Alex Tyrrell

Class Consciousness in Early Victorian Britain: Samuel Smiles, Leeds Politics, and the Self-Help Creed

“During the late 1830s and 40s two forms of class consciousness were being forged in Britain, not one — middle-class consciousness and working-class consciousness.” Asa Briggss belief is shared in all its starkness by many students of early Victorian Britain, including R. K. Webb, who has even referred to “the working class point of view,” which middle-class men could adopt only by becoming “traitors to their class.” Such statements have been severely taken to task by various historians, and from the beginning Briggs has seen the need to admit important qualifications. Quoting the nineteenth-century economist W. T. Thornton, he has agreed that “the labouring population … spoken of as if it formed only one class” was “really divided into several,” each distinguished from the other by wage rates, social security, regularity of earnings, climate of industrial relations, status in the local community, prospects of future advancement, and sophistication of political attitudes. Unfortunately these qualifications are productive of confusion: it is by no means obvious why Briggss readers should believe that only one form of working-class consciousness existed in such conditions of diversity. Nor is it obvious why similar qualifications should not be made concerning the middle classes. Was the gulf between William Lovett and those whom he called the “vicious many” not similar in extent to that between most members of the Leeds middle classes and their fellow citizen J. G. Marshall, “a millionaire mill-owner, a man aristocratically allied, and the manager of the largest factory in the world”? Nor is it necessary to rely on such an extreme example, if one believes Gibbon Wakefield, who detected the existence of an “uneasy class,” the product of a division within the ranks of the professionally qualified: The learning, skill and reputation, united, of a professional man may be called his capital.

Samuel Smiles and the Woman Question in Early Victorian Britain

When Samuel Smiles (1812–1904) looked back over his career from the vantage point of old age he saw himself as one who had labored for “the emancipation and intellectual improvement of women.” His self-description will surprise those who know him, either through his famous book, Self-Help (1859), where women make fleeting appearances as maternal influences on the achievements of great men, or through the attempts that have been made during the Thatcher years to offer him as an exemplar of a highly selective code of “Victorian Values.” Nonetheless, there is much to be said for Smiless interpretation: not only was he a prolific author on the condition of women, but his writings on this subject from the late 1830s to the early 1850s were radical in tone and content. By directing attention to these writings, this article makes three points about early Victorian gender relations, radicalism, and Smiless own career. First, it challenges the lingering notion that this was a time when patriarchal values stifled debate on gender issues. For some historians who write about the womens movement, the early Victorian era has the status of something like a dark age in the history of the agitation for womens rights; this period is overshadowed on the one side by the great debates initiated by Mary Wollstonecrafts Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) and on the other by the new feminist movements that developed after the 1850s. Barbara Caine, for example, has written recently that the exclusion of women from the public sphere was “absolute” in the mid-century years; few women had the financial resources necessary to set up a major journal even if they had been bold enough to do so, and the sort of man who wrote sympathetically about women was concerned primarily with his own needs.

Making the Millennium: the Mid-Nineteenth Century Peace Movement

On 22 August 1849 a privately sponsored peace congress opened in the Salle de Sainte Cecile in Paris. In the chair was Victor Hugo, assisted as vice presidents and secretaries by a team of men from Britain, the United States, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. Several of these men, such as Richard Cobden, were members of the legislatures of their respective countries: others were prominent clergymen and philanthropists. Seated before them were delegates from a slightly wider range of countries which in that blissfully Eurocentric era were deemed to represent the world. They had been brought together by an invitation sent by the London-based Peace Congress Committee to well-known individual sympathizers, peace societies, religious bodies, philanthropic and other civic groups. The business before them consisted of a series of propositions advocating international arbitration, general and simultaneous disarmament, a congress of nations, an international court, and various measures designed to facilitate international communication. This peace congress was the second in a series of four convened between 1848 and 1851 in Brussels, Paris, Frankfort and London to co-ordinate and develop various pressure-group activities which had gained momentum during the late 1840s in Britain and the United States.

THE EARL OF EGLINTON, SCOTTISH CONSERVATISM, AND THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR THE VINDICATION OF SCOTTISH RIGHTS

This article re-evaluates the role and importance of the thirteenth earl of Eglinton as president of the National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights (NAVSR). Departing from the established historiography, which depicts his career as a romantic absurdity because of his organization of a medieval tournament in 1839, it shows Eglinton to have been a political figure of substance, who played a significant role in public life during the mid-Victorian era. The article emphasizes the importance of ‘administrative devolution’ as a feature of long-term Conservative political thought and points to activities of Eglinton and his circle as an example of the need to give more weight to the importance of Conservatives in modern Scottish history.

“In the Thickest of the Fight”: The Reverend James Scholefield (1790-1855) and the Bible Christians of Manchester and Salford

Few places in early nineteenth-century Britain had as grim a reputation as the Manchester suburb of Ancoats. In this concentration of “dark, satanic mills” and festering slums were some of the worst social problems of the Industrial Revolution. Angus Reach, a journalist with the Morning Chronicle , who visited Ancoats in the late 1840s, described it as “entirely an operative colony” containing “some of the most squalid-looking streets, inhabited by swarms of the most squalid-looking people which I have ever seen.” While making his way through this “labyrinth,” Reach saw no promise of anything better. Even the handful of chapels seemed to complement the scene of hopelessness; in a pathetically futile attempt to carry the eye up to a vision of something better their “infinitesimal” Gothic arches and ornaments only served to reinforce “the grimy nakedness” of the surrounding factories.

A Card King? The Earl of Eglinton and the Viceroyalty of Ireland

Throughout its existence after the Union of 1800 the viceroyalty (lord lieutenancy) of Ireland was a butt of raillery and contempt. William Makepeace Thackeray lampooned it as “the greatest sham of all the shams in Ireland,” and Walter Bagehot asserted that there was “hardly a single institution known to our political system at once so costly and so useless,” but even their derision fell short of the picture that was presented at the turn of the twentieth century by “A Native” in his Recollections of Dublin Society. Drawing on memories that went back to the 1830s, the “Native” took his readers on a rollicking jaunt through scenes of absurd pretentiousness peopled by those who saw themselves as the social elite of Dublin. Presiding over this “theatrical make-believe” was the viceroy, a “Card King” whose duties revolved around levées, St. Patrick’s Day balls, dinners, concerts, and dances where, in the absence of the London-based Irish aristocracy, he had to endure the company of parvenu officials, professionals, merchants, and their families. The “Native” remembered one viceroy as “the first in order” of those who provided the “pomp and state and glitter” for this “strange, theatrical installation”: his horses and retainers were “the finest”; he was “lavishly hospitable [and] spent money liberally.” The reference was to Archibald William Montgomerie, the thirteenth earl of Eglinton and Winton (1812–61), who had assumed office distinguished only by a bizarre claim that he had made on public attention several years earlier when he attempted to revive

Slave Traffic in the Age of Abolition. Puerto Rico, West Africa, and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean, 1815–1859

Abstract The nineteenth-century British took their anti-slavery heritage seriously. Westminster Abbey, the pantheon of the nation, contains several memorials of men who campaigned and legislated against the slave trade and slavery. One of the earliest, inaugurated in 1822, shows Charles James Fox dying in the presence of an Mrican. On bended knees the African gratefully acknowledges Foxs crucial role in 1806 during the process that terminated Britains participation in the slave trade. As Joseph C. Dorsey points out in his Slave Traffic in the Age of Abolition. Puerto Rico, West Africa, and the Non-Hispanic Caribbean, 1815–1859, the British were not content with asserting their sense of national morality through the beatific sentiments of the evangelical-humanitarian public and the legislative enactments of sympathetic politicians. British abolitionism also spoke through the mouth of the cannon. At the Congress of Vienna the British Government embarked on several decades of diplomatic pressure with the intention of forcing other governments to prohibit their citizens from participating in the transatlantic slave trade. As the hegemonic ruler of the waves, the British had the means to enforce the treaties that they made with foreign powers, and until far into the century the Royal Navy maintained a squadron of warships to deter slave traders from making the Atlantic crossing. Landings were made on the African coast, and slave-trading depots were destroyed.

THE HOSKEN FAMILY PAPERS: A NAVAL GENEALOGY

(1988). THE HOSKEN FAMILY PAPERS: A NAVAL GENEALOGY. The Mariners Mirror: Vol. 74, No. 3, pp. 273-282.