“The Labour of the Country Is the Wealth of the Country”: Class Identity, Consciousness, and the Role of Discourse in the Making of the English Working Class

International Labor and Working-Class History

Volumn 49, Issue , 1996, Pages 1-25

  Steinberg, Marc W ^a  

^a SMITH COLLEGE   (United States)

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EID: 0030534011     PISSN: 01475479     EISSN: 14716445     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S014754790000168X     Document Type: Article

References (222)

1. For accounts of the rioting brought on by the piece-rate disputes see Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992), 270–279
2. George Rudé, Wilkes and Liberty (Oxford, 1962), 98–103
3. Walter J. Shelton, English Hunter and Industrial Disorders (Toronto, 1971), 192–199
4. Marc W. Steinberg, “Worthy of Hire: Discourse, Ideology and Collective Action Among English Working-Class Trade Groups, 1800–1830,” unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, University of Michigan, v. 1 (1989), 134–137.
5. A List of Prices in Those Branches of the Weaving Manufactory, Called Strong Plain, Foot Figured and Flowered Branches (London, 1769).
6. A. E. Bland, P. A. Brown, and R. H. Tawney, ed., English Economic History: Select Documents (New York, 1919), 547–551
7. J. H. Clapham, “The Spitalfields Acts, 1773–1824,” Economic Journal 26 (December 1916):459–471.
8. British Library, Add. MSS. 27805, An Account of the Proceedings of the Committees of the Journeymen Silk Weavers of Spitalfields; in the Legal Defence of the Acts of Parliament, Granted to their Trade, in the 13th, 32nd, and 51st Years of the Reign of his late Majesty, King George the Third (London, 1823), 67.
9. Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840–1914 (Cambridge, 1991)
10. Joyce, “The Imaginary Discontents of Social History: A Note of Response to Mayfield and Thorne, Lawrence and Taylor,” Social History 18 (January 1993):81–85
11. Jacques Rancière, The Night of Labor: The Workers' Dream in Nineteenth-Century France, trans, by John Drury (Philadelphia, 1989)
12. William Reddy, Money and Liberty in Modern Europe: A Critique of Historical Understanding (Cambridge, 1987)
13. Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988)
14. Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17 (Summer 1991):773–97
15. Scott, “The Tip of the Volcano,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35 (1993):438–51
16. William H. Sewell, Jr., “Toward a Post-Materialist Rhetoric for Labor History,” in Rethinking Labor History, ed. Lenard R. Berlanstein (Champaign, 1993), 15–38
17. Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working-Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983)
18. James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture c. 1815–1867 (Cambridge, 1993)
19. Vernon, “Who's Afraid of the ‘Linguistic Turn’?: The Politics of Social History and Its Discontents,” Social History 19 (January 1994): 81–97.
20. For a recent exchange on this post-materialism see Sewell, “Toward a Post-Materialist Rhetoric,” and Michael Hanagan, “Commentary: For Reconstruction in Labor History,” in Rethinking Labor History, ed. Lenard R. Berlanstein (Champaign, 1993), 182–199.
21. This article was written before the publication of Patrick Joyce's latest statements; see Patrick Joyce, Democratic Subjects: The Self and The Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge, 1994)
22. “The End of Social History ?” Social History 20 (January 1995);73–91.
23. E. P. Thompson, “The Poverty of Theory,” in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (New York, 1978), 250
24. Thompson, “The Peculiarities of the English,” in The Poverty of Theory, 245–303
25. Ellen Meiksins Wood, “The Politics of Theory and the Concept of Class: E. P. Thompson and His Critics,” Studies in Political Economy 9 (Fall 1982):45–75. Writing on British cultural Marxism and its conception of class is now voluminous.
26. For two overviews see Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians (Oxford, 1984)
27. the essays in Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland, eds., E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia, 1990).
28. Sonya Rose and Anna Clark provide analyses of the relation between this school and feminist analyses for the British case. See Sonya O. Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkeley, 1992)
29. Rose, “Gender and Labour History: The Nineteenth-Century Legacy,” International Review of Social History 38 (supplement, 1993): 145–62
30. Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, 1995).
31. Ellen Meiksins Wood, “Falling Through the Cracks: E. P. Thompson and the Debate on Base and Superstructure,” in E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, ed. Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (Philadelphia, 1990), 116
32. see also Derek Sayer, The Violence of Abstraction (Oxford, 1987)
33. Catherine Hall, “The Tale of Samuel and Jemima: Gender and Working-Class Culture in Nineteenth-Century England,” in E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, 78–102
34. Sonya O. Rose, “‘Gender at Work’: Sex, Class and Industrial Capitalism,” History Workshop 21 (Spring 1986):113–131.
35. Wood, “The Politics of Theory,” 49
36. Adam Przeworski, “Proletarian into a Class: The Process of Class Formation from Karl Kautsky's The Class Struggle to Recent Controversies,” Politics and Society 7 (1977):343
37. see also Peter Meiksins, “New Classes and Old Theories: The Impasse of Contemporary Class Analysis,” in Recapturing Marxism: An Appraisal of Recent Trends in Sociological Theory, ed. Rhonda Levine and Jerry Lembke (New York, 1987), 37–63
38. E. P. Thompson, “Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Struggle Without Class?,” Social History 3 (May 1978):133–165.
39. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1966).
40. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, 1983, 101
41. Joyce, Visions of the People, 9.
42. David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, “Social History and Its Discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the PoHtics of Language,” Social History 17 (May 1992):177–179.
43. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class.
44. Stedman Jones's revisionist interpretation has spawned considerable debate. For citations of these numerous critiques and commentaries see Marc W. Steinberg, “The Re-Making of the English Working Class?” Theory and Society 20 (1991):173–97
45. Mayfield and Thorne, “Social History and Its Discontents.” Lawrence and Taylor argue that the latter pair misconstrue Stedman Jones's work as being part of the linguistic revisionism, when it is in fact part of his larger enduring program to rethink the transformation of nineteenth-century society. While Lawrence and Taylor seem justified in asserting a distinct trajectory for Stedman Jones, his work has certainly been influential in motivating this allied revisionist project; Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, “The Poverty of Protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language-A Reply,” Social History 18 (January 1993):1–15.
46. A recent defense of Marxist historiography against the linguistic turn has been conducted passionately by Bryan Palmer, Descent Into Discourse: The Reification of Language and the Writing of Social History (Philadelphia, 1990)
47. “The Eclipse of Materialism: Marxism and the Writing of Social History in the 1980s,” in The Socialist Register 1990, ed. Ralph Miliband, Leo Panitch and John Saville (London, 1990), 111–46
48. “Critical Theory, Historical Materialism, and the Ostensible End of Marxism: The Poverty of Theory Revisted,” International Review of Social History 38 (1993):133–162.
49. Joyce, Visions of the People, 8, 16–17.
50. Joyce, Visions of the People, 12, 329.
51. Joyce, Visions of the People, 11.
52. Joyce, Visions of the People, 57, 90–92, 99–100, 108–9.
53. Joyce, Visions of the People, 94, 100.
54. Joyce, Visions of the People, 329, 334–35.
55. Joyce, Visions of the People, 333.
56. Scott, “Evidence,” 793.
57. Scott, “Evidence,” 785
58. Gender, 84. In her essay on The Making of the English Working Class, Scott contends that Thompson in fact genders his account of class formation by identifying the rational and progressive as male and the feminine as the sphere of the domestic (i.e., nonproductive), expressive, religious, and irrational, and therefore subvertive of class consciousness.
59. See Scott, Gender, 79. As I have argued elsewhere, Scott is surely right that there is a neglect of women and gender in the volume
60. see Steinberg, “The Re-Making.” However, the duality of gendering she finds in Thompson is an idiosyncratic one, based on a binary and structuralist reading which Laura Downs has in other ways argued is inherent in much of Scott's work. Downs, though, finds this only in Scott's French work and enthusiastically endorses her critique of Thompson.
61. See Laura Downs, “If ‘Woman’ Is Just an Empty Category, Then Why Am I Afraid to Walk Alone at Night? Identity Politics and the Postmodern Subject,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 35 (1993):421–423.
62. E. P. Thompson, “Folklore, Anthropology, and Social History,” Indian Historical Review 3 (January 1977):262. In their recent analysis of the growing divide between materialist and post-materialist accounts, David Mayfield and Susan Thorne perceptively reiterate Thompson's concern with language and culture as a central point of material life. While they perhaps errantly find analogs between the epistemological premises of Thompson and the deconstructionism of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, they are surely correct in maintaining that Thompson's reading of Marx opens a wide space for the role of language in class analysis.
63. See Mayfield and Thorne, “Social History”; Mayfield and Thome, “Reply to ‘The Poverty of Protest’ and ‘The Imaginary Discontents,’” Social History 18 (May 1993):219–233.
64. Both Carolyn Steedman and John Goode also see potential links between Thompson and recent discourse theory. See Carolyn Steedman, “The Price of Experience: Women and the Making of the English Working Class,” Radical History Review 59 (1994):108–19
65. John Goode, “E. P. Thompson and the ‘Significance of Literature,’” in E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives, ed. Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (Philadelphia, 1990), 183–203.
66. For other recent discussions see Ron Aminzade, “Class Analysis, Politics, and French Labor History,” in Rethinking Labor History, ed. Lenard R. Berlanstein (Champaign, 1993), 90–113
67. Hanagan, “Commentary.”
68. See Sally Alexander, “Women, Class and Sexual Differences in the 1830s and 1840s; Some Reflections on the Writing of Feminist History,” History Workshop 17 (Spring 1984):125–49
69. Christina Crosby, “Dealing with Differences,” in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (London, 1992), 130–43
70. Rosemary Hennessey, Materialist Feminism and the Politics of Discourse Analysis (London, 1992)
71. Denise Riley, Am I Thai Name?: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis, 1988)
72. Riley, “A Short History of Some Preoccupations,” in Feminists Theorize, 121–29
73. Rose, Limited Livelihoods. Recent work by Purvis and Hunt suggests the potential for a fruitful union between what they term the critical perspective on ideology developed by Marx and poststruc-turalism. See Trevor Purvis and Alan Hunt, “Discourse, Ideology, Discourse, Ideology, Discourse, Ideology …, ” British Journal of Sociology 44 (September 1993):473–499.
74. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London, 1991), 9
75. Richard Terdiman, Discourse/Counter-Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France (Ithaca, 1986), 55.
76. Robert Stam, “Mikhail Bakhtin and Left Cultural Critique,” in Postmodernism and Its Discontents, ed. E. Ann Kaplan (London, 1988), 123.
77. See also Fred Evans, “Language and Political Agency: Derrida, Marx, and Bakhtin,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 27 (1990):505–23
78. V. N. Volosinov, “Literary Stylistics,” in Bakhtin School Poetics, ed. Ann Shukman (Oxford, 1983), 93–152.
79. Lawrence Grossberg, “History, Politics, and Postmodernism: Stuart Hall and Cultural Studies,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 10 (Summer 1986):66.
80. Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World (London, 1990), 24
81. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dos-toevsky's Poetics (Minneapolis, 1984), 183, 202.
82. Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, 1981), 293.
83. Ken Hirschkop, “Bakhtin, Discourse and Democracy,” New Left Review 160 (November-December 1986):98
84. “Introduction: Bakhtin and Cultural Theory,” in Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, ed. Ken Hirschkop and David Shepard (Manchester, 1989), 16.
85. Eagleton, Ideology, 45, 195
86. Michael Gardiner, The Dialogics of Critique: M. M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology (London, 1992), 74, 81
87. Stuart Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debates,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2 (June 1985): 104
88. Hirschkop, “Introduction,” 21.
89. See also Purvis and Hunt, “Discourse, Ideology”
90. Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, 1986).
91. Terdiman, Discourse, 61
92. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990), 188.
93. Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 401.
94. Eagleton, Ideology, 115
95. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985), 326
96. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey N. Smith (New York, 1971), 323.
97. See also Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing the ‘Popular’,” in People's History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (London, 1981), 227–40
98. Alan Hunt, “Rights and Social Movements: Counter-Hegemonic Strategies,” Journal of Law and Society 17 (Autumn 1990):309–28
99. Purvis and Hunt, “Discourse, Ideology”
100. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford, 1976).
101. Ava Baron, “Gender and Labor History,” in Work Engendered: Toward a New American Labor History, ed. Ava Baron (Ithaca, 1991), 31.
102. Scott herself notes that the very multiplicity of discourses allows the possibility for people to stand outside a particular discursive formation; in any one situation the given ontology through which a set of social experiences or relations is naturalized can thus be questioned. See Scott, “Evidence,” 793.
103. However, two points concerning this position should be raised. First, as British analytic philosophers such as John Austin note, language is both an act in saying something and an action through saying something. See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, Mass. 1975), 99–103. There is a tendency in Scott to lose focus of the fact that language is thus a complex process of human action.
104. Second, there is both epistemological and ontological slippage in Scott's deconstruction-ism. In arguing that all discourse is contextual, she sets up a relational contrast between context and discourse. See Scott, “Evidence,” 793–795.
105. Yet if there is nothing beyond discourse, context is an impossibility. I think it is possible to maintain on the ontological side that the situational constructions of discourse facilitate extra-situational networks of action, which is what we normally term social structure. This in turn limits the possibilities for discourse. Perhaps this is what Harrison White argues in part. See Harrison White, Identity and Control: A Structural Theory of Social Action (Princeton, 1992).
106. William A. Gamson, Talking Politics (Cambridge, 1992), 57, 60.
107. Rick Fantasia, in his analysis of class conflict, has argued that such senses of agency (as well as the concepts of identity upon which they are based) are constructed within what he terms “cultures of solidarity.” These cultures provide workers with a set of collective meanings that heightens their solidarity and validates their contentious actions. See Rick Fantasia, Cultures of Solidarity (Berkeley, 1989).
108. In a somewhat different vein, Margaret Somers has suggested that workers develop “narrative identities” through which they make claims for rights and structure their collective identities as citizens and producers. See Margaret R. Somers, “Narrativity, Narrative Identity, and Social Action: Rethinking English Working-Class Formation,” Social Science History 16 (1992):591–630
109. Somers, “Law, Community, and Political Culture in the Transition to Democracy,” American Sociological Review 58 (October 1993):587–620
110. Somers, “Rights, Relationality, and Membership: Rethinking the Making and Meaning of Citizenship,” Law and Social Inquiry (1994):63–112.
111. Scott, Domination, 103.
112. British Pariiamentary Papers (hereafter PP) (Lords) 1823 [57], CLVI, 15.
113. G. R. Porter, Treatise on the Origin, Progressive Improvement, and Present State of the Silk Trade (London, 1830), 80
114. PP (Lords) 1823 [57], CLVI, 5, 186.
115. See also Gerald B. Hertz, “The English Silk Industry in the Eighteenth Century,” English Historical Review 24 (October, 1909):710–27
116. Alfred Plummer, The London Weavers' Company 1600–1970 (London, 1972)
117. Frank Warner, The Silk Industry in the United Kingdom: Its Origin and Development (London, 1921).
118. George Dodd, “Spitalfields,” in London, vol. 2, ed. Charles Knight (London, 1851), 386
119. PP (Lords) 1823 [57], CLVI, 23
120. PP (Commons) 1834 [36], XXXV, App. B. 2, Pt. IV, 83i, 87i.
121. Clark, Struggle, 126–130.
122. PP (Commons) 1835 [572], VII, 10–11
123. PP (Commons) 1818 [211], IX, 44, 148
124. PP (Lords) 1823 [57], CLVI, 5, 56, 62, 102, 126–28
125. Dorothy M. George, London Life in the 18th Century (London, 1925), 181–82
126. W. M. Jordan, “The Silk Industry in London, 1760–1830, with Special Reference to the Conditions of the Wage-Earners and the Policy of the Spitalfields Acts,” unpublished M.A. thesis in History, University of London (1931), 12
127. Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution 1750–1850 (London, 1969), 168, 176–77
128. Trades' Newspaper, February 23, 1828. In a fascinating account of the mechanization of the winding trade, William Hale told a Select Committee of the Lords how the movement of women into weaving actually led to the mechanization of that industry. In the first decade of the century, “almost all the Females left the Trade and went into the Looms, which forced the Manufacturers to turn their attention to Machinery; they then commenced, and they do now neariy wind all their Silk by Machinery.”
129. See PP (Lords) 1823 [57], CLVI, 5. There are bits of evidence to suggest that by the 1820s male weavers were accepting girls with no kin ties as apprentices. It is possible that the apprenticeship premium became an important source of additional income, particularly after the repeal of the Spitalfields Acts (which I discuss below).
130. See Trades' Newspaper, September 18, October 9, 1825; January 22, 1826.
131. See Marc W. Steinberg, “The Roar of the Crowd: Repertoires of Discourse and Collective Action Among the Spitalfields Silk Weavers in Nineteenth-Century London,” in Repertoires and Cycles of Collective Action, ed. Mark Traugott (Durham, 1995), 57–88
132. Steinberg. Fighting Words: Working-Class Formation, Discourse, and Collective Action In Early Nineteenth-Century England, unpublished manuscript. I am drawing here from Thompson's work on the moral economy of the eighteenth century.
133. See E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971):76–136
134. Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York, 1991).
135. Thompson argues that class relations can be analyzed in terms of a moral economy when they are negotiated through a series of community practices which recognize mutual obligations, when market practices are thus publicly acknowledged to have normative underpinnings, and when the ideological bases of these practices are articulated in plebeian discourses. See Thompson, Customs, 271, 343,350
136. see also Charles Tilly's definition as quoted in Thompson, Customs, 338. My claim is that the weavers' class consciousness was based precisely on such notions of entitlement based on membership in both a trade and political community.
137. See Clive Behagg, “Custom, Class and Change,” Social History 4 (October 1979):455–80
138. Behagg, “Secrecy, Ritual and Folk Violence: The Opacity of the Workplace in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” in Popular Custom and Culture in Nineteenth-Century England, ed. Robert Storch (New York, 1982), 154–79
139. John Belchem, Industrialization and the Working Class: The English Experience, 1750–1900 (Portland, 1990)
140. Clark, Struggle; Eric Hobsbawm, “Artisan or Labour Aristocrat?” Economic History Review, second series, 37 (1984);355–73
141. Iowerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London: John Cast and His Times (London, 1979)
142. John Rule, “The Property of Skill in the Period of Manufacture,” in The Historical Meaning of Work, ed. Patrick Joyce (Cambridge, 1988), 99–118.
143. R. J. Morris, “What Happened to the British Working Class, 1750–1850?” Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History 41 (Autumn, 1980):14.
144. Porter, Origins, 222–23, 274.
145. Natalie Rothstein, “The Introduction of the Jacquard Loom to Great Britain,” in Studies in Textile History, ed. Veronica Gervers (Toronto, 1977), 281
146. PP (Commons) 1832 [678] XIX, 213, 488, 716, 725.
147. PP (Commons) 1834, XXXV, App. 2, B. 2, Pt. 1, 83f
148. Tower Hamlets Library (London), Local History Collection, Christ Church Spitalfields Vestry Minute Books, 1828–1831
149. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government From the Revolution to the Municipal Corporations Act: The Parish and the County (London, 1906), 79–90.
150. Phillip McCann, “Popular Education, Socialization, and Social Control: Spitalfields 1812–1824,” in Popular Education and Socialization in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Phillip McCann (London, 1977), 3
151. PP (Commons) 1817 [642], VI, 31.
152. PP (Commons) 1832 [678], XIX, 714.
153. An Account, 20–21
154. PP (Commons) 1818 [134], IX, 160
155. PP (Commons) 1832 [678], XIX, 230
156. PP (Commons) 1834 [556], X, 320
157. PP (Lords) 1823 [57], CLVI, 115.
158. See Bland, Brown and Tawney, English Economic History, 547–51
159. J. L. and Barbara Hammond, The Skilled Labourer, 1780–1832 (New York, 1967), 209–12
160. Rudé, Wilkes, 100–103
161. Plummer, London Weavers' Company, 320–29
162. Shelton, English Hunger, 192–197.
163. An act of 1792 extended these provisions to mixed fabrics. In 1811 they were legally extended to women as well, providing some indication of the significance of women in the trade. See Clapham, “The Spitalfields Acts,” 460–462
164. Hammond and Hammond, Skilled Labourer, 209
165. Plummer, London Weavers' Company, 328–29
166. PP (Commons) 1818 [211], IX, 190.
167. Letters, Taken from Various Newspapers, Tending to Injure the Journeymen Silk Weavers of Spitalfields, with an Attack against the Acts of Parliament, Regulating the Prices of Their Work … Also, the Answers, by the Journeymen and Their Friends (London, 1818), 42–43.
168. PP (Lords) 1823 [57], CLVI, 172, 176.
169. PP (Commons) 1832 [678], XIX, 734.
170. British Library, Francis Place Newspaper Cuttings and Clippings Collection, Set 16, V. 2, fo. 32
171. Jordan, “The Silk Industry,” 3
172. see also “Verax,” Review of the Statements in Hale's Appeal to the Public on the Spitalfields Acts (London, 1822), 22–23.
173. PP (Commons) 1818 [134], IX, 143, 168,161, 192
174. PP (Commons) 1834 [44], XXIX, Pt. Ill, 112A.
175. PP (Commons) 1835 [572], VII, 86.
176. Barry Gordon, Economic Doctrine and Tory Liberalism 1824–1830 (London, 1979), 19.
177. Hansard's Parliamentary Debates, new series, 9 (1823), c. 146–49.
178. For Tory policy see Boyd Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1977)
179. Gordon, Economic Doctrine.
180. For the relationship between Evangelicalism and political economy see Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865 (Oxford, 1988).
181. As Gregory Claeys observes, “For much of the nineteenth century, political economy successfully dictated the terms of debate about such vital issues as poor laws, trades' unions, hours and conditions of labour, emigration, the morals of the poor, and the extension of the factory system.” Gregory Claeys, Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989), 144.
182. Claeys maintains that much of the age's working-class radical thought accepted some notion of free markets, and that even the Owenites initially tried to displace such ideas with moral rather than economic arguments concerning production and consumption. Claeys, Citizens and Saints, 174–83
183. see also Mitchell Dean, The Constitution of Poverty: Toward a Genealogy of Liberal Governance (London, 1991)
184. Thomas A. Home, Property Rights and Poverty: Political Argument in Britain, 1605–1834 (Chapel Hill, 1988).
185. For a narrative account see An Account.
186. Barrie M. Ratcliffe and W. H. Chaloner, trans, and ed., A French Sociologist Looks at Britain: Gustave D'Eichthal and British Society in 1828 (Manchester, 1977), 25.
187. An Account, 29. The campaign was extensive and aided by many other weavers' groups from around the country. On 21 May 1823 the MP for Weymouth presented an antirepeal petition with eleven thousand signatures, a number all the more remarkable because women and people under twenty had not been permitted to sign. Petitions were also presented from Spitalfields (with a reported twenty-three thousand signatures) and other areas around the country on 5 March 1824, 10 March from Coventry, 18 March from “silk manufacturers of London” (presumably the smaller masters), 19 March from some “silk manufacturers in England”, and 22 March from the parish of Bethnal Green (with 7,000 signatures).
188. See Hansard's, new series, 9 (1823): c. 378
189. Hansard's, new series, 10 (1824): c. 780–81, 869, 1221, 1285, 1312.
190. For an analysis of this repertoire see Steinberg, “Roar of the Crowd”
191. Marc W. Steinberg, “New Canons Or Loose Cannons? The Post-Marxist Challenge to Neo-Marxism as Represented in the Work of Calhoun and Reddy,” Political Power and Social Theory 8 (1993):221–270.
192. On the scope of these collective actions, see Steinberg, “New Canons”
193. Steinberg, Fighting Words, chap. 7.
194. On the uneven history of the weavers' participation in radical politics from the 1810s to the early 1830s see David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–1848 (Cambridge, 1984), 185–89
195. Patricia Hollis, The Pauper Press: A Study of Working-Class Radicalism of the 1830s (Oxford, 1970), 264–65
196. J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London 1796–1821 (Oxford, 1982), 97
197. Plummer, London Weavers' Company, 330
198. Prothero, Artisans and Politics, 70, 142, 285
199. Steinberg, Fighting Words, chap. 5
200. Thompson, The Making, 634.
201. I cannot examine the whole dialogic interplay between the weavers and their adversaries, which I analyze at varying lengths elsewhere. See Steinberg, “Roar of the Crowd”
202. Steinberg, Fighting Words, chaps. 6 and 7.
203. An Account, 60. One expert the weavers sometimes quoted when constructing their case was Adam Smith. On the issue of wage levels one weaver's advocate noted sardonically during the course of the repeal debate that “Adam Smith, an authority our great pretenders are fond of quoting, says, ‘the prosperity of a country consists in the comforts and enjoyments that the people, both rich and poor, possess beyond the common necessaries of life.” See British Library, Add MSS 27805, John Powell, A Letter Addressed to Weavers, Shopkeepers, and Publicans, on the Great Value of the Principle of the Spitalfields Acts: In Opposition to the Absurd and Mischievous Doctrines of the Advocates for their Repeal (London, 1824), 5
204. see also William Hale, An Appeal to the Public, in Defence of the Spitalfields Act: with Remarks on the Causes Which Have Led to the Miseries and Moral Deterioration of the Poor (London, 1822), 41.
205. British Library, Add MSS 27805, “Coventry Freeman,” Animadversions on the Repeal of the Act for Regulating the Wages of Labour among the Spitalfields Weavers; and in the Combination Law (London, 1824), 3.
206. An Account, 25. Although the male weavers did not emphasize consistently who should distribute wealth within the household, this was made clear on several occasions. The man held authority, and indeed part of his degradation was its attenuation. As one weaver noted during a campaign in 1826, “His industry, which should promote the welfare of his family, ultimately hastens to its ruin; … he beholds his helpless family bereft of their natural protector, and compelled to apply to that miserable and degrading substitute, the parochial fund.” Trades' Free Press, July 9, 1826.
207. “Coventry Freeman,” Animadversions, 5.
208. William Lovett, The Life and Struggles of William Lovetl, vol. 1 (London, 1967), 57
209. John Prout, Practical View of the Silk Trade (Macclesfield, 1829), 23
210. PP (Commons) 1832 [678], XIX, 212, 387, 89, 476, 479, 488, 701, 719, 725
211. PP (Commons) 1834 [556], X, 4, 324.
212. PP (Commons) 1832 [678], XIX, 770.
213. See Steinberg, Fighting Words, chaps. 6 and 7.
214. The petition was presented with twenty thousand signatures as part of a larger working-class campaign for wage protection legislation. Petitions were also sent from the silk-weaving towns of Coventry (ribbon weaving), Macclesfield, Manchester, and Norwich, as well as other industrial areas. See Trades' Free Press, 5, 26 April 1828, May 3, 1828.
215. Trades' Free Press, February 23, 1828.
216. Report Adopted at a General Meeting of the Journeymen Broad Silk Weavers, held in Saint John Street Chapel, Brick-lane, Spitalfields, On Wednesday, the 20th of February, 1828, to take into Their Consideration the Necessity of Petitioning the Legislature for a Wage Protection Bill and Such Other Purposes as May Arise out of the Same. To which is Appended, The Petition (London, 1828), 31.
217. Report, 12–14.
218. Report, 1 (from the petition, paginated separately).
219. Report, 20, 25–26.
220. Report, 21.
221. Report. 14–15.
222. In her analysis of patriarchal sexual cooperation among the silk weavers, Anna Clark argues that the male weavers were less likely than skilled artisans to construct pronounced gender differences in their trade rhetoric because of the centrality of women in production. See Clark, Struggle, 127–28, 199.