Revisionisms || Historiography, Narrative, and the Nineteenth Century

Historiography, Narrative, and the Nineteenth CenturyAuthor(s): Richard PriceSource: Journal of British Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2, Revisionisms (Apr., 1996), pp. 220-256Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of The North American Conference on BritishStudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/175800 .

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Historiography, Narrative, and the Nineteenth Century

Richard Price

The narrative stories of nineteenth-century British history have been pulled seriously out of joint.1 At one time, not too long ago, the master narrative of nineteenth-century history seemed fairly straight- forward. The nineteenth century raised the curtain on the modern age; its politics, economics, social relations, and culture presaged the world we know from our own times. If there was one organizing principle that the historiography privileged above all others, it was the idea of change. This was the century of growth and change-generally of a progressive kind. But new stories are now being told that force us to reconsider this picture. The spotlight is being directed toward themes of continuity that challenge the representation of the nineteenth century as the moment of modernity. It is this shift from change to continuity as the basic organizing principle of the field that is the starting point for this article.

The touch of continuity is everywhere. The traditional historiography rested secure in the conception that the nineteenth century was shaped and dominated by the fact of Britain as the first industrial nation. But current research has dissolved the Industrial Revolution into the long-term trends of economic growth; now the very name itself is jeopardized. Whereas the nineteenth century was once regarded as

RICHARD PRICE is professor of history at the University of Maryland at College Park. He wishes to thank the following persons who at some stage read and made very helpful comments: James Epstein, John Belchem, James Cockburn, Adele Seeff, Laura Tabili, Peter Weiler, Peter Mandler, Terry Parssinen, and James E. Cronin. He also benefited from discussions at seminars at the University of Bielefeld, University of G6teborg, and Erasmus University, Rotterdam, where an earlier version of this article was presented in 1992-93.

1 See my "Does the Notion of Victorian England Make Sense?" in Cities, Class and Communication: Essays in Honour of Asa Briggs, ed. Derek Fraser (Hassocks, Sussex, 1990), for an early formulation of this argument, which I intend to develop more fully in a book tentatively titled "Contest and Containment: Britain, 1680-1880."

Journal of British Studies 35 (April 1996): 220-256 ? 1996 by The North American Conference on British Studies. All rights reserved. 0021-9371/96/3502-0004$01.00

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the age of the bourgeoisie, it is the landed elites and their various allies who now occupy center stage. The urban middle class has been returned to the provincial peripheries. Traditional historiography em- phasized how class formation accompanied economic discontinuity; revisionist historiography has dispersed the collectivity of class into various other alliances, mainly of a cross-class nature. Similarly, the politics of Victorian society have been inverted from the familiar steady march toward representative democracy to a world where theater and spectacle remained the prime source of political legitimation until the advent of party organization systematically closed public spaces for political participation. Traditional icons of "progress" are not safe from these reassessments: Gladstone has been turned into a major wrecker of the stately and civilized continuities of Whig gover- nance.2

There is nothing very surprising about revisionist tides. The familiar historiographies of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and twentieth centuries have all been swamped at one time or another by competing interpretations. Indeed, much of the historical writing in these fields revolves precisely around the issue of what kind of narrative best describes the period. Fierce and impolite intellectual struggles quite frequently erupt between differing narrative visions of particular periods, and it would be hard to argue that they are the worse for it. Eighteenth-century scholarship, for example, has scarcely been im- poverished by the debates about whether it was an aristocratic century or an age of the polite, commercial, propertied Englishman whose values were those of the "middling classes"; on the contrary, it is the vital center of British history these days. And the civil wars of seventeenth century historiography or the (more sedate) focus in the twentieth century on central institutions like the state have all enriched their fields as well as providing narrative signposts.3

But it is intriguing that for the nineteenth century no new narrative framework has emerged to replace the older works of historians such as Asa Briggs, George Kitson Clark, Harold Perkin, Llewellyn Wood-

2 For this new political history, see the recent books by James Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, 1815-1867 (Cambridge, 1993); and Jonathan Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, Conn., 1994).

3 See John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth Century En- gland (Cambridge, 1984); J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660-1832 (Cambridge, 1985); Paul Langford, A Polite and Commercial People: England, 1727-1783 (Oxford, 1989), Public Life and the Propertied Englishman, 1688-1788 (Oxford, 1990); and James Cro- nin, The Politics of State Expansion: War, State and Society in Twentieth Century Britain (London, 1991).











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ward, and G. M. Young, whose books continue to be issued in unre- vised editions. What is more, recent attempts to present synthetic approaches-we can instance F. M. L. Thompson and Keith Rob- bins-remain locked almost entirely within the framework established by the older generation of historians. The periodization is replicative, the organizing categories are duplicative, and the main lines of interpretations fail to stray far from the arguments put forward by the earlier generation.4 I shall also have occasion to note how much revisionist work (even when it proposes different categories like gender, patriarchy, and identity) remains firmly within the conventional chronology in spite of the challenge that its material and arguments often pose to that location.

This article is about the narrative framework of nineteenth- century history and proceeds through three stages. First, it discusses the traditional narrative of the nineteenth century around the metaphor of change and makes the argument that the superficial security of that narrative disguised important tensions and fractures. Second, I turn to the elevation of continuity as the key conceptual frame and suggest not only how it opens new epistemologies and perspectives but also how it highlights problematic legacies from the older historiography and contains its own catalog of difficulties. The third part of the argument proposes that the contradictions of the old historiography and the emphases of the new point toward the construction of a new narrative for modern British history that dissolves the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century into a broader period that begins in the late seventeenth and ends in the late nineteenth century. This final section, which is the heart of the historical argument, will sketch in brief outline the economic, social, and political architecture that would underpin such a narrative; it will, of necessity, bypass many relevant issues of theory and justification.

I

The nineteenth century has occupied an unquestioned place at the center of the history of modern Britain, but significant, if often latent,

4 Thus, F. M. L. Thompson's Rise of Respectable Society (London, 1988) main organizing category is, as the title suggests, the very Victorian notion of "respectabil- ity." Keith Robbins's Nineteenth Century Britain: England, Scotland, and Wales: The Making of a Nation (Oxford, 1989) attempts to understand the century as marked by the emergence of a "modern" British identity, but it is similarly unpersuasive because it fails to ask what was distinctive and peculiar about the nineteenth century in this respect.



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tensions lie embedded within the descriptive frameworks of its historiography that challenge the conventional characterizations of the shape and dynamic of the period. We can illustrate this with a brief glance at the simple, but not inconsequential, question of when the nineteenth century was. No other segment of British history, perhaps, contains such a bewildering variety of demarcations. Trevelyan opened his Brit- ish History in the Nineteenth Century in 1782 and in the first edition ended it in 1901, but in later additions he carried the story through to 1919. Most politically oriented textbooks begin in 1815 and end in 1914, but some, like Eric Evans's Forging of the Modern State (whose very title suggests a matter for debate rather than a given), opens in 1783 and ends in 1870-though the very first sentence of the book is a quote from the 1760s. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer in The Great Arch, in contrast, see the modern state as essentially created by 1870, a view that I just do not understand. Briggs's Age of Improvement opens in 1780 and ends in 1867; Perkin's Origins of Modern English Society, too, begins in 1780 but closes in 1880. Young's nineteenth century (in Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, at least, it was different elsewhere) extended from 1810 to ca. 1880. Roy Porter's En- glish Society in the Eighteenth Century opens in 1688 (everyone seems to be agreed on this for the eighteenth century) and ends with the Peace of Amiens in 1802 and, when it appears, Gatrell's volume will extend to 1870, after which Jose Harris takes the story to 1914.5

More important than the question of dates is the conceptual understanding that shaped the framework for the traditional narrative. And here differences are immediately apparent between the global and the local perspectives. At the macro level, in titles for example, key words such as "improvement" and "reform" dominate the characterization of the period, while at the micro level all sorts of qualifications are entered. Thus it is a mistake to think that the current emphasis in the scholarship on continuities is new. Underlying the traditional narrative was a tension between the relative importance of continuity and change. The conceptual starting point for the notion of the nineteenth

5 See George Macauley Trevelyan, British History in the Nineteenth Century (Lon- don, 1922; 2d ed., London, 1937); Eric Evans, Forging of the Modern State (London, 1983); Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer, The Great Arch (Oxford, 1985); Asa Briggs, Age of Improvement, 1783-1867 (London, 1959); Harold Perkin, Origins of Modern English Society (London, 1969); G. M. Young, Victorian England: Portrait of an Age, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1900); Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (Harmonds- worth, 1982); V. A. C. Gatrell, Britain, 1800-1870 (Harmondsworth, in press); Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain, 1870-1914 (London, 1993).







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century within the traditional literature was the transformative changes of the Industrial Revolution, and the general tendency of the historiography, therefore, was to frame the history of the period around the notion of change. But to anyone working in the early and mid- nineteenth century, the continuities with the past were inescapable and had to be entered into the analysis at some level.

There were various ways of handling this, but in general they involved reducing the continuities to a lesser priority of importance, to anachronistic "survivals" that were of interest only because they highlighted the forces of progress and change in the society. We need only note a few examples from some of the most significant works- those that effectively shaped a generation of research and teaching-to illustrate this point. Thus, on the very first page of The Age of Improve- ment Briggs notes that, although there "were features of the past that recalled or perpetuated older systems of social and political organization, it was the march of events which fascinated contemporaries and sometimes horrified them." Throughout this book there are continuing reminders of the often central role that these "features of the past" played throughout the period (at one point the continuities of the In- dustrial Revolution are noted). But it is ultimately the forces for "improvement"-urbanism, the rise of middle-class cultural and political influence, the making of the working class, and the opening of the political system-that are privileged in the account. Much the same point may be made about Woodward's Age of Reform, 1815-1870, recently reissued by Oxford University Press.6

Kitson Clark in his-again, recently reissued-Making of Victo- rian England gave even more prominence to the forces of continuity, noting how the "survivals" of the eighteenth century were to be found especially at the top and bottom of society. Indeed, he imagined Victo- rian England as a site of battle between the forces of civilized progress (i.e., the middle class) and the uncivilized past represented by sections of the plebeians and patricians. The metaphors of "civilized" and "uncivilized" thread their way inexorably through this book and Clark's other writings, casting the whole analysis in melodramatic light. Thus, for Clark the culture of Victorian society bore the mark of its recent emergence "from the animalism and brutality of primitive society" and was distinguished by the coming of "order"; its past was an "un- lawful" time of dogfights, public hangings, pillories, and the like. One

6 See Briggs, Age ofImprovement, 1783-1867, pp. 1-5, 17, 406-7, 523, for examples of these points; quote is on p. 1. Also see Llewellyn Woodward, The Age of Reform, 1815-1870 (Oxford, 1992), pp. 1-51.













merely needs to remember that the last public hanging took place in 1868 and that skimmingtons, dogfights, and even ratting were endemic to early and mid-Victorian England to realize the confused notion of the historical process that underlies his whole account.7

Perkin's Origins of Modern English Society took the presence of continuities more seriously. His account revolved around the process of class accommodation and stabilization. Between the 1820s and 1840s various "ideals" competed for the defining ideology of the nation, a process Perkin termed "the battle for the mind." Only the "aristocratic" ideal representing a revitalized paternalism really put up much of a contest against the ascendant "entrepreneurial" ideal of the middle classes that ultimately absorbed its competitors. This vic- tory neatly solved the problem of "survivals." The continued aristocratic presence in government, for example, was no longer a problem because they spoke the language and followed the policies of the entrepreneurial middle class. But this attempt to finesse the problem of "continuities" ultimately fails to convince precisely because the process of class accommodation is reduced solely to the realm of the "mind" and because it assumes that these "minds" were peculiar to the nineteenth century.8

Perkin's collapse of the story of the nineteenth century into the story of the "entrepreneurial" middle classes suggests a crucial connection that pervades the entire corpus of traditional historiography and of which revisionists of whatever stripe should take careful note. These accounts propose the period as the time of crucial passage from the past. But this notion derives directly from the sense of the world as it was conceived and projected by the early and mid-Victorian intel- ligentsia. Thus, a characteristic metaphor used to describe the age- employed by as varied a range of people as Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, James Martineau, John Stuart Mill, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Frederick Harrison, John Morley, and Prince Al- bert-was that of "transition." As Walter Houghton has pointed out, this term was used in the special sense to describe the era as one of "change from the past to the future." Indeed, adds Houghton, "in England that idea and the Victorian period began together." And, what is more, it was the Middle Ages from which Victorians saw their age

7 For representative examples both of the recognition of continuities and their treatment as anachronistic survivals, see G. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England (London, 1962; reprint, London, 1994), pp. 59-63, 206-10, 277, and An Expanding Society: Britain, 1830-1900 (Cambridge, 1967), pp. 10, 12-13, 18, 20, 28. Quote is from The Making of Victorian England, p. 64.

8 See Perkin.





8 See Perkin.





8 See Perkin.

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emerging; the image of the eighteenth century was a virtual blur in their eyes, as it has been to most historians of the nineteenth century. This sense of the early and mid-nineteenth century as the hinge of modernity, as the final showdown in the political and social worlds between the remnants of medievalism and the forces of modernity, is a commonplace in the social and literary comment of the time. Thomas Arnold remarked, for example, how he felt feudality had finally van- ished the first time he saw a train pass Rugby. What is surprising is the ease with which historians have taken over this metaphor as the principal organizing concept of the field and how completely it has become assimilated into the literature.9

This is revealed particularly in the treatment of the eighteenth century as, at best, an "old society" prologue to the industrial nineteenth and, at worst, as caricatured by Kitson Clark, as a savage, bestial place of callous brutality and heavy drinking. The failure to relate the nineteenth century to the eighteenth century in any convinc- ing way is perhaps the most serious shortcoming of the traditional historiography, and one that current revisionism is in danger of repeating. While eighteenth-century scholarship was the preserve of Na- mierite high politics this perspective was understandable. But the current vitality of a historiography rooted in the social history of the field and the revisionism of key parts of the nineteenth-century narrative demands some reconsideration of the relationship between these two time periods.10

The main difficulty, of course, for the conventional view of the nineteenth century as the hinge of modernity is that virtually all the criteria that are deployed to demonstrate that status may be replicated in the previous century. This too was a period of vibrant economic growth, of the commercialization of consumer markets, and of foreign and domestic market expansion. It was a century of urbanization that

9 Walter Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind (New Haven, Conn., 1957), pp. 1-4. Houghton's quote is on p. 1; Thomas Arnold is cited by Houghton on p. 4. Note how Briggs warns against this historical borrowing when he remarks that "any modern interpretation of what many outstanding Victorians considered to be an age of improvement should be coolly critical and not simply derivative." But he ends up by adopting the "commanding themes" as defined by such Victorians. See Briggs, Age of Improve- ment, pp. 3-4. Of course, this does not mean that everyone approved of this transition-or of certain aspects of it. On the complicated relationship between medievalism and Victorian culture, see, e.g., Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot (New Haven, Conn., 1981); and, of course, Kenneth Clark, The Gothic Revival (London, 1928).

10 See G. Kitson Clark, The Making of Victorian England, pp. 62, 63, 277. We should note that the logic of much of Edward Thompson's work was to bridge the gap between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. But it was a logic that did not receive his full attention.















spawned the notion of "improvement" to describe the civic pride and development sponsored by middling-class groups. Just as in Briggs's Victorian Cities, eighteenth-century cities were also the sites where middle-class identity and consciousness were "made" and where it flexed its political, social, and cultural muscles. An aristocratic presence remained prominent, and its relationship with the middling classes contained the same mix of contest, emulation, and reciprocity that are familiar to any nineteenth-century historian."

II

If continuity has been treated as a destabilizing annoyance in the older historiography, it has emerged as the central category of revisionism. This has been most fully expressed, of course, in the history of economic change where the notion of discontinuity now finds few champions.12 But the most interesting work has been done in political history, which, proceeding from very different premises, has tended to draw support from revisionism in economic and social history. The historiography of nineteenth-century politics had always genuflected

l Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (London, 1963). Eighteenth-century history revolves around these themes; see, e.g., Langford, A Polite and Commercial People and Public Life and the Propertied Englishman; Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth Century En- gland (Bloomington, Ind., 1982); Roy Porter and John Brewer, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (London, 1993); Peter Borsay, ed., The Eighteenth Century English Town: A Reader in Urban History, 1688-1828 (London, 1990); W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife (London, 1985); Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Busi- ness, Society and Family Life in London, 1660-1730 (London, 1989); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1832 (New Haven, Conn., 1992); John Money, Expe- rience and Identity: Birmingham and the West Midlands (Montreal, 1977); and Philip Jenkins, The Making of a Ruling Class: The Glamorgan Gentry, 1640-1790 (Cambridge, 1983).

12 For the best statement of the new econometric history of the Industrial Revolu- tion, see N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution (Oxford, 1985). For some restatements of the discontinuity argument, see Joel Mokyr, ed., The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective (Boulder, Colo., 1993); and Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, "Rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution," Economic History Review 45, no. 1 (February 1992): 24-50. It is important to note that the question of continuity in economic growth was always recognized, but, as in the general histories, it was ultimately pushed aside; see Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution (Cam- bridge, 1964), pp. 1-5. A good recent attempt to rescue the term "industrial revolution" by defining it as the process of raw material substitution is E. A. Wrigley, Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge, 1988). For a sensible overview, which raises the difficulties of periodization, see C. H. Lee, The British Economy since 1700: A Macroeconomic Perspective (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 1-23. And for the relationship between historiography and contemporary events and moods, see David Cannadine, "The Past and the Present in the English Industrial Revolution, 1880-1980," Past and Present, no. 103 (May 1984), pp. 131-72.


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toward the presence of traditional elites, but, apart from the bold sweep of Perry Anderson's provocative survey written at the end of the 1960s, these formations had not been placed at the center of British political history. Insofar as it was theorized at all (and most of it was not), British political history tended to operate within the whiggish context of a steady drive toward representative democracy. In the main, therefore, the evident importance of "aristocratic" politics and culture in the high noon of the bourgeoisie age had always been regarded as something of a problematic anomaly, perhaps the central problem that political history needed to address. Obviously, in the crudest sense, continuities in economic and social structures also suggest continuities in political structures, and so the seemingly "traditional" nature of Britain's political structures-long after they should have been replaced by "modern," bourgeoisie ones-was perhaps less of a problem than it had once seemed.13

Ironically, it was J. C. D. Clark who picked up the schema first proposed by Anderson and filled in the historical details. Clark's as- sault on the Whig-Marxist view of the eighteenth century proposed a narrative of English history from 1688 to 1832 focused around a political culture that rested on theories of kingly patriarchalism, state structures that relied on traditional theories of dynasticism, and a hege- monic Anglican religion that furnished a cultural arena of consent for elite rule. Whatever the weaknesses in his account, it did have the very great virtue of directing attention to the enormous resilience that overtly traditional structures of power possess in British society and the necessity of accounting for that fact.14

In Clark's wake, it is hardly surprising that the nineteenth-century Whigs are being actively rescued from the considerable condescension of their own time and posterity and that their history is being reoriented away from the sedate passage to inevitable oblivion that dominated the traditional historiography. It has been argued that the vitality of Whig paternalism extended beyond the "age of reform" and into the 1870s and 1880s precisely because, far from being a mere style of

13 Perry Anderson, "Origins of the Present Crisis," in his Towards Socialism (Ith- aca, N.Y., 1966), pp. 11-52, originally published in New Left Review in 1964; Charles Seymour, Electoral Reform in England and Wales (Archon reprint, New Hamden, Conn., 1970), pp. vii-viii; Walter Arnstein, "The Myth of the Triumphant Victorian Middle Classes," Historian 37, no. 2 (February 1975): 207-21.

14 See J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1660-1832 (n. 3 above), and Revolution and Rebellion: State and Society in England in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Cambridge, 1986). For a sensible critique of Clark, see Joanna Innes, "Jonathan Clark, Social History and England's 'Ancien Regime,' " Past and Present, no. 115 (1985), pp. 165-200.















governing through an extended kinship network, it was a real political program capable of outmaneuvering and absorbing Benthamism or Radicalism. Only the manic energy of Gladstone was capable of de- stroying its program and political viability. Indeed, from this perspective, the dynamic force in reform politics in the nineteenth century was to be found mainly within the sectors of traditional social and political power rather than in the "new" urban middle class of the industrial towns. And this fits well with the emphasis given by social historians like W. D. Rubenstein to the continued power and importance of the commercial and landowning elites.15

It should, perhaps, come as no surprise, however, that it is the working class that has suffered most from the revisionism of continuity. Just as the urban industrial middle class is no longer granted the importance and power that earlier accounts tended to accord it, so the working class as we have known it has been dissolved. In the conventional literature, the 1790s mark a decisive transformation in popular politics as they now begin to prefigure the politics of the twentieth century. This was always seen as a partial process; the difficulties of regarding Chartism as the first working-class movement have long been recognized, and its connections with eighteenth-century radicalism were well established in the pioneering scholarship of Briggs and others, although they ultimately judged its "modernity" of prime importance. Thus, political movements that continue to reveal more "traditional" features later in the century such as the anti-Russian Urquhartite campaign in the 1850s and the Tichborne Claimant's case in the 1860s-80s were treated as anomalies because they did not fit a perspective that assumed a steady movement toward twentieth- century forms of mass politics. Revisionism has moved these "traditional" political forms to the center of interpretation. As a conse- quence, "class" as the social basis of explanation has been displaced in favor of such notions as "community" as a better way of understanding the "populism" of mass politics that eschewed class appeals in favor of various discourses of "popular constitutionalism." The appeal to the "constitution" has been recognized as an important con-

15 See Parry (n. 2 above), a book that may do for nineteenth-century political history what J. C. D. Clark has done for the eighteenth; Peter Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830-1852 (Oxford, 1990); T. A. Jenkins, Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party, 1874-1886 (Oxford, 1988); and Philip Har- ling and Peter Mandler, "From 'Fiscal-Military' State to Laissez-Faire State, 1760- 1850," Journal of British Studies 32, no. 1 (January 1993): 44-70. Also see the important article by W. D. Rubinstein, "Wealth Elites and the Class Structure of Modern Britain," Past and Present, no. 76 (May 1977), pp. 99-126.







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stituent of popular politics for some time. What is new is the argument that this describes the master narrative of popular politics far better than explanations around socioeconomic and class frameworks.16

To replace "change" with "continuity" as the central descriptor of nineteenth-century society is not without its problems, however. We might note first how traditional chronologies and metanarratives continue to govern and to constrain revisionist accounts. Thus, when J. C. D. Clark attributes the collapse of the "old regime" in 1829-32 to a stab in the back by Wellington and Peel, he reinstates a conception of discontinuity that restores the "great" reform bill of Whig-Liberal legend. It also gives credence to the notion of an "age of reform" in the 1830s and 1840s and a "Victorian revolution" in government that the work of people like Derek Fraser has done much to undermine. Similarly, the important work of Frank O'Gorman and James Vernon on popular political structures that demonstrates the essential continuities of popular political mobilization well into the mid-Victorian period continues to leave unchallenged the traditional divide around the early nineteenth century. And the same is true for the standard interpretation of the coming of Victorian patriarchy that I shall address later on. In other words, the tendency of the older historiography to artificially detach the nineteenth from the eighteenth century remains a common feature of current revisionism.17

A second implication of privileging continuity is that it tends to result in a conservative history. The difficulty here is not with the politics of such an interpretation but with the way it deproblematizes

16 Craig Calhoun's The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism during the Industrial Revolution (Chicago, 1982) was an early opening of this perspective and first used the term "populist" to describe lower-class ideology. This was followed by Gareth Stedman Jones, "Rethinking Chartism," in his Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1983). And, of course, this perspective has been carried to its fullest expression in Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840-1914 (Cam- bridge, 1991). See also Vernon, Politics and the People (n. 2 above); and Asa Briggs, Chartist Studies (London, 1959). On Tichborne and other similiar mid-century movements, see Rohan McWilliam, "Radicalism and Popular Culture: The Tichborne Case and the Politics of Fair Play, 1867-1886," and Miles Taylor, "The Old Radicalism and the New: David Urquhart and the Politics of Opposition, 1832-1867," both in Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850-1914, ed. Eugenio Biagini and Alastair Reid (Cambridge, 1991).

17 See Derek Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England: The Structure of Politics in Victorian Cities (Leicester, 1976); J. C. D. Clark, English Society, pp. 394-409; Frank O'Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734-1832 (Cambridge, 1989), "Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: The Social Meaning of Elections in England, 1780-1860," Past and Present, no. 135 (May 1992), pp. 79-115; and Vernon, Politics and the People, which essentially extends O'Gorman's analysis to 1867.















the very issues of hierarchy, power, and authority that lie at the heart of British history. Clark's account of eighteenth-century England as a confessional, ancien regime state is ultimately unsatisfactory precisely because its power structures are treated as intrinsically unproblematic and natural, not needing to be protected and defended. Too many lacunae are left unattended in any approach that seeks to ignore the contests that surround these matters. The same tendency is implicit also in the turn away from "class" as a category of analysis in nineteenth-century historiography. Substituting "populism" or "community" for "class" directs attention to the convergencies between Liberalism and plebeian politics. This is a long, well-respected historiographical convention that historians who graduated in the "Class of '68" treated by focusing on the circumstances, means, and strategies that accompanied this alliance. But for some in the class of the 1980s the history of populist politics in the nineteenth century is a lot less contingent and fragile. (And looking at the sad history of Britain in the 1980s we can well understand why.) The result, however, is that these revisionist historians end up placing a celebratory history of lib-labism at the center of social relations, and in this history the Liberal order of society and its class relations is treated as natural and unproblematic.18

It is important to emphasize that this particular use of categories like "populism" and "popular constitutionalism" replicates the preju- dices and political purposes of Victorian Whig-Liberal discourse itself, which argued that although there were classes their interests were mutual and compatible. In fact, of course, we know quite well that social relations were not that simple and that great efforts in time and

18 This is, of course, in contrast to an earlier generation of historians like John Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1974); or Brian Harrison, Drink and the Victorians (London, 1971). For a very different interpretation of popular constitionalism that emphasizes its oppositional capacities-and that was also one of its earliest formulations-see John Belchem, "Republicanism, Popular Constitution- alism and the Radical Platform in Early Nineteenth Century England," Social History 6, no. 1 (January 1981): 1-32. And for an interpretation that emphasizes the diversities in popular constitutionalism, see James Epstein, "Understanding the Cap of Liberty: Symbolic Practice and Social Conflict in Early Nineteenth Century England," Past and Present, no. 122 (February 1989), pp. 75-118. For the historiographical origins of this recent emphasis on the convergence of Liberalism and working-class politics, see Trygve Tholfsen, Working Class Radicalism in Mid-Victorian England (London, 1976). This argument has recently been restated, fused with elements of John Vincent's pioneering Formation of the Liberal Party, 1857-1868 (London, 1966), and spiced with more attention to the politics and political language of the relationship in Eugenio Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860-1880 (Cambridge, 1992), which suggests a "charismatic" theory of Gladstone's appeal. For the new lib-labism, see Eugenio Biagini and Alastair Reid, "Currents of Radicalism, 1850-1914," chap. 1 of Biagini and Reid, eds.







231 231 231



money were expended to create this representation of reality. We need only mention such key Victorian institutions as working men's clubs, mutual improvement societies, educational efforts, and the like. The

point, however, is that to take the language of Victorian Liberalism to define the categories of historical analysis is to preordain the conclu- sions that social relations were really rather cozy. Just as the "paternal" rhetoric of social relations favored by the eighteenth-century squirearchy (to which the Victorian Liberal discourse was closely related) disguised the continual tussle between the rough plebeian culture and patrician claims to authority, so the discourses of populism and popular constitutionalism do not necessarily help us understand how

power, ownership, and authority (which were, after all, class things) were manifested and exercised in the state and the wider society. In- deed, as treated so far, they tend to avoid such issues, although they need not necessarily do so. Contextualizing the text is the crucial part of the historical imagination, and at some point it becomes necessary to connect the rhetoric of politics to material dimensions: power, like the Balinese cockfight, is not merely symbolic ritual or language game.19

Finally, the elevation of "populism" as the substitute category for "class" leads to a curious set of contradictions. "Populism" is a "language" term entirely; nobody called themselves "populists" in nineteenth-century Britain. In fact, the term sits quite strangely in the British context in contrast to America and Russia, where "real" populist movements were rooted in definable organizational and social contexts. In Britain the term has no similar social, political, or geo- graphical moorings, and it is quite hard to think of any aspect of nineteenth-century British society that was "populist." "Populism," then, might be thought of as an appropriately postmodern term-almost hyp- ertext. "Class," however, was used in the language, although it possessed many meanings, and it was located in exactly the social settings that "populism" lacks. "Class" may be identified with social stratifi-

19 For examples of the unproblematic use of sources such as middle-class-owned provincial newspapers to represent the beliefs and assumptions of the plebeians, see Biagini's Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform, the very title of which illustrates the borrowing from Victorian Liberalism, for which it is a panegyric. David Mayfield and Susan Thorne have rightly remarked that by making the cognitive relationship of subject viewing object "the explicit centerpiece of their researches [Stedman Jones and Joyce] render the problem of social relations and social power ... meaningless from the very outset (long before any empirical encounter with the archive)"; see their "Reply to 'The Poverty of Protest' and 'The Imaginary Discontents,' " Social History 18, no. 2 (May 1993): 219-34, quote on 232. For the eighteenth century, of course, see E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York, 1993), pp. 21, 24-26.















cation and is descriptive of power hierarchies. Yet its usage is denied precisely because of a language game that simply and falsely looks for a Leninist conception of class, finds it missing, and concludes the absence of class.

This naming procedure reflects the challenge of the "linguistic turn" to historical materialism as the main conceptual framework for nineteenth-century historiography. The convergence between a postmodernist theoretical scaffolding and a social and political history that privileges continuity is no accident. A social and political history without class nestles cozily in the theoretical duckdown of postmodernism. Class is a term with an epistemology and historical context in positiv- ism and modernism and has typically been spoken of as part of a sense of movement. Conversely, to abstract politics into a series of discourses-and that alone-is consistent with postmodernism's denial of "reality" beyond the realms of language and rhetoric. And, indeed, this trope is reflected in the histories of populism and popular constitutionalism where questions of how and why social identities changed or party organization developed are not at the center of analysis; indeed, they are barely addressed at all. Within this context, the historical meaning of continuities, or persistence of old structures, rhetorics, and issues, is not ultimately a matter of empirical balancing. "Fact" is not the central issue. One can match evidence of "class" presence against evidence of "populist" presence to little effect. The question is epistemological: "class" is a modernist term, both in its derivation and usage; it suggests a view of the world that posits something "real" out there. "Populism" is a postmodernist category; it implies no necessary specific social location and is dependent in the scholarship for its validation through the public political languages people use. Thus, understanding this particular theme of revisionist scholarship requires an encounter with postmodernist theory.

This is difficult for a variety of reasons-not least because postmodernism comes in a variety of forms that mutate in rapid succession. It is difficult also because its practitioners in nineteenth-century social history tend to under attribute source authorities for their conceptual categories, so evaluating the theoretical orrery being used to organize and interrogate the historical texts is an uncertain business. Indeed, it is not even established that postmodernist theory is necessary to the historical arguments that are being made under its authority. But the lightness of connection between theory and sources was established from the very beginning when the argument for centering the language of Chartism on the theoretical authority of Ferdinand de Saussure was made in an elliptical aside, without even a footnote, let alone any







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explicated reading of Saussure.20 In spite of this tendency to invoke intellectual authorities like rubber stamps, to query the status of the linguistic turn as a superior mode of analysis to historical materialism is to meet with the impatient claim (by Patrick Joyce) that "times really have moved on." In order not to be left behind, I will not wait to interrogate this interesting question here but will jump ahead to consider some of the implications of postmodernism for the kind of reperiodizing narrative framework that I am suggesting for the nineteenth century.21

It is important and healthy for historians to hold up their epistemologies for scrutiny once in a while, and our general attitude to theoretical debate in history has to be to welcome the possibility of one thousand flowers in bloom. Postmodernism is attractive to historians because it tends to confirm what has been their dominant practice of looking at the particularities of history, emphasizing the ambiguity and untidiness of the past and retreating into the difficulties of saying anything about the whole. It is salutary to be reminded of the provi-

20 The reference to Saussure is in Stedman Jones's Languages of Class, p. 20. Saussure regarded language as the product of social forces, as a social institution, as a system of signs that do not derive meaning in an arbitrary way but from social forces and facts. See Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (New York, 1966), pp. 9, 15, 67-69, 113, 114-15, 122. See also Jonathan Cullen, Saussure (London, 1976); and Roy Harris, Reading Saussure (London, 1987), pp. 64-69. For a fierce, but telling, critique of the linguistic turn as it is practiced in this field, see Bryan Palmer, Descent into Discourse (Philadelphia, 1990), and "Critical Theory, Historical Materialism, and the Ostensible End of Marxism: The Poverty of Theory Revisited," International Re- view of Social History 38 (1993): 133-62.

21 The quote is from Patrick Joyce, "The Imaginary Discontents of Social History: A Note of Response to Mayfield and Thorne and Lawrence and Taylor," Social History 18, no. 1 (January 1993): 81-85; the remark about times moving on is on 84. It is difficult to find any sustained attribution to a body of linguistic or other theory in Joyce's Visions of the People. And, as Epstein has remarked, it is not clear how seriously to take Joyce's commitment to poststructuralism given the sharp distinction between his assertions and his actual historical practice. See James Epstein, "The Populist Turn," Journal of Brit- ish Studies 32, no. 2 (April 1993): 179-89. But for an assertive though curiously slight claim for postmodernism's superiority over materialism, see Patrick Joyce, "History and Post-Modernism," Past and Present, no. 133 (1991), pp. 204-9. For intelligent reflections on this body of scholarship see David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, "Social History and Its Discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language," Social History 17, no. 2 (May 1992): 165-88; Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, "The Poverty of Protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the Politics of Language-a Reply," Social History 18, no. 1 (January 1993): 1-15. Joyce replied to the former in "The Imaginary Discontents of Social History: A Note of Response to Mayfield and Thorne and Lawrence and Taylor." Mayfield and Thorne responded in "Reply to 'The Poverty of Protest' and 'The Imaginary Discontents.' " James Vernon weighed in with "Who's Afraid of the 'Linguistic Turn'?" Social History 19, no. 1 (January 1994): 82-97, in which a list of postmodernist authorities was provided along with apologies for his and Joyce's rudeness.













sionality and instability of categories, of the essential ambiguity and untidiness of the historical process. And it is useful to recall the dan- gers that Jean-FranQois Lyotard speaks of in "Futility in Revolu- tion"-and that are amply illustrated by the historiography of this article-of adopting the categories of the time and thus writing the propaganda of one interested section of society.22

Equally, the attention that is given by postmodernists to reading through and behind the texts to possible hidden meanings that shape and mold representations is not incompatible with the traditional inter- rogatory strategies of the historian. Neither is the postmodernist denial of any privileged standpoint contrary in principle to good historical practice-in spite of its formulation against history. Furthermore, it is especially helpful for attention to be directed to the power structures and struggles that are represented by particular discourses. Postmod- ernism is especially concerned with the tyrannies of dominant interpretations or theories of knowledge and reminds us that rhetoric itself is a form of political power.23 Undoubtedly, the rise of Thatcherite conservatism and the demise of the British Labour movement could be written from such a perspective. Similarly, it would be highly in- structive to look, for example, at the way the discourse of free trade crowded out all other competitors in the nineteenth century.

All of these features of the postmodernist corpus are helpful and can be used to enrich historical writing. More problematic for the historian is the tendency of postmodernism to react against the totalizing aim of modernism by emphasizing indeterminacy, fragmentation, chaos, and pluralities. At the heart of this position is the opposition to metanarrative accounts of the historical process-that is, looking at history as the unfolding of the spirit of freedom, or expression of the will of the people, or the progress of the proletariat. According to postmodernism, the conventional historical metanarratives that grew out of Enlightenment thought prescribe a tyrannical organization of

22 1 have found the following pieces helpful in exploring the question of postmodernism: Jean-Francois Lyotard, "Futility in Revolution," in Toward the Postmodern (At- lantic Highlands, N.J., 1993), pp. 87-114, and The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis, 1984); Roland Barthes, The Rustle of Language (Berkeley, Calif., 1989); Hans Kellner, Language and Historical Representation: Getting the Story Crooked (Madison, Wis., 1989); William Ray, Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction (Oxford, 1984); Ihab Hassan, The Postmodern Turn (Columbus, Ohio, 1987); Thomas Docherty, ed., Postmodernism: A Reader (New York, 1993); Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations (Basingstoke, 1991); and Gabrielle Spiegel, "History, Historicism, and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle Ages," Speculum 65 (January 1990): 59-86.

23 On this last point, for illustration, see Vernon, "Who's Afraid of the 'Linguistic Turn'?" pp. 81-82, 87-88.











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knowledge. Thus, to look for meaning in the past-pace Marx, Weber, and others-is to create a totalizing framework that inevitably implies authoritarian categories of knowledge and thought. (The postmodernist vocabulary is riven with alarmingly violent language as it describes the totalitarian impulse in all such metanarrative enterprises.) It is not clear how far such arguments are intended to go. There is a difference between writing history as the unfolding of a prescripted play and the use of certain concepts (class struggle, the struggle to expand free- doms) as ways to read and understand events. Postmodernism tends to elide this distinction, which in practical terms leaves only the local, particular, and transient as safe and legitimate for historical investigation. Even those, like Gabrielle Spiegel, who have offered routes around postmodernism's collapse of everything into discursive phenomena do so without moving beyond the local focus. Joyce, one of postmodernism's most active advocates in modern British history, has taken the absence of grand narratives in nineteenth-century history to be a mark of the epistemological superiority of its historians over their weaker brethren in earlier and later periods. But if, in fact, general narratives written around certain concepts have the same authoritarian consequences as the metanarratives of Marx, Weber, and others, then (as an example) writing the history of plebeian politics around notions of "populism" or "popular constitutionalism" falls subject to the same fallacy as writing them around the category of "class."24

There are several things to be said about this that might rescue such narratives from the taint of totalitarianism. In the first place, it is not only useful, but essential, for us to retain a portion of (what Lyotard terms) an "incredulity towards metanarratives" and to remember that all argumentation has to be provisional, and its categories unstable. Any general viewpoint is inherently temporary, waiting to be replaced by the next one: class has served as a metanarrative but is now about to be replaced by populism that in its turn will be replaced by something new. At least that is how the postmodernist would put it. But historical processes through time are inclusive. Thus, the La- bour Party preserved bits and pieces of Liberalism, capitalism possessed traces of feudalism, and Roland Barthes retained portions of Saussure. Historical procedures reflect this in the way historians (if

24 See Spiegel. Joyce in "The Imaginary Discontents of Social History," p. 84, has contrasted the absence of grand narratives in nineteenth-century history in comparison to the eighteenth or seventeenth centuries as a sign of the greater theoretical sophistica- tion of those working in the former field. But it should be clear from this article that in the skeletal form of periodizations grand narratives continue to shape even the work of revisionists.











they are any good) allow for the possibility that aspects of old schemata may be of use to new ones and could be retained, that older interpretations will be recovered and reworked in a continual process of debate and argumentation between different schemes, proposals, approaches, and narratives. This is the way the world works.25

A second objection is that to regard a concept-metanarrative or not-as possessing one quality or another is to ignore the importance of contextualization. Thus, when Lyotard implies that the Declaration of the Rights of Man is an authorizing document for French imperialism, he is actually posing a historical problem. Like the emancipation of the proletariat, the Declaration of the Rights of Man can express libertarian and authoritarian possibilities in any conceivable combina- tion or quantity. Which road is taken by movements authorized by those particular slogans cannot be known in advance and is the job of the historian to explain.26

In the third place, as part of explanation, historians usually work with large categories that are represented in some material presence: institutions, gender, capitalism, bodies, class, and the state would be typical examples. But the metanarrative proscriptions of postmodernism declare an end to historical narratives around macro categories, and this means that the historian must abdicate from being able to say much about anything beyond the local and specific. The implications of this are well expressed by two feminist scholars speaking of Lyotard: "There is no place ... for critique of pervasive axes of stratification, for critique of broad-based relations of dominance and subordination along lines like gender, race and class."27

Historians could just about work without categories like "capitalism" and the "state" (some already do), but the postmodernist subver- sion extends beyond that even to the category of the "social," without which it is hard to see how historians could operate at all-although it appears that Joyce is willing to give it a try. This is, in fact, the place where the logic of postmodernism takes us, and it reflects the view of the historical process as floating in metaphysical chaos. For the postmodernist, the public political sphere is to be understood, not as a Habermasian socially and politically constructed space that theory

25 Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition, p. xxiv; Kellner, p. 304. 26 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Explained: Correspondence, 1982-1985

(Minneapolis, 1993), p. 52. 27 See Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, "Social Criticism without Philosophy:

An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism," in Docherty, ed., p. 419, who go on to deny that postmodernism should foreswear large historical narratives or macro analysis of social phenomenon.















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can help us understand, but as the chaotic clashing of political spectacle, performance, and what Lyotard calls the "libidinal," by which is meant (I think) the carnival, the seemingly marginal, and the oddity whose meanings cannot be probed by grand theory. It is these that the postmodernist would move to the center of historical attention in the belief that they destablize notions of politics based on organization, institutions, and interest. Given this, it is unsurprising that postmodernism has little interest in theories of power, political economy, or state structures and even less, of course, in social theory. But the relationship between history and these bodies of knowledge has been the source of much important insight and has given the best history its traditionally interdisciplinary character. It is hard to understand why historians should abandon these frameworks when there is ample evidence that they do possess material dimensions and are more than simply rhetorical discourse.28

It is similarly with change and periodization. Postmodernism is not interested in development over time as a feature of the historical process. To compose a narrative, with its conventional beginnings and endings, is to construct a rhetoric of naming, choices, and exclusions that will order and predetermine the readings of the very sources and texts that are then used as the legitimation of the argument.29 Postmod- ernism prefers the associative procedure that subverts the confining discipline of chronology. If meaning is understood as a never-ending series of discursive codes, texts behind texts (raising the question of infinite regress), and if relationships are essentially chaotic rather than structured, then the notion of change as a historical process as opposed to a matter of continual, shifting indeterminacy is both moot and unim- portant.

Finally, however, I would suggest that the fear of the general narrative framework is unnecessarily limiting as well as quite unhelpful to the play of historical knowledge. To speak of grand narrative or periodization as forms of closure is-in the "real" world of historical debate and disputation-an abstraction that allows no alternative and is itself an argument for closure. Underlying each theoretical position

28 The category of the "social" has been questioned by Jean Baudrillard; see Joyce's two references to it-without much elaboration-in "History and Post-Modernism," and his "Imaginary Discontents of Social History," p. 82, although I have been unable to find the work there cited. But there seems to be some confusion on this matter, because Vernon in "Who's Afraid of the 'Linguistic Turn'?" p. 96, allows the social and social-structural approaches. In its indeterminacy this is a very postmodern position, I suppose. For a critical appreciation of Baudrillard, see Best and Kellner, pp. 114-28.

29 For the difficulties with beginnings and endings, see Kellner, pp. 7, 60-63.















and, indeed, each work of history is some explicit or implicit notion of periodization and idea of how the subjects of investigation are related to that particular moment. Within the notion of postmodernism itself there is a periodizing assumption: that there was a modernist moment that some date as beginning around 1875 and some have marked as ending around 1988 in architecture. There is nothing contra- dictory to postmodernism about this: it is only possible to understand what is peculiar to one period by asking how it is different from another, by uncovering what is often hidden from itself.30 To deny the significance of time is to remove one of the ways we can contextualize and to deny an important subject of historical interrogation.

Thus (while I claim no great theoretical insights for this argument), periodizing provides one of the central vocabularies of the historical imagination as we speak to one another in the process of trying to understand what defines our subject and how we may comprehend the interrelationships between historical phenomena and events. It draws attention to broad formations and their interconnections-which may be perceived as structured, associative, or chaotic. Indeed-and here we encounter the core difficulty with postmodernism for the historical enterprise-if we follow the strict logic of postmodernism, we end up allowing only the local and the particular to be the proper subject of historical investigation; we also close off too many areas of useful inquiry that cannot be reduced simply or only to discourse. The activi- ties of real people extend beyond the symbolic and into the real world of material negotiation. Not to recognize this is to dismiss huge areas from the field of historical investigation.

In any case to return to the safer (?) ground of the texts, I am struck by the irony that both political history inspired by the "linguistic turn" and economic history underpinned by "materialist" and "posi- tivist" assumptions can be read as leading to the same conclusion. Each suggests the possibility of a new narrative that turns away from

30 Arnold Toynbee was one of the first to use the term "postmodern," which therefore has good Anglo-Saxon roots, although it has now been captured by the French and slavishly adopted by the Americans. Toynbee referred to post-1875 as the "postmodern" age, characterized by anarchy, turmoil, revolution, and the collapse of the Enlighten- ment ethos. These were exactly the qualities that Young found in the late Victorian age. Others have pointed to the prefiguring of postmodernism by conservative theorists in the fifties like Daniel Bell, who spoke of a postindustrial society. For these remarks, see Best and Kellner, pp. 6-9; Young (n. 5 above), pp. 157-87. For an excellent critique of postmodernism from the viewpoint of historical materialism as well as the specific reference to architecture, see David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Cam- bridge, 1989), p. 356. also see F. R. Ankersmit, "Historiography and Postmodernism," History and Theory 28, no. 2 (1989): 146.









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the prescribed choice between continuity and change as dominant organizing themes in understanding nineteenth-century history. And so I return to the matter with which I opened this essay: how to frame an understanding of modern British history that locates in time the relationships between the different spheres of societal experience and makes an argument about the distinctive qualities and properties that belong to this period. I can see a place in this enterprise for a wide variety of theoretical positions. Historians work with explicit or implicit notions of where their subject sits in time and place, what binds its diverse elements together, and what organizing principles are to be privileged in our understanding of the particular moment. It is precisely these elements that have been eroded in our understanding of the nineteenth century.

III

The late seventeenth century to the late nineteenth century constituted a "stage" in the history of modern Britain that can be usefully demarcated and discussed as a unit. Throughout this period the basic structures of society operated within contexts whose boundaries, scripts, tensions, and instabilities are visible by the late seventeenth century and are only decisively disrupted into new arenas of engage- ment two hundred years later. It is not particularly helpful to see the period as marked by ruptures and transformative change. Indeed, it is a mistake to privilege either continuity or change as the overriding category of the period; it is rather more useful to see them as both operating within borders whose limits were subject to greater or lesser pressures throughout the period, but which generally held firm. How they were challenged-along class, sectional, regional, and gender lines-and why they held firm must be major questions for historians to explore. And in doing so, they will explore what we call "change." No justice can be done here to the complexities and nuances of the argument that would have to be made to sustain these contentions; that must await another place. The best that can be done is to describe in bald design the architecture of such an argument and categories used to support it.

I start with the themes of economic history simply because they are a starting point, not necessarily the starting point and because I am not concerned in this piece with causation, only with presenting a series of associations that can be seen to fall within similar general narrative lines. In addition, the patterns of economic history in this period that illustrate the argument may be quickly and easily ex-


III




III







plained; they are such an obvious part of the historiographical land- scape that I can confine myself to making some fairly simple remarks.

In the first place, it is clear from statistical and other evidence that economic growth was largely a continuous process, that "new" elements appeared much earlier than the late eighteenth century and "old" elements remained central much later, and that Britain's economy possessed a significant manufacturing component by the late seventeenth century. By the mid-eighteenth century, at least most labor was occupied outside the agricultural sector. Equally, the intensifica- tion of production in the early nineteenth century was as much a func- tion of the "traditional" sectors of production as of the factory, and as late as 1860 around 50 percent of productivity growth came from the nonmechanized sectors of the economy. Steam power did not displace water power in manufacturing or sail on the ocean until the 1860s.31

In the second place, it is important to note that this emphasis on continuity does not deny the significance or importance of economic growth in this period. Abandoning the term "industrial revolution" does not mean decentering the significance of economic growth. Al- though there will continue to be debate over the measurement of economic indices, the perspective that fits best within a total societal context seems to be the historiographical stance of J. U. Nef and J. H. Clapham, whose careful and qualified histories suggested that "industrialization" was not something that happened once but was a process that accompanied the different phases and stages of capitalist growth from the sixteenth century onward. Perhaps the most notable aspect of economic growth was regional concentration around particular industries. The phenomenal growth of textiles in the northeast in the late eighteenth century was part of a process of regional variation and relocation that first appeared in the sixteenth-century expansion of the coal industry.32

31 See Crafts (n. 12 above), pp. 42, 45-47, 61, 63, 66, 87; essays by C. H. Feinstein and Donald McCloskey in The Economic History of Britain since 1700, vol. 1, ed. Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey (Cambridge, 1981); C. Knick Harley, "British Industrialisation before 1841: Evidence of Slower Growth during the Industrial Revolu- tion," Journal of Economic History 42, no. 5 (1982): 267, 276-77; Dolores Greenberg, "Power Patterns of the Industrial Revolution," American Historical Review 87, no. 2 (1982): 1237-61. The growth rate reached 3 percent-the rate recognized to be the signal of an industrializing economy-only in the 1830s and 1840s.

32 On the historiography of the Industrial Revolution and its relationship to contemporary economic moods, see Cannadine (n. 12 above). See also J. U. Nef, The Rise of the British Coal Industry (London, 1932), vol. 1, pt. 2; and J. H. Clapham, An Economic History of Modern Britain: The Early Railway Age, 1820-1850 (Cambridge, 1926). Pat Hudson has recently reemphasized the importance of regional growth for the idea of an











241 241 241



Accompanying this was the progression of economic change through the vast expansion of traditional modes of production. This was a familiar pattern from the past and at this moment reflected the many routes to mass production apart from the factory. The economic structure in the period of industrialization was, and remained, highly variegated, but the fluctuating intensity and pace of economic change operated within a workshop-dominated economic structure. Thus, while there will probably continue to be dispute over the measurement of the economic indices, the effect of this "revolution" in social terms seems to have been manifested not through exposure to new technolo- gies or modes of working. If foreign trade statistics provide evidence for "takeoff" in the 1780s, the actual structures of production and distribution that lay behind that growth experienced expansion rather than alteration. The experience of this particular phase of economic growth was represented by the intensified intrusion of market forces into the structures of everyday life; a keyword of the period for both the political economists and their opponents is "competition." And, thus, neither urbanism nor the factory defined this period of economic change more than the destruction of wage and apprenticeship standards or the redivision of labor.33

But by most comparative indices, Britain's economic growth has been extremely slow over the past three hundred years. And this suggests how its economic success lay less in manufacturing prowess and more in commerce and trade, which is a third aspect of economic structure that needs to be highlighted in any new narrative of British history. If by the mid-nineteenth century Britain was the workshop of the world, it had self-consciously sought to be the world's warehouse since the seventeenth-century struggles against the Dutch-whose own experience provided the model for Britain's imperial dreams and fiscal innovations. The "commercial revolution" was not a preparation

industrial revolution in The Industrial Revolution (London, 1992). See Maxine Berg's book The Age of Manufactures (London, 1984) for a good statement of the variegated and uneven process of this phase of economic growth.

33 See Jonathan Zeitlin and Charles Sabel, "Historical Alternatives to Mass Produc- tion: Politics, Markets and Technology in Nineteenth Century Industrialisation," Past and Present, no. 108 (August 1985), pp. 133-76. It is worth noting that Toynbee saw the essence of the Industrial Revolution as "the substitution of competition for the medieval regulations which had previously controlled the production and distribution of wealth"; Arnold Toynbee, The Industrial Revolution (Boston, 1956), p. 84. See Maxine Berg, "What Difference Did Women's Work Make to the Industrial Revolution?" His- tory Workshop Journal 35 (Spring 1993): 22-44, for the key role that female labor played in the growth industries. See also Javier Cuenca Esteban, "British Textile Prices, 1770- 1831," Economic History Review 48, no. 1 (February 1994): 66-105.













for industrialization but an abiding and determining feature of Britain's political economy. Indeed, the secret of Britain's economic success lay primarily in the network of international trade, commerce, and financial systems and services that came to center on London from the late seventeenth century. Britain was the facilitator of trade services and a great entrepot for world trade (thus the competition with the Dutch who had first charted this map of economic growth); it does not become an export economy until the mid-nineteenth century. The history of reexports (which made up over 30 percent of all exports in the eighteenth century), for example, is likely to prove the great untold story of British trade policy and economic growth in this period.

This network was a central concern of state policy from the 1650s, and a major theme of economic policy was how best to protect and expand its reach. Simply put, this priority forged the tight relationship between the state and finance capital that until the middle of the nineteenth century remained the unchallenged nexus of economic policy making. The idea that free trade was a nineteenth-century invention reflecting the priorities of the industrial sector of capital is quite wrong. Indeed, industry, like finance, was divided on the advantages of free trade whose hold over the world of business was much more fragile than historians have appreciated. In any case, at no point in the nineteenth century did the priorities of the industrial sector displace those of the alliance between landed and commercial interests that has been termed "gentlemanly capitalism."34

Thus, to place commerce and finance at the heart of the economic process and to make it predominant in the political economy enables us to interpret economic and imperial history more meaningfully than a perspective that accords prime attention to industrial capital. It also conforms with what we know about the relationship between social class and political power during the period. The distinguishing mark of the British landed classes was their unequivocally capitalist character, as revealed by their key role as agricultural, industrial, and adven- turing entrepreneurs. In this period, the most important pole of economic and political power was that modus vivendi forged between the

34 Charles Wilson, England's Apprenticeship, 1603-1763, 2d ed. (London, 1984), esp. chap. 8; Francois Crouzet, "Toward an Export Economy: British Exports during the Industrial Revolution," Explorations in Economic History 17 (1980): 48-93; Jacob Price, "What Did Merchants Do? Reflections on British Overseas Trade, 1660-1790," Journal of Economic History 49, no. 2 (June 1989): 267-84. See also Lee (n. 12 above), pp. 3-23, 271-74; and W. D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain, 1750-1990 (London, 1993); P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innova- tion and Expansion, 1688-1914 (London, 1992).









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landed and the "monied" interests during the financial revolution of the 1690s that allowed the mobilization of landed (and other) surplus capital by the Bank of England and other financial institutions in the City.

The history of British capitalism in this period was essentially the story of this configuration, its internal struggles and changes, and its response to changing international and domestic circumstances. It was a south of England formation: most commercial wealth circulated there, most imperial investment seems to have been generated there (at least in the later nineteenth century), and London was its particular center of activity.

This system produced a set of mutually beneficial interconnections and the most powerful political field of force in Britain's domestic and imperial political economy. Its various elements, of course, had diverse interests and priorities-as is illustrated by the struggle within the City over whether to adopt free trade in the period ca. 1820 to the 1840s.35 But it tied together the key elements of the social, political, and commercial elites within an arena of self-interest that focused on the generation of imperial trade and power. The great trading compa- nies with their close ties to government finances were one facet of this many-sided prism; the Bank of England was another; what John Brewer has called the "fiscal-military" state was a third;36 and the corporate relationship between these institutions gave rise to the appel- lation of "old corruption"-which was another way to express its power.

London was the center of the system, reinforcing the existing fault lines in the distribution of power and influence between capital and province. And the London middle classes who staffed the commercial and financial services possessed an economic and political power that far outstripped that of the provinces. Indeed, W. D. Rubinstein has estimated that for much of the nineteenth century the income generated by the London middle classes was 50 percent of the national income for the whole of the middle class. That fact reflected the modest wealth of the industrial middle classes compared to the magnates of land or trade. The wealthiest businessman in the nineteenth century left only ?6 million at his death-less than one half of the estate wealth

35 See Anthony Webster, "The Political Economy of Trade Liberalization: The East India Company Charter Act of 1813," Economic History Review 43, no. 3 (1990): 404- 19; A. C. Howe, "Free Trade and the City of London c. 1820-1870," History 77, no. 251 (October 1992): 391-410.

36 John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State, 1688- 1783 (London, 1988).

















of the richest landowner. Such well-known figures as John Bright and Joseph Chamberlain possessed quite modest fortunes.37

It no longer makes sense, therefore, to privilege the industrial middle class as the dynamic group in the nineteenth century as the older historiography tended to do. Until the later part of the century, for example, the greatest champions and intiators of "reform" were to be found in segments of the landed classes. In the post-Napoleonic period and during the Whig governments of the 1830s in particular it was the inheritors of the Foxite tradition within the aristocracy who provided the leadership in dismantling the "fiscal-military" state. Fur- thermore, and even more important, the industrial middle class was only one segment of the complex and changing social stratum that constituted the middle orders of society whose social and political presence was not to be calibrated to the rise of industry or the language of evangelicalism.38

There are important lines of continuity within the key features of urban middle-class social and political life between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Thus, struggles between the various groups of the middle station, their overall relationship to the landowning elites, and the central question of how they were to represent and exercise their power were all dominant throughout the period from the late seventeenth century. The central elements that we take to define provincial middle-class civic life in the nineteenth century emerge and develop throughout the eighteenth century-the concept of "improvement," for example, and the networks of professional and voluntary associations that served as agents of integration for the fragmented social structure of both the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. Thus, the origins of a middle-class provincial consciousness and assertive influence lay essentially in the eighteenth century. The shape and contours of this middle class clearly changed over time; as the nineteenth century wore on, for example, factory owners replaced "middle men" as the characteristic representatives of the industrial middle

37 W. D. Rubinstein, "The Size and Distribution of the English Middle Classes in 1860," Historical Research 61, no. 144 (February 1988): 65-89; Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, pp. 53-104.

38 See Harling and Mandler (n. 15 above), pp. 46-47, 61-66; P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, "Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas: Part I. The Old Colonial System, 1688-1850," Economic History Review 39, no. 4 (1986): 501-25. Even within the industrial towns of the nineteenth century (as Morris and Koditschek among others have demonstrated), the segmentation and fractionalization within the myriad professional, commercial, and bureaucratic elements that made up the middling groups make any valid generalizations difficult. See R. J. Morris, Class, Sect and Party: The Making of the British Middle Class, Leeds, 1820-1850 (Manchester, 1990); and Theodore Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society (Cambridge, 1990).











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classes. But the questions of how to establish and realize its political identity were part of a much longer continuum.

Middle classness, however, more than all other class identities, was a gendered concept. As both working- and middle-class women were excluded from the public (economic) sphere, a powerful patri- archially based ideology brokered the division between private and public spheres and the definition of the family. Working women experienced this largely in the labor market, where they were decisively separated from higher-paid and status-ranked jobs. Middle-class women experienced it through their relegation to the privacy of the drawing room and the "nonwork" of running the household. Gender roles were separated into female private and male public spheres, mediated by the power of evangelical religion. In both the traditional and revisionist feminist scholarship, this process is located in the notion of a great transformation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but in fact it may be pushed back much earlier. By the end of the seventeenth century, patriarchalism was becoming much less a foundation of political order and hierarchy and more an ideology for the private sphere. Significantly, it was at this time that the development of a public space that was specifically identified as middle class emerged. How men and women fit into the functioning of that space was an inseparable part of this process.39

Separate spheres and domestic ideology were, therefore, clearly visible one hundred years before "Victorian" England. The combined exclusion of middle-class women from a public business role in the early nineteenth century and their private centrality to middle-class economic life that is described in Leonora Davidoff and Catherine Hall's Family Fortunes may be replicated almost exactly in the account of early eighteenth-century middle-class life in London given by Peter Earle-which in its turn confirms the arguments of Alice Clark for the seventeenth century. Similarly, the arguments of domestic ideology and separate spheres were formulated at this moment, from

39 On the process of the gendering of politics and the way the definition of middle- classness itself is intricately related to politics, see Dror Wahrman, "'Middle Class' Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class, and Politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria," Journal of British Studies 32, no. 4 (October 1993): 396-432. For the most complete statement of this argument, see Leonora Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes (London, 1988); and various articles such as Catherine Hall, "The Early For- mation of Victorian Domestic Ideology," in Fit Work for Women, ed. Sandra Burman (London, 1979), pp. 15-31. See also Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gen- der and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1988). On the notion of the public and private spaces as part of the emergence of bourgeois politics and identity, see, of course, Jurgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).













Rousseau to less important thinkers like James Fordyce, an eighteenth- century nonconformist minister whose sermons prefigured Ruskin's doctrine of the "angel in the home": "there is an Empire which belongs to you. ... I mean what has the heart for its object and is secured by meekness and modesty, by soft attraction and virtuous love."40

This foreshortening of the historical process is further confused

by the way the argument relies on a particular view of evangelical religion to define "middle class" and to explain the evolution of this

family ideology. It is worth noting that this version of "middle class" (characteristic of both traditional and revisionist historiography) con- flates the evangelical middle classes with the whole in an act of borrowing that writes the version of history concocted by the evangelical middle classes themselves. Evangelicalism as a source of middle-class self-definition and morality did not issue newborn out of the mouths and minds of the Clapham Sect, although it was given greater urgency in the age of the French revolution. It belonged to a preexisting tradition that assumed its characteristically "Victorian" form in the 1690s with the formation of various reformation societies whose purpose was to enforce an evangelical morality in public and private. They did so using the principles of voluntary association and private prosecution that later became the characteristic weapons of Victorian reformers. When William Wilberforce established his Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1804, the model was the evangelical societies of the 1690s.41

But as the history of philanthropy in this whole period illustrates, the separate spheres were inherently unstable, and there was constant tension around their borders as women pressed into the forbidden public sphere. This was as true of the eighteenth century as it was of the nineteenth, although the particular forms of contestation might be different. Sexual politics was a fiercely contested terrain in the 1760s and 1770s, revolving around the right of women to engage in public organization of patriotic politics. Hannah More's resolution of this tension was not unlike that of Florence Nightingale one hundred years later: to behave in ways that transgressed those boundaries quite decisively while publicly accepting the strict observance of the separate spheres. Although the case of Hannah More illustrates quite nicely

40 See Davidoff and Hall; Earle (n. 11 above), pp. 160-74; Alice Clark, The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, 2d ed. (London, 1982). Fordyce is quoted in Langford, A Polite and Commercial People (n. 3 above), p. 606.

41 Wahrman, pp. 402-3; T. A. Curtis and W. A. Speck, "The Societies for the Reformation of Manners: A Case Study in the Theory and Practice of Moral Reform," Literature and History 3 (March 1976): 45-64.















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how it is impossible to separate class from this process, it also suggests how the use of the language and ideology of patriarchy to open certain spaces for middling-class women was not peculiar to Victorian times. Similarly, the Queen Caroline affair served to mobilize women against the double standard and in that respect presaged the campaign against Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1860s and 1870s. In short, both the formation of, and the contestation around, the domestic ideology of Victorian times belongs to a longer continuum in the history of patriarchy and gender relations than one that begins with the evangelical reaction to the French and industrial revolutions. Throughout the period I am proposing, the practice and operation of domestic ideology remained confined within the same gendered boundaries; it stayed within clearly defined class limits; and it also generally remained behind the same political limits that excluded women. The first sugges- tion of a challenge to those limits that would redefine the question of gender relations comes in the 1860s with the creation of local suffrage committees.42

Conceptualizing the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries as a distinct period also allows us to make better sense of lower- class social relations. Organizing this period around the "making" of an English working class turns out to be somewhat misleading because the main economic, social, and political formations of plebeian culture remain constant. Workshop production ranging from artisanal through family forms of organization dominated the economic foundations of lower-class life. Social customs like wife selling and the charivari of rough music, which first appeared around the 1670s, tended to go un- derground in response to the pressure of evangelical attack from around the 1780s, but they did not die out until the 1870s-80s. Popular political consciousness continued to be expressed in the languages of the "moral" political economy. The case of the Tichborne Claimant, for example, was the last social movement that would have been understood by John Wilkes. Its language was the language of popular

42 On eighteenth-century gender politics, see Langford, A Polite and Commercial People, pp. 110-11, 112, 602-3, 606-7; Colley (n. 11 above), pp. 237-81. On Nightingale, see Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid- Victorian England (Chicago, 1988), pp. 164-66 passim; and Martha Vicinus and Bea Nergaard, Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale: Selected Letters (Cambridge, Mass., 1990). On the colonization of philanthropy by women in the mid-nineteenth century, see Frank Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford, 1980). On the suffrage and mid-Victorian feminists, see Philippa Levine, Victorian Femi- nism, 1850-1900 (Tallahassee, Fla., 1987), chap. 3. Obviously, the suffrage situation was different in the mid-nineteenth century-in some ways more confusing-with some openings in the local government franchise, but the agitation for a parliamentary franchise-on a class basis-was only just beginning to emerge.











constitutionalism against the corruption of vested interests; its leadership was patrician-at least in appearance if not in lineage; it appealed to the deeply rooted suspicion of the centralizing tendencies of the state (opposition to the income tax was a part of its campaign); and in its search for legitimation it skipped over Chartism to appeal to the tradition of the Commonwealth radicals and the Magna Charta for the "fair play" and virtue it found absent in the current political system's treatment of the claimant.43

E. P. Thompson's work on the "making of the working class" was framed in a theoretical stance that assumed the nineteenth century was the moment when the twentieth-century working class emerged. But to see that period as marked by the erosion of a political economy of (essentially) artisanal workshop production rather than the creation of a working class makes much better sense of the evidence than looking for signs of modern class politics. The response to this decay oc- curred within the framework of notions of a "moral economy" that protested the replacement of "custom" as the determination of economic rights by the capricious will of an abstract "market." But even if only a cruel parody, the workshop economy of artisanal independence persisted into mid-Victorian Britain with enough vitality to allow ech- oes of this mentalite, in what Joyce terms the "moral discourses of labour," to continue to shape the vocabulary of employer-worker relations.44

Social relations can only reflect the possibilities of the time as they are structured materially and imagined, and to expect twentieth- century forms of social organization to describe the class relations of this period is anachronistic. The ideological vibrancy of the period from 1790 to the 1840s in which certain prefigurative ideas in socialism and feminism broke through the restraints of culture reflected the way times of generalized crisis provide opportunities for widespread reconsideration of political and social conventions. But ultimately, this swirl of ideas and proposals remained moored in the language and concepts of the eighteenth, rather than the twentieth, century. The organizational forms that represented plebeian social and political aspirations

43 See E. P. Thompson (n. 19 above), pp. 1-15, on the way "custom" underlay the plebian political consciousness of the eighteenth century, and pp. 410-11, 442, 451-53, 456, 476-77, 505, 511, 517-18, 528-29, on the chronology of wife sales and rough music. Also see McWilliam (n. 16 above), pp. 44-64.

44 See Joyce's use of the term in Visions of the People (n. 16 above), pp. 87-113. Also see Raphael Samuel, "The Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Tech- nology in Mid-Victorian Britain," History Workshop Journal 3 (Spring 1977): 6-72. Joyce's Visions of the People is an excellent description of the persistence of the languages of moral economy in mid-nineteenth-century social relations.











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in this period were, therefore, qualitatively different from those that emerged after the 1870s, when collective organization came to provide the arena of mediation between social interests and groups. And this, it seems to me, is the key to evaluating and categorizing class relations. Trade unions are the obvious example. Where trade unions existed, they did so not as proto-twentieth-century formations but as expres- sions of the independence of the mainly artisan members. Collective bargaining was no more on their agenda than it was in the vision of the employers. But, as Joyce suggests, the problem is largely one of chronology, and if we want to talk of a making of the working class in the sense of the emergence of a class identity in the Thompsonian sense (and I still think this is useful), we have to postdate it by seventy years or so.45

In this context, too, the language of paternalism becomes more than just a refutation of class: it becomes the ambivalent, elusive, and reciprocal vocabulary that expressed the patrician and paternal styles of social relations. The structuring of relationships around paternal styles provided an arena for mediation that was markedly different from that which developed once collective organization was allowed. The paternal style was more than a matter of language, however, it was primarily about behavior that, if it served to mask certain realities of class power, also allowed social relations to be expressed in ways that legitimated both patrician rule and plebeian presence. Following a well-established historical pattern, such modes of expressing social relations were revitalized in the accelerated economic change in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as they met the need to assert patrician authority in the face of destabilizing forces. Here, too, there was constant tension around defining the proper boundaries of this relationship, of what described the duties of patricians and the rights of plebeians-and vice versa. Thus, the supreme importance of the law in the eighteenth century as one of the fields where this contest was played out.

In a similar way, the poor law was a site of frequent tension

45 Barbara Taylor, " 'The men are as bad as the masters .. .': Socialism, Feminism and Sexual Antagonism in the London Tailoring Trade in the 1830s," in Sex and Class in Women's History, ed. Judith L. Newton, Mary P. Ryan, and Judith Walkowitz (Lon- don, 1983). Although this is not the main point of Gregory Claeys's work on Robert Owen, there is much support for this argument in his Machinery, Money and the Millen- ium: From Moral Economy to Socialism, 1815-1860 (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 189, 192-94, and even more in his Citizens and Saints: Politics and Anti-Politics in Early British Socialism (Cambridge, 1989), esp. pp. 7, 14-15, 25-29, and 329, where the main argument is the continuities between eighteenth- and nineteenth-century social thought. See Joyce, Visions of the People, p. 4.













because it was the place where the paternal contract was most visibly expressed and where the pressure of costs put it under the most severe strain. In the 1840s, when the mask of paternalism had almost slipped completely off, coal owners like the third marquis of Londonderry tried to push it back with Chadwickian social engineering projects to keep his workers loyal. This strategy was, perhaps, more visible at the local, personal level than in state policy. But even there, one of the strands that fed into the "reforms" of the 1830s and 1840s was the necessity to restore the ties of connection between the classes. All of this makes sense in the context of the economic change described above. Not only were paternal styles a valid historical experience to call on, but they fit well with broad-based notions of "independence" from the tyranny of collective organization.46

There were strong similarities between the world of popular culture and the structures of popular public politics. Both contained large portions of symbolic theatrical and rowdy assertions of popular rights. The rituals of popular politics revolved around the claims of the excluded to a place in the processes of electoral choice and patrician genuflection to this "right." As O'Gorman has explained, these forms of popular politics emerged after 1688 in the party competition of the period until the 1720s and proved impossible to shut off as elections became fewer in number. The agitations from the 1760s through the 1780s injected new life into the practices, and its forms continued to infuse popular politics until the 1860s. It would be a mistake to roman- ticize the opportunities this system provided for popular participation, but it did represent a political system that was peculiar and distinct to the period ca. 1690-ca. 1880.47

This was true also of the more formal parts of the political structure, whose key theme from the Restoration through the mid- nineteenth century was the establishment and maintenance of landowner, aristocratic control. Until 1867 the major change was, not the Reform Bill of 1832, but the tendency to greater partisanship in electoral behavior that begins in the 1770s. This hardly signified an "inexo-

46 See E. P. Thompson, "Patrician Society, Plebeian Culture," Journal of Social History 7, no. 4 (Summer 1974): 382-405, and "Eighteenth-Century English Society: Class Society without Class," Social History 3, no. 2 (May 1978): 133-66; David Levine and Keith Wrightson, The Making of an Industrial Society: Whickham, 1560-1765 (Ox- ford, 1991), pp. 356-60, 378-81; Peter Dunkley, "Paternalism, the Magistracy and Poor Relief in England, 1795-1834," International Review of Social History 24, no. 3 (1979): 371-97; and Mandler (n. 15 above) for the coexistence of paternalist and individualist tendencies in Whig ideology.

47 O'Gorman, "Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies," and Voters, Patrons and Par- ties (both in n. 17 above); Vernon, Politics and the People (n. 2 above).











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rable movement towards parliamentary democracy" as John Phillips claims (against the burden of his evidence) but, rather, a clever and effective defense against admitting the possibility that electoral politics should be democratized. There was no systematic and progressive march toward greater democracy: reform was designed not to chart that route but rather to close it off. After 1832, patronage and influence remained, as did the proprietary borough, and over sixty members continued to owe their return to the influence of great landowners. The weakened informal structures of authority actually encouraged corruption-the importance of which (according to Charles Seymour) cannot be overstated-following 1832 until its final eradication in the 1880s. Registration did make a real difference, but not enough to redefine the political world or to alter the central question of political identity in the period: where to fix the boundaries of the political nation?48

The answer to that question remained consistent-around property and gender, although the definition of the former was uncertain and, as we have seen, the boundaries of the latter were in constant dispute. It is impossible to assess the expansions or contractions of participation in the governing process. There were many opportunities in the eighteenth century for quite modest people to become involved in the many functions of government. And it is quite possible-though by no means certain-that these opportunities diminished until the party organizations of the late nineteenth century opened different kinds of channels to participation. But we do know (because Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb told us) that fewer householders had the vestry franchise by the early nineteenth century than at the end of the seventeenth century.49 There were many different qualifications for participation in the governing functions of the country in the eighteenth century. And even if these were not always strictly observed (as Ver- non has noted of the vestry franchises), the fact remains that the tendency over time was to raise ever higher the amount of property it took to become a member of parliament, justice of the peace, turnpike, or improvement commissioner.

48 See Seymour (n. 13 above), p. 193, for corruption. Seymour fully recognized the way 1832 changed little in the operation of politics, and his findings have been confirmed by Gash and others. But Seymour's work is marred by the framing of the issue of political reform as one of aristocracy versus middle class. See also, of course, Norman Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel, 2d ed. (Hassocks, 1976); John A. Phillips, The Great Reform Bill in the Boroughs: English Electoral Behaviour, 1818-1841 (Oxford, 1992), quote on p. 303, and also his Electoral Behaviour in Unreformed England: Plumpers, Splitters and Straights (Princeton, N.J., 1982), pp. 306-7.

49 Sydney Webb and Beatrice Webb, English Local Government from the Revolu- tion to the Municipal Corporations Act: The Parish and the County (London, 1906), pp. 146-72.













The proper level of property qualification was a continual issue for debate from the 1690s and a perpetual source of tension between and within the middling, urban, and landed elites as attempts were made to balance the values of different kinds of property. By the mid- eighteenth century the tension between real and personal property, or monied or landed wealth, had been effectively resolved-although resonances continued well into the early nineteenth century. And it was never the case that franchises were confined entirely to landed property. But the decisive admission of the urban middling classes came in the early 1800s, when vestry franchises were put on a rate- payer basis, thus removing them from the influence of "corrupt" popular control. This became the model for the local government franchise in the 1830s, which, like 1832, was not necessarily the precedent for an expanding franchise. The boundaries of the political nation held firm under the pressures of the 1760s and post-Napoleonic agitations and were not decisively challenged until the 1880s, when the unin- tended logic of 1867, the growing presence of labor as a collective entity, and the continuing struggle over gender exclusion drew in faint but distinct lines of relief the bare outlines of a new political world.50

Both revisionist and traditionalist scholarship tends to treat the early nineteenth century as a ceasura in state formation. But from the perspective of 1870 or 1900 it looks more like a culmination and a continuity. The structures of the state that were "reformed" in the 1830s had been under increasing pressure for the previous sixty years, sometimes longer. It had been Wilkes who first put parliamentary reform on the public political agenda, and that cat was never rebagged. The debate over the poor law was a quintessential eighteenth-century debate. In its essentials-how to control costs, what were the duties of the rich to the poor, and what were the moral responsibilities of the poor-the debate from the 1790s replayed the debate of a century before that had culminated in the establishment of a workhouse and union-based system of poor relief in the Act of 1723. The same was true of the municipal corporations that for a hundred years or more had been the target of complaints about oligarchical control, the site of middling-class struggles for power, and the place where civic im- provements had been installed. And if the debate over these issues came right out of the eighteenth century, so, too, did the core of the "reform" solution: rate-payer democracy.51

50 Vernon, Politics and the People, pp. 16-22; and Webb and Webb. On 1867, see the very important article by John Davis, "Slums and the Vote, 1867-1890," Historical Research 64, no. 155 (October 1991): 375-88.

51 On the poor law in this period, see Tim Hitchcock, "Paupers and Preachers: The









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Thus, although the 1830s are conventionally seen as introducing a new tendency to centralization in the balance of power between the center and the localities, it is not clear that these changes amounted to a revolution in government. Parliament in the eighteenth century was the place where the power and rights of local authorities to do things was secured and protected-just as it had been in the seventeenth century-and the arena where national interest groups mediated their disputes. And this was still largely true in the mid-nineteenth century. Although it is possible to detect a change from enabling legislation to prescriptive legislation in the 1830s and 1840s, this merely served to heighten local resistance to central encroachments on local prerogatives-as the well-known struggle over the police bill in 1854-56 illustrated. Indeed, the net effect of the reforming legislation on municipal government and the poor law in the thirties and forties was to reinforce local authority rather than to diminish it. And it remained true that the machinery of central government to assist local authorities and enforce standards remained extremely rudimentary. The frontier between central and local power remained in basically the same place that it had been throughout the eighteenth century until the 1870s. After that date, we can detect a partial and hesitant but decisive movement in favor of central government driven by changes in tax policy, a growing attention to social policy issues that resisted local emollients, and the resultant increased bureaucratization.52

This shift was paralleled, and partly related to, a restructuring of the realms of the public and private. I have already indicated above how it is more appropriate to see Victorian struggles around gender boundaries as part of this broader period rather than as prefiguring

SPCK and the Parochial Workhouse Movement," in Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social and Economic Problems in England, 1689-1750, ed. Lee Davison (New York, 1992), pp. 145-47. The major and important difference between this effort and the successful replay a hundred years earlier was that in the early eighteenth century this policy flowed not from the state but from the Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) and was taken up by parishes. The 1723 workhouse act was an enabling bill, not a prescriptive one. But there were interesting similarities; thus, at both periods the magistrates were suspicious of the workhouse policy, preferring the system of outrelief. For towns, see Penelope Corfield, The Impact of English Towns, 1700-1800 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 154-56; and Borsay, ed. (n. 11 above).

52 The opening chapter of Oliver Macdonagh, Early Victorian Government, 1830- 1870 (London, 1977), pp. 1-21, is a good example of the internal inconsistencies in the revolution in government thesis by its leading proponent. See also Christine Bellamy, Administering Central-Local Relations, 1871-1919 (Manchester, 1988); W. L. Burn, Age of Equipoise (London, 1964), pp. 167-76; Jennifer Hart, "The County and Borough Police Act, 1856," Public Administration 34 (1956): 405-17; Carolyn Steedman, Policing the Victorian Community: The Formation of English Provincial Police Forces, 1856- 1880 (London, 1984), pp. 25-32.













twentieth-century feminism. One further aspect of the public-private divide is the naming of sin. Since the 1690s, definitions of morality and the work of reformation had been actively propagated through private associations, using what law stood to hand with what support could be mustered from local magistrates and the like. During the early eighteenth century, it was difficult to secure patrician backing for these efforts, but by the early nineteenth century a solid phalanx of elite approval stood behind moral reformation. It remained true, however, at that time that the state was not much involved in the regulation of morality. Frontiers began to be breached in this regard, too, from the 1880s, ironically as a follow-through to the libertarian protests against the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s. Local governments were pressed by organized social purity campaigns to regulate brothels, prostitution, soliciting, and other, more benign matters like theater performances. More dramatically, by legislation in 1885 male homo- sexuality was distinguished from the more varied practice of buggery, was precisely defined for the first time both as a social and medical problem, and was subjected to criminal penalties. In the Empire, too, private sexuality came under increased scrutiny, and regulation from the 1870s led to the legislated end of cross-race liaisons, a stricter separation of the races, and an official code of sexual purity. At home, state regulation of key aspects of family life crossed a previously established boundary as it began to assume the responsibility of protecting wives and children against certain abuses by husbands and parents. Many other examples could be cited from the field of social policy- especially at the local level-which, of course, had changed direction almost entirely by the time of the famous reforms of the 1906 Liberal government.53

IV

This, then, is the outline of a narrative I would propose to replace those that currently frame "Victorian" Britain. Imagining this kind of nineteenth century does three things. First, it helps us move beyond the kinds of contradictions I noted in the first part of this article, and it helps us avoid repeating the same mistakes in substituting a typology of continuity for that of change. Second, it enables us to bridge the

53 Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (London, 1981); Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State (Cambridge, 1980); George Behlmer, Child Abuse and Moral Reform in England, 1870-1914 (Palo Alto, Calif., 1982); Ronald Hyam, Empire and Sexuality: The British Experience (Manchester, 1991), chaps. 4-6.


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traditional and ahistorical gap between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by linking them together in ways that illuminate both. Third, it proposes a framework of organizing principles that focuses on the interactive nature of the various spheres of society. My emphasis here has been on how those spheres conjoined; how the political, economic structures, for example, can be described as operating in mutually reinforcing ways. This is not to make any judgment about determination; it is purely a descriptive statement that proposes a way of seeing a particular period.

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Revisionisms || Historiography, Narrative, and the Nineteenth Century