see also February 5, 1842).

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102 Epstein, “Constitutionalist Idiom” (n. 22 above), p. 565.

103 Here I differ from Behagg, who argues that workplace democracy produced Chartist ideas of democracy by showing that workplace gender hierarchy limited Chartist democracy. See Behagg (n. 39 above), pp. 57, 146, 157; for gender hierarchy in the workplace, see Lazonick, William, “Industrial Relations and the Case of the Self-Acting Mule,” Cambridge Journal of Economics 3, no. 3 (1979): 233Google Scholar.

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117 Northern Star (January 8, 1842).

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129 For instance, the journal the British Workman (1855) tried to persuade men to reform their domestic habits before claiming the vote.

130 O'Connor and Jones, eds. (n. 59 above), 1:44–49.

131 Northern Star (May 8, 1847; July 10, 1847), where O'Connor celebrates both women's domesticity and skills with the pick-axe. Thomas Martin Wheeler pointed out that “mothers could not attend to their children and allotments at the same time” in 1847. See Stevens, William, A Memoir of Thomas Martin Wheeler (1862, reprint, Westport, Conn.: Garland, 1986), p. 40Google Scholar; for an overview, see Jones, D., Chartism and the Chartists (n. 27 above), p. 137Google Scholar.

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