A History of Britain, Volume 3 (23 page)

Likewise the Manchester oligarchs – cotton masters and bankers like the Gregs, Heywoods and Potters – who ran the city, who had cleared out its centre to build their swaggering neo-classical warehouses, made no bones about the fact that their first, in fact their supreme obligation was to the profitability of their business. It was from this, and only from this, that the welfare of the workers could be augmented. If the vagaries of the business cycle (like the collapse of foreign demand in the first five years of Victoria’s reign) required wage cuts or lay-offs so that the firm might survive, who ever said capitalism was a funfair or a hand-out? If they thought the situation was dire now, let them see how much worse it could be if mills were to go under because of the ‘blackmail’ of high wages and demands for shorter hours! As far as the bosses were concerned, trade unions were nothing more than conspiratorial extortionists and saboteurs who would rather see legitimate business concerns fail than relinquish control over the gullible. Besides, they said, if the price of bread was too high it was undoubtedly the fault of the wicked Corn Laws, established to protect the ‘landed interest’ from the proper workings of the free market, which otherwise would have imported cheaper foreign grain. If the mill hands wanted to do something constructive about the earning power of their wages, they could do nothing better than join the great middle-class crusade of the Anti-Corn Law campaign, whose temple was the Manchester Free Trade Hall.

A few leaders of the working people of industrial Britain believed in self-improvement through education, temperance and religion, and for a while flirted with the possibility of some sort of broad middle- and working-class alliance. More of those leaders, however, remained deeply suspicious, believing that the abolition of the Corn Laws and the arrival of cheaper grain, flour and bread would just be a pretext for employers to lower wages further. Only if the mass of working men (women were only rarely an issue, despite the fact that they were very active in the movement, especially in Scotland and Lancashire) were granted the vote, only if a true democracy were created, could they be sure that ‘reforms’ would not be the means of even greater exploitation by the masters. James Bronterre O’Brien, the editor of the
Poor Man’s Guardian
, put the matter succinctly: ‘Knaves tell you that it is because you have no property that you are unrepresented. I tell you, on the contrary, it is because you are unrepresented that you have no property’ The answer was a Magna Carta for the modern age: a People’s Charter, demanding universal manhood suffrage, no property qualifications for the vote, equal representation (each vote to count equally), annual parliaments, paid MPs and the secret ballot. Many of these issues, of course, had featured in the old radical gospel of the days of Major Cartwright, William Cobbett and ‘Orator’ Hunt, who were all now dead. But it was precisely the ‘traditionalism’ of the grievances that made them seem, in the eyes of activists who came together in torchlight meetings and processions in 1838 and the millions who signed the monster Chartist petitions in 1839, 1842 and 1848, their indisputably legitimate birthright as free-born Britons.

Inevitably the petitions, solemnly brought to parliament in hackney cabs or decorated farm wagons, and dragged on to the floor of the Commons, met with a dusty, not to say derisory, response. As economic conditions in the Midlands and north worsened, these repeated snubs divided the Chartists into those for whom only peaceful means of pressing their case were acceptable and those like John Frost, a draper from Newport in south Wales, and George Harney, a journalist from London, for whom the rejections were a provocation to armed insurrection. Reginald Richardson, a Salford radical who had given up his trade as a carpenter to become an Anti-Poor Law campaigner, then a Chartist journalist (and whose wife distributed its tracts and pamphlets from their print shop), now concluded that ‘there was no hope for the people of England but in hanging a sabre or some other offensive weapon’ over his mantelpiece. Even so, the ‘physical force’ Chartists often liked to invoke the canon of British law – Sir William Blackstone – in justifying the right of resistance to ‘tyrants’. According to the frightened local authorities, in
April
1839 the London Chartist Henry Vincent told a crowd in Newport that ‘when the time for resistance arrives, let your cry be, “To your tents, O Israel” and then with one heart, one voice and one blow, perish the privileged orders! Death to the aristocracy! Up with the people and the government they have established.’ This turned out to be more than just incendiary hot air. In the autumn, while Albert and Victoria were billing and cooing, south Wales saw a dramatic armed uprising as small armies of thousands of Chartists marched on Newport and Ebbw Vale. At Newport on 3 November a battle took place between the Chartists and the authorities, resulting in at least 15 dead and at least 50 seriously wounded. It was the largest loss of life inflicted by a British government on its own people at any time in the 19th or 20th century.

The risings, which took place in Yorkshire as well as Wales, were crushed, but the resistance was certainly not over. As long as the brutal slump continued, so did the nocturnal meetings and processions on moors in Lancashire and Yorkshire; the ‘conventions’ of delegates from Chartist associations throughout the country; and, above all, the waves of local and regional strikes. A mass petition was mobilized to commute the death sentence passed on the rising’s leader, John Frost. Crowds sang the variation of the national anthem they had once used for Tom Paine:

God Save our Patriot Frost

Let not his cause be lost

God save John Frost.

And, prudently, preferring removal to martyrdom, the authorities commuted Frost’s sentence to transportation to Australia. But governments, whether Whig or Tory, now began to see the Chartists as a vanguard of armed worker revolution. Richardson was one of many who were arrested, and spent nine months in prison (during which time he still managed to smuggle out newspaper articles) for ‘incitement to tumult and insurrection and to use force to procure resistance to the law of the land’.

By 1842 the Chartists had an effective and charismatic leader in the lawyer Feargus O’Connor, nephew of the old United Irishman Arthur O’Connor, who was still alive but exiled in France. Inheriting Cobbett’s parliamentary seat in Oldham, O’Connor founded the
Northern Star
(named after his uncle Arthur’s Belfast broadsheet) as an Anti-Poor Law paper but turned it into the major organ of Chartist politics, edited by the fire-breathing socialist George Harney. O’Connor’s task in holding the moderate and militant wings of the movement together was difficult and perhaps ultimately impossible, for he needed
to
steer a prudent course between alienating ‘moral force’ Chartists, scared off by the stockpiling of arms, and abandoning the strikers of 1842 who had responded to factory owners’ wage cuts with the ‘plug’ strikes. But O’Connor managed to convert what had essentially been an uncoordinated scattering of regional insurrections into something like the shape of a modern political pressure-group campaign, with local units organized by, and answering to, a national coordinating office. The new strategy, partly borrowed from the phenomenally successful middle-class, Bible-quoting Anti-Corn Law campaign, worked well enough to produce a second monster petition in 1842 with over three million names on it. Needless to say, it was rejected out of hand once more on the floor of the Commons.

After 1842, with economic conditions improving, some of the steam went out of the Chartist campaign. But when the trade cycle took another dip in 1847–8 neither the grievances, nor the bitter memories of rejection had gone away. The most powerful account of the stinging humiliation felt by a Manchester Chartist appeared in a novel,
Mary Barton
, written by the bravest woman writer of the early Victorian age, Elizabeth Gaskell. Her tragic hero, the widower John Barton, struggling and failing to make a living for himself and his daughter Mary, politicized by unemployment, destitution and despair, goes to London with the Chartist petition of 1842. The marchers, in their clogs and ragged clothes, move slowly through streets choked with fashionable traffic; they are prodded and beaten by truncheon-wielding policemen who, he tells his daughter and friends when he gets back, inform him,

‘It’s our business to keep you from molesting the ladies and gentlemen going to Her Majesty’s Drawing Room.’

‘And why are WE to be molested?’ asked I, ‘going decently about our business which is life and death to us and many a little one clemming [starving] at home in Lancashire. Which business is of most consequence i’ the sight of God, think yo, ourn or them gran ladies and gentlemen as yo think so much on?’ But I might as well ha held my peace for he only laughed.

When asked about the scene in parliament itself, John Barton is too angry to say anything at all except something deeply ominous, for himself and, so it seemed in 1848, the year
Mary Barton
appeared, for Britain.

It’s not to be forgotten or forgiven either, by me or by many another, but I canna tell of our down-casting just as a piece of London news.
As
long as I live our rejection that day will bide in my heart and as long
as I live I shall curse them as cruelly refused to hear us
.

Both Carlyle and Charles Dickens were admirers of Mrs Gaskell and
Mary Barton
. For although there had been ‘social realist’ novels before, there had been nothing quite like this one. Disraeli’s
Sibyl
had purported to set the ‘two nations’ problem before the country, but told its story mostly through the eyes and mouths of the ‘millocracy’. Although Elizabeth Gaskell was firmly middle class, as the wife of a Unitarian minister in Manchester, she had followed him into the most unsavoury and distressing areas of the city and its hovel-dotted outskirts, to places like Miles Platting, where children played in dark, filthy alleys with rats for their company. Nothing escapes her steely attentiveness: the gin palaces, the open sewers, even the sad little patches of wild flowers hanging on to scraps of dirt amidst the smoke and grime. For the first time, too, in the pages of
Mary Barton
the polite middle-class reader in Herne Hill or Bath could hear the voice of working-class Manchester, even its songs like ‘The Oldham Weaver’:

Oi’m a poor cotton weyver, as moiny a one knoowas

Oi’ve nowt for ’t yeat and oi’ve worn eawt my cloos

Yo’ad hardy gi tuppence for aw as oi’ve on

My clogs are both brosten and stuckings oi’ve none

Yo’d think it wur hard

To be browt into th’world

To be clemmed an do th’best as you con.

‘Clemmed’ – starved – is the word that strikes like a hammer blow over and over again in
Mary Barton
. It is both reproach and battle cry: ‘Theyn screwed us down to the lowest peg in order to makie their great big fortunes and build their great big houses and we, why we’re just clemming many and many of us. Can you say there’s naught wrong in this?’ When John Barton visits a fellow-worker lying sick in a tenement cellar, where ‘the smell was so fetid as almost to knock a man down’, his eyes gradually become accustomed to the darkness and he makes out ‘three or four little children rolling on the damp, nay wet, brick floor through which the stagnant filthy moisture of the street oozed’. The father tells the children to hold their noise as a ‘chap’ has got some bread for them. In the dimness, Barton feels the hunk of bread torn from him and gone in an instant.

Not surprisingly, Elizabeth Gaskell found herself cold-shouldered by the Manchester cotton barons and bankers, who thought she had
given
a grossly unjust account of their relations with their hands and had caricatured their own lifestyle without saying anything about their philanthropy and civic activism. They did, in fact, have a point. But the writer courageously stuck to her guns. There was something more important at stake than her own social popularity. ‘My poor “Mary Barton” is stirring up all sorts of angry feelings against me in Manchester,’ she wrote to her cousin Edward, ‘but those best acquainted with the way of thinking and feeling among the poor acknowledge its truth; which is the acknowledgement I most desire because evils once recognized are half way towards their remedy.’

The Manchester cotton barons may have felt that 1848, the year of revolutions in Europe (there was already a republic in France by February), was the most tactless moment imaginable for a Unitarian minister’s wife to unburden herself of her social conscience. But it was just
because
Britain seemed to be on the threshold of another crisis that Elizabeth Gaskell felt duty-bound to tell the truth about the immense distance separating the fortunate and unfortunate classes. Only if she were able to make those who had the vote and a share of Britain’s power and property fully aware of the anger, as well as the distress, of the millions who had neither might she be able to forestall a second civil war.

In the complacent light of hindsight, 1848 figures as the great anti-climax of the campaign for political and social democracy in Britain. The sense of a bogus panic was made much of in the sunny smugness of the Crystal Palace years, as if ‘British Revolution’ were itself an oxymoron. But that is certainly not how it appeared at the time, either to the foot soldiers of the People’s Charter or to those who were determined to prevent them taking control of the capital. George Harney had no doubt at all about what was coming: ‘From the hill tops of Lancashire, the voices of hundreds of thousands have ascended to Heaven the oath of Union and the rallying cry of conflict … Englishmen have sworn to have THE CHARTER and REPEAL [of the New Poor Law] or … “Vive la République”.’

Feargus O’Connor, who, after being arrested, had come back to parliament as MP for Nottingham, held back the ‘physical force’ wing of Chartism only by promising a final attempt at moral persuasion. A Chartist Convention would meet in London at the beginning of April and present the latest monster petition – five million names, it was said, on a document so immense that it would have to be taken to parliament in great bales, loaded on to a farm wagon pulled by four big dray horses. Supporters, including a sizeable contingent of Irish nationalist ‘confederates’, would descend on the capital from the Midlands and the north, Wales and even Scotland; would meet in morning assemblies at Russell
Square,
Bethnal Green, Clerkenwell Green and Stepney Green; and move south in converging processions towards the Thames bridges, and thence to their mass meeting place at Kennington Common. After speeches had been made, the petition was then to be brought to Westminster. Whether the crowds would follow it and make their presence felt, if not irresistible, was, of course, the crucial question. Was this to be the final act of a peaceable demonstration, or the first of a revolution? A ‘Charter’, after all, as they were all well aware, had been the beginning of the end of the Bourbon monarchy in France in 1830. And now there had been another revolution there – this time, it seemed, one in which middle-class radicals, artisans and workers had all been united. With the traditional party of order, the Tories, broken by Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws two years earlier, O’Connor must have thought he had the best chance yet of gaining at the very least some concessions.