‘The Mid-Victorian Age’
• Unravelling Britain: Lecture 3
‘The Mid-Victorian Age: Britain in the 1850s and 60s’
#unravellingbritain 3: Dr Robert Saunders
‘The Age of Equipoise’?
Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke (1850, repr. 1862)
1862 Preface
The book was written at a time of ‘hateful severance
between the classes. … Then arose Luddite mobs,
meal mobs, farm riots, riots everywhere; Captain
Swing and his rickburners, Peterloo “massacres”,
Bristol conflagrations, and all the ugly sights and
rumours which made young lads … believe (and not
so wrongly) that “the masses” were their natural
enemies, and that they might have to fight, any year,
or any day, for the safety of their property and the
honour of their sisters.
How changed, thank God! is all this now’
William Gladstone
Gladstone in Lancashire, 1865
‘It has been our privilege to see a
process going forward in which the
throne has acquired a broader and
deeper foundation in the affections of
the country; in which the laws have
commended themselves more and more
to the respect and attachment of the
people; in which the various classes of
the country have come into closer union
with one another … [so that a man],
looking out over the broad surface of
society, may thank God and say,
“Behold! How good and pleasant it is for
brethren to dwell together in unity”.
Election Violence
The Hustings
The hustings at Hastings, 1865
Election Violence in England and Wales, 1857-1880
• 6 General Elections
• 63 riots
• 77 serious disturbances
• 51 violent incidents
Source: J. Wasserman and E. Jaggard, ‘Electoral Violence in England and Wales’, Historical Research 80:207 (2006), pp. 124-55
Trade Unions and Strikes
The Preston Strike/Lock-Out, 1853-54
‘amid the resources of our
manufacturing system, has been
developed the power of blockading a
town with an invisible enemy, of
drawing a charmed circle around it more
effective than lines of [cannon], and of
arriving slowly but surely at those
results of starvation and destruction of
property, which it costs the soldier so
much clangour of arms to accomplish’.
The Westminster Review, 1854
The Strikes and Class Relations
• ‘the Lancashire “strikes” remind us that our wealth and our prosperity
… depend on the will of men too ignorant to understand their own
interests, or to listen to any argument save that enforced by the
wretchedness to which they are reduced by their own folly’.
• Statesman should remember the ‘danger of lowering the franchise,
while its intended recipients are so ignorant’.
The Times, December 1854
Ethnic Tensions: the Irish
‘The Irish Frankenstein’
Ireland after the Famine
• Irish Potato Famine, 1845-52
• More than a million dead of
hunger and disease
• More than a million emigrated
to Britain, the USA and the
colonies
• Population of Ireland halved,
1841-1901 [Population of
England and Wales doubled]
Attack on Clerkenwell Prison, 1867
12 killed, 40 injured
‘No Popery!’ Catholics and Protestants
The Martyrs’ Memorial, Oxford (1843)
‘Anglicans’ and ‘Nonconformists’
The Church of England
• The Church ‘by law established’
• The monarch its Supreme
Governor
• Bishops appointed by the
government
• Parliament is the legislative
assembly of the Church of
England
Nonconformists/ ‘Dissenters’
• Protestant churches that refused
to ‘conform’ to the rites of the
Church of England
• E.g. Methodists, Baptists,
Quakers
• Usually believed in the
separation of Church and State,
and sought to dismantle the
privileges of the Church of
England
Peel’s Second Government, 1841-46
• Reintroduction of income tax
• Free Trade in most foodstuffs
and raw materials
• Repeal of the Corn Laws
• Goal: that ‘thoughts of the
dissolution of our institutions
should be forgotten in the midst
of physical enjoyment’.
th
10
April 1848
Disraeli, Sybil: or, the Two Nations (1845)
‘“Two nations: between whom there
is no intercourse and no sympathy;
who are as ignorant of each other’s
habits, thoughts and feelings, as if
they were dwellers in different zones,
or inhabitants of different planets;
who are formed by a different
breeding, are fed by a different food,
are ordered by different manners,
and are not governed by the same
laws”.
“You speak of—”, said Egremont,
hesitatingly.
“THE RICH AND THE POOR”
The Illustrated London News (1848)
• ‘We must now consider seriously whether this
despised Chartism have not, after all, some possible
truth and some real vitality in it’, and ‘investigate what
social fire it is which produces the ugly smoke of
Chartism’.
The Great Exhibition, 1851
The Great Exhibition, 1851
The Volunteer Movement, 1859-60
G. Ludlow and L. Jones, The Progress of the
Working Class, 1832-1867 (1867)
• ‘[In 1832], Political discontent was widespread, and discontent in
those days was always very near to rebellion. The writer … must
confess to having his sharpened pike by him in 1832, ready for a
march on London if the Reform Bill had not passed; and he was but
one of thousands of Manchester working men who were alike
prepared for the dread hazard of civil war’.
‘he has since had the honour of serving … in her Majesty’s Lanarkshire
Volunteers’
‘Among the most striking evidences of this altered change of feeling
has been the participation of the working classes in the Volunteer
movement’.
The US Civil War and the Cotton Famine, 1861-65
Gladstone: ‘There is in mankind at large a sense of right and wrong, a sense of justice, on which reliance may
be placed’. Hoped that when the franchise was next discussed, ‘the conduct of the men of Lancashire may be
favourably remembered’.
THE SECOND REFORM ACT, 1867
‘The Second Reform…zzzzz’
Robert Lowe, 1866
‘If you want ignorance, if you
want venality, if you want
drunkenness and facility for
being intimidated, where do
you look for them in the
constituencies? Do you go to
the top, or to the bottom?’