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

The Journal of British Studies

Volumn 24, Issue 4, 1985, Pages 415-433

  Nicholls, David ^a  

^a MANCHESTER METROPOLITAN UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 1542636833     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: 15456986     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/385845     Document Type: Article

References (57)

1. See, e.g., R. J. White, Radicalism and Its Results, 1760–1837 (London, 1965), p. 3;
2. E. Royle and J. Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers, 1760–1848 (Brighton, 1982), p. 9; and
3. J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London, 1796–1821 (Oxford, 1982), p. 1.
4. See, e.g., A. J. A. Morris's introduction to Edwardian Radicalism, 1900–1914, ed. A. J. A. Morris (London, 1974), pp. 1–12; and
5. F. Parkin, Middle-Class Radicalism (Manchester, 1968). Compare the discussion of definitional problems in J. O. Baylen and
6. N. J. Gossman, eds., Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals, vol. 1, 1770–1830 (Brighton, 1979), p. 5; and
7. in N. J. Gossman, “Definitions of and Recent Writings on Modern British Radicalism, 1790–1914,” British Studies Monitor 4, no. 1 (1973): 3–11.
8. N. Poulantzas, Political Power and Social Classes (1968), trans, Timothy O'Hagan (London, 1973), pp. 168–73.
9. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963).
10. A. Briggs, “Middle-Class Consciousness in English Politics, 1780–1846,” Past and Present, no. 9 (1956), pp. 65–74.
11. One historian has gone so far as to deny the existence of any clearly defined middle class before 1870 (T. Nossiter, “The Middle Class and Nineteenth-Century Politics: Notes on the Literature,” in The Middle Class in Politics, ed. J. Garrard et al. [London, 1978], pp. 80–81).
12. H. Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London, 1969);
13. T. R. Tholfsen, Working-Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England (London, 1976).
14. E. Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1901–4), trans. Mary Morris (London, 1934), p. 428.
15. James Mill's articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1820)
16. (esp. his essay on government, which was reprinted as An Essay on Government, ed.
17. E. Baker [Cambridge, 1937]) 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 I. Bradley, The Optimists: Themes and Personalities in Victorian Liberalism [London, 1980], p. 22).
18. J. S. Mill, Autobiography (1873; London, 1924), p. 196.
19. 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 H. Jephson, The Platform: Its Rise and Progress, 2 vols. [1892; reprint, London, 1968], 1:194).
20. The analysis for this period draws on George Rudé, Hanoverian London, 1714–1808 (London, 1971), Wilkes and Liberty (London, 1962), and Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1970); on A. Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the Age of the French Revolution (London, 1979); and on the several works of Brewer and Sutherland cited below.
21. J. Brewer, “English Radicalism in the Age of George III,” in Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Princeton, N.J., 1980), pp. 323–67.
22. L. Sutherland, “The City of London in Eighteenth-Century Politics,” in Essays Presented to Sir Lewis Namier, ed. R. Pares and A. J. P. Taylor (London, 1956), p. 55.
23. See also L. Sutherland, The City of London and the Opposition to Government, 1768–74 (London, 1959).
24. C. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (1959; 2d ed., New York, 1968).
25. 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 C. Hill, “The Norman Yoke,” in Democracy and the Labour Movement, ed. J. Saville [London, 1954], pp. 11–16).
26. H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977), pp. 202–3.
27. 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 J. M. Main, “Radical Westminster, 1807–1820,” Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand 12, no. 46 [April 1966]: 186–204.)
28. Quoted in J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (London, 1976), p. 168. 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.
29. Quoted in Sutherland, “The City of London in Eighteenth-Century Politics,” p. 66. Bentham used the same imagery (see C. B. Roylance Kent, The English Radicals: An Historical Sketch [London, 1899], p. 187).
30. 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.
31. Roylance Kent, pp. 23–24, 92–93. Many radical M.P.s were, however, reluctant to be bound by pledges.
32. See J. Hamburger, James Mill and the Art of Revolution (New Haven, Conn., 1963), and
33. Intellectuals in Politics: John Stuart Mill and the Philosophic Radicals (New Haven, Conn., 1965);
34. W. Thomas, The Philosophic Radicals (Oxford, 1979); and Halévy (n. 9 above).
35. 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 P. Richards, “State Formation and Class Struggle, 1832–48,” in Capitalism, State Formation and Marxist Theory, ed. P. Corrigan (London, 1980), pp. 49–78. 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 P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (Brighton, 1980), for some interesting insights into working-class Toryism.
36. Quoted in D. Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (London, 1975), p. 125.
37. Joseph Sturge, a Birmingham middle-class radical, wrote a series of articles for the Nonconformist in the autumn of 1841 entitled “Reconciliation between the Middle and Working Classes” that paved the way for the Birmingham conference. There are extracts in P. Hollis, 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 Nonconformist.
38. 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).
39. For the imbalance between the weaving and the spinning sectors of the textile industry and the consequences for social relations in Oldham, see J. Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1974), pp. 103 ff.
40. P. Hollis, The Pauper Press (Oxford, 1970), esp. pp. 288–89, 304.
41. Quoted in G. M. Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London, 1913), p. 141.
42. 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 G. Stedman Jones, “The Language of Chartism,” in The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–60, ed. J. Epstein and D. Thompson (London, 1982), pp. 3–58.
43. Foster; G. Stedman Jones, review of Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution, by J. Foster, New Left Review 90 (1975): 35–69 (which has greatly influenced my interprétation);
44. E. J. Hobsbawm, Industry and Empire (London, 1968), chap. 6.
45. R. A. Church, The Great Victorian Boom, 1850–73 (London, 1975), pp. 27, 30–34, 39.
46. The controversy surrounding the restabilizing “mechanism” is compounded by disagreement over the role of the labor aristocracy. See, e.g., K. Burgess, The Challenge of Labour: Shaping British Society, 1850–1930 (London, 1980), chap. 1, which emphasizes the differentiation taking place within the working class as a result of the creation of a market for labor, which benefited a privileged elite. By contrast, Joyce (n. 25 above) challenges the credibility of the labor aristocracy thesis.
47. R. Gray, The Aristocracy of Labour in Nineteenth-Century Britain, c. 1850–1914 (London, 1981), provides a succinct introduction to the literature.
48. 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 J. Seed, “Unitarianism, Political Economy and the Antinomies of Liberal Culture in Manchester, 1830–50,” Social History 7 (1982): 1–25.
49. The details of middle-class efforts to promote reconciliation with the working class can be found in F. E. Gillespie, Labor and Politics in England, 1850–67 (1927; reprint, London, 1966).
50. See also R. Harrison, Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861 to 1881 (London, 1965).
51. Quoted in D. Read, Cobden and Bright (London, 1967), p. 30.
52. W. L. Guttsman, The British Political Elite (London, 1963), p. 91.
53. There is as yet no general history of this period that satisfactorily reconstructs these complex interconnections. The most useful studies are J. Cornford, “The Transformation of Conservatism in the Late Nineteenth Century,” Victorian Studies 7 (1963–64): 35–66 (on changes in the Conservative party);
54. G. Stedman Jones, O utcast 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);
55. B. Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform (London, 1960) (on the divisions between Liberal social imperialists and Conservative social imperialists); and
56. M. Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978); and
57. P. Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978) (on the recognition of the imperative of social reform by the new liberals). 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).