Table Of ContentPOPULAR RADICALISM IN
NINETEENTH-CENTURY
BRITAIN
Social History In Perspective
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John Belchem Popular Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain
Sue Bruley Women in Britain Since 1900
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POPULAR RADICALISM IN
NINETEENTH-CENTURY
BRITAIN
jOHN BELCHEM
pal grave
macmillan
* Cl john Belchem 1996
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction
1 The Eighteenth-Century Context: Civic Humanism,
Commercial Liberalism and the Crowd 9
2 Radicalism, Revolution and War, 1790-1815 16
3 The Radical Mass Platform, 1815-20 37
4 Ideology, Public Opinion and Reform, 1820-35 51
5 Radicalism and Class, 1835-50 74
6 Radicalism, Liberalism and Reformism, 1850-7 5 10 2
7 Gladstone, Lib-Labism and New Liberalism 128
8 Labour's Turning-point? 14 7
9 Liberals, Labour and the Progressive Alliance 166
Conclusion: The First World War and After 184
Notes 189
Further Reading 209
Index 214
v
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As much has been compressed in this brief study of radi
calism in the 'long' nineteenth century, I must apologize
to those scholars whose work I have misrepresented, over
looked or acknowledged inadequately. In the notes and
the Guide to Further Reading I endeavour to clear some
of my vast burden of intellectual debt. An old friend,
Richard Price, and a new colleague, Jon Lawrence, have
put me straight on a number of key issues, helping me
to retain some semblance of balance and historical san
ity, the 'linguistic turn' notwithstanding. Mary-Rose, my
partner in radicalism, has done much to improve the quality
of the argument.
Liverpool J. B.
VI
INTRODUCTION
Radicalism in nineteenth-century Britain was a political
project with a number of programmes, differing for the
most part only in detail, presentation and appeal. Important
as these differences were, there was an underlying com
mitment to the essential features of British political cul
ture. Whether they wished to go back to the roots (the
literal meaning of radicalism) or to return to first prin
ciples (which might suggest a complete rejection of the
past), radicals sought almost without exception to extend
and redefine, not to challenge and subvert, the proud
political heritage of constitutional rights and parliamen
tary government. Throughout the period under study, this
'constitutionalist idiom' -and the particular history it em
bodied - served to identify and distinguish competing
political groups. 1 Conservatives imbued the constitution
with the force of established law and divine providence:
as upheld in the Glorious Revolution and the Act of Settle
ment, it had delivered England from popery, poverty and
disorder. Radicals were inspired by a different reading, a
history of recovery and resistance in which the constitu
tion confirmed the sovereignty of the people and the
contingent authority of parliament. The liberal version
of constitutional history grew steadily in influence: a chron
icle of progressive improvements founded on the concepts
of liberty and tolerance, it justified continued but mod
erate reform.
Although essentially political in language and values,
nineteenth-century radicalism has generally been inter
preted by historians in socio-economic terms, as the means
1
Popular Radicalism
by which the expanding middle and working classes of
urban-industrial Britain sought to attain their respective
'class' interests. United in radical opposition to aristocratic
privilege and 'Old Corruption', the 'useful classes' pursued
(whether consciously or not) conflicting 'ideological' aims.
The middle class advocated parliamentary reform to hasten
the free-market 'entrepreneurial ideal', while the work
ing class looked to a reformed parliament to protect their
living standards against economic deregulation and laissez
faire. Seen in these socio-economic terms, radicalism thus
served to mediate either class harmony and/ or class con
flict, controversial issues of debate which dominated and
enlivened traditional historiography.2 Class, however, has
now fallen from favour. Dubious of the priority tradition
ally accorded to socio-economic factors, and increasingly
aware of the fluidity of social identities (whether class,
gender, ethnic, national, sectarian or whatever), historians
are exploring a new political and cultural agenda. The
purpose of this short study is to provide a critical intro
duction to these latest approaches.
Of the various factors which have contributed to the
demise of socio-economic interpretation and class-based
narratives of radicalism, two require brief mention here.
First, the recent (or 'fourth-generation') reassessment of
the 'industrial revolution', reduced in some revisionist cal
culations and perspectives almost to myth.3 A diverse range
of manufacturing structures coexisted across and within
industries as proto-industrialization led to industrial growth
in some regions and to deindustrialization in others. The
transition to 'machinofacture', to highly mechanized, fac
tory-based mass-production industry, was cautious and
protracted, far from complete by the 1840s when over 75
per cent of manufacturing remained in unmodernized
industries, small in scale, little affected by the use of steam
power and characterized neither by high productivity nor
by comparative advantage.4 In the absence of a sudden
and dramatic 'take-off', the first industrial revolution no
longer serves as the paradigm of modernization, the his-
2
Introduction
torical guide to economic development. A slow-moving
and multi-dimensional process of combined and uneven
development, industrialization in Britain was accompanied
by such a diversity of material experience that a united
or 'class' response by workers was seemingly precluded.
In the absence of common experience, appeals to work
ing-class solidarity - however much they might impress
historians - lacked resonance and purchase.
The questioning of class, however, is by no means a
peculiarity of British economic historiography. It is sympto
matic of a wider fin de siecle political revisionism. 'Across
the "developed" industrial world', Robbie Gray has noted,
'class as an organizing and legitimizing political identity
no longer has the assured place it once (and quite re
cently) seemed to occupy; while observers of all persua
sions have been disoriented by the swift and remorseless
collapse of regimes of avowedly Marxist inspiration, and
the fragmentation of both liberalism and social democ
racy in the absence of the communist "other'".5 In its
most strident and iconoclastic form, however, the
decentring of class derives less from empirical revision
ism and political disorientation than from the embrace
of post-modernist theory, the second factor which requires
some brief introductory (but alas jargon-ridden) comment.
Where revisionist historians have increasingly recognized
the diffuse and plural nature of social relations and ident
ities, post-modernists have privileged such notions as com
plexity, diversity, fragmentation, relativity, multiplicity and
discontinuity. Dismissing class-based (and other) grand his
torical narratives - along with the allegedly totalizing,
system-building, intellectual theories of modernism - post
modernist historians insist on the primacy of language
and discourse. As post-structuralists, their interest is in
the 'representational', in the construction of identity and
social reality through language and discourse.6 Fortunately,
however, most practitioners of the 'linguistic turn' stop
short of linguistic determinism or its semiotic deconstruc
tion into arbitrariness and aporia, into 'an anti-system
3
