Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

Подождите немного. Документ загружается.

early nineteenth century which still further exacerbated class relations. Two of

these were economic. One was the peculiarly explosive combination of high

unemployment and high bread prices which characterized trade depressions

before the repeal of the corn laws, and touched off the bread riots, machine-

breaking and other outbreaks which so often coincided with major political

crises.

The other was the structural change in the economy which inexorably

destroyed the occupations and eroded the incomes of those handworkers who

formed the backbone of the more violent working-class movements, from

Luddism to physical-force Chartism.

Yet even these do not exhaust the factors involved in the evolution from

violent to peaceable class conflict, for there were gradations even in violence,

and one of its historians notes that ‘“explosiveness” was less, where regular

institutions existed which were believed capable of safeguarding the general

bargaining position of the men and their basic minimum of life’

The crucial

factor in the rise of a viable class society was in fact the institutionalization of

class, the creation, recognition and acceptance of the political, social and

industrial institutions through which the classes could express themselves,

safeguard or ameliorate their standards and conditions of life, and channel their

conflicts out of the paths of violence into those of negotiation and compromise.

The evolution was much more gradual than the superficial contrast between the

two periods before and after 1848 suggests. Many of the institutions, like the

Owenite general union of 1834 or the engineering employers’ association of

1852, were created for the purpose of threatening the destruction of the

institutions of a hostile class, but were driven by events to acceptance and

negotiation. Others, like the Dissenters’ organizations, evolved more slowly,

from old society interest groups into new society class institutions, threatening

destruction to some aristocratic institution like the Church. Between the two

extremes there was every variety of evolutionary type, with only this in

common: that they pursued class ends by means which were less violent the

more they were organized and institutionalized.

The transition, then, was not a sudden, dramatic leap from the violent hostility

of ‘depression’ into the sedative complacency of ‘prosperity’. It was a gradual

evolution from a phase of immature class struggle, aggravated by adverse

economic factors, into one of mature class conflict, aided by favourable

economic trends. The earlier phase became by degrees much less violent than its

The most violent period in politics and industrial relations since the Chartist period was

in fact 1910–14, when an opposite and, in recent times, exceptional conjunction of

economic trends was in operation, viz. sharp inflation accompanied by stagnating

production and falling real wages.

Cf. Rostow, British Economy, chap. v, ‘Trade Cycles, Harvests, and Politics, 1790–1850’,

esp. the ‘Social Tension’ chart and table, pp. 124–5; E.J.Hobsbawm, ‘Economic

Fluctuations and Some Social Movements since 1800’, Ec.H.R., 1952, V. 5; K.K.Macnab,

op. cit., p. 352.

284 RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY

image. The later, in spite of its pacific legend, was still an age of class conflict,

some of it more violent than is commonly believed, for the threat of violence

remained a factor, if an increasingly remote one, in Victorian class society until

its close.

The rise of a viable class society depended, more than on anything else, on the

extent and speed at which the classes were institutionalized and the institutions

learned by experience the sophisticated arts of mutual bargaining. Here, if

English class society was unlucky in the economic climate in which it passed

through the main stage of institutionalization, it was lucky in institutions which it

inherited from the old society. Apart from an array of political, legal and

administrative institutions capable in the event of being reformed to meet its

needs, it inherited one set of institutions which might have been designed to be

the models and mentors of the new class organizations, and to instruct them in

the art of non-violent conflict. These were the institutions of sectarian religion.

THE ROLE OF RELIGION

The role of religion at the birth of class, we said in Chapter VI, was threefold: to

give expression to emancipation from the dependency system before it hardened

into class antagonism; to provide a means or model for class organization; and to

administer an analgesic against the pains of labour by influencing conflict in the

direction of non-violence. For this reason we called sectarian religion the

midwife of class, but left the second and third roles to be dealt with in this

chapter, where the functions of the midwife can merge with those of nursemaid

of the infant and teacher of the adolescent.

In the case of Old Dissent and the middle class there was a direct connection

between the ‘interest’ institutions of the old society and the class institutions of

the new. The Dissenting churches themselves were institutions which could

serve, consecutively or even simultaneously, the purposes of an interest group

supporting the aristocratic Whigs, their traditional patrons, on such issues as

toleration or education, and of a class organization pursuing their own middle-

class ends, such as the campaign against Church rates or against the

Establishment itself. In this way Old Dissent was able to act as an agent in the

transition from the interest politics of the old society into the class politics of the

new. Its agency can be most economically illustrated by tracing it through three

key movements: Parliamentary Reform; the Church rates agitation; and the

campaign against the corn laws.

The Dissenters helped to transform Parliamentary Reform from an interest

movement into a class movement. For their Whig allies it was always the former,

a struggle of the Whig ‘outs’ against the Tory ‘ins’, for which they hoped to rally

Hobsbawm, loc. cit., p. 17.

RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY 285

behind them a formidable proportion of the middle ranks and lower orders. In

this endeavour the Dissenters were an invaluable ally, a natural bridge

connecting them with the middle ranks of the growing industrial towns from

which the main pressure for Reform increasingly came, and at the same time a

defensive buffer of moderate opinion between themselves and the extreme

Radicals. The Dissenters on their side originally looked to Reform to give them

‘complete toleration’, meaning civic equality with the Anglicans in local

government and so on.

When the Tories gave it to them in 1828 it was the Whig

leaders, Lord Holland and Lord John Russell, they thanked with a dinner in their

honour, and pressed on with them for Reform which would make toleration

meaningful by defeating the Anglican corporations which in most towns

controlled both Parliamentary representation and local government. The Political

Unions, including the renegade Tory Attwood’s own at Birmingham, were led by

middle-class Dissenters like Joseph Parkes at Birmingham and the Potter

brothers at Manchester. Their traditional pressure groups, the Committee of

Dissenting Deputies and the Protestant Society for the Protection of Religious

Liberty, threw themselves into the campaign for Reform, and took an active part

in the elections for the Parliament which passed the Reform Bill.

The Dissenters and their friends and enemies expected Reform to increase

their political power. Brougham for the Whigs acknowledged in 1828 that they

already possessed informal power.

Of this I am quite satisfied, that the representatives of every town will hear

from the places they represent the voice of the constituents, in approval of

the vote [in favour of the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts]…; for

everywhere there has arisen a body of constituents, wealthy, and if I may

use the expression, intelligent to a degree of which those who have not

well considered the subject can form no adequate notion—I mean the

Dissenters….

And when Reform came, Wellington expected it to sweep them into formal

power:

The revolution is made, that is to say, that power is transferred from one

class of society, the gentlemen of England, professing the faith of the

Church of England, to another class of society, the shopkeepers, being

Dissenters from the Church, many of them Socinians, others atheists.

Cf. U.R.Q.Henriques, Religious Toleration in England, 1787–1833 (1961), pp. 4, 57–8.

R.G.Cowherd, The Politics of English Dissent from 1815 to 1848 (1959), pp. 33, 73–83.

Ibid., p. 31.

286 RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY

Yet Reform was almost as disappointing to the Dissenters as it was to the

working class. Very few Dissenters were elected to the Commons,

and those

who were soon began to find, as did their allies the Benthamite Radicals, that the

aims of the Whig Government increasingly diverged from their own. Certain

gains they did achieve: the right of Quakers and Separatists to take their seats in

Parliament without swearing an oath; the reform of municipal government and

the replacement of the self-perpetuating Anglican corporations in many boroughs

by elected and predominantly Dissenting ones; and the secularization of the

registration of births and deaths and of the solemnization of marriage. But on

what they considered the most vital issues, the abolition of Church rates and the

reform and disestablishment of the Church itself, the Whigs were at bottom as

reactionary as the Tories. The Dissenters therefore increasingly turned away from

their aristocratic patrons and towards the secular representatives of their own

class, the still more rigorously anti-Church and anti-aristocratic Benthamites and

their provincial allies in the growing anti-corn law movement.

Class politics decisively superseded interest politics when in 1836 the

Dissenters joined the Benthamites in the Church Rates Abolition Society, still

more when the Whigs dropped the Church Rates Bill in 1837.

Abolition was

meant as a step on the way to Church disestablishment, but it had the advantage

of enabling the middle class to organize effectively and win victories at the local

level, by capturing the parish vestries and blocking the levying of the rate. This

had been done in Sheffield since 1824 and in Manchester since 1835. Now the

campaign was spread systematically to other towns, producing its ‘Church rate

martyrs’ who went to prison for non-payment, like John Thorogood of

Chelmsford and William Baines of Leeds. It even produced anti-Church rate

riots at Birmingham in 1837. Here was an example of legal violence—the harsh

treatment of G.F.Muntz and other non-payers of rates—provoking illegal

violence even in middle-class chapel-goers, which helped to stoke the anti-

aristocratic fires of class. By 1842 rate levies were blocked in 53 towns, and

payment refused by Dissenters in many others. After a long-drawn-out series of

legal cases, the House of Lords determined in 1853 that a rate levied by a

minority of a vestry was illegal, and in effect gave the victory to the Dissenters

wherever they could gain a majority, though the question was not finally settled

until the Compulsory Church Rates Abolition Act of 1868.

Meanwhile, the anti-

Church rate agitation had merged with others of wider political import. Its

Wellington to Croker, 6 March 1833, The Correspondence and Diaries of J.W. Croker

from 1809 to 1830 (ed. L.J.Jennings, 1884), II. 205–6.

Only one trinitarian Dissenter, John Wilks of Boston, was elected in 1832, though he was

joined by Edward Baines in 1834, and there was a handful of Unitarians—Gash, Reaction

and Reconstruction, p. 66.

Ibid., p. 73.

RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY 287

significance lay chiefly in alienating the Whigs and bringing to the fore the class

connections of Dissent.

In the anti-Corn Law movement the emphasis shifts still further, from middle-

class support for a mainly Dissenting cause, to Dissenting support for a wholly

middle-class cause. The Anti-Corn Law League, that ‘uniquely powerful

instrument in the forging of middle-class consciousness’, as Asa Briggs has

called it,

was as much a crusade against the tithe-collecting Church as against

the rent-collecting aristocracy. The Anglican Cobden wrote to the Quaker Bright

in 1842:

The Church clergy are almost to a man guilty of causing the present

distress by upholding the Corn Law—they having themselves an interest in

the high price of bread,

and declared in public that

We have, I believe, the majority of every religious denomination with us—

I mean the Dissenting denominations; we have them almost en masse, both

ministers and laymen; and I believe the only body against us, as a body, are

the members of the Church of England.

Finally, he practically identified the middle class with Dissent, and

acknowledged their common interest in non-violent agitation:

We have carried it on by those means by which the middle class usually

carries on its movements. We have had our meeting of Dissenting

ministers; we have obtained the co-operation of the ladies, we have

resorted to [tea?] parties, and taken those pacific means for carrying out

our views which mark us as a middle-class set of agitators.

The League was not always so peaceable, either in words or in deeds. Cobden’s

meeting of Dissenting ministers, at Manchester in July 1841, heard some very

unclerical language about ‘round-bellied bishops’, ‘sleek, meek, well-fed

ecclesiastics’, and ‘holy men, who luxuriate in the embraces of the national harlot’.

Cobden himself organized, through Edwin Watkin, later the railway magnate, a

body of strong-arm men to beat the Chartist hecklers at their own game.

Yet

there is not much doubt that Dissent taught the League a great deal about non-

violent agitation, and the concessions which ‘pacific means’ wrung from a still

Ibid., p. 66–7, 72–3; Cowherd, op. cit., pp. 94–5, 155–7.

Briggs, ‘Language of Class’, loc. cit., p. 59.

Cobden to Bright, 12 May 1842; McCord, op. cit., p 26.

Cowherd, op. cit., p. 131.

288 RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY

aristocratic Parliament certainly helped to reconcile the middle class to the

political system.

We might also fairly claim that Dissent taught the middle class the need to

come to terms with the working class, at least on the political plane. The

Complete Suffrage movement of 1841–42, led by the Birmingham Quaker

Joseph Sturge and the Congregationalist editor of the Nonconformist Edward

Miall, was an attempt to unite the middle- and working-class Radicals, the Anti-

Corn Law Leaguers and the Chartists, in a campaign for everything in the

Charter except the name. If it failed on this single point, it also hammered home

the wedge between the protagonists of physical and moral force which finally

split the movement and rendered it impotent—a disservice perhaps to the

working-class movement, but a step on the way to social peace.

Ultimately, however, Dissent was not the middle class, for just as Dissent was

wider than the middle class, so the middle class was wider than Dissent. The

political dissidence of Dissent went beyond that of its middle-class allies, and

indeed in the 1840’s went to such extremes in its attack on the Church that it

alienated many of them and helped to prevent the very thing it hoped to create, a

separate middle-class political party. For four years, between 1843 and 1847, it

looked as if a third force in the House of Commons might coagulate around the

Dissenters, united as they had never been before, for now they had the

Wesleyans and the Roman Catholics with them too.

The occasion was the

victory of the non-Anglicans over Sir James Graham’s Factory Education Bill of

1843, which marked the high-water mark of the Church’s highly successful

counter-attack. Having saved itself by internal reforms in the 1830’s from the

threat of reform from without, it now set out to reassert its rights as the

Established Church of the whole nation, and especially its right to control all

education provided by the State. The ensuing outcry, in the form of public

meetings and massive petitions, not by unenfranchised Chartists but by solid

citizens with votes, stopped the Bill in its tracks. Its defeat began the Victorian

deadlock in educational policy: in Lord Ashley’s words, ‘The Dissenters and the

Church have each laid down their limits which they will not pass, and there is no

power that can either force, persuade or delude them.’

But the Dissenters, swollen with triumph, tried to exploit their victory. Led by

Edward Miall and Edward Baines they set out to create a middle-class Dissenting

party, uniting the platforms of the League and the Anti-State Church

Association:

free trade, Church disestablishment, complete suffrage, and

Voluntaryism’ (no State aid) in education. In the 1847 general election they

rejected both Conservatives and Whigs as belonging to the same aristocratic party

—‘so far as we are concerned, they are one’

—and managed to defeat not only a

few aristocrats but some of their own best friends, such as Macaulay and

Anti-Bread Tax Circular, 8 September 1842.

McCord, op. cit., pp. 26–7, 97.

RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY 289

Roebuck. The net result was a slight gain in Dissenting representation, at the cost

of alienating not only the Whigs but the secular Radicals as well. As the 1847

edition of the Black Book put it, ‘Why…should the pastors of any sect meddle

with politics, least of all the Dissenters, who are notoriously men of narrow

minds and intolerant conclusions’

Far from uniting the middle class, the

resulting ‘party’—twenty-six Dissenting M.P.s, sixty in all pledged to Church

disestablishment

— divided it. Dissent, itself fragmented into endless sects,

helped to fragment still further the middle-class political effort and foreshadowed

the secular failure of Cobden and Bright, which left it no alternative but to exist

as the divided left wing of the Liberal Party.

Yet even this was a contribution to the rise of a viable class society. Though

there were also material reasons why the middle class should prefer to be

represented in Parliament by upper-class politicians—notably the lack of leisure

of the owner-managing capitalist at the crucial period of his career—the main

legacy of Old Dissent to the Victorian middle class was the habit of voting

Liberal. Thus Old Dissent carried over to the new class society an element of the

‘interest’ politics of the old society. And that element was to be one of the major

factors in the political harmony of the viable class society.

The connection between Methodism and the working-class movements of the

early nineteenth century could not by its nature be so direct as that between Old

Dissent and middle class. Since the main body of Wesleyans, like Wesley

himself, were staunch Tories at the opposite political pole from the working-

class Radicals, historians have taken opposite views about what the connection

was and how it worked. On the one side, Halévy saw in Methodism the ‘key to

the problem’ of ‘the extraordinary stability which English Society was destined

to enjoy through a period of revolutions and crises’, partly through its influence

via Evangelicalism on social reform, but mainly by its mollifying influence on the

working-class movement.

On the other, Eric Hobsbawm and Edward Thompson

argue that the Tory Wesleyans were far too few to make a decisive difference,

though after that point they diverge. While Hobsbawm believes that the seceding

Methodist sects, the Kilhamites, the Primitive Methodists, the Bryanites or Bible

Christians, and so on, were more Radical and provided political and industrial

leadership, Thompson thinks it ‘ridiculous to describe the participation of

Cf. Gash, Reaction and Reconstruction, pp. 86–8, 100–6.

C.S.Parker, Life of Sir James Graham (1907), I. 345.

Formed in 1844 out of the Church Rates Abolition Society.

Eclectic Review, 1847, XXII. 365: ‘We have learned to walk alone and shall not

contentedly sink again into bondage. Whig and Tory have hitherto been charmed words,

but their spell is dissolved, their power is broken.’

op. cit., p. vii.

Cowherd, op. cit., p. 163.

Halévy, op. cit., I. 387.

290 RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY

rebellious Methodist lay preachers and others in extreme Radical agitations as a

“Methodist contribution” to the working-class movement’

In a paradoxical way, both sides are right. The key to the paradox is the dynamic

migration made by so many working men in the early nineteenth century which

we noticed in Chapter VI, from Wesleyanism (more often than not after leaving

the Church of England) through one or more of the more Radical Methodist sects

to secular Radicalism and spiritualism, religious indifference or militant atheism.

Whether they remained Tory because they were Wesleyans, or Wesleyan

because they were Tories, those who did not migrate were, as Halévy shows, a

stabilizing influence, in that they provided an alternative, highly-charged,

emotional pole towards which a much larger part of the working class than were

Methodists at any one time might be diverted from political or industrial protest.

Whether those who migrated did so because they were Radicals or became

Radicals as a result of migrating, the Methodists of the smaller seceding sects, as

Hobsbawm shows, had an influence out of all proportion to their numbers on the

leadership and organization of the political and industrial working-class

movements, particularly in certain areas of the country. And whether we call it a

Methodist contribution or not, the ex-Methodist political and industrial leaders,

however militant or rebellious, made a contribution to political and social

stability which was even more important than that of the Wesleyans. As

Thompson shows, ‘the Methodist political rebel carried through into his radical

or revolutionary activity a profound moral earnestness, a sense of righteousness

and of “calling”, a “Methodist” capacity for sustained organizational dedication

and (at its best) a high degree of personal responsibility’

Trained in oratory,

initiative and organization, lay preachers naturally gravitated to the leadership of

any movement they joined. As leaders they saw and taught the value of clear aims,

sound discipline and solid organization which, even when the aims were illegal

and potentially violent, avoided the sporadic, unthinking, unorganized, riotous

violence of the old society, and created an institutional framework for the non-

violent forms of conflict, protest and demonstration characteristic of a viable

class society. The institutionalization and non-violent expression of working-

class discontent was a far more penetrating contribution to social peace than the

pouring of a small amount of Wesleyan oil on the troubled waters of the class

struggle.

Of the Toryism of the Wesleyans, from Wesley himself to Jabez Bunting, who

dominated the Connexion during the critical years of class conflict, there can be

no doubt. The annual Conference and the Committee of Privileges never ceased

to denounce the Radical societies and their ‘tumultous assemblies …calculated,

E.J.Hobsbawm, ‘Methodism and the Threat of Revolution in Britain’, in Labouring Men

(1964), pp. 23–33; E.P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), p.

394.

Ibid., p. 394.

RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY 291

both from the infidel principles, the wild and delusive political theories, and the

violent and inflammatory declamations…to bring all government into contempt,

and to introduce universal discontent, insubordination, and anarchy,’ and to

extrude brethren such as Thomas Cooper and J.R. Stephens if they took too

active a share in Radical politics of the left or the right.

The only question is

whether it was effective as an anti-revolutionary force. The statistical evidence is

necessarily equivocal. On the one hand, the original Connexion always had more

members than all the seceding congregations put together.

On the other,

Methodists of all kinds were never more than a fraction of the working class—

under one in four of church attenders in 1851, and on the most generous estimate

not more than the same proportion of the working class

—and the Wesleyans,

with at best one in eight of the working-class population, needed to reach large

numbers to make their message of political quietism effective. The best

evidence, however, comes from their opponents. It was not for nothing that

Cobbett and the Radicals singled out the Wesleyan ministers as the ‘bitterest foes

of freedom in England’.

They recognized in them their deadliest rivals for the

hearts and minds not merely of the working class as a whole but for the relatively

small élite of intelligent, talented, morally passionate men who were the natural

leaders of the class.

Perhaps the most insidious way in which Wesleyanism, and indeed some of

the seceding sects as they grew older and the fire went out of their bellies,

undermined working-class Radicalism was by their worldly success in

demonstrating the entrepreneurial ideal of the self-made man. Wesley himself

had warned his followers in a famous passage:

religion must necessarily produce both industry and frugality, and these

cannot but produce riches. But as riches increase, so will pride, and anger,

and love of the world…the Methodists in every place grow diligent and

frugal; consequently they increase in goods…. So, although the form of

religion remains, the spirit is swiftly vanishing away.

This proved to be prophetic. By the 1850’s a Wesleyan historian could claim that

Methodism had raised many a rich man from squalid poverty: ‘It was she that

saved him from rags—put him on his feet—gave him a character, and placed him

Methodist Committee of Privileges, 1819, T.P.Bunting, Life of Jabez Bunting (1887), p.

528; Life of Thomas Cooper, written by Himself (1873), pp. 100–1; G.J.Holyoake, Life of

J.R.Stephens (1881), pp. 50–3.

E.g. in 1851 the Wesleyans made 1,544,528 attendances, the other Methodist sects 1,

182,579—Census of England and Wales, 1851, Religious Worship, pp. clxxxiif.

In 1851 c. 1.8 million out of c. 7.9 million attenders (two-thirds of attendances);

allowing, on Mann’s estimate, p. cxxf., that only 58 per cent could attend at any one time,

this represented at most c. 3 million Methodists (not all working-class) out of a total

working-class population in England and Wales of c. 14 million.

292 RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY

in the path of industry in which he has found both affluence and position.’ He

also admitted that ‘we have not taken hold of the poorest— we have not reached

the outcast and dregs of society.’ ‘What a host of noble lay members have proved

that “godliness is profitable in all things”,’ a minister wrote in 1866, but added,

‘Gold comes in at one door, and Grace is driven out at another.’ By the last

quarter of the century the Methodist Times no longer thought of Wesleyanism as

a mainly working-class religion: ‘It is evident at once that Methodism has been

much too exclusively the sect of the lower middle class’; ‘we make the pulpit

and the pew too much a middle-class monopoly.’ And a Wesleyan baronet could

boast:

The Methodist people are said to be a thrifty, saving, and sober people: we

know that many of them are captains of industry in the great commercial

life of the land. Some of them are millionaires.

How many potential revolutionaries had been diverted meanwhile into the path of

social ambition it is impossible to calculate.

Nevertheless, a great many potential Wesleyan ministers and captains of

industry had been diverted into the paths of working-class agitation, as the

Wesleyan leaders admitted by their constant denunciations, ‘expostulations’, and

expulsions. A correspondent of Bunting’s wrote from Newcastle in 1816 about

two local preachers who had attended a Radical mass meeting at North Shields:

I hope no considerable portion of our brethren is found among the

Radicals; but a small number of our leaders are among the most

determined friends to their spirit and design…and some of the really pious,

misguided sisterhood have helped to make the colours.

His hope was forlorn. Large numbers of Wesleyans—or rather, since few of them

waited for ‘expostulation’ or expulsion, ex-Wesleyans—like Samuel Bamford,

William Lovett, and Joseph Barker, threw themselves into the working-class

movement, appearing there mainly as members of the seceding sects, or simply

as secular Radicals.

The Methodists and ex-Methodists from whatever Connexion brought great

powers of charismatic leadership to the working-class political societies and

Political Register, 3 January 1824.

R.Southey, Life of Wesley (1925), II. 306.

J.B.Dyson, The History of Wesleyan Methodism in the Congleton Circuit (1856), p. 178;

‘A Wesleyan Minister’, Temporal Prosperity and Spiritual Decline (1886), pp. 16, 18;

Methodist Times, 19 August 1886, 4 February 1897; Sir Robert Perks, in Methodist

Recorder, 3 February 1898; Inglis, op. cit., pp. 9, 86.

RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY 293