Wanting and having

Popular politics and liberal consumerism in England, 1830–70

Peter Gurney

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781526101815
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Nineteenth-century England witnessed the birth of capitalist consumerism. Early department stores, shopping arcades and provision shops of all kinds proliferated from the start of the Victorian period, testimony to greater diffusion of consumer goods. However, while the better off enjoyed having more material things, masses of the population were wanting even the basic necessities of life during the 'Hungry Forties' and well beyond. Based on a wealth of contemporary evidence and adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Wanting and having focuses particularly on the making of the working-class consumer in order to shed new light on key areas of major historical interest, including Chartism, the Anti-Corn Law League, the New Poor Law, popular liberalism and humanitarianism. It will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in the origins and significance of consumerism across a range of disciplines, including social and cultural history and literary studies.

1

‘A new order of things’: mapping popular politics onto consumption

In July 1846 no fewer than 500 members of the Council of the Anti-Corn Law League, drawn from all over the country, packed into Manchester Town Hall. The atmosphere was both euphoric – for they were celebrating what they perceived to be a world-historic victory over the Corn Laws – and tinged with deep regret, for they were meeting to disband the organisation that had successfully spearheaded the campaign for the liberalisation of trade during the preceding seven years. There was no short supply of hubris among the speakers. Richard Cobden referred to the abolition of the Corn Laws as the most important event since the beginning of the Christian church: ‘it is a world’s revolution, and nothing else.’ John Bright declaimed that the League ‘will stand before the world as a sign of a new order of things’ and told the audience that ‘we have been living through a revolution without knowing it’. The new order Bright spoke about was one in which the power of ‘the people’, understood to mean the intelligent, respectable sections of the middle and working classes, rather than the aristocracy, would determine the course of national economic and political life. However, it also involved the widening of material prosperity that free trade made possible both at home and abroad. At the core of the campaign for free trade lay the interests of the mass of consumers, conceived in abstract terms. It guaranteed ‘improvement’ for consumers in the widest sense; the prosperity free trade promised to deliver would, it was thought, trickle down through the social structure, civilising and comforting the lives of the majority. ¹

Abolition of the Corn Laws was highly symbolic because it was seen as the first step on the road to laissez-faire, a thorough separation of the economic from the political domain, which would allow capitalists to function more efficiently and maximise output by observing the ‘natural’ laws of the market, laws that the modern science of political economy had only recently revealed. Bright and others warned the audience not to be complacent, however; only a few years previously the country had been on the edge of an abyss and social harmony between classes would only continue along the promising lines exhibited recently in northern manufacturing districts if capitalists shouldered fully their responsibilities and worked hard to increase the ‘enjoyments’ of the working class. This was a truly utopian vision, a secular religion or Weltanschauung that gave purpose to action in the present and inspired hope for a better future. Things were central to it, even the most mundane things conferring rights of citizenship and manhood. As the great liberal historian G. M. Trevelyan remarked in his monumental biography of the leader of the League, for Bright the ‘connection between a good coat and the right to the franchise seemed an obvious first postulate of civilised society; it was an instinct beyond the assault of argument, outside the proper limits of political controversy’. ² We should not be surprised perhaps that a carpet manufacturer like Bright should have such faith in the power of goods to change people’s circumstances and selves. Nor should we be surprised that critics such as Thomas Carlyle sneered at what they regarded as crass materialism, memorably condemning the League as offering nothing more than a ‘bagman’s’, or commercial traveller’s ‘millennium’. ³ For good or ill, this is the world that we have inherited.

Against free trade and free markets, activists in the Chartist movement urged protection by government and communities, which would only be achieved by the establishment of what they called ‘pure’ or ‘true democracy’. They counterpoised an alternative vision of regulated markets and commercial activity as a solution to the scarcity experienced in the present by poor consumers who could ill afford to wait until the arrival of the ‘bagman’s millennium’. Some of them, including the ideologue and radical journalist James Bronterre O’Brien, picked up the neologism ‘moral economy’ to try to communicate this stress on connection. Contesting the fashionable views of ‘social quacks’ early in 1837, for example, O’Brien argued for what he termed ‘true political economy’, which involved balance and a sense of fairness. Drawing on an idealised view of handicraft and artisan production, O’Brien praised ‘true domestic economy’ that he believed characterised relations within the home and which transgressed any simple dichotomies between production and consumption, the moral and the economic. Domestic relations involved the whole person, making it impossible to reduce individuals to hands or gaping mouths. Such truths, he argued, were disregarded by those who ‘make wreck of the affections, in exchange for incessant production and accumulation … It is, indeed, the MORAL ECONOMY that they always keep out of sight.’ ⁴ Whatever the shortcomings of this term – and we shall return to these presently – it is important to note how Chartists like O’Brien partly invented and sought to appropriate it within a particular historical conjuncture for their own ends, as a weapon in the struggle against the free trade utopia. The concept of moral economy drew on a partly imagined past in order to project a vision of a regulated economy in the future.

Nearly two years later in the radical London paper the Operative, a writer who described himself ‘A Disciple of Bronterre’ (probably O’Brien himself) provided a fascinating sketch of the world of fairs and public markets that had served ordinary consumers until fairly recently. According to the article, relations between producers and consumers had been far more direct before such forms were driven out by ‘shopocrats’ that frequently defrauded or even poisoned poor consumers. The rise of the abstract free market and free trade and the ‘revolution in the exchange of domestic produce and manufactures’ had impoverished consumers and exposed them to ‘the Maltho-Martineau-Broughamic discoveries that very nutritious and finely flavoured soup — for the poor — may be made from bone-powder, brick-dust, and hide-parings seasoned with stinging nettles, and sweet marjoram’. O’Brien and others believed that modern capitalism systematically exploited working-class consumers, stripped them of any power they had once had and interposed a rapacious class of middlemen between consumers and commodities. ⁵ Chartists were not always opposed to free exchange of goods, certainly, but the free trade project was something quite different, a key component part of what they sardonically dubbed ‘the extension of commerce’, that is, the generalisation of capitalist social relations. ⁶ They would have fully concurred with John Maynard Keynes’s later definition of free trade as the ‘most fervent expression’ of laissez-faire. ⁷

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman predicted some years ago ‘that sooner or later, we will rewrite the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because we understood nineteenth-century history only as the production of industrialism’, and he went on to ask: ‘What about the production of consumerism?’ ⁸ This study is intended as a contribution to this wider investigation. For sure, early historians of consumption documented the emergence of the middle-class consumer in the eighteenth century, and that century continues to hold an enduring fascination. ⁹ However, the reach of consumer markets was limited during this period and it was only from the mid nineteenth century that the majority could afford much more than the necessities of life. This book is concerned with how middle- and working-class consumers were configured and mobilised by popular political movements during a crucial period of capitalist transition. It is about the struggle between alternative paths of historical development as they affected the mass of consumers, which played out from the early nineteenth century. It foregrounds particularly the contested and uneven development of the working-class consumer in England between the First and Second Reform Acts and explores the making of a social order in which consumer interests and consumption practices were considered increasingly to lie at the root of society, economics and politics, providing a shared focus, which transcended particular domains. It aims therefore to bring the historiographies of popular politics and consumption into closer dialogue with one another. A particular concern is with the political and ideological production of the worker as desiring consumer and with the construction of the idea that social advance could best be gauged in terms of the acquisition of material things. The intention is not to be exhaustive but to illuminate by means of detailed analysis of important sites of ideological and practical contention the three key questions that inform this work: in what ways and with what success did working-class and middle-class radicals think about and organise around consumption; how did political ideologies attempt to speak for and represent the mass of consumers; and how was the gulf between poor and rich consumers, between scarcity and excess, handled or naturalised by working-class and middle-class radicals? In fine, this study explores how new ways of being a consumer meshed with political identities and belongings. John Bright’s words provide a useful departure point: the argument of this book is that the new order that emerged during the mid nineteenth century put things firmly centre stage.

Historiographies

The field of nineteenth-century popular politics has attracted generations of historians, constituting the empirical terrain on which many important methodological and theoretical breakthroughs have been made. How relative social and political stability was maintained despite severe strains in the world’s first industrial nation has understandably exerted an enduring fascination. Writing from the turn of the century, radical liberal and Fabian historians interpreted Chartism as a more or less inchoate protest against the development of free market capitalism, limited in various ways by the nature of its critique. ¹⁰ Whether a profound caesura occurred at mid-century was a key theme in the literature from the start, with some socialist scholars narrating the decline of Chartism as a kind of fall. ¹¹ As labour and social history became more firmly established institutionally after the Second World War, the exact filiations between popular radicalism and popular liberalism began to be explored more fully. Following Eric Hobsbawm’s seminal studies, historians sought to better understand how workers had been ‘incorporated’ into capitalism, eventually accepting the economic system as the only possible framework for action. A variety of approaches were adopted: Marxist scholars emphasised structural factors such as the emergence of a ‘labour aristocracy’ as well as the deliberat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• 1 ‘A new order of things’: mapping popular politics onto consumption
• 2 ‘Rejoicing in potatoes’: the politics of consumption in England during the ‘Hungry Forties’
• 3 ‘The Andover Cannibalism’: popular entitlement and the New Poor Law
• 4 ‘Yours in the cause of Democracy’: democratic discourse and the Chartist challenge
• 5 ‘Consumers of their own productions’: popular radicalism and consumer organising
• 6 ‘Please, sir, I want some more’: Dickens on working-class scarcity and middle-class excess
• 7 ‘The Sublime of the Bazaar’: the religion of free trade and the making of modern consumerism
• 8 ‘The lion turned into a lamb’: the consumer politics of popular liberalism
• Epilogue: ‘The Age of Veneer’: the limits of liberal consumerism
• Index