Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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More important than their direct effect on their immediate readers, however, was

their general contribution to the developing myth of the self-made man, the chief

form in which the entrepreneurial ideal sought to win the minds of the working

class. It began as the idea of the self-educated man. Brougham in the pamphlet,

Practical Observations on the Education of the People (1825), which became the

Bible of the Mechanics’ Institute movement and of the Society for the Diffusion

of Useful Knowledge, held up the example of Benjamin Franklin. If the working

man would only read his Life,

I am almost quite sure he will resolve to spend his spare time and money in

gaining those kinds of knowledge which from a printer’s boy made that

great man the first philosopher and one of the first statesmen of his age.

Few are fitted by nature to go as far as he did… But all may go a good way

after him, both in temperance and industry and knowledge, and no one can

tell before he tries how near he may be able to approach him.

It rapidly became an undiscriminating admiration for anyone of humble origin

who had risen to fame and wealth, by whatever means. The original plan of the

Library of Useful Knowledge included biographies of ‘six Self-Exalted Men’,

which inaugurated a whole literature of success, on the careers of James Watt,

George Stephenson, the Peel family, Sir Humphry Davy, William Hutton the

Birmingham bookseller-antiquarian, Joseph Brotherton ‘the factory boy’, and a

host of others, down to Smiles’ Lives of the Engineers (1861–2). It pervaded the

middle-class periodicals for the working-class reader. The Family Friend in 1850

printed a list of a hundred names from Aesop, ‘a slave’, to Shakespeare, ‘the son

of a butcher’, with the injunction: ‘As an encouragement to begin, to persevere,

and to conquer, read the following list of self-made men.’ And the moral was

always the same: ‘What some men are, all without difficulty might be.’

The myth in fact found the Achilles’ heel of the ambitious working man, and

diverted many a Radical into the paths of self-education and material success, like

Samuel Bamford of Peterloo fame who started the long tradition of self-

congratulatory autobiographies of working men, or ‘Shepherd’ Smith the

Owenite ‘Universalist’ who transferred to elevating middle-class journalism with

the Family Herald. Even the ‘Educational Chartism’ of Lovett came down to

individual self-education in the end, while O’Connor’s Land Plan degenerated

into a scheme for establishing self-made peasants. An Anti-Corn Law League

Lecturer told a crowd of Chartist hecklers in 1840: ‘Denounce the middle classes

as you may, there is not a man among you worth a halfpenny a week that is not

anxious to elevate himself among them….’

It is a measure of the success of the

J.F.C.Harrison, op. cit., pp. 28–34.

New, op. cit., p. 339.

254 TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL

myth and the triumph of the entrepreneurial ideal in the battle for the mind that it

was almost certainly true.

THE BATTLE FOR THE STATE

The battle for control of the State was really two distinct battles, or two phases of

the same battle fought at two quite different levels. The first was the running

battle for Parliamentary Reform: a three-cornered fight between the three major

classes to decide the form of the constitution and the method of choosing who

should rule. The second was the battle for administrative reform, to determine

the machinery of executive government and the method of recruiting the

administrators. The first was an open battle, fought in the widest public arena of

politics, with sound and fury and the occasional threat of revolution. The second

was partly in the open, with public agitations for particular reforms, but that was

the less important part. The more important part was the struggle to determine

the means of implementing the reforms, fought mainly in what are now called

the corridors of power, by the men who built the corridors and channelled the

power through them, the new administrators themselves.

In both battles the two middle-class ideals worked so closely together as at

first sight to be nearly indistinguishable. Yet there was a difference of emphasis

between the two, of little consequence in the first battle, but of great importance

in the second, where the two ideals increasingly diverged. In the battle for

Parliamentary Reform the entrepreneurial ideal led the way, with the

professional ideal as a discreet and almost unconscious ally. In the battle for

administrative reform, especially in the in-fighting behind the scenes, much of

the struggle was necessarily in the hands of administrators, whose professional

minds and interests led them far beyond the simple-minded demand of the

entrepreneurial ideal for cheap and efficient government.

Both battles nevertheless were a triumph for the entrepreneurial ideal, since

the mid-Victorian State was at the conscious level of social and economic policy

controlled and administered on the principles of that ideal, open competition and

the free play of market forces. Yet both victories contained the seeds of future

decay: the first because the apparently general acquiescence in the

entrepreneurial ideal led to the enfranchisement of a large part of the working

class, whose demands were to transform the laissez-faire State from without; the

second because the necessary utilization of professional administrators to solve

urgent social problems was already, in the heyday of laissez-faire, modifying it

from within. This second triumph, with its more insidious modification by the

Cf. J.F.C.Harrison, op. cit., pp. 204–5.

McCord, op. cit., pp. 57–8.

TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL 255

professionalism of its instruments, will be the subject of the next section, after

the more straightforward story of the first has been dealt with in this.

The political history of Parliamentary Reform is too familiar to need repeating

here. What interests the social historian is Reform as a struggle between the class

ideals, as an attack on property and patronage by capital and competition

(supported by expertise and selection by merit) from the one side and by labour

and co-operation from the other. In brief, Reform was at first feared by the

aristocracy as destructive of both pillars of their ideal, but they later came to

distinguish between Reformers who wished to abolish property and those who

were as determined as they to preserve it. They were thus able to save the main

pillar, property, by sacrificing the secondary one, patronage. And they were able

to do this because in the main middle-class ideal capital was compatible with

property while competition was inimical to patronage. The resulting compromise

successfully split the Reformers, and stalled off further Reform until it was

‘safe’, that is, until the working-class ideal had exhausted, at least for the time

being, its revolutionary opposition to property and capital, and the middle-class

ideal had so permeated the bulk of the population that capital and property were

no longer in danger from democracy.

When Parliamentary Reform first became a class issue in the period after

Waterloo it was regarded by both aristocratic parties as a threat to property.

Canning asked a Liverpool audience apropos of Peterloo, ‘Do I exaggerate when

I say, that there was not a man of property who did not tremble for his

possessions?’

And Lord Grey, the erstwhile and future Reformer, told Sir Robert

Wilson, the Radical general, that the object of ‘the popular party, or rather of the

Mob…certainly is not Reform but Revolution,’ and that if Burdett and his

friends succeeded, ‘I shall not precede you by many months to the scaffold….’

This naturally remained the opinion of the Tory opponents of Reform until the

great Reform Act. As Blackwood’s expressed it in 1830,

Even against British property in various modes, there exists an organized

conspiracy—against the property of the West Indians— against the

property of the fundholders, and, finally, against the property of the

Church. But above all the great and paramount conspiracy lies against the

guardian of all our property and rights— the aristocracy of our land….

Yet even Blackwood’s had long recognized that landed property no longer stood

alone, that the progress of arts, manufactures and commerce had bestowed

property on other classes, and that the time had gone by, for example, for Lord

Blackwood’s, 1820, VII. 12.

J.R.M.Butler, The Passing of the Great Reform Bill (1914), pp. 34–5.

Blackwood’s, 1830, XXVII. 717.

256 TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL

Lauderdale’s ‘absurd and erroneous’ theory of ‘renovated feudalism’.

Incensed

at Catholic emancipation and the liberal economic policies of Peel and

Huskisson, which they put down to ‘the gross incompetency of the House of

Commons’ and the ‘impotence and dependence’ of the House of Lords, the High

Tories even demanded their own brand of Reform, designed to amalgamate the

new capital with the old property: men of non-landed wealth should be allowed

to purchase the franchise in the counties and open boroughs for ready money.

This, too, was the grand strategy of the reforming Whigs— in Durham’s

phrase, ‘to attach numbers to property and good order’—with the difference that

the Whigs had a shrewder political sense of what would satisfy the moderate

Reformers and detach them from the extremists. Francis Jeffrey, who drew up

the Bill for Scotland, saw that ‘this may be done by extending the Elective

Franchise to those classes, who possess property and knowledge…any plan must

be objectionable which, by keeping the Franchise very high and exclusive, fails

to give satisfaction to the middle and respectable ranks of society, and drives

them to a union founded on dissatisfaction, with the lower orders. It is of the utmost

importance to associate the middle with the higher orders in the love and support

of the institutions and government of the country.’

He saw that the key division

was not between Reformers and reactionaries, but between opponents and

defenders of property: ‘The real battle is not between Whigs and Tories, Liberals

and Illiberals and such gentlemen-like denominations, but between property and

no-property—Swing and the law.’

The Whig strategy worked because it fell in exactly with that of the middle-

class Radicals. The latter were as appalled as the aristocracy at the danger to

property implicit in manhood suffrage when allied to the working-class ideal.

James Mill, an extreme democrat as long as he remained confident that the

working class would follow their natural leaders, the middle class, complained to

Place of a deputation ‘from the working classes’ which preached communism to

Black of the Morning Chronicle:

Their notions about property look ugly; they not only desire that it should

have nothing to do with representation, which is true, though not a truth for

the present time, as they ought to see, but they seem to think that it should

not exist, and that the existence of it is an evil to them.

Place replied that

Ibid., 1821, VIII. 581–5.

Ibid., 1830, XXVII. 640, 646; 1829, XVII. 641.

H.Cockburn, Letters on the Affairs of Scotland (1874), pp. 258f.

Lord Cockburn, Life of Lord Jeffrey (1852), II. 223.

TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL 257

The men who called on Black were not a deputation from the working

people, but two out of half-a-dozen who manage, or mismanage, the

meetings at the Rotunda in Blackfriars Road, and at the Philadelphian

Chapel in Finsbury. The doctrine they are now preaching is that

promulgated by Hodgskin in a tract in 1825, entitled ‘Labour Defended

against the Claims of Capital’…

Place drew exactly the same distinction as Grey between Reform and revolution,

but pinned them more firmly to the rival middle and working-class

organizations:

The great peculiarity causing a difference between the Political Unions and

the Unions of the working classes was, that the first desired the Reform

Bill to prevent a revolution, the last desired its destruction as the means of

producing a revolution.

Place’s strategy, therefore, was to unite ‘the People’ in the ‘Political Unions of

the Middle and Working Classes’ behind the middle-class ideal, and to isolate

the protagonists of the working-class ideal, the Rotundanists, as an extremist and

unrepresentative faction. With the aid of the Government, which obligingly

prosecuted Lovett, Watson and Benbow for doing exactly the same as it freely

allowed Place and his friends to do, it was eminently successful, and the

unrevolutionary Reform Bill passed with popular acclamation.

If the middle-class Radicals were not against property as an institution, what

were they against? They were against its abuse, as idleness, as privilege, as

monopoly, as undue political influence and corruption. It was therefore against

patronage that their main attack was mounted, all the more successfully because

this secondary pillar of the aristocratic ideal was already crumbling. Official

patronage had been declining in extent ever since the ‘economical reforms’ of

the 1780’s. Lord Liverpool complained in 1817 that ‘the Pension fund is now so

limited, as to be scarcely able to meet the just claims which were made upon it

for the distressed nobility, and for the persons and families of those who have

long laboured in the public service’, and another observer in 1821 noted that

where once there had been 150 placemen in the House of Commons, there were

now not half that number.

Long before the Reform Bill the giving up of

sinecures was cheered in the Commons, and old naval officers complained ‘that

(in common, however, with every other class) the patronage which was wont to

be awarded to admirals, and even to captains, is completely swallowed up.’

1829 even the High Tories were attacking ‘the gentlemen pensioners and

placemen of the new system’ of Peel and Wellington.

The successive editions of

Wallas, Place, p. 274n.

Ibid., pp. 290–1.

258 TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL

the Black Book were flogging, if not a dead, at least a dying horse. On this side

Reform was almost completely successful. The 1847 edition of the Black Book

produced a catalogue of pensions with explanations (from Hume’s Select

Committee of 1837), most of which it considered justified, and commented: ‘The

preceding List winds up a chapter of British history…upon the whole we are

satisfied, and we dare say the public will be so likewise.’

Before then the middle-class attack had switched from the particular to the

general abuse of the political power of property, in the shape of urban

misgovernment, Church administration and the corn laws, and had been

successful there also. This was all the more surprising since the Reform Act gave

so little direct political power to the urban, emancipated middle class. The Act

increased the United Kingdom electorate from 435,000 to only 813,000 in an

adult male population of about 6 million. More important, it gave an

overwhelming majority of the seats to the counties and small boroughs, where

the deference and ‘virtual representation’ of the old society survived, over the

great towns, where the new class society was already in being.

Most important

of all, middle-class politicians lacked the unearned wealth and so the leisure

early enough in life to gain the experience and training required for high office.

They reached Parliament later in life—Grote at 38, Cobden at 37, as against

Gladstone at 23, Sidney Herbert at 22—and unless, like Disraeli or Macaulay,

they levered themselves up by patronage and professional earnings compatible

with parliamentary attendance, rarely gained the indispensable apprenticeship in

the House and in junior office. This was the chief reason why property, in the

sense of unearned wealth, retained the lead over capital, in the sense of wealth

which had to be managed. As the Westminster Review reluctantly admitted in

1833,

The landed interest must always exercise great sway in public affairs; for

that class alone have much leisure to meddle in them. The intelligence of

the other classes is absorbed, if not exclusively, yet in a great degree, in the

business of money-making…. The men who have the leisure for intrigue,

from whose coteries the ministries are formed, and whose leisure finds no

other occupation than to tattle on the politics of the day, to clog the steps of

officials, and flutter from club to club,—are of the landed interest.

W.R.Brock, Lord Liverpool and Liberal Toryism, 1820–27 (1941), p. 91; Blackwood’s,

1821, VIII. 583.

Lord Castlereagh’s announcement in H. of C, 11 February 1817, that Marquess Camden

had resigned all the emoluments and profits of his Tellership of the Exchequer except the

regulated salary (‘cheering’), Blackwood’s, 1817, I. 106; Capt. J.Griffiths, R.N., quoted in

ibid., 1826, XX. 754.

Ibid., 1829, XXVI. 774.

Black Book of England (1847 ed.), pp. 221–2.

TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL 259

In 1848 John Bright told the House of Commons:

This House and the other House of Parliament are exclusively aristocratic

in character. The administration is therefore necessarily the same, and on

the Treasury Board aristocracy reigns supreme.

And Matthew Arnold was still observing in 1879 that ‘In England the

government is composed of a string of aristocratical personages, with one or two

men from the professional class who are engaged with them.’

How then did the middle class manage to dominate the legislative climate of

the age? The answer lies partly in the work-ing of the new political system. In

spite of its limitations, Reform was not without effect. If the aristocracy were left

in possession of the main positions of power, possession was no longer theirs by

automatic right, but had to be bargained for. The radical change produced by the

Reform Act was from aristocratic rule by prescription to aristocratic rule by

consent. It was not so much the actual existence of a large anti-aristocratic block

vote which swayed the politicians, as the fear of creating one. Given that the

aristocracy were divided between competing parties not based primarily on class

—a situation which could hardly have survived the rise of a great middle-class

party—the aristocratic politicians were bound to show themselves increasingly

sensitive to the most independent and rapidly growing section of the electorate.

They were, indeed, sensitive to every section, even the least independent and the

non-electors: they listened to the tenant farmers of the Anti-League on the Corn

Laws, and to the working class on factory reform and economic distress.

How

much more sensitive they were to the demands of the urban middle class, and

how high a price they were prepared to pay to placate them, can be seen from the

achievement of ‘free trade in practically everything’ —land alone partially

excepted—catalogued above.

At no point, however, can it be said that the pressure of middle-class votes

alone forced the aristocracy to yield a specifically middle-class reform. Even

repeal of the Corn Laws owed next to nothing to fear of retribution from the

electorate if it were not passed. Repeal was due to the conversion of both Peel

and Russell, and of a large part of their landed followers, to the necessity of free

trade in corn, and this in turn was due to their acceptance of, or acquiescence in,

the middle-class view that one species of wealth, namely passive property in

land, had no right to abuse its political power to exact a toll from another, namely

active capital in industry and commerce. The same moral and intellectual

E.g. in England the small boroughs with under 1,000 electors together with the counties

had 341 out of the 471 seats—N.Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (1935), pp. 65–85, 88–9.

West.Rev., 1833, XVIII. 109–10.

G.M.Trevelyan, Life of Bright (1913), p. 166.

M.Arnold, Mixed Essays (1879), p. 164.

260 TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL

persuasion can be traced in the decline of patronage, the reform of municipal

government, the reform of the Church, the abolition of Church rates, the reform

of Oxford and Cambridge, the free trade budgets, the abrogation of the ‘taxes on

knowledge’, the reform of the civil service, the abolition of the landed property

qualification for M.P.s, the virtual prohibition of the enclosure of urban

commons, and a great many more diminutions of aristocratic power and

privilege. Since all of these were achieved before the landowners lost their

overall majority in the House of Commons in the 1880’s, and long before they lost

their control of the Cabinet, they could only be passed by the landowners

themselves.

It was because the entrepreneurial ideal had already won the moral and

educational battles, therefore, that it was able, in spite of the failure of the middle

class to capture direct political power, to win the battle for the State. It was an

imperfect victory, in that the aristocracy still possessed a veto on all legislation

which they felt justified in opposing, as in the case of the reform of land itself.

Yet so much greater was the force of the ideal than the strength of the class from

which it emanated that the veto was used only in extreme cases, as for example

in 1837 against the expropriation of the Irish Church.

Most remarkable of all, it

achieved by the 1860’s a degree of self-confidence—or bravado—which enabled

it to try, and to survive, the dangerous experiment of admitting to the franchise

as a majority of the electorate the very class which in 1832 it had combined with

the aristocracy to exclude.

Between the fear of revolution which forbade the working class the vote in

1832 and the cautious but unfeared concession of urban household suffrage in

1867 lies the whole process of educating all three major classes to accept and

live with each other which we shall call the rise of a viable class society.

For the

moment we are simply concerned with the failure of the working-class ideal not

merely to capture control of the State but even to maintain its hold on the bulk of

the working class. Whether in its extreme political form of manhood suffrage for

the purpose of establishing a classless society based on co-operative labour it

ever did gain a hold on the bulk of the working class we may well doubt.

Because of the size of the working class and the fragmentation of the ideal which

we discussed above,

the numbers who held to any one version of the ideal can

only be guessed. Not all the more than three million people who were claimed to

have signed the largest Chartist petition

were social revolutionaries, and,

Cf. Mary Lawson-Tanered, ‘The Anti-League and the Corn-Law Crisis of 1846’, Hist.J.,

1960, III. 162f.; M.W.Thomas, The Early Factory Legislation (Leigh-on-Sea, 1948),

passim.

Chap. vii, § 1, above.

Cf. N.Gash, Reaction and Reconstruction in English Politics, 1832–52 (Oxford, 1955),

pp. 40–1, 58–9.

See chap. ix, below.

TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL 261

although for most of them the Charter probably represented the social and

economic hopes as well as the political rights of labour, the number who knew

how to use the vote to transform society must have been very small.

Nevertheless, so long as the least suspicion remained amongst the party leaders

that further Reform meant social revolution, it was certain that the working class

would not get the vote. It is true that the Whigs were more tolerant of the

Chartists than were the Tories, and less fearful of a revolutionary outbreak as a

means of obtaining the Charter, but they were just as determined to prevent the

Charter from reaching the statute book, and were prepared to use police, troops

and even artillery to that end.

The only means by which the Chartists could placate this intransigent

opposition was by convincing Parliament that they were not revolutionaries. One

method was by allying themselves with men who were manifestly upholders of

order and property. This was tried twice without success, first at the beginning in

1838–39 in the alliance with Attwood and his following of Birmingham business

men, secondly in 1841–42 in the alliance with Joseph Sturge and his Dissenting

friends in the Complete Suffrage movement. Both broke down on the Chartists’

refusal to renounce revolution as a means or as an end, the first over the threat of

physical force, the second over the by now revolutionary name of the Charter.

There remained one further method of reassuring their opponents, and that a

paradoxical one. It was to threaten force and have their bluff called. O’Connor’s

greatest service to the cause of working-class suffrage was his ‘cowardice’ on

Kennington Common on 10th April 1848, when he obeyed Police Commissioner

Maine and called off the march to the Houses of Parliament. From that day when

Chartism as an attempt to capture control of the State died, the process of

working-class enfranchisement can be said to have begun. For it convinced the

other classes that the working class had renounced revolution as a means and

might conceivably be educated to renounce it as an end.

This, indeed, is exactly what happened. When at last the vote came to be

granted to the urban working class in 1867 it was granted in a totally different

climate of opinion from that of the Chartist period. There were still those

politicians, like Robert Lowe, who opposed their enfranchisement as a threat to

property:

Once give the working man the vote, and the machinery is ready to launch

these votes in one compact mass upon the institutions of property in this

country.

§ 2, above.

Northern Star, 7 May 1842.

Cf. F.C.Mather, ‘The Government and the Chartists’, in A.Briggs, ed., Chartist Studies

(1962), pp. 372–405.

262 TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL

But Lowe and a handful of die-hards were isolated in their Cave of Adullam,

while the two major parties vied with each other over which was to gain the

credit for Reform. Both sides accepted Gladstone’s principle that ‘every man

who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness

or of political danger is morally entitled to come within the pale of the

Constitution.’

The only question at issue was where the line of personal fitness

and politicial safety was to be drawn—in the boroughs at  7,  5 or complete

household suffrage, with or without personal payment of rates, including or

excluding lodgers; in the counties at  15,  14 or  12 tenant franchise. In the

event Parliament took the Bill out of the hands of Derby and Disraeli’s

Government and opted for the lowest line consistent with political safety.

The

famous ‘leap in the dark’ was uncertain only for the Tory Party. In the Punch

cartoon the course and the horses were the same on either side of the fence: the

only uncertainty was over which party would win the electoral race.

In short, by 1867 Parliamentary Reform was no longer a struggle between the

ideals for control of the State, because that struggle had already been won. The

working class had become, in Gladstone’s words, ‘our fellow-subjects, our

fellow-Christians, our own flesh and blood, who have been lauded to the skies for

their good conduct,’

that is, were believed to have accepted so much of the

entrepreneurial ideal of a class society based on capital and competition as to be

trusted not to use their voting power to undermine it. No doubt in the long term

Lowe and the die-hard opponents of the Second Reform Act were right as in the

long term the High Tory opponents of the First Reform Act were right. The

working class were to use their votes to modify the social system in the direction

of their ideal. This suggests that their ideal was not dead but moribund, and ready

to spring into life again when the climate changed once more. But no such

quickening is discernible until the 1880’s at the earliest, and it will be necessary

to look very closely at working-class institutions in the mid-Victorian age to see

the ideal still operative in an etiolated form.

Meanwhile, the entrepreneurial

ideal was so confident in its indirect control of the State that it saw no threat in

the admission to the electorate of a not as yet large but nevertheless decisive

working-class majority.

R.Lowe, Speeches and letters on Reform (1867); Briggs, Age of Improvement (1959), p.

500.

Disraeli had already talked in 1859 of opening avenues to the mechanic, ‘whose virtue,

prudence, intelligence and frugality entitle him to enter the privileged pale of the

constituent body of the country,’ and Stanley (Lord Derby) had used a similar phrase as

early as 1853—cf. Briggs, Age of Improvement, p. 492.

Viz. household suffrage, including lodgers, in the boroughs and  12 tenant franchise in

the counties, adding 938,000 voters to the electorate of 1,056,000 in England and Wales.

Punch, 1867, LIII. 47.

TRIUMPH OF THE ENTREPRENEURIAL IDEAL 263