Model Citizens and Millenarian Subjects: Vorticism, Suffrage, and London's Great Unrest (original) (raw)
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Unrespectable Radicals?: Popular Politics in the Age of Reform
2007
Once, radicals of the late 18th and early 19th century appeared as distinctly respectable. They were earnest, improving, and mindful of the public good, which was all of a piece with the sober Dissenting stock from which many of them sprang. There was, of course, a revolutionary fringe, but this was inhabited by the overwrought or the immature. That revolutionary extremists made their foolhardy grabs at power was regrettable, but the insurrectionary attempts of these years-two parts tragedy to three parts farce-were a measure of the ruling elite's selfish and shortsighted obstinacy; they did not detract from the essential rightness of the radical critique. In this view, which was not entirely dispelled by E. P. Thompson, the radicals of unreformed England were Gladstonian liberals in utero. All they lacked was the whiskers. That was before Iain McCalman's Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries, and Pornographers in London, 1795-1840 (Cambridge, 1988). McCalman lifted the lid on an altogether seamier side of radical endeavour. In the taverns and alehouses of the capital's lowliest neighbourhoods he located a 'blackguard' tradition, nourished by irreconcilable enemies of the established order. These were people who had no notion that they were living through an age of reform-to use the phrase employed rather incongruously in the title of the collection under review. Even if they had, they would have wanted none of it. The denizens of the radical underworld were treasonable by instinct. They aspired to overturn, not to ameliorate. They were rancorous millenarians, scurrilously abusive utopians. They inhabited a criminal demi-monde where extortion, pimping or the publication of obscene squibs were admired ways of turning a penny. They scoffed at self-improvement. For them, 'un-respectability' was a badge of honour. Needless to say, they despised Francis Place, the arch-exponent of artisanal respectability. The feeling was mutual. Although savage mockery of all that was holy was the stock-in-trade of this radical underworld, its activists were deadly serious about what they were doing. Like Francis Place, many of them were veterans of the London Corresponding Society (LCS). The 'Two Acts' of 1795 made public agitation of the democratic cause, which the LCS had pioneered, a virtual impossibility, and in 1799 the organisation was proscribed outright. In the face of this legislative pounding, the democrats of the 1790s dispersed in different ideological directions. For Thomas Evans and a clutch of others who were to embody the 'blackguard' tradition the writings of Thomas Spence became pivotal. Spence (1750-1814) had been a down-at-heel presence on the London radical scene in the 1790s, but he was no orthodox democrat. Political equality, he
2013
Act of 1888, which provided a greater degree of legal protection to newspaper proprietors against lawsuits. Britain's reading public also grew at a tremendous rate at the turn of the century, spurring the growth of new papers. The population in England and Wales alone nearly doubled between 1861 and 1911, climbing from just over 20 million persons to more than 36 million. 33 The population increase was most dramatic in the rapidly industrializing cities, where industrial workers and middle-class professionals and businessmen came to dominate the demographic. These growing numbers were increasingly literate, in part due to educational reforms, especially the Elementary Education Act of 1870, which set up public elementary education and administration throughout England and Wales, and the Education Acts of 1880-1899, which made education compulsory for children up to the age of twelve. 34 This burgeoning readership took on greater political import as well with the growing enfranchisement in the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1867 and the Representation of the People Act in 1884, which cumulatively gave most British men the right to vote. Politics became decidedly mass, and politicians gave increasing attention to the press, from courting particular journalists to founding and sponsoring individual newspaper companies. The political focus on the press was accentuated after Gladstone's successful Midlothian campaign of open-air speeches in the General Election of 1880, which demonstrated the new power of the masses in politics. 35 Unlike Gladstone's public speeches on his campaign trail, the new scale and reach of newspapers
2016
This thesis examines the transition between working-class radicalism and labour politics in two provincial English constituencies, Bristol and Northampton, between 1867 and 1918. By combining local case studies with a textual analysis of empirical material and a conceptual approach to ideology, it offers fresh insights into popular political change in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. Its central argument is that, contrary to the prevailing historiography on labour politics and identity, a distinctive sense of class could shape working-class radical and labour strategies, languages, identities, and ideologies continuously between 1867 and 1918. In particular, it demonstrates that, before the mid-1880s, working-class radical activists in Bristol and Northampton exhibited a non-adversarial sense of class, which shaped their perceptions of the social order, their interpretations of radical ideology, and their relationships with both mainstream liberals and middle-class radicals. It also suggests that while working-class radicals came to use 'labour' to describe themselves and their organisations from the mid-1880s, this was primarily a rhetorical move rather than one reflecting a substantive change in their political identity. Over the next thirty years, labour activists in both Bristol and Northampton remained fiercely committed to the dominant strategy, the non-conflictual conception of class, and the political ideology that had long shaped local working-class radical traditions. In these constituencies, the Victorian tradition of working-class radicalism left an indelible mark on twentieth-century labour politics. This study has important implications for our understanding of political and ideological change in modern Britain. Firstly, confirming the existence of a decidedly working-class radical movement makes it easier to understand the rise of a class-based labour politics in late-Victorian Britain without having to account for either discontinuities in popular politics or the re-emergence of a dormant class-consciousness within the British working class. Secondly, establishing a line of continuity between working-class radicalism and later labour politics helps us to explain some of the tensions that characterised progressive politics in the Edwardian era. Finally, seeing working-class radicalism as a distinctive ideology with its own conceptual framework enriches our understanding of non-liberal progressive thought in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century.
Late Nineteenth-and Early Twentieth-Century British Thought
The Routledge Companion to Social and Political Philosophy, 2010
Key features of late nineteenth and early twentieth century British thought include analysis of the nature of liberty, keen interest in the role of the state in creating conditions for personal development, and belief either in perfectibility of human beings or in social progress, often in both. In spite of significant disagreements on these issues, the main representative thinkers of this periodhere we focus on Herbert Spencer, T.H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet and L.T. Hobhousebelieved in systematic studies of human nature and society, drawing on a range of disciplines in humanities and natural sciences. Also all of them believed in a link between morality and politics. Unlike the liberal political theorists of the second half of the twentieth century, these Victorian and Edwardian thinkers, all passionate in defending liberty, were not moral pluralists.