Perkin Harold. The Origins of Modern English Society

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they lacked the numbers to overawe or the M.P.s to outvote the aristocracy. They

did so on principle and out of policy. Attwood and the Parliamentary Reformers

set out ‘to form a GENERAL POLITICAL UNION between the Lower and

Middle Classes of the People.’

Chartism began as an attempt by Place and the

Parliamentary Radicals to strengthen their following out of doors.

The Anti-

Corn Law League assiduously wooed the working class with Radical speeches

and verses, special working-class lectures, and Operative Anti-Corn Law

Associations, as well as by the attempt to ally with the Chartists in the Complete

Suffrage movement.

It might be argued from such evidence that they were

therefore not simply middle-class but joint middle- and working-class

institutions, but this would be to mistake the nature of class politics. Every class

political movement, if it wishes to succeed in a multi-class society, must

persuade as large a fraction of the society as possible to accept its views. The

middle-class Parliamentary Reformers made no concession whatever to the

demands of their working-class allies. Universal manhood suffrage they

eschewed, or consigned to a distant future, as a threat to property and capital.

Place used all his immense political skill and cunning to isolate the Rotunda

Radicals and deprive them of influence in the National Political Union. He had a

bad conscience about it, and salved it by refusing to regard the Bill as a final

measure:

The working people would see in the proceeding the old desire to use them

for a purpose and then to abandon them.

But he more than anyone else helped the middle-class Radicals to use them to

obtain the Reform Bill and then to abandon them.

To Place’s credit, he did not abandon them himself. He it was who, after the

failure of Owenite alternatives to capitalism—the labour exchange scheme and

the general syndicalist strike— brought together the Parliamentary Radicals and

the London Working-Men’s Association and wrote, or helped Lovett to write,

the People’s Charter.

Attwood too tried to revive the old Birmingham alliance

on the basis of the Charter. But class ideals are more powerful than personalities.

Attwood and the other middle-class Chartists could not carry the middle class

Hansard, 1829, III. 1029.

Wallas, Place, p. 322.

McCord, op. cit., pp. 111, 122–4, 128–31.

Briggs, Chartist Studies, p. 365.

See below, § 3.

A.Briggs, ‘Middle-Class Consciousness in English Politics, 1780–1846’, Past and

Present, 1956, IX. 65.

Wallas, Place, pp. 359–69.

304 RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY

generally behind a programme of manhood suffrage backed by threats of

violence, the working-class Radicals refused to be gulled again by a mixed

programme of currency and other reforms designed, they feared, to kill manhood

suffrage by compromise, and within the first twelve months most of the

Attwoodites resigned and Chartism, in spite of its middle-class demagogues,

became an overwhelmingly working-class movement. Joseph Sturge’s attempt to

unite the two classes behind the Complete Suffrage movement in 1841–42

rapidly met the same fate: the middle-class members would not have the name

‘Charter’, and the working-class would not have them without it.

As for the

Anti-Corn Law League itself, as Cobden wrote at about the same time,

I don’t deny that the working classes generally have attended our lectures

and signed our petitions; but I will admit, that so far as the fervour and

efficiency of our agitation has gone, it has eminently been a middle-class

agitation….

Now, our business is, first to show the working men that the question of

wages is a question depending altogether on principles apart from party

politics…that if we had the Charter tomorrow the principles which govern

the relations between masters and men would be precisely the same as they

are now….

In other words, middle-class institutions would accept working-class support

only on their own terms, and without abandoning any part of their ideal.

On the other side, the middle-class reformers were equally led by the politics

of persuasion to woo the ruling class. The extra-parliamentary pressure group

was in itself a mark of the transitional character of class institutions at this period.

As we saw under the role of religion, above, there is a continuity of evolution

from the interest group of the old society to the class movement of the new.

Leaving Dissent aside, a clear line of development runs from the campaign against

the Orders in Council in 1812 to the Anti-Corn Law agitation. If the first was an

old society interest group lobbying an aristocratic government for relief but

concealing an element of class antagonism, the second was a class movement

Lucy Brown, ‘The Chartists and the Anti-Corn Law League’, in Briggs, ed., Chartist

Studies, esp. pp. 344, 355–6, 363–6.

Wallas, Place, pp. 281–5, 288.

Ibid., p. 367; contrast Lovett, op. cit., pp. 164–5; for a modern discussion of the

authorship of the Charter, which concludes in favour of Place’s claim, see D.J. Rowe,

‘The London Working Men’s Association and the “People’s Charter”’, Past and Present,

1967, No. 36, pp. 73f.

RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY 305

demanding justice from an aristocratic parliament but forced by the lack of

political power to adopt the tactics of an interest group.

The difference lies in which strand was uppermost, the old warp of interest or

the new weft of class. The critical test is their ideal of society and how it should

be governed. While the first accepted the old hierarchical society and the

aristocracy’s right to rule it, merely asking that it should rule equitably as

between the various interests, the second rejected that right and tried, by means

such as the creation of forty-shilling freehold votes, to end it. If the League was

forced to pursue interest politics, it did so with a significant inversion. It was the

landed class in its view which was the interest—in class terms the ‘selfish’ or

‘sinister’ interest—maintaining a privileged monopoly at the expense of the rest

of the community, while the League stood for a class, and one which had the

same interests as all the producers and consumers, and therefore of the whole

community. As Cobden was to put it some years later, the middle class ‘have no

interest opposed to the general good, whilst, on the contrary, the feudal

governing class exists only by a violation of sound principles of political

economy.’

This was a complete inversion of old society interest politics, in

which the aristocracy was the master interest at the head of all the other interests,

the representative and custodian of the overriding national interest. The League’s

strategy was to isolate it and narrow it down to a mere agricultural interest, and

one shorn if possible even of the support of the farmers and farm labourers. It is

a curious irony that if the premise had been true the strategy would not have

worked. The corn laws were repealed only because Peel and the aristocracy rose

above their agricultural interest and acted, in traditional style, as custodians of

the national interest.

It was clearly more than that, however. To see the national interest as requiring

their own loss of privilege and income went far beyond the demands of old

society interest politics. It is true that Peel and many other landlords had made

their calculations, and discovered that, with improved methods of high farming,

free trade need not be disastrous, but no calculation could make it free of risk or

costs.

It is also true that many of the larger as distinct from the smaller

landowners drew a considerable part of their incomes from non-agricultural

sources. But in practically no case did the industrial and commercial part

outweigh the agricultural.

Repeal was thus tantamount to accepting the middle-

class view of the national interest, which placed the needs of consumers and the

prosperity of producers before the unearned incomes of the landlords, or at any

M.Hovell, The Chartist Movement (Manchester, 1959), pp. 242–50, 264–5.

Anti-Bread Tax Circular, 8 September 1842.

J.Morley, Life of Cobden, (1903), p. 860.

Cf. D.C.Moore, ‘The Corn Laws and High Farming’, and S.Fairlie, ‘The 19th-century

Corn Law Reconsidered’, Ec.H.R., 1965, XVIII. 544f., and 562f.; but see below, chap. x,

§ 1, for the comparative decline of agricultural real rentals in the period of high farming.

306 RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY

rate saw the last as secondary to and dependent upon the other two. Whether we

call this a Victory of the middle class’ or ‘a concession by the aristocracy’, a

‘timely retreat’ to insure the continuation of aristocratic rule,

scarcely matters.

The important question is, aristocratic rule upon whose terms?

This question helps to resolve the final paradox of the political

institutionalization of the middle class, the fact that it survived and indeed

thrived upon the successive extinction of most of the specifically middle-class

institutions. Victory in each ephemeral campaign, for Parliamentary Reform, the

abolition of Church rates, the repeal of the corn laws, the abrogation of ‘taxes on

knowledge’, and so on, promptly led to the disbandment of the army, and a new

one had to be recruited when the next campaign was launched. Even failure, as in

the case of the Complete Suffrage movement, or only partial success, as with the

Financial Reform Associations of 1849–52, seems to have had much the same

effect, since pressure groups of this kind were designed for blitzkrieger, win, lose

or draw. Meanwhile, the troops defected in large numbers, since each victory

satiated and each failure or stalemate wearied a fraction of the middle-class

dissidents, who henceforth found a political home in one of the traditional

parties, and refused to be recruited for the next campaign. Cobden and Bright,

for example, were never again able to recruit more than a fraction of the

League’s men and resources for their later campaigns for public education,

financial and parliamentary reform, and ‘free trade in land’. The reason for this

they found, like Bagehot, in deference: ‘We are a servile, aristocracy-loving,

lord-ridden people, who regard the land with as much reverence as we still do the

peerage and baronetage’

It is true that the 1850’s and 1860’s saw a revival of the language of deference

and of the pejorative use of ‘class’, as in ‘class prejudices’ and ‘class

legislation’, and the sub-divisions within classes and the many rungs on the social

ladder were given a new emphasis. Yet, as Asa Briggs points out, this revival

was superficial, and it is important to get below the surface to the reality it

concealed.

What Bagehot was trying to explain at bottom was why the

electorate remained predominantly middle-class, and why that electorate

continued to choose a predominantly aristocratic Parliament and Cabinet. In

‘deferential nations’, Bagehot suggested, the numerical majority ‘abdicates in

favour of its élite, and consents to obey whoever that élite may confide in,’ and

this educated minority prefers to choose its legislators from ‘the highest classes’.

But he was in no doubt about where political power resided: ‘The middle classes

—the ordinary majority of educated men—are in the present day the despotic

power in England.’

Cf. F.M.L.Thompson, op. cit., pp. 266–7; D.Spring, ‘Earl Fitzwilliam and the Corn

Laws’, J.Mod.H., 1954, LIX. 287.

G.Kitson Clark, ‘The Repeal of the Corn Laws and the Politics of the Forties’, Ec.H.R.,

1951, IV. 12.

RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY 307

Similarly, the pejorative use of class—the historian of the Anti-Corn Law

League on ‘a cruel subjection to class interests’, Carlyle on ‘class legislation’,

Gladstone on ‘the narrow and oblique purposes of class…pursued by

Parliaments in the choice of which the upper orders had it all their own way’

—

was directed against the landed class, not against the class which now dominated

legislation. And the emphasis on the many-runged social ladder sprang from the

concern with social mobility which was nearer the heart of the middle-class than

of the aristocratic ideal, and was the salvation and justification of the new class

society: for the aristocratic ideal it was a prop and support, for the middle class

the main pillar of the house. Social climbing, according to Cobden, was the

ultimate reason why the men who had fought aristocratic privilege would not

attack aristocracy itself, in the shape of the system of land tenure:

Public opinion is either indifferent or favourable to the system of large

properties kept together by entail. If you want a proof, see how every

successful trader buys an estate, and tries to perpetuate his name in

connexion with ‘that ilk’ by creating an eldest son.

Nor was this tenderness towards the aristocracy as distinct from their privileges a

product of mid-Victorian ‘prosperity’. Alexis de Tocqueville discovered it,

somewhat to his surprise, as early as 1833:

So, too, if you speak to a member of the middle classes; you will find that

he hates some aristocrats but not the aristocracy. On the contrary, he is

himself full of aristocratic prejudices….

It is not rare to hear an Englishman complain of the extension of

aristocratic privileges and to speak with bitterness of those who exploit

them; but come to tell him the one way to destroy the aristocracy, which is

to change the law of inheritance, and he will draw back at once…. Thus it

is true that there is hatred of aristocrats, but public opinion is far from

envisaging the destruction of the aristocracy.

The main prerequisite of viable class relations, the belief that class conflict is not

a war to the death but a limited contest for power and income between opponents

who recognize each other’s right to exist, was accepted by the English middle

Morley, Cobden, p. 518.

Cf. Briggs, ‘Language of Class’, loc. cit., pp. 69–73.

W.Bagehot, The English Constitution (World’s Classics, 1958), p. 235.

A Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn Law League (1853), II. 444; Carlyle, Past and

Present (1893 ed.), p. 27; W.E.Gladstone, ‘Last Words on the Franchise’, The 19th

Century, 1878, quoted by A.Arnold, Free Land (1880), pp. 183–4.

308 RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY

class as far as the aristocracy was concerned—though not, as we shall see, by the

organized working class—the moment the Reform Bill was passed.

At the same time, too, began that drift of the middle class into support of the

existing political parties which frustrated Cobden and Bright and rejoiced

Bagehot. J.S.Mill and Roebuck told de Tocqueville in 1835:

all the upper class and a large part of the middle class, as you said just now,

has [sic] already gone over to the Tories: one section of the middle class,

which is nearest to the people, is daily going over.

More objective evidence, such as it is for this period, shows, as one would

expect, that urban middle-class electors divided their votes, not equally but with

a surprising lack of discrimination, between Liberals and Conservatives. The

Rochdale poll books of 1841 and 1857 show them both drawing votes from

every sub-class and almost every separate occupation, the Liberals gaining

substantial but not overwhelming majorities of the textile interest, the retailers

and the (largely self-employed) craftsmen, the Conservatives similar majorities of

the commercial and professional men and ‘capitalists’. The only sub-class to

show an overwhelming bias in favour of one party was the drink trade, and that

only in 1857 when they swung four to one against Edward Miall, the militant

Dissenter.

At first sight, this readiness to vote almost indiscriminately for the existing

parties would seem to give the lie to class politics and to argue a rapprochement

between the middle class and the aristocracy which overrode the interests of

class. But this only brings us back to the key question, rapprochement on whose

terms? The middle class, it appears, was reconciled to the existing parties only in

proportion as the latter accepted the principal tenets of the middle-class ideal.

We have already seen, in a general way, how that ideal won the battle for the

State and came to dominate Government policy and legislation.

Now we must

see, more particularly, how it captured the minds, or at least the public personae,

of the party leaders, and came to be institutionalized in the parties themselves,

ultimately, though by no means inevitably, in the Liberal Party.

By this it is not meant that the two parties became stereotyped and exclusive

class institutions, the Conservatives the party of the landed interest and

protection, the Liberals the party of industrialism and free trade. Class politics in

Victorian England were more complex than that, and each party stood for more

than one economic interest. Both were primarily constitutional and religious

rather than economic and social institutions, the Conservatives the party of order

and stability, of authority and the High Church, the Liberals the party of progress

Morley, Cobden, p. 561.

Tocqueville, op. cit., pp. 70–1.

Ibid., p. 86.

RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY 309

and reform, of the Low Church and Dissent.

But in order to gain and hold

power, their rival and equally aristocratic leaders were forced to come to terms with

and increasingly to satisfy the aspirations of those who voted for them. It

mattered little that the leaders did not belong to the middle class, or share by

birth, education, occupation or source of income these aspirations. On the

contrary, the fact that the most brilliant and intuitive leaders were more

concerned with what they believed to be the national interest than with the

immediate economic advantage of any single class, including their own, made

them all the quicker to respond to the demands of whichever class could

successfully present its own aspirations as the manifest common sense of the

age.

In the aristocratic competition to express the sublimated middle-class interest

disguised as the spirit of the age, the Liberals with their traditional alliance with

the urban middle class and identification with reform held all the cards, but

mismanaged them so badly that they nearly threw the game away. It was two

supremely patrician Tories—with, it is true, personal advantages of their own in

their family connections with the industrial and commercial middle class—who,

almost in spite of themselves, came most closely to personify the middle-class

ideal. Peel, indeed, sacrified his party—and thereby saved the Liberals—by

doing so. Gladstone, having inherited Peel’s mantle and carried it with him into

the Liberal Party, found it, to his own surprise, to be the aegis of the symbolic

representative not so much of the middle class as of the middle-class civilization

of mid-Victorian England.

Peel never ceased to be a landed aristocrat, with all the pride in his order and

prickly sense of honour of the second-generation new man, but his flirtation with

the middle-class ideal began before the Reform Act, with his tacit acceptance of

the whole canon of classical political economy and Benthamite administrative

theory as revealed in his and Huskisson’s tariff policies and his own police and

penal reforms. It was not at this early stage, perhaps, a personal affair, but part of

the general capitulation of progressive Tories to the charms of Utilitarianism

which we explored in Chapter VI. Peel differed from the rest only in

administrative ability and quickness of apprehension of the higher expediency of

safeguarding aristocratic rule by organic reform. Having broken off the suit by

his rejection of the crude surgery of the Reform Bill, he was forced to re-create

the relationship during the long years in opposition and the few brilliant

reforming years in office. Meanwhile, the vacillating Whigs, who could never

make up their minds whether they were a patrician or a popular party, held the

middle-class reformers at arms’ length and almost forced them into the arms of

J.Vincent, The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1857–68 (1966), pp. 97–8, 105–8, 116–

18.

See chap. viii, § 3, above.

Cf. Gash, Reaction and Reconstruction, pp. 128–30.

310 RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY

Peel, whose fiscal policies and other reforms seemed to promise them all that the

Whigs had refused.

By 1845 Cobden had transferred his hopes from Russell

—‘Now I am convinced past all change that he is not the man to do our work’—

to his rival—‘The thing is going fast, and Peel is the man to give us free trade.’

At the end Peel represented middle-class feeling on repeal of the corn laws more

accurately than the League:

the fact is the feeling is so strong among the middle class everywhere

(excepting the Council Room) in favour of the measure, that it would not

be good policy to deny its merits….

As Cobden expressed it after Peel’s death and before Gladstone emerged as the

apotheosis of the Zeitgeist, Peel represented ‘the idea of the age, and it has no

other representative among statesmen’

Peel’s gratuitous act—for he was fully aware that repeal of the corn laws was

irrelevant to the ostensible cause, the Irish famine, and he was certainly not

forced to accept the poisoned chalice from Russell—achieved what the League

had failed to do, that is, to reduce the landed interest as represented by the Tory

Party to a mere agricultural, protectionist interest. The chief beneficiary was the

Liberal Party, which as a result enjoyed twenty-eight years of power, all but a

few months of them in office. The first half of that period presents the curious

spectacle of a vast reserve of middle-class adulation looking for a leader to fasten

on to. Lord John Russell was too timid or too unimaginative to accept it when

offered, as at Sheffield in 1857. Palmerston, with the cynical detachment of the

cool patrician, called on it to rescue him from a political corner, as in the Don

Pacifico debate, but otherwise disdained to traffic out of doors.

Finally it

fastened, somewhat surprisingly, on the at first sight unpromising figure of

Gladstone.

An austere, High Church landowner whose personal ideal was the old rural

social order of ‘kindly and intimate relations between the higher and the lower

classes’, who to the end of his life believed in ‘the conservation of estates, and the

permanence of the families in possession of them, as a principal source of our

social strength, and as a large part of true conservatism’, ‘a firm believer in the

aristocratic principle—the rule of the best’ and ‘an out and out inequalitarian’,

Gladstone was no more cut out to be the idol of the middle class than Peel.

Indeed, it was not until after 1859 when as Chancellor of the Exchequer he took

up again Peel’s unfinished work of giving the middle class what they wanted—

complete free trade, the repeal of the taxes on knowledge, cheap, efficient

Cf. ibid., pp. 184–9.

McCord, op. cit., pp. 195,202–3 (Cobden to J.B.Smith and to George Wilson).

Vincent, op. cit., p. 201 (Cobden to Baines, 11 April 1857).

Cf. ibid., pp. 143–9.

RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY 311

government, and peace with France—that he found popularity thrust upon him.

‘I am become for the first time a popular character,’ he wrote in 1864. ‘As far as

I feel justified in appropriating and enjoying any of this popularity, it is on

account of what I did, or prevented from being done, in 1859–61….’

He was

feted in Liverpool, Manchester, Tyneside, Stoke and Middlesbrough, and

importuned to stand for South Lancashire, Leeds and other industrial

constituencies. What the industrialists and merchants applauded in him was the

personification of middle-class aims, free trade, peace and economic progress,

pursued by the same laissez-faire policies which had covered Bootle with ‘the

houses of thinking citizens’: ‘the beneficial legislation which has struck the

fetters from the arms of human industry.’

It is true that Gladstone, with his mercurial—or brilliantly opportunist—mind

and his intuitive grasp of the slightest shift in the centre of gravity of politics,

claimed to stand for other groups besides the middle class: for the aristocracy,

the Church, Dissent, and, from the moment their enfranchisement was seriously

in question, for the working-class as well. To his admirers he was all things to all

classes; to his enemies, ‘the prince of the humbugs of the present day’.

His

concern for the working class, as well as for the Irish, was later to alienate many

of his middle-class followers. But meanwhile, until the 1880’s certainly, his

policies were those which the middle class would have pursued for themselves if

they could have found in their midst a leader as appealing and representative as

Gladstone.

Thus it was through identification with Gladstone and his policies that a large

part of the Victorian middle class came to institutionalize themselves in the

Liberal Party—though a smaller, if increasing, party identified with his

Conservative opponents. He had not chosen them: they had chosen him, and

their faith in him lasted no longer than the policies by which he deserved it.

Already in the mid-Victorian age there were the first signs of that drift of

business men to the Tory Party which in the last twenty years of the century was

to change the social structure of English politics. That drift can be traced in part

to a further change in the representative character of the Protean Gladstone and

the Liberal Party, as a result of bringing within the pale of the constitution both

the British working class and the Irish peasantry. But, as we shall see in the final

chapter, it had even more to do with the change in the character of the middle class

F.E.Hyde, Mr. Gladstone at the Board of Trade (1934), p. 11; J.Morley, Life of

Gladstone (1901), I. 347; L.March-Phillips and B.Christian, Some Hawarden Letters

(1917), p. 37; Vincent, op. cit., p. 212.

i.e. the Anglo-French trade treaty and prevention of war with France; Gladstone to

A.H.Gordon, 1864, Vincent, op. cit., p. 229.

W.E.Williams, The Rise of Gladstone to the Leadership of the Liberal Party, 1859–68

(1934), p. 169; Vincent, op. cit., p. 220.

Manchester Courier and Advertiser, 10 June 1865.

312 RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY

and the decline of the entrepreneurial ideal. Meanwhile, as long as

entrepreneurial society lasted in a form still recognizably true to its ideal, it

found its chief political expression in Gladstone and the Liberal Party.

There was another set of institutions which embodied the industrial middle

class and its ideal for the purposes of conflict: the employers’ associations. But,

since these were called into existence only in response to the challenge of the

trade unions, they can best be dealt with in connection with the

institutionalization of the working class.

THE INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF THE WORKING

CLASS

If the key to the rise of a viable class society was the imposition on the rest of

society of the major middle-class ideal, one of the locks into which it fitted was

the rise of working-class institutions willing to acquiesce in that ideal. This

development was all the more remarkable since, with some important

exceptions, nearly all the institutions generated by the workers themselves, as

distinct from those provided for them by the other classes, were founded for the

express purpose of opposing that ideal. The transformation of institutions aimed

at checking or reducing the power of the capitalist class and modifying or

replacing the competitive system, into ones which accepted the new class society

and merely sought to improve the worker’s place in it, tended to follow one or

both of two evolutionary lines. One of these may be called education by failure,

that is, the acceptance born of the frustration, deadlock, or diversion into

unintended paths, of institutions built for class antagonism and steered on

collision courses with the declared intention of forcing a battle. The other may be

called education by success, the internal adaptation of institutions formed for

opting out of the competitive system to a highly successful modus vivendi within

it. The first was the path mainly taken by the overtly revolutionary working-class

bodies, the abortive general unions and the physical-force Chartists; the second,

by the covertly revolutionary co-operative movement and the moral-force

Chartists, and, less obviously, by the unrevolutionary craft, factory and mining

unions.

There was, of course, one group of working-class institutions, and that the

largest of all, which went through neither evolution, since they were founded

from the beginning as instruments of working-class amelioration within the

existing social system. These were the friendly societies, which came to embrace

a larger proportion of the working class than any other institution and can

therefore be considered the most typical of all working-class bodies formed to

respond to the problems of industrialism. They grew most rapidly in the period

and in the areas of fastest industrial growth, their membership increasing from

under a million in 1815 to over three million in 1849 and to an estimated four

million in 1872, heavily concentrated throughout in Lancashire, Yorkshire, and

RISE OF A VIABLE CLASS SOCIETY 313