the english middle class and the ideological significance of radicalism, 1760-1886

The English Middle Class and the Ideological Significance of Radicalism, 1760-1886Author(s): David NichollsSource: Journal of British Studies, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Oct., 1985), pp. 415-433Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on BritishStudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/175474 .

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The English Middle Class and the Ideological Significance of

Radicalism, 1760-1886

David Nicholls

I

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 applica- tion 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.2 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.3 At best "radical" retains its original adjectival power of describ-

DAVID NICHOLLS is senior lecturer in history at Manchester Polytechnic. l For the sources of the quotations and the etymological history of "radical," see

the Oxford English Dictionary. 2 See, e.g., R. J. White, Radicalism and Its Results, 1760-1837 (London, 1965), p. 3;

E. Royle and J. Walvin, English Radicals and Reformers, 1760-1848 (Brighton, 1982), p. 9; and J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London, 1796-1821 (Oxford, 1982), p. 1.

3 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 F. Parkin, Middle-Class Radicalism (Manchester, 1968). Compare the discussion of definitional problems in J. O. Baylen and

Journal of British Studies 24 (October 1985): 415-433 ? 1985 by The North American Conference on British Studies. All rights reserved. 0021-9371/85/2404-0002$01.00

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ing 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 oper- ation 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. It will further suggest that capital, like labor, has never been a homogeneous bloc but consists of fractions that are themselves often in conflict, though such conflict is constrained by overriding needs and common interests. Such competition was rationalized in terms of an ideology of reform (radicalism), but reform congruent with and not antagonistic to capitalist relations of production.

Two factors are crucial to an understanding of the character and role of radical ideology in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain. The first of these is the capitalist basis of agricultural production by the eighteenth century, which meant that, as the commercial and industrial middle classes emerged, they required some form of political accommodation with the landed class but not an economic revolution. In this context radicalism emerged as an ideology whose central tenet was parliamentary reform. At the same time, because of its capitalistic basis, the landed aristocracy was able to make concessions to the middle class, most notably in 1832 and in 1846. In this way land was able to retain its political preeminence until the 1880s, and as a direct consequence of this, class relations and class antagonisms were effectively "masked."4 Parliament appeared to be the center of power, and it was dominated by the landed class. The middle-class critique was therefore in large part acceptable to an emerging working class that itself wanted a redistribution of power, but it was acceptable only because of a second crucial factor, the relatively slow growth of industrial capitalism in Britain.

While the term "Industrial Revolution" aptly underscores the far- reaching consequences of the new system of machinofacture, it gives a

N. J. Gossman, eds., Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals, vol. 1, 1770- 1830 (Brighton, 1979), p. 5; and in N. J. Gossman, "Definitions of and Recent Writings on Modern British Radicalism, 1790-1914," British Studies Monitor 4, no. 1 (1973): 3- 11.

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

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IDEOLOGICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF RADICALISM

false impression of the pace of the change. Because Britain was the first nation to industrialize, the path it followed, of entrepreneurial and piecemeal development, was in many respects unique. The result of this particular factor was the protracted dislocation of certain groups of workers as manufacture only slowly gave way to machinofacture-the artisans, handloom weavers, and field laborers whose experiences are central to E. P. Thompson's account of working-class formation.5 Their struggles were in general aimed at preserving the old system of moral economy rather than at providing a new and alternative critique of political economy, though they were also receptive to major elements of the middle-class radical critique (e.g., its emphasis on tradition, on the preservation or restoration of English rights and liberties). Hence the cooperation, or symbiosis, of these early "working-class" groups with the middle class in the cause of reform and their common designation as "radicals." Moreover, socialism emerged out of the experiences of British industrialization and did not, unlike Continental developments, exist as a ready-made doctrine on which an infant working-class movement could draw. Socialist ideas only began to influence the English working class comparatively late in its protracted development, especially from the 1880s on, and even then it had to compete with an entrenched radical tradition.

This then was the context within which the hegemony of a middle- class radical ideology was established and blurred the edges of class conflict. It is important therefore to analyze the development of radical ideology in the context of evolving class relations. At the moment, however, there is no history of the English middle class that satisfactorily confronts the problem of reconstructing the connection between a developing class consciousness and the objective position of capitalist fractions (landed, commercial, industrial) in the network of ownership relations. Historians have generally found it easier to describe the development of a middle-class consciousness than to pinpoint the middle class itself.6 They have recognized that a particular set of ideas was emerging from the late eighteenth century that, by the mid-nineteenth century, became dominant and that therefore played a crucial role in stabilizing a society undergoing a profound metamorphosis. The development of those ideas-the articulation of classical political economy

5 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963). 6 A. Briggs, "Middle-Class Consciousness in English Politics, 1780-1846," Past

and Present, no. 9 (1956), pp. 65-74. 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).

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and the attenuation of its more rigid claims from the 1840s-cannot, however, be understood simply in terms of their "triumph" or solely in their eventuation in a consensus creed (liberalism) achieved through the "negotiating process" of class conflict and cooperation, though this latter element is clearly important.7 The absent dimension is the economic, not in the crude sense of capitalism improving living stan- dards or prosperity leading to social peace but rather in terms of the developing complexity of social and production relations and a more buoyant confidence in the industrial middle class as capitalism, in the railway-led boom of 1835-47, pulled through its first major crisis of overproduction.

The content of early nineteenth-century bourgeois ideology is fairly well known. The developing middle-class critique of the existing aristocratic-dominated polity consisted of two essential elements. On the one hand was the attack on "Old Corruption," the constant asser- tion that the enemy of both middle and working class alike was a landed aristocracy, placemen, churchmen, and a corrupt Parliament.8 On the other, there was that creation of consensus values so well described by Perkin and Tholfsen, values of respectability, thrift, moral education, self-help-indeed that whole panoply of Smilesian values that were set against the aristocratic systems of charity, pater- nalism, and deference. The new ideology was fed by the Old Dissenting tradition, but it was systematized in the claims to "science" of the political economists and Utilitarians. As Halevy demonstrated a long time ago, these middle-class ideologues sanctified the rights of the individual to free admission to the economic (and increasingly the political) market. And they were strident in their promotion of the middle class as the most economical class and therefore the one best able to accumulate capital and secure the progress of all.9

Two points about political economy deserve particular attention. First, its protagonists' claim to have uncovered the immutable laws of

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

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 E. Halevy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (1901-4), trans. Mary Morris (London, 1934), p. 428. James Mill's articles for the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1820) (esp. his essay on government, which was reprinted as An Essay on Government, ed. 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).

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the marketplace was a prescription for acceptance on the part of the working class. The scientific or objective status of political economy placed it in antithesis to ideology. The radical reform that it entailed could thus lay claim to be nonclass and nonideological, to work through pressure groups and by education and enlightenment, and by implication to indict any noncooperation on the part of the working class as "ideological" and "sectarian." Second, the language and terms in which the critique was expressed opened up the possibility of working-class acquiescence. The landowner, by his accumulation of unearned income from rent, obstructed industrial and commercial progress and was thus the enemy of both middle and working class alike. Both classes should therefore cooperate to wrest political power from the aristocracy in order to secure the progress of society as a whole. Indeed, the political economists, when outlining their theory, tended to talk in terms not of middle and working classes but rather of the industrious classes, who together were opposed, of course, to the idle, place-seeking aristocracy. John Stuart Mill wrote in his Autobiog- raphy: "We yet looked forward to a time when society will no longer be divided into the idle and the industrious."10 Middle-class radicals continued to foster the desirability of class cooperation and to sustain the Old Corruption analysis even after the "betrayal" of 1832. How and why they were able to do this and its implications for class relations can be best illustrated by a brief review of the history of middle- class radicalism.

II

This suggested outline for a history of middle-class radicalism can be no more than schematic. However, for the purposes of simplifica- tion and clarification, such a history might usefully be divided into four main periods.

First was "the formative period" from the 1760s to the 1780s. The origins of radicalism lie in London and, in particular, in the growth of the metropolis as the center of commercial capitalism. London was, first and foremost, a major port and trading center, and it developed, in the course of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the nec-

10 J. S. Mill, Autobiography (1873; London, 1924), p. 196. 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).

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essary financial institutions to promote a successful commercial policy. Located in that square mile that was the heart of the City were the Bank of England, the South Sea Company, the East India Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, and other North American trading companies. The City therefore constituted a powerful vested interest and had refined its own system of government (using institutions dating back to the Middle Ages) to protect that interest. A myriad of manorial courts made the constitution of the City extremely complex, but there were three courts of outstanding importance: Aldermen, Common Council, and Common Hall.1

During the course of the eighteenth century elements of class conflict began to develop within the City, a conflict between the City's aristocracy of wealth (the aldermen, directors of the great joint stock companies, the very rich merchants, the financiers of the London money market, and so on), whose powers had increased as a result of the financial requirements of government in the European wars of the turn of the eighteenth century, and its "middling" class (the lesser merchants, tradesmen, and master craftsmen). This second group, primarily liverymen of London, dominated by sheer numbers the Court of Common Hall, through which they were able to determine City policy through the election of the lord mayor and the City's four M.P.s and by controlling elections to the Common Council. Hence, while the very wealthy of the City tended to support the government during the eighteenth century, the middling class, increasingly squeezed by credit crises and higher taxes (especially customs and excise duties) and alienated from a parliament that, at the same time as it was becoming more oligarchical and exclusive, was interfering more in their lives by increased legislation, sided with the antiministerialists.12 In other words, the City courts controlled by the middling class aligned themselves with the "Country" party against the "Court" party. Lucy Sutherland has estimated that, in the period 1720-82, the City was in opposition to the government for all but eleven years.13 This did not

" The analysis for this period draws on George Rude, 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.

12 J. Brewer, "English Radicalism in the Age of George III," in Three British Revo- lutions: 1641, 1688, 1776, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Princeton, N.J., 1980), pp. 323-67.

13 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. See also L. Sutherland, The City of London and the Opposition to Government, 1768-74 (London, 1959).

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make the City necessarily a radical body; it made it merely a traditional antiministerial body. But it did make that radicalism possible, radicalism in the sense of turning away from operating through the traditional channels of the parliamentary opposition to extraparliamentary methods, agitation, and a program.

Two factors in particular helped to convert City opposition to City radicalism. On the one hand were the events of 1760-63. The City was dependent on effective government policy to protect and extend its commercial interests, and wars with France, successfully prosecuted, were an integral part of such a policy. Pitt's successes in the Seven Years' War had therefore made him the darling of the City; his resigna- tion, the dismissal of other members of the "Patriot" party in 1761, George III's appointment of his favorite, the earl of Bute, and the subsequent signing of an unpopular peace treaty earned the king the enmity of the City and prompted the attacks on the Court of first Beckford and then Wilkes.

The second crucial factor in the birth of City radicalism was the availability of a critique of government to which an aggrieved middle class could turn in the 1760s. This was the ideology of the Common- wealthmen-essentially the Lockean theory of government-which had been kept alive by the so-called real Whigs.'4 They believed that the gains of the Revolution had been eroded by the Whig patriarchs who dominated government after 1688 and were exploiting their position for their own pecuniary advantage, and they cited as evidence the Act of Union with Scotland, the Septennial Act, the growth in the standing army, the corruption of the Place and Pension bills, and the control of parliamentary elections and the corresponding attack on the wide franchise of the City of London. Moreover, the power of the king, which the revolutionaries had fought to reduce, now was seemingly being restored if not enhanced; and George III, with his determination to appoint his own favorites, appeared, at least to the middle classes of the City, to embody a new despotism.

In the climate of 1760-63, therefore, the ideas of the real Whigs found a receptive audience among the City's middling class, whose potential radicalism was encouraged by at least three further factors. In the first place, the dependence of the City wealthy on government contracts, loans, and imperialist ventures had made them toadies of the

14 C. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (1959; 2d ed., New York, 1968). 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).

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government. Many were themselves landowners or the sons of landowners who had built up their own estates and fortunes in the colonies. They therefore seemed to be a part of Old Corruption, were less than zealous in criticizing government policy, and thus polarized opinion as the lesser merchants and middling interests were prepared to voice their grievances. Second, this developing class consciousness on the part of these middling elements was heightened by a large element of nonconformity (with its roots in Puritanism) among them. The claim to religious liberty as a natural right led to the claim for political liberty; in other words, the demand for toleration shifted from the theological to the political plane.15 Moreover, their religion excluded them from key directorships in the big City "establishment" institutions, and Dissent therefore came to play an important role in the coalescing and articulation of middle-class grievances. Finally, London was grossly underrep- resented in the House of Commons despite its large population, and parliamentary reform was therefore seen as a necessary prerequisite to a remedy of these grievances.16

For the first time in the 1760s, therefore, the middling elements of London began to reveal a class awareness, an acknowledgment of their own specific class interests, and a confidence in the virtue of their claims vis a vis those of other classes of society. John Wilkes ad- dressed the Court of Common Pleas on May 6, 1763, in the following terms: "The LIBERTY of all peers and gentlemen, and, what touches me more sensibly, of all the middling and inferior class of the people, which stands most in need of protection, is in my case to be finally decided upon: a question of such importance as to determine at once, whether ENGLISH LIBERTY be a reality or a shadow."17 But the best

example of the growing sense of class relations and the superiority of the middle class within a class hierarchy is to be found in the resort to the image of "dregs" and "scum" as exemplified by this speech of William Beckford to the House of Commons in 1761: "The sense of the people, Sir, is a great matter. I don't mean the mob; neither the top nor

15 H. T. Dickinson, Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977), pp. 202-3.

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 J. M. Main, "Radical Westminster, 1807-1820," Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand 12, no. 46 [April 1966]: 186-204.)

17 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.

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the bottom, the scum is perhaps as mean as the dregs.... When I talk of the sense of the people I mean the middling people of England, the manufacturer, the yeoman, the merchant, the country gentleman, they who bear all the heat of the day."

8

Beckford's "middling people" seem at first sight a curiously heterogeneous group, but not if we remember that we are talking about fractions within capitalism who were making their livelihoods under the dominant capitalist mode of production (whether through land, commerce, or manufacture) and whose main sense of grievance was one of political exclusion. To recapitulate, the British ruling class as it emerged from the seventeenth-century revolution was a small and very wealthy landed and commercial clique whose wealth was based on capitalist practice. But its very successes in the imperial wars of the eighteenth century were to provide the bases of opposition to it. On the one hand, the expansion of London as center of trade and commerce threw up that middling class that was excluded from key positions of wealth and prestige and that was becoming class conscious in the man- ner described. On the other, the lesser landowners (the Tory gentry) were critical of the cost, raised in taxes, of the wars fought to sustain and expand that commercial empire. The result was the emergence of that apparently curious alliance of country gentry and London middling class that was to reach its apogee in the Wyvill Association Movement of the 1780s. Further, this opposition group formulated its grievances not in terms of a new ideology but in defense of the old, of English liberty against Old Corruption, a revival of the Commonwealth tradition. But at the same time the program demanded-essentially peace, retrenchment, and reform-anticipated the Liberal program of the nineteenth century.

Now if the imperialism of the eighteenth century was the seedbed from which the political crisis of 1760-63 sprang and out of which radicalism was born, it also sustained and developed that crisis. The particular issue that fulfilled this role of sustained development was the crisis in the American colonies and the war for independence that ensued. America neatly encapsulated all the diverse strands of radicalism-the tax grievances of the gentry and the criticisms of corrupt and inefficient administration proffered by the London radicals. Above all, America seemed to confirm the ideological perspective of the radicals-here the despotic king and his henchmen were bent on crushing

18 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).

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American liberties as a prelude to crushing British liberties. And it was at the height of the American crisis that Dunning passed his famous resolution in the House of Common: "That the power of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished."'9

The reformers of the 1760s essentially looked back to the Leveller, republican, and Commonwealth era rather than forward to a new constitution; and yet their program anticipated the bourgeois liberalism of the nineteenth century. How is this anomaly to be explained? The answer lies in the fact that the traditional Commonwealth demands for a purified constitution were raised in new circumstances in the 1760s so that the ideology itself underwent subtle changes that reflected the new conditions.20 The most important of those new circumstances was the existence for the first time of artisan or popular radical opinion. It was this fact, as much as anything yet described, that lent the first radical movement its particular significance, a movement in which the defense became, ironically, associated with the defense of a libertine, John Wilkes.

London in the middle of the eighteenth century was the largest manufacturing center in the country, a center of traditional craft industries organized along preindustrial rather than industrial lines. It therefore had a large artisan class that was, in the course of the century, becoming politically informed. The debating clubs, coffee houses, reading rooms, and burgeoning press made for a fair degree of political sophistication and reflected a remarkably high level of literacy among the artisan class of the capital. The publications (especially the wide range of pamphlets) in which the critique of Old Corruption and the new reform program were expressed were read not just by the middling ranks but by the lower orders as well and achieved some purchase in the wake of the social distress and unrest caused by bad harvests and postwar labor problems. But for the artisans liberty meant something rather different than what it meant for the middling class. At the same time middle-class radicals found, in their attacks on the government, that it was occasionally advantageous to cultivate popular support. Wilkes is particularly important because he was the first middle-class radical to exploit such an "alliance." The middle class had, however,

'9 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 en- franchisement 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.

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to pay a price for such support. They had to inform and thus to enlight- en the lower orders politically, and they in turn took up the ideas introduced to them-and radicalized them. Good examples of this are the shift in the ideology of reform in the 1760s, from the old notion of the fair representation of property to the radical and new notion of the representation of persons as a natural right, and the claims of radical M.P.s to be mere delegates of the electors, who in turn began to exact pledges in return for their support.21 The formation of national extraparliamentary "associations," of which the Society of the Support- ers of the Bill of Rights of 1769 was the first, was also crucial in this dissemination of radical ideas-downward to the people and outward to the nation. This dialectic, which is present at the birth of radicalism, shapes the relations and programs and determines the progress of the two class movements for the next 150 years.

The second period in the history of middle-class radicalism might, pace E. P. Thompson, be described as that of "the making of the English middle class" (1790-1832).

The radicalization of reform ideology was one of the changing circumstances of the formative period. A second was the dissemination of reform ideas outside London, a process that was to advance rapidly in the period after 1790 and that was facilitated by improvements in communications and publishing techniques. Moreover, London's position as a major port was itself significant. Ideas were carried into (not least of all from America) and out of the city, especially by sailors, a prominent group in the Wilkite agitation; and it is no accident that several of the important new areas of provincial radicalism tended to be ports, such as Bristol and Norwich (though they were also, of course, major centers of Dissent).

The growth of provincial awareness evidenced in a strident middle-class press should be seen partly as a reaction against a metropolitan-dominated culture. Indeed it is possible to speak only of a tendency toward a solidary middle-class consciousness in this period, and the internal complexity of the "middle classes" must necessarily make one chary about referring to a unified middle class or to a national middle- class program. There were, however, strong countervailing forces to a continuing particularism ("provincialism" in its pejorative sense), not least of all the nationalist and class sentiments raised by the Revolu- tionary and Napoleonic Wars. Above all, the principal tenets of classical political economy and, sui generis, that distinctive brand of

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

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bourgeois ideology known as Philosophic Radicalism were enunciated and disseminated, at very varying levels of sophistication, through the burgeoning publications of this period.22

This was also the period that witnessed the slow growth of industrial capitalism and that protracted social dislocation, experienced especially by the artisans, referred to earlier. Most artisans, faced with the loss of their traditional crafts, would eventually be drafted into the growing army of industrial workers. A few were able to exploit the new industrial techniques and become employers of labor themselves. The period was one of uneasy symbiosis, of cooperation (in the attack on Old Corruption) but also of a developing sense of conflict, especially in the wake of the revolutionary events in France in the 1790s, which polarized opinion in Britain. A whole range of leaders (who, significantly, appear in the working-class pantheon even though they were not themselves working class) betrayed in their policies this uneasy relationship of the classes and the continuing hegemony of the middle-class critique. Paine's Rights of Man illustrates this dichotomy beautifully because it was both an attack on Old Corruption and a program of social reform (but even this program rested on a punitive system of taxation that Paine expected to come largely from the landed aristocracy).23

Jacobinism in the 1790s and the increasing independence of working-class organization and activity led to wariness on the part of middle-class radicals. Bentham found himself in 1820 defending Radi- calism not dangerous against the extremism of working-class activity as evidenced by Cato Street. Moreover, universal suffrage was quietly dropped from the middle-class program. Certain writers, such as Thomas Hodgkin and William Thompson in the 1820s and, later, Bron- terre O'Brien, were groping toward a critique of classical political economy, but it was largely obscured by the dominant Old Corruption perspective. A number of respectable radicals criticized the government's handling of Peterloo and were themselves prosecuted (Bur- dett's career is salient in this respect),24 and many of them continued to cooperate with working-class radicals (e.g., Joseph Hume led the parliamentary campaign against the Combination Acts). And, of course,

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

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Francis Place continued to flit between Charing Cross Road and Bowood. In other words, in this period of developing class consciousness, the repeated attacks of middle-class radicals on Old Corruption helped to blunt the potential for class conflict.

The third period, that of "the 'class' campaigns" (1832-50), opened with the "betrayal" of the working class by the middle class in 1832 and culminated in the great "class" campaigns of Chartism and Corn Law repeal. The Reform Act, achieved in an atmosphere of middle-class threats of revolution, was the first step in a long process of consolidation of capitalist fractions, and the legislation that followed demonstrated the propensity of an aristocratic parliament leavened with a pinch of radicalism to implement a middle-class program- reform of the Poor Law, municipal corporations, education, taxes on knowledge, and, of course, the Corn Laws-albeit somewhat falter- ingly and not without the tit for tat by land of such "Tory radical" measures as factory reform.25

The result was a heightening of working-class consciousness. Place commented on 1832 and the subsequent Whig reforms, "The consequence of this was the total abandonment of all reliance upon the middle class to an extent which never before was entertained by them."26 Working-class leaders became totally suspicious of the middle class and their homilies to cooperation. As O'Connor said of the Anti-Corn Law Leaguers, "They offer you the minimum necessary to gain their ends."27 Thus even the attempted reconciliation-in the form of the Complete Suffrage Union and the conference in Birming- ham in 1842-broke down; partly because of the truculence of O'Con- nor and partly because the middle-class radicals would not endorse the six points of the Charter.28 It is significant, then, that even in Birming-

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 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.

26 Quoted in Jephson (n. 10 above), 2:195. 27 Quoted in D. Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (London, 1975), p. 125. 28 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

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ham, which, like London, had a social structure that encouraged cooperation between artisans and manufacturers and that was the main center of Political Unions of the Middle and Working Classes, agree- ment was no longer possible.29 The explanation lay not just in working- class recalcitrance after the betrayal-after all, moral force Chartists of London and Birmingham, such as Lovett and Vincent, wanted to cooperate still-but also in the shift in the initiative behind the working-class movement in the Chartist era to new centers of activism, such as Manchester and Leeds, where the effects ot the first major crisis of overproduction in an industrial economy and a markedly different structure led to an exacerbated class conflict.30

Yet even given this heightening of consciousness, the overriding feature of the period was the failure of the working-class movement, despite the exertions of O'Brien, Hetherington, Carpenter, and others, to develop a hegemonic critique distinct from that of the middle class. The mainstream working-class movement remained wedded to the moral language of the Old Corruption analysis. For example, in the campaign to repeal the taxes on knowledge, the old ideology of radicalism remained, as Pat Hollis has shown, remarkably resistant to the new (although elements of the latter were incorporated into the old), and despite differences in tactics and expectations, there was a high degree of cooperation between middle- and working-class radicals.31 Again, the program of the Charter was good old-fashioned radicalism-the program of the 1770s-and despite the backtracking of the middle class on the subject of universal manhood suffrage, it was nevertheless middle-class radicals who presented the petitions at the bar of the Commons (Roebuck in 1838 and Duncombe in 1842). Even the Anti-Corn Law campaign, which was a grand middle-class assault on a vested interest of Old Corruption, was accepted in the final analysis by many of the working class as being in their interest, as middle- class radicals had never ceased telling them it was! Bright, for example, described the league in December 1845 as "a movement of the commercial and industrious classes against the lords and great propri-

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.

29 The original program of objectives of the Birmingham Political Union of Decem- ber 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 J. Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1974), pp. 103 ff.

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

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etors of the soil."32 This is not to argue with hindsight that the working class somehow got it wrong. Indeed, their instincts as to where the great wealth and power lay were quite sound. It is historians who have teleologically hurried along the Industrial Revolution and the socialist consciousness that was supposed to arise with it. What the Chartists of the 1830s and 1840s wanted, and what with good reason they always claimed, was parliamentary reform, not revolution.33

In the fourth period, that of "middle-class hegemony" (1850-86), industrial capitalism, narrowly based as it was on textiles, underwent a serious crisis in the 1830s that reinforced that level of ideological en- trenchment on the part of both middle and working classes described above. John Stuart Mill and other political economists believed that the British economy might be approaching the stationary state predicted by Ricardo. The exact economic lever that revived the flagging economy is disputed. Apologists for capitalism have for long pointed to the restorative power of free trade. More recently, John Foster, following Lenin's theory of imperialism, sought an explanation in the export of surplus capital. Eric Hobsbawn and Gareth Stedman Jones preferred to emphasize the great boost given to the economy by the railway-led boom beginning around 1835.34 Whatever the precise mechanism, what is clear is that new opportunities for the investment of accumulated capital were emerging by the late 1830s and that the economy as a whole was diversifying. Transport and communications played a prominent role in this process, accounting for over half the gross domestic fixed-capital formation in the 1850s and 1860s and spurring the growth of ancillary industries such as coal, iron, engineering, building, and machine tools.35

Reductive arguments that equate social peace with a new prosperity have long been discounted by historians. Poverty, as Henry Mayhew's writings testify, remained endemic in this period. The economic boom did, however, lead to a new network of social relations, a further consolidation of the leadership of capital, and the attenuation of

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

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

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

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the harsher tenets of classical political economy. For example, the stimulus to engineering and other industries (shipbuilding and machine tools) produced a new type of labor aristocracy, while in coal-mining areas those close-knit communities that were to give such an important Lib-Lab thrust to working-class politics began to grow.36 The boom in land values and the investment by landowners in the new railways and the coal mines on their land helped to consolidate agrarian and industrial capitalism, paving the way for the concessions of Peel's government in the 1840s. Finally, in the wake of the fears aroused by the Chartist movement, the conscience of the middle class could at last air itself on the Condition of England question and find salve in abandon- ing (or rather reformulating) the utilitarianism of Gradgrind and the political economy of Bounderby.37

Only in this context can the importance of middle-class radicalism be assessed, particularly in its deliberate appeal to the labor aristocracy.38 An expanding capitalism provided a growing range of opportunities for both skilled and unskilled and assisted the institution of re- wards and incentives for the skilled, which contributed to a diversity within the working class marked by the growth of craft unions. Self- Help was the ideological rationalization of this process; its institutional form the temperance hall, the co-op, and the Sunday school. With the pronounced respectability of the artisans in the 1850s the middle class was able to adjust the rules of the class war.

Moreover, the middle class found itself in need once again of the strength in numbers of the working class. Cobden had put this bluntly in commenting on Sturge's case for reconciliation in 1841-42: "It will be something in our rear to frighten the aristocracy"; but the time was

36 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 empha- sizes 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. R. Gray, The Aristocracy of Labour in Nineteenth-Century Britain, c. 1850-1914 (London, 1981), 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 complex- ities of the ideological shifts within the bourgeoisie, see J. Seed, "Unitarianism, Political Economy and the Antinomies of Liberal Culture in Manchester, 1830-50," Social His- tory 7 (1982): 1-25.

38 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). See also R. Harrison, Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861 to 1881 (London, 1965).

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not then ripe.39 The middle class had not gained political superiority by the Reform Act of 1832, and despite the responsiveness of the aristocratic parliament to middle-class pressure-group activities on a wide range of issues, that responsiveness was, in the 1850s, clearly shown to be not nearly enough. In particular the Crimean War revealed Old Corruption at its very worst-an expensive war, inefficiently handled, providing jobs for the younger sons of the aristocracy, and increasing the claims on the pockets of the peace-loving middle class. This was the thrust of the extreme radical stance of Cobden and Bright. Others, such as Roebuck, were prepared to support the war but to condemn its mismanagement. All, however, agreed that a middle-class government was necessary to avoid such disasters in the future. The way was thus prepared for the emergence and progress of the financial reform associations, for economy; the administrative reform associations, for efficiency; and, above all, the parliamentary reform movements, for a change in political leadership. And in this political campaign, the middle-class radicals appealed once again to the working class, but a working class now demarcated by "respectability." The rest were, in Bright's disdainful description, the "residuum." Bright, like James Mill before him, had supreme confidence in the virtues of the middle class, and he played a prominent role in advocating class cooperation through the Reform Unions. As he put it at Rochdale in 1866: "We believe that the time has come when the middle classes, who are mainly liberal, shall unite and can unite with the great body of the working class, who are aspiring for something higher and better than they have hitherto had; and we say that, united together, we can gain from our Government and Parliament whatever is necessary for us."40 After that reform of Parliament was accomplished in 1867, the first truly Liberal administration was able to emerge and over the next twenty years could embark on a program of reforms that middle-class radicals had always wanted-civil service, army, education, further amendments to the parliamentary system, and so on-in other words, knocking out the poles on which Old Corruption had once so firmly rested. By the mid-1880s the ideology of radicalism (as liberalism) was firmly ensconced in government, and so Old Corruption gradually ceased to be a viable radical program. Above all, the middle class was

39 Quoted in D. Read, Cobden and Bright (London, 1967), p. 30. 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.

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now a long way toward achieving its central ambition of political domi- nance. In the 1880s land ceased for the first time to be the preponderant interest in the Commons, and from 1886 to 1916 cabinet posts were evenly shared between the aristocracy and the middle class.41

The decade of the 1880s therefore marked a watershed in the fortunes of middle-class radicalism. The contradictions that were emerging in a mature capitalist economy and that were intensified by international competition found their correspondence at the political and ideological levels-politically in the slow but continuing process of capitalist consolidation through a reconstructed Conservative party and the gradual disintegration of the Liberal party with the departure first of the Whigs and then of the Chamberlainites to the Conservatives and later of the radicals to Labour; ideologically in the rise of socialism at one extreme and social imperialism at the other.42 Caught between this political and ideological polarization, middle-class radicalism was squeezed out, but not before its swan song in the shape of the new liberalism. Indeed, the achievements of Lloyd George in the last flour- ish of middle-class radicalism were made possible partly by the protracted divisions in the ruling class between the finance capital of the City and a resilient entrepreneurial capital-enshrined in the free trade/imperial preference debate. The history of this phase is, however, outside the scope of this essay.

III

Historians of radicalism have generally emphasized its diversity and eclecticism, and their studies of individual radicals or of radical programs have reinforced this interpretation. This essay, however, has

41 W. L. Guttsman, The British Political Elite (London, 1963), p. 91. 42 There is as yet no general history of this period that satisfactorily reconstructs

these complex interconnections. The most useful studies are J. Cornford, "The Trans- formation of Conservatism in the Late Nineteenth Century," Victorian Studies 7 (1963- 64): 35-66 (on changes in the Conservative party); G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London (Oxford, 1971) (on the shift in bourgeois ideology from the perspective of "demoraliza- tion" to "degeneration" in the crisis of the 1880s and social-imperialist "solutions" to the degeneration of the urban poor); B. Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform (Lon- don, 1960) (on the divisions between Liberal social imperialists and Conservative social imperialists); and M. Freeden, The New Liberalism: An Ideology of Social Reform (Oxford, 1978); and 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).

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shifted away from a conventional analysis of the political content of radicalism to a consideration of its significance as an ideological concept. In the course of suggesting how a history of middle-class radicalism might be written along these lines, two broad propositions have been advanced: first, that radicalism was a reform ideology that emerged, developed, and declined in the context of conflicts within capitalism among its agrarian, commercial, industrial, and financial sectors; and, second (and deriving directly from the first proposition), that radicalism played a syncretic role in capital/labor relations, bind- ing together two potentially hostile classes in an uneasy symbiosis. The radical tradition therefore dates from the second half of the eighteenth century, when first the commercial and later the industrial middle class sought to reform the oligarchical system of government. The term "radical" came into general use at this time to describe those propos- als that its proponents believed would cut to the roots of Old Corrup- tion. Radicalism encouraged ad hoc and piecemeal political reform to remove these roots one by one. It instituted a tradition of reform accepted by both middle- and working-class reformers, making the latter peculiarly unresponsive to a theoretical alternative when one emerged. "Radical" was also a term used to describe both sets of reformers, its eclectic and empirical nature being well and truly reflected in the fact that the word has generally been associated with any reformer. In the British tradition, therefore, it is almost a respectable form of nomencla- ture-indeed, even Tories have sometimes been known to call themselves radicals, and historians have fought shy of attempting either to define the concept or to analyze the apparently amorphous tradition subsumed by it.

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the english middle class and the ideological significance of radicalism, 1760-1886

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