The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain

Copyright

William Collins

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

A Fontana Press Original 1988

Copyright © F. M. L. Thompson 1988

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Editor’s Preface

Author’s Preface

CHAPTER 1 Economy and Society

CHAPTER 2 The Family

CHAPTER 3 Marriage

CHAPTER 4 Childhood

CHAPTER 5 Homes and Houses

CHAPTER 6 Work

CHAPTER 7 Play

CHAPTER 8 Authority and Society

Further Reading

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

Editor’s Preface

It has sometimes been remarked that all forms of history are becoming social history, and, less frequently, it has been claimed that social history is total history, alone capable of comprehending and articulating all facets of past human experience. This series, which aims to present in three volumes a view of the social history of Britain from the early eighteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, is not particularly attached to either proposition; it has no designs on the autonomy of other branches of history, though conscious of its close relations with economic history, and no pretensions to be all-embracing. It has the more modest and pragmatic aim of tackling the great outpouring of research and publication in British social history which has taken place in the last twenty years, and of attempting to integrate the fruits of these detailed and original studies into works which will be more accessible to students coming fresh to the subject and readers who have no time or inclination to scan a hundred books and articles in order to get the feel of a century. The aim, however, is also more ambitious than this may sound: the purpose is not to provide a survey and summary of what other scholars have said, but to construct an interpretation of continuity and change in society, in its structure, its institutions, its customs and habits, and its class and gender relationships. The three volumes cover the ‘long’ eighteenth century, extending to 1830; the Victorian period; and the twentieth century. The editorial brief leaves each author to make sense of the material on his century in his own way: there is uniformity of structure in the thematic organization of each volume, but no uniformity of views, no party line. This is not a way of avoiding brickbats or shirking editorial responsibilities, it is just the way history works as a humane and liberal profession. If the result is a series which provokes discussion and stimulates further research and re-interpretation, that will be more than sufficient justification for the enterprise.

January 1988

F.M.L. THOMPSON

Author’s Preface

It is fitting that an Editor who announces that the time is ripe to take stock of the effects of the explosion of interest in the social history of Britain should be the first to respond to his own call, if only to demonstrate that it is possible to offer a synthesis whatever the hazards of being tripped up on this or that point by the specialists. The expansion of social history, moreover, has not been a simple matter of the unearthing of new facts, new information, and new material by researchers digging in previously unknown or untapped sources, although there has been plenty of that. It has been above all a redefinition and enlargement of the territory of social history using instruments and concepts adapted from social anthropology and sociology, as well as quantitative methods, alongside the older guides derived from political economy whether of liberal or Marxist varieties. Where matters of faith, doctrine, or ideology are involved the synthesizer is necessarily stepping through a minefield. Nevertheless, the very fact that social history is about ideas and ways of viewing the behaviour and relationships of groups, genders, communities, generations, and classes, and not simply about the ‘facts’ of life – although sex is an important and often central activity which earlier generations of historians preferred to sweep under the carpet – means that no single overview can ever claim to be either comprehensive or definitive. Hence the present volume is offered as no more than one out of several possible ways of depicting and attempting to understand what made Victorian society tick, and how it developed.

An overview such as this, which attempts to be more than a plain survey, which tries to look at all levels of society and not simply at the working classes, and which seeks to present a seriously argued revision of Victorian social history, has to be selective. Rather than attempting to squeeze everything in, certain topics and themes have been sliced up, spread over several chapters, or set aside: some will think they have been ignored. Rural society, religion, social policy, the social dimension of politics, whether parliamentary or popular, the professions, and even aristocratic society, for example, may – rightly – appear to have been dealt with in a perfunctory fashion, or not at all. This is not because of any dearth of recent literature on these subjects; on the contrary, plenty of excellent work exists which would have been grist to another kind of synoptic mill. It is because the organizing principle for a dynamic anatomy of Victorian society dictated a different way of arranging material thematically, so that some familiar categories have either vanished altogether, or play relatively minor supporting roles. Readers should be warned, however, that this is not a textbook which claims to contain all they want to know, or need to know, about the social history of Victorian Britain. It is only fair to warn them that although it is a book about Britain, it is definitely Anglocentric. In a mechanical way Scotland and Wales may receive proportionately as much space as their populations contributed to total British population, about 12 per cent and 5 per cent respectively; but that is not offered as a justification for the neglect of the specifically Scottish or Welsh characteristics of social structure and social institutions, a neglect normally excused on grounds of limitations of space or knowledge, but in fact evidence of the persistence of national divisions within Britain which limit the possibilities of framing generalizations about British society.

A book of this kind does not rest upon original personal research, but upon research conducted, analysed, and published by other scholars. Rightly or wrongly the chosen format precludes the use of footnotes or detailed references, in order to sustain the flow of argument and avoid a parade of attribution, exegesis, and qualification which some readers might find irritating or superfluous. My complete reliance on the flood of monographs and articles is, I hope, sufficiently indicated by the short bibliographies linked to each chapter (but for convenience collected together at the end of the text), which list the works on which I have drawn. My sense of indebtedness to friends and colleagues, the authors of these works, is most inadequately expressed by the formality of these listings; it goes without saying that it is entirely due to their collective efforts that the opportunity of writing such a book as this exists at all. In one or two cases I have also listed unpublished doctoral theses, where they have been important sources of ideas and material. Only the exceptional reader is likely to have access to them; but the theses apart, the chapter bibliographies may perhaps serve as guides to further reading as well as acknowledgements of my debts.

June 1987

F.M.L. THOMPSON

CHAPTER ONE Economy and Society

In the autumn of 1830 the Liverpool and Manchester Railway opened, in an atmosphere of triumphant excitement turned to tragedy by the fatal accident to Huskisson, and the Reform Parliament met in a buzz of expectant speculation at Westminster. The two events were not unconnected. The railway, the first locomotive-operated public line in the world, was the culmination of the application of the new technological skills, enterprise, and capital which had been transforming the British economy for the previous half century or more. The first Reform Act was an attempt to adapt political institutions to the alteration in the balance of social forces brought about by this transformation. While they shared these common roots and may both be viewed as at once instruments and symbols of the start of a new age, Reform essentially glanced backward with an approving eye on the traditional order which it sought to buttress, and the railway pointed forward into the unknown territory of urbanized and industrialized society. Therein lies the kernel of their message: not that 1830 was some decisive turning-point and outstanding landmark in social history, but that it stood in a particularly prominent way at the crossroads between the traditional and the new, neatly demonstrating the twin forces of continuity and change that are always at work in society.

Nowhere was this tension between old and new more obvious than in the political structure, which was widely believed to have become dangerously out of touch with social realities. Power and influence were concentrated in the hands of a privileged few, mainly the landed classes aided and abetted by allies and hangerson from the wealthier reaches of commerce and the professions, operating through a system whose agglomeration of curious franchises, pocket and rotten boroughs, was so bizarre as to defy rational justification. The unreformed system was tolerable only so long as it worked, through manipulation of its ramshackle machinery by networks of influence, patronage, and deference, to produce reasonably acceptable and enforceable exercise of authority. That this ceased to hold true for some sections of the ruling class itself, which were alienated from the governments of the 1820s by their handling of the issues of agricultural distress, deflation, and Catholic Emancipation, may indeed have triggered Reform by producing a critical shift within the charmed circle of the political nation that enabled an unreformed Parliament to reform itself without resort to unconstitutional means. Politically this was extremely important. More significant socially, however, was the resentment at their exclusion from the political nation expressed by many groups in society in the rumblings and eruptions of parliamentary reform agitation from the later eighteenth century onwards, since this defined the points at which political and social structure were felt to be seriously out of mesh.

The salient characteristic of those who spoke for the excluded was that they came from every rank in society, save for the poorest and most illiterate, and framed their attacks on the old order in the language of justice and equality rather than in appeals to the interests of class. The leaders of popular radicalism were predominantly artisans, whose skills as printers, compositors, tailors, or cobblers stretched even further back than the ancestry of their ideas, which may be traced to the sturdy independence and self-respect of the Civil War Levellers. These were no more representatives or products of a recently created industrial order clamouring to be admitted to their rightful place in the body politic than were the gallery of orators from middle-class backgrounds – the farmers Cobbett and Hunt, and the army officer Cartwright were the most prominent – which played such a large role in the popular cause. They thought of themselves as the champions of the rights of downtrodden and neglected ordinary people, who counted increasing numbers of industrial workers, particularly factory workers, in their ranks; these undoubtedly formed an important element in the great reform meetings and demonstrations of 1816–19 or 1830–2, but there is no evidence that they were the backbone of popular protest. Information about the rank and file of such movements is invariably patchy, but such as there is suggests a different conclusion. A list of ‘the leading reformers of Lancashire’ at the end of 1816, for example, names two cotton manufacturers, two letterpress printers, a draper, a tailor, a hatter, a shoemaker, a stone cutter, and a clogger, who were all small masters or artisans; three cotton weavers, three silk weavers, and one wool weaver, who would all have been handloom weavers; and not a single cotton spinner, the sole type of factory worker to be found in the region in any numbers at that time. At the other end of the scale the great Reform riots of 1831 took place in Derby and Nottingham, manufacturing towns but not factory towns; Bristol, a commercial more than a manufacturing town; and Bath and Worcester, well removed from the centres of industrialization. The factory towns of Lancashire and the West Riding were absent from this list not because they enjoyed a superior form of social discipline and unanimity in support of reform which rendered rioting against the traditional authorities that had rejected the second Reform Bill superfluous, but because the class antagonism between millowners and operatives was so strong that there was no popular support for what was seen as an employer’s measure. Disciplined leadership of the struggle for parliamentary reform was taken by precisely those towns, Birmingham above all others but also Newcastle, which had seen considerable growth and industrial expansion but had retained the structure of small workshops that blurred the divisions between masters and men and supported sufficient social harmony and cohesion to nourish an interclass radical alliance.

There was, then, massive working-class involvement in reform, and it centred in the traditional, preindustrial, groups rather than in those spawned by factory and machine. This is not to say that these groups had been unaffected by the course of economic change; but it is to say that viewed from this angle the perceived conflict between the established political structure and social reality was not a simple, direct consequence of the emergence of a factory proletariat. Viewed through the ruling-class end of the telescope, all workers, irrespective of their precise status or relationship to the means of production, being propertyless were either potentially dangerous as liable to subvert property and the social order, or at best not worthy of political recognition as being incapable of taking a balanced and responsible view of the public interest. The vital thing in the situation of 1830–2, so it seemed to Whig ministers, was to break the radical alliance by driving a wedge between the middle and the working classes, buying off the one with votes and representation and leaving the other, isolated and weak, outside the pale. The tactic, in Grey’s words, was ‘to associate the middle with the higher orders of society in the love and support of the institutions and government of the country’. Accordingly, the middle classes were accommodated with the £10 householder franchise, the hallmark of the 1832 Reform Act in the boroughs. It has often been remarked that this action defined, even created, the working class by lumping together all those unable to afford to occupy a house of at least £10 annual value as unfit to exercise the franchise, thus forging a common bond of resentment and frustration between otherwise diverse social groups. The other side of this coin is that the franchise also defined the middle class as all those who came above the £10 line regardless of differences in social position.

The middle classes who asserted their claims to be included in the political nation were a very mixed bag, and it would be as difficult to claim for them as for the working classes that their alienation from the old order stemmed wholly or even principally from the new social forces generated by industrialization. To be sure, by 1830 many industrialists had come round to the view that the protection of their interests and recognition of their status required direct representation in Parliament, whereas a generation or so earlier they had been largely indifferent to notions of parliamentary reform and direct involvement in politics, being content to accept the arguments of virtual representation and leave the conduct of public affairs to those accustomed to handling such matters. Northern manufacturers, in Lancashire and the West Riding, were active in the cause of reform in 1830–2; and a Wolverhampton manufacturer neatly expressed the sharpening of political awareness in his class: ‘Fifty years ago we were not in that need of Representatives, which we are at present, as we then manufactured nearly exclusively for home consumption, and the commercial and manufacturing districts were then identified with each other; where one flourished, both flourished. But the face of affairs is now changed – we now manufacture for the whole world, and if we have not members to promote and extend our commerce, the era of our commercial greatness is at an end.’ Manufacturers were key recruits to the cause of limited reform, and their demands for representation for themselves and the chief industrial centres were clear expressions of the failure of the political structure to reflect new social and economic developments. Nevertheless, manufacturers were recruits to a band of bankers, lawyers, writers, traders, editors, and other professional men, who continued to provide most of the drive and organization of middle-class political action: men of property, conscious of their position and probity no doubt, but not unmistakably men of the Industrial Revolution.

The towns which were given representation for the first time in 1832 were indeed in the main the chief centres of ‘manufacturing capital and skill’ in the Midlands and the north, whose fair representation Lord John Russell picked out as a major purpose of the Reform Bill when introducing it. It is worth remarking, however, that Brighton, the fastest growing town of the 1820s and in its fashionable seaside frivolity the very antithesis of an industrious town, and Stroud, a small pocket of the traditional woollen industry set in rural Gloucestershire, were included in the same company as the familiar industrial giants, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, and Sheffield, and were placed on a par with Bolton, Bradford, Blackburn, or Oldham. Similarly, Cheltenham, Frome, and Kendal were equated with the second-ranking industrial towns like Dudley and Walsall in the Black Country, Rochdale, Salford, and Warrington in Lancashire, or Gateshead, South Shields, and Tynemouth on Tyneside, in being elevated to single-member boroughs. These are reminders that the new constituencies did not all fall into a single category, and that scope was deliberately found for some increase in the weight given to traditional and non-industrial urban interests, quite apart from the five new parliamentary boroughs created in metropolitan London, itself a kaleidoscope of aristocratic, financial, commercial, administrative, and professional, as well as manufacturing, interests. In addition the boroughs which were preserved from extinction, although shorn of one of their former two members, and those which were continued unaltered from pre-reform days, were predominantly county towns, small market towns, long-established ports, and the like, albeit they did include some places – Liverpool, Preston, Hull, Newcastle, or Sunderland, for example – that were in the mainstream of industrial growth. In sum, however, the collection of new and surviving boroughs that made up the total of 187 post-1832 parliamentary boroughs in England was dominated by small towns, hangovers from the preindustrial past.

The fact that something like two thirds of the post-1832 boroughs might be thus classed could indicate no more than the limited, cautious, imperfect, and muddled nature of the Reform Act itself, removing only the most glaring defects of the unreformed system, perpetuating many anomalies and inequalities of representation, and never intending to supply an accurate political mirror of the actual distribution of economic and social weight and consequence in the nation. Even so, it is significant that among the top third of boroughs, measured by the size of their electorates, less than half would figure on any list, however widely drawn, of thrusting, expanding places at the forefront of economic change. Thus Chester, Exeter, Bath, Worcester, or York were in the same league as Manchester, Birmingham, or Leeds in numbers of voters, although not, of course, in total population; while Bedford, Reading, Colchester, Canterbury, and Maidstone could out-vote but not outnumber Stockport, Salford, Bolton, Oldham, and Wolverhampton. This was an effect of the franchise and the fact that the distribution of £10 householders differed, often quite sharply, from the distribution of population. In part this was due to marked regional differences in house values, themselves produced by complex interactions of custom and market forces, with the great majority of houses in London having rents of over £10 a year so that many working-class householders obtained the vote, while essentially similar houses in Leeds or Manchester were rented at £5 to £8 a year. In part, however, it was due to regional variations in the numbers and proportions of men with high enough incomes to command a £10 house and the standing of respectability and modest substance that went with it; in relation to total population the older established towns tended to have a higher proportion of such householders than those of most recent rapid growth.

While it is clear that the £10 householders did not constitute a single social class, since there were wide social differences within towns between those who just qualified and those whose houses could be worth £50 or £100 a year, as well as between towns, it is also clear that this property qualification embraced virtually the entire population of middle-class family men, even if in some localities it also had the effect of bringing some artisans and skilled workers within the net. The middle class thus attached, in expectation, to the support of the constitution contained large numbers of small shopkeepers, traders, and dealers, small masters and lesser professional men, men of some consequence and influence in their communities but far removed in wealth and status from the great overseas merchants, the bankers and financiers, and the industrial capitalists. Whether they were precisely the sort of men Earl Grey had had in mind when he had spoken of ‘the middle classes who form the real and efficient mass of public opinion, and without whom the power of the gentry is nothing’, may perhaps be doubted, since at the time he was more concerned with the intelligent, educated and articulate men who shaped informed opinion in the press, the journals, the literary and philosophical societies, and the counting houses. Nevertheless, they formed the core of the middle classes, the most numerous and most widely spread groups with a solid stake in the country, however small their individual properties. This core had been growing in size and wealth as a result of the general influences of population growth and economic expansion, but only in some parts, depending on location, had it become integrated into industrial society in direct economic and cultural dependence on the great capitalist employers. In bringing the urban middle classes within the political nation the new franchise brought in something at once more varied, and more traditional, than simply an industrial-based middle class. This was as much a matter of reflecting the nature of the existing social structure as it was one of political calculation, although it did not escape notice that the lesser bourgeoisie of the smaller towns were amenable to patronage and influence.