The Chartists

The First National Workers Movement

John Charlton

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 1997
• ISBN:
  9781783719402
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

'A lucidly written and well-researched account... Its particular value lies in its examination of areas of the movement often overlooked in introductory texts.' Teaching History

CHAPTER 1

The 1830s – Bourgeois Power and the Working Class

By the 1840s industrial capitalism had more than a half century of growth. Industrial villages had long been sprouting in the North, the Midlands, South Wales and the Clyde Valley. Displaced rural workers had been drawn into burgeoning towns like Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford and Glasgow. The 1851 Census was the first to register a majority of the population as town-dwellers. New technologies and new forms of work organisation had been eroding skill. In the 1830s and 1840s there was a proliferation of descriptive commentaries and analyses by writers like Frederick Engels, Peter Gaskell, Andrew Ure, James Kaye, Edward Baines, Leon Faucher, John Fielden, William Cooke Taylor, Charles Babbage and Charles Dickens and many minor figures. Whether triumphalist, critical or merely anxious, they indicate that middle-class contemporaries were aware of a massive acceleration of change in their own lifetimes. Their work often exudes a sense of cataclysm:

From Birmingham to Wolverhampton, a distance of thirteen miles, the country was curious and amusing; though not very pleasing to eyes, ears or taste; for part of it seemed a sort of pandemonium on earth – a region of smoke and fire filling the whole earth between earth and heaven; amongst which certain figures of human shape – if shape they had – were seen occasionally to glide from one cauldron of curling flame to another …¹

In the 1830s the industrial revolution entered a serious crisis. The transfusion to be offered by the revolution in metal-working and the railway frenzy was still around the corner. The canal-building and textile booms of the previous 60 years were tumbling into ever-deepening recessions. After 1815, no longer cushioned by the demand of a war economy, the domestic system of textile manufacture was in terminal crisis.

Middle-class observers could be moved by anger at what they saw of the new industrial system but they were just observers. Working people were at the system’s centre; the creators of its wealth. Exploitation and oppression were the very heart of the process. Workers could only attain a subsistence wage by toiling for up to 16 hours per day. Women and children might be paid less than subsistence wages because they were readily available and not perceived as the family’s main wage earner. Conditions at work were dismal with no attention being paid to safety or workers’ health. An authoritarian management imposed rigid rules of conduct punishable by fines and summary dismissal, backed by the Master and Servants Law of 1823.

For most working people recession was a way of life. By 1850, a 40-year-old worker could have experienced no fewer than seven depressions (1819, 1826, 1829, 1832, 1837, 1842 and 1848). Downturns in trade accelerated the pace of technical and organisational change. Employers fought to gain autonomy over the labour process. Most trades were affected. In cotton, the domestic system had been virtually marginalised by the end of the eighteenth century. From the 1820s the fight was on to install the self-acting mule to allow greater concentration of production and a further erosion of skill. Concentration was rapid in wool, as handicrafts located in homes were replaced by central workshops. Semi-independent weavers, woolcombers, stockingers and laceworkers in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire were decimated, their earnings catastrophically reduced in the 30 years following the end of the war. The woolworkers of East Anglia and the South West were virtually wiped out. Metalworkers and potters in the West Midlands were subjected to fiercer and fiercer market pressures by middlemen and the intrusion of large-scale manufacturers. Even the most skilled trades like printing, bookbinding, watch and gun-making, carpentry, coach-building and mill-wrighting were subjected to the pressures of dilution, as Parliament excised ancient protective legislation on entry, apprenticeship and quality control. London artisans had fought on this ground for over 50 years. These were secular trends intensified in the depression years.

This viciously subordinate relationship at work was truly reflected in the workers’ situation beyond the factory, workshop and mine. Home was frequently an overcrowded hovel, offering little protection from the elements, a repository of violence, disease and death. The streets, teeming with people, were fraught with danger from arbitrary violence, pollution from factory chimneys, stagnant pools, mineshafts and germs from running sewers, graphically described by Engels in The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844:

At the bottom flows, or rather stagnates, the Irk, a narrow, coal-black, foul smelling stream, full of debris and refuse … In dry weather, a long string of the most disgusting, blackish-green, slime pools are left standing on this bank, from the depths of which bubbles of miasmatic gas constantly arise and give forth a stench unendurable even on the bridge forty or fifty feet above the surface of the stream … the stream itself is checked every few paces by high weirs, behind which slime and refuse accumulate and rot in thick masses … Above the bridge are tanneries, bonemills, and gasworks, from which all drains and refuse find their way into the Irk which receives the contents of all the neighbouring sewers and privies … Below the bridge you look upon the piles of debris, the refuse, filth and offal from the courts on the steep left bank.

A few public-spirited physicians laboured in the squalor, fighting fruitless battles against epidemics. Diarrhoea was the biggest killer, its number of victims incalculable. Tuberculosis killed 59,000 in 1838 alone. Whooping cough accounted for 10,000 deaths annually and measles 7000. Even minor injuries could result in incapacity or death.

Despite the ravages of the cholera epidemic which struck urban Britain in 1831, killing 30,000 people, the 1830s opened with a glimmer of hope. Buoyed by news of revolution in Europe, a movement for reform of Parliament re-emerged. Hundreds of thousands of workers were propelled into political activity organised by middle-class and artisan Political Unions. This movement was strongest in Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds, but the flashpoints were Nottingham, Bristol and, most dramatically, Merthyr Tydfil, where the workers temporarily ruled the town. These upsurges were produced by spontaneous crowd alliances in which trade boundaries and skilled/unskilled boundaries melted into the air.

The events of Merthyr were not part of the pressure for reform promoted by the middle class; they represented the most insurrectionary act of the new working class so far. In Merthyr the stresses of nascent capitalism reached breaking point at the end of May 1831. An early coal and iron boom town, it was a magnet for the poor rural Welsh and those from further afield. In two decades the settlement had mushroomed into the largest town in Wales. In the general national crisis the specific problems of Merthyr raised unrest to the level of insurrection as ironworkers and miners took on proprietors, shopocracy and army, holding the town for four days and providing Wales with its first working-class martyr, Die Penderyn. He was tried and hanged, largely for being in the right place at the wrong time.

The insurrection failed to spread to neighbouring communities, giving the military time to regroup to defeat the workers. Nevertheless, the crucible of insurrection clearly sharpened class attitudes and created a class consciousness quickly reflected in the lightening spread of trade unionism across the valleys of eastern Wales. Short-lived though this was, crushed by a determined employers’ offensive, the class-conscious sentiments created were revived at the end of the decade in the Chartist Newport Rising.

In 1830 Nottingham and Bristol turned out to be the centres of a mass involvement for reform not reached elsewhere. Timid middle-class leadership advised, even fought for caution. Artisan exclusivity still handicapped the coherence of the movement, especially in London. Crucially, the ruling class made the minimum concession necessary to consolidate the alliance between land and industry and commerce. The character of politics for the next two decades was set in the Reform Act settlement of 1832 and the Municipal Corporation Act which followed in 1835.

The Reform Act has sometimes been seen as minimalist legislation. In terms of the number of new electors this may be true, but such a view is to miss its real significance. It is no exaggeration to argue that it may have been the single most important piece of legislation of the nineteenth century. It placed a ring around the middle class and linked them emphatically to the ruling order. That it was not complete, that the middle class continued to supply dissent on a wide range of questions, is beside the point. From 1832, the bulk of the middle class was a reliably conservative social force.

The franchise was widened to include all men of sufficient property. The balance of representation shifted from south to north, embracing the manufacturing districts. The industrial towns were the main beneficiaries. Any shortcomings for the middle class in the 1832 Act were compensated for in the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835. They dominated the towns. Political power was added to economic and social power.

Increasingly working people in these towns were to face the bourgeoisie or their agents directly. Inequality and class bias were scored into the very highways. Enormous municipal extravagance in the shape of grand public buildings celebrating bourgeois values were to be erected alongside, or on the site of, workers’ slums. Elegant stone-built mansions arose in carefully delineated middle-class districts whilst workers’ housing was thrown up in the path of the smoke of factory chimneys. Neo-Gothic churches and chapels were erected to save men’s souls whilst their bodies were left to suffer in mill and mine.

A precarious peace was preserved. The middle classes built bridges to the upper strata of the working class through encouraging chapel attendance, membership of friendly societies and the co-operative movement. A new police force was founded and plentifully supplemented at times of crisis by young men of the middle class dressed as policemen – the special constables.

The new ruling-class alliance gave a stronger framework to the implementation of political economy. Working people were persistently faced by the strident claim that laissez-faire was the natural state of affairs. Even the most modest proposal for factory reform was opposed on the grounds that it would fatally disturb the natural workings of the market. This included shorter working hours and limitations on the employment of child labour. Such theoretical purity would be breached by the rulers when convenient. The blunt instruments of state power could be invoked to prevent workers’ combination and regulate the lives of the poor.

Nowhere was this seen more clearly in the 1830s than in the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. After 30 years of anxiety, indeed hysteria, at the rising cost of the old Poor Law, which dated back to the Tudor period, Parliament established a Commission of Enquiry in 1832 to examine it and to make recommendations. Paradoxically, perhaps, ruling-class pressure for reform of the system came at a point when the cost was actually falling. A clue to motivation is offered by a rural magistrate, writing to Sir Robert Peel after the rural riots of 1830. He claimed that, ‘if this state of things should continue the Peasantry will learn the secret of their own strength’.² A dose of firm discipline was what was required.

Under the direction of Edwin Chadwick, a pioneering middle-class utilitarian administrator, a report was produced which exposed the existing system in a way which drew special attention to a range of problems central to capitalist production. These were, specifically, the Poor Law’s alleged tendency to distort the labour market, cut down labour mobility, restrict the ‘freedom’ of labourers to sell their labour, to distort the wages system, to demoralise labour and to threaten public order. The remedies were to abandon outdoor relief and to create ‘less eligibility’. By establishing an alternative system of relief in institutions – workhouses – in which conditions were more onerous than could be found outside, it was hoped that the poor would be driven to accept work at the market price. Implicit, too, was a fierce attack on the independence of women. On the assumption that women were completely dependent upon their spouses, unmarried women were forced into the workhouse, yet in reality working-class women were often the main breadwinners. By placing the emphasis firmly upon the responsibility of the male to provide for the family (a test of his masculinity), two pieces of ideology were implanted: the subservience of women and moral turpitude associated with asking the state for assistance.

The New Poor Law was immediately felt as crude class legislation by working people. Since it was replacing a law born of a paternalistic system and a parliament of landed interests, it was seen as the work of the middle class, the ‘traitors of 32’. As the main employers of waged labour they ad most to gain. Certain classes of outworkers, and the weavers and woolcombers in particular, were in an advanced state of decline; the woolcombers were ‘a sort of common reservoir of all the poverty of England and Ireland’.³ The new law promised to bear very heavily upon them and their families. Factory workers were becoming used to the effects of the boom-slump cycle. Slumps and unemployment were likely to throw them on the mercy of this new law.

The law was first enacted in the southern counties where agricultural labourers were demoralised by the crushing reaction which followed the Swing riots in 1830 and their failure to save the Tolpuddle Martyrs in 1834. Despite considerable resistance the workhouse building programme was carried out and the Act was in place by 1837. As attention turned to the industrial Midlands and the North a deep depression hit trade in 1837. A massive campaign of resistance to the law developed in the factory districts – most intensely in south-east Lancashire, where a genuine across-trades mass workers’ movement developed. An outstanding leader of this activity was Joseph Rayner Stephens, a Methodist minister, who was to be a central figure in the first stage of Lancashire Chartism and who saw Chartism as ‘a knife and fork question’.⁴ One result of militant agitation was that it took over 15 years to implement the New Poor Law in Lancashire and even then only in modified form.

Anti-Poor Law activity was not the first working-class campaign to follow the suffrage agitation. Short Time Committees had been formed in 1831 to campaign for factory reform. They proliferated in West Yorkshire and the Manchester district, holding large assemblies and organising mass petitions. Although they had achieved only modest success with the Factory Acts of 1834, their members and organisation flowed into the Anti-Poor Law agitation.⁵ Furthermore, working-class men and women were deeply involved in the agitations to save the agricultural labourers of Tolpuddle in 1834 and the Glasgow Cotton Spinners in 1837, both crude attacks by the state on incipient trade unionism. Many were to move on to become a critical organisational foundation of Chartism, especially in the industrial districts.

Spearheaded by the Poor Man’s Guardian, a virtual underground organisation existed to produce and circulate radical newspapers in defiance of the Act banning an unstamped press.⁶ This was a struggle which reached back decades. It was interwoven with other strands in the development of radicalism: the belligerent antiestablishment journalism and pamphleteering of Thomas Paine and William Cobbett, Mary Wollstonecraft and women’s rights, the demand for suffrage, republicanism, religious toleration and free-thinking, workers’ education, anti-slavery campaigns, and anti-corruption in government. Artisan involvement dated from post-Civil War attempts to organise the London trades and the development of a rich and vibrant cultural tradition around London pubs and coffee houses.

In the 1790s such impulses had taken on clear organisational form in the emergence of the Corresponding Societies. Identifying with the sans culottes of revolutionary Paris but imbued with the vigorous English radicalism of Thomas Paine, the Societies became the first political organisations of working men inviting ‘members unlimited’. Their growth and activity in the early years of the war with France was a major cause of the assembling, by William Pitt, of a new repressive state apparatus in that decade. Driven from the streets into an opaque underground, many of these activists survived to carry and pass on their experience to future generations of radicals.

The acquisition of literacy, the solidity of organisational practices, the resistance to state interference, persistent threats to their skill, the mounting of a long and intelligent critique of the precepts of political economy and the sheer obduracy of the democratic tradition made the artisans a potent source for the founding and promotion of the Charter.

CHAPTER 2

The Making of the Charter

A national campaign

Of all the issues which fed into the movement for suffrage extension the campaign against the stamp duty on newspapers was the most immediate because its centre was London where most papers were published. The persistence of its participants, over decades, had established an organisation on the ground with hundreds of activists and, crucially, a determined and articulate leadership. In addition to older or more experienced men like Cobbett, who died in 1835, Richard Carlile, who had suffered repeated prison sentences, and Henry Hetherington, proprietor of the Poor Man’s Guardian, a new layer of figures including William Lovett, Bronterre O’Brien and Julian Harney cut their political teeth in this struggle.

In 1835 the government, under pressure, reduced the stamp duty, whilst intensifying repression. But this move perhaps simply whetted an appetite for struggle. The gathering together in London of leading campaigners to take the contest forward resulted in the founding of the London Working Men’s Association in the summer of 1836. There was ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The 1830s – Bourgeois Power and the Working Class
• 2 The Making of the Charter
• 3 The Mass Strike of 1842
• 4 Downturn 1842–47
• 5 1848
• 6 Anatomy of the movement
• 7 State Power
• 8 Conclusion
• Appendix 1 Marx and Engels and Chartism
• Appendix 2 Chartism and the Historians
• Appendix 3 Brief Biographies
• Notes
• Index