Popular virtue: Continuity and change in Radical moral politics, 1820–70

By Tom Scriven

Popular virtue is the first in-depth study of the changing nature of moral politics within working-class Radicalism between 1820 and 1870. Through study of the lives, activism and intellectual influences of a number of key leaders of working-class Radicalism, this book highlights how Radicalism's attitudes to morality and everyday life shifted from a festive and libertarian culture that advocated sexual liberty and gender equality in the 1820s-30s to a more austere and ascetic politics that emphasized moral improvement, temperance and frugality after the 1840s. Despite the fracturing of this culture with the decline of Chartism in the 1850s, Popular virtue highlights how the moral politics of the 1840s possessed important legacies in not only the politics of Popular Liberalism and the Reform League but also in heterodox medicine and self-help.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jun 19, 2017
• ISBN: 9781526114778

Tom Scriven

Tom Scriven is Hallsworth Research Fellow at the University of Manchester

Book preview

Popular virtue

POPULAR VIRTUE

Continuity and change in Radical moral politics, 1820–70

Tom Scriven

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Tom Scriven 2017

The right of Tom Scriven to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

ISBN 978 1 5261 1475 4 hardback

First published 2017

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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For Jess

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1A ‘Radical Underworld’? The infidel roots of Chartist culture

2Politics and everyday life in early Chartism

3From insurrection to the ‘little republic of the home’

4Medicine, popular science, and Chartism’s improvement culture

5Communal self-improvement after the ‘disasters of the Strike’

6The fragmented legacies of Chartist moral politics

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1The header of A Slap at the Church!, from the edition of April 14 1832. © The British Library Board

2‘Interior of the Tory Charnel House’, Figaro in London, 21 April 1831. Image produced by ProQuest as part of British Periodicals. Inquiries may be made to www.proquest.com

3‘The Royal Civic Gorge, or Who Pays for It’ from Cleave’s London Satirist and Gazette of Variety, 11 November 1837. © The British Library Board

4‘Phrenology’, in Henry Dewhurst, A Guide to Human and Comparative Phrenology (London, 1830). By permission of Yale University, Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library

5‘The Drunkard’s Coat of Arms’, from Cleave’s Penny Gazette and Variety of Amusement, 17 March 1838. © The British Library Board

6‘The English Town’, drawing by Ernest Jones c. 1848. © The British Library Board

7‘The Grecian City’, drawing by Ernest Jones c. 1848. © The British Library Board

8O’Connorville, The Northern Star, 22 August 1846. © The British Library Board

9‘Louisa Stanley’, from George W.M. Reynolds, Mysteries of the Court of London, Volume III (London, 1851). © The British Library Board

10‘Venetia’s Lovers’, from George W.M. Reynolds, Mysteries of the Court of London, Volume III (London, 1851). © The British Library Board

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding the research from which this book originated. Sarah Wood and James Greenhalgh both commented on versions of the first two chapters, for which I am extremely grateful. Sarah Roddy’s advice was also invaluable while I was preparing the proposal, as was Henry Miller’s, who also provided many pertinent leads to sources and material. Paul Pickering provided encouragement along with copies and a transcript of a letter of Henry Vincent’s from the Dorothy Thompson archive, transcribed by Robert Fyson. I would also like to thank Bertrand Taithe, Julie-Marie Strange, and Michael Sanders for supervising the thesis, imparting upon me the skills and knowledge necessary to complete a book, as well as numerous instances of help and encouragement since 2012. On the same note I would like to thank my external examiner, Malcolm Chase, who has remained an inquisitive, informative and helpful presence. The anonymous reviewers at Manchester University Press provided invaluable comments and suggestions for which I am grateful, while the rest of the team ensured that the production went smoothly. I would also like to thank the various archives I visited during the research, in particular the remarkable Labour History Archive and Study Centre at the People’s History Museum in Manchester, which possesses extremely friendly and knowledgeable staff. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to thank Jess Patterson for comments, advice, and providing a sounding-board for ideas. In particular she deserves recognition for answering my constant questions about Christian heterodoxy, the Enlightenment, and intellectual history more generally. She also deserves recognition for dealing with my grumpiness during the researching and writing of the book.

Introduction

On 24 August 1849 the prominent Chartist publisher Henry Hetherington died aged fifty-seven, another victim of the cholera epidemic sweeping London. As the eulogy by his friend Thomas Cooper suggested, this was more likely worsened than prevented by his years of teetotalism and vegetarianism and his preference for homeopathic and botanical medicines:

With regret, it must be stated that there is too strong reason to conclude that our friend’s decease was hastened by want of proper care. His strict temperance – for he had been almost an absolute teetotaller, for many years – warranted him in believing that he was not very likely to fall a victim to the prevailing epidemic. When he was seized with it, he refused – from what we must call a prejudice – to call in medical relief. Our friend Holyoake prevailed with him to have a physician called, after having himself stayed the cramp he suffered from. It was too late, however, for medicines to relieve his case – although several medical friends were successively brought to his bed-side. His natural frankness and humour were exhibited even in his last hours. ‘Why did you not call for help sooner?’ said one medical friend to him. ‘Why, you know,’ he replied with a smile, ‘I don’t like you physic-folks; and besides, I have had Doctor Holyoake attending me; and he has done all that could be done.’¹

These were not just the acts of an isolated eccentric who succumbed to a misguided fad, but in fact representative of a much wider political culture within the British working class over the course of the 1840s as thousands turned towards various forms of dietary, physical, mental, and moral improvement, all with the aim of thereby affecting social and political change. Alongside this Hetherington’s death scene was emblematic in other ways; his friend George Julian Holyoake reported that when he realised his ‘malady might terminate fatally’ Hetherington insisted on attempting to finish the production of some of his books, attesting to the vibrant intellectual culture of which he himself was a key instigator. The ‘natural humour’ recalled by Cooper was one of the ways in which he had helped build that culture, being part of a group of publishers who produced often caustic political commentaries throughout the 1830s, while the friend that cared for him, the Owenite midwife Emma Martin, illustrates the proximity of Chartist and Radical thought to socialism and feminism. One of Hetherington’s final acts was to sign a document he had written over a year previously, which became his last will and testament. In it he attacked the clergy and stated his abject refusal to their speaking at his funeral, and re-affirmed his strongly materialist Deism along with his faith in both Robert Owen and socialism. The development and shifting priorities afforded to all of these different currents within Chartist thought is the subject of this book.

Between 1838 and 1852 millions of working-class men and women campaigned for the implementation by Parliament of the ‘People’s Charter’, the six points of which were sought to overturn a political system that only represented the propertied classes by demanding universal male suffrage, the ballot, the equalisation of electoral districts, the payment of MPs, the ending of the property qualification for MPs, and annual Parliaments. This had grown from the earlier campaign for reform of Parliament between 1830 and 1832, which culminated in the 1832 Reform Act – which, in setting property qualifications on the rights to vote and hold office, sorely disappointed those working-class Radicals like Hetherington who had campaigned for reform. Subsequently the 1830s became a decade of strife as the Whig government, which was widely seen as representing the newly enfranchised middle class, violently repressed unrest in Ireland, struck at trade union organisation within Britain, and replaced the generous welfare system with the draconian and penal new Poor Laws.

Chartism was therefore an attempt to continue the reforms of 1832 in order to ensure that working-class interests were represented in Parliament and that economic and social grievances could then be redressed. Over the course of 1838 and 1839 the hostility it received from the government and its own internal radicalisation pressed it into a much more confrontational position with the State and the British ruling class. Many Chartist leaders and rank-and-file members were pressed by both economic distress and a sense of political crisis into revolutionary positions, with some even calling for a fundamental restructuring of the economy and the distribution of wealth. A huge national petition that demanded the implementation of the Charter was presented to Parliament in May 1839, only to be ignored. The National Convention, an anti-Parliament formed from the Chartist leadership that sat throughout much of the spring and summer of 1839, ended in indecision and disunity and in August a politicised general strike dubbed the ‘Sacred Month’ failed through a lack of leadership and firm planning. Many Chartists thereafter turned to the ‘Ulterior Motives’ they had threateningly mooted throughout the year, and during the winter of 1839–40 insurrectionary plots were launched to almost immediate failure. Hundreds of Chartists were subsequently arrested, regardless of whether they had been involved in the plots or even supported insurrection. The early, enthusiastic phase of Chartist organising ended abruptly.

It was following this that the culture encapsulated in Hetherington’s death was pressed much more to the forefront of the movement. The impasse after 1839 convinced many Chartists that the government could not be coerced or overthrown, and that instead only a longer-term strategy could secure political emancipation. Consequently, the early years of the 1840s saw working-class Radicalism posit the unified moral, physical, and intellectual improvement of the individual as the chief means of bringing about a more benevolent society. By directly challenging the degrading effects of both political corruption and economic exploitation through education and physical improvement it was hoped that a rational, sober, and united working class would finally seize political power, not only because it was morally just but also because such an organisation would be undefeatable. Chartist leaders presented a range of means of bringing this about – from the teetotalism and quackery practiced by Hetherington to wider schemes of mutual improvement and co-operative land ownership. This was intensified as 1842 witnessed similar defeats as in 1839, when a second National Petition was disregarded by Parliament and a politicised mass strike with revolutionary undertones once again failed. After this, the strategy of gradualist moral improvement became viewed as one of the few remaining viable spheres of working-class political action.

As much as this was a continuation of earlier working-class ideas about education, improvement and social progress, it was also an abrupt shift away from the culture of early Chartism and the movement’s Radical antecedents. In the 1830s Radicalism incorporated many aspects of working-class life, such as drinking, festivity, and sexual libertarianism, as a means of infusing politics into the everyday life of the working class. Bawdy satire and sensational crime stories were both the basis of the immense popularity of the Radical press and the vehicle for cautionary tales and moral criticism of society and its elite. The changing fortunes of Chartism transfigured these moral attitudes into increasingly austere forms that shunned more libertarian outlooks, so that in the 1840s Chartism pushed for ascetic forms of ‘self-culture’. After 1848 – the year of revolutions across Europe, which saw Chartists turn towards social democratic ‘Red Republicanism’ – this direct link between Chartism and asceticism was cut. The movement’s new socialist leadership posited moral improvement as something that could only come after the seizure of political power and then social reform, and returned once again to a bawdier and more sensational political culture. However, self-improvement lived on within the co-operative and trade union movements, and with fundamental revisions this moral politics survived to become an important aspect of not only the politics of the Reform League and Popular Liberalism after the 1860s, but also the developing ideology of self-help.

Moral politics was therefore profoundly important during the Chartist era, and it is in this sphere that many of the defining characteristics, discourses and practices of mid-Victorian plebeian culture were shaped and delineated. The dominance of political reform within Radical action and discourse from the 1832 Reform Act to the decline of Chartism after 1848 was accompanied by a cohesive but dynamic and changing moral philosophy and concerted attempts to put it into practice. This study looks in detail at the extensive counter-culture that resulted from this interchange between the mass-agitation for universal suffrage and the campaign for individual self-improvement. It reveals the extent to which these two ideological stances were responsive to one another, producing a political culture that comprehensively sought to reform society from its most prosaic points up.

Politics, society, and culture in Chartist historiography

Chartism’s political culture has dominated the recent historiography of the movement, but despite this the changing nature of its emphasis on morality and everyday life has been neglected. Following Gareth Stedman Jones’s pioneering work on the language of Chartism, historians have studied the movement chiefly in terms of how it communicated its ideas and formed and represented a distinct identity. Stedman Jones’s account argues that rather than a novel response to industrialisation, as the earlier Marxist historiography proposes, Chartism was instead a continuation of the older ‘Old Corruption’ tradition of Radicalism. This discourse focused on State tyranny, corruption, and over-taxation, and was therefore primarily a political critique. As such, it was potentially inclusive of many sectors of society and not the preserve of the proletariat alone.² This argument was given weight since it was concurrent with a number of methodologically distinct studies which nevertheless came to the similar conclusion that there was an uninterrupted continuity within British Radicalism throughout the long nineteenth century.³ Stedman Jones’s method and argument set the agenda for language (broadly understood to include oral, written, and symbolic communication) and representation being the key prisms for analysis of Chartism, even amongst historians critical of his conclusions and his rejection of class consciousness as the movement’s chief ideological expression. This development within the historiography of British popular politics and labour history was an important feature of the rise of cultural history after the 1980s.⁴

These studies have shared the tendency of viewing political culture as a means of conveying political ideas, and while this has led to interesting approaches to the debates surrounding Chartist ideology it also possesses a number of deficiencies. The emphasis on representation and symbolism has led to an idea of culture as something that political movements utilise, for instance to press their critique of society or in order to bind their members together. Isolated case studies of such symbolism and representation do not encourage investigation of change within the movement, as such studies are often focused on individuals or very particular moments, tendencies, and regions. The dynamism of political culture, its ability to change quite dramatically, and its role not just as a means of facilitating political activity but also as a sphere of political action in itself have all therefore been marginalised by the ‘cultural turn’. Rather than emphasise how Chartists sought to represent themselves and their ideas, Popular Virtue instead turns to the broader mentalité of the movement. What was the moral mindset of Chartism? How did this mindset change, and what did it retain? What practices did this mentalité require of the movement’s supporters?

One of the core conclusions that Popular Virtue arrives at after posing these questions is that the idea of an uninterrupted political tradition during the period disregards a more complex and contradictory trajectory for popular politics during the Chartist era. It does this by emphasising the changes and bifurcations that occurred within moral politics and everyday culture. In itself ‘Old Corruption’ was a moral critique of the political system, arguing that it was designed largely to exploit ‘the People’, defined as the productive working and middle class, in order to uphold both the power and the dissolute lifestyles of the rich. For those arguing for a fundamental continuity running through early Radicalism, Chartism, and then Popular Liberalism, this moral critique and the existence amongst Radicals of a moralistic culture that valued hard work, sobriety, sexual propriety, and thrift are important indicators of both continuity and values shared across class boundaries.⁵ If such values were not hegemonic within Radicalism by the Chartist period then a major assumption of the continuity thesis is undermined. Popular Virtue outlines how the ‘Radical underworld’ of humour, irreligion, and sexual libertarianism remained a feature in early Chartism and returned in late Chartism after the interregnum caused by Chartism’s turn towards ascetic moral improvement.⁶

Furthermore, the improving strategy that took hold of Chartism in the 1840s had very different aims from the improvement culture of either its Whig and Utilitarian contemporaries who sought to ‘improve’ the working class through education, or popular Liberalism later in the century which represented an alliance between working-class Radicals and middle-class Liberals. Chartism’s improvement culture incorporated eccentricities such as phrenology, mesmerism, hydropathy, homoeopathy, vegetarianism, and herbal medicines. This emphasis on materialist moral philosophy and science was responsive to popular criticisms of industrialisation and capitalism that were simultaneously developing within working-class Radicalism. A core aspect of Stedman Jones’s argument was the claim that Chartists did not adopt the critique of capitalism or socialist interpretation of the labour theory of value most clearly adopted by the socialist Owenites after the 1820s. John Saville rejected this, noting that this argument relied upon a neglect of research which had showed that such critical political economy was prevalent within working-class Radicalism since the 1830s, and he was soon followed by Gregory Claeys’ outlining of the birth of ‘social Radicalism’ in the 1830s, which by 1848 had developed into political socialism within both Chartism and Owenism.⁷ This book will parallel this argument by outlining how ethical Radicalism built upon social Radicalism’s critique and outlook by seeking an immediate palliative to the corruption and degradation of the working class under industrial capitalism. Chartism should consequently be placed within a socialist continuity as much as a Liberal one. This book therefore seeks to understand Chartim’s moral politics not by projecting back from those of the 1860s and 1870s, but in their own terms.

From Freethought to social democracy

Alongside the discontinuities within Radical culture, the other core argument of this book is that social concerns were foregrounded within Chartism. Popular Virtue therefore posits a different narrative for the development of Chartism than most studies, which emphasise instead its place within a political continuity. This book charts the development of the movement against its intellectual culture, and with that the changing nature of its politicisation of everyday life. When viewing Chartism from the perspective of its moral politics abrupt changes become apparent, despite a consistent and fundamental emphasis upon the moral and social consequences of political corruption and economic exploitation.

This moral politics originated in the ‘Freethought’ culture that emerged in the 1820s. In print and in meetings these ‘infidels’ – an appellation originally applied by opponents before being adopted by the freethinkers themselves – drew from the radical enlightenment to advocate moral and religious unorthodoxy and Republicanism. This culture possessed several distinct nuclei. One was the ‘underworld’ outlined by Iain McCalman, which coupled religious and political heterodoxy with a bawdy and festive culture that often shaded into obscenity and pornography.⁸ Another was the loose movement that surrounded the anti-Christian Republican Richard Carlile, a self-educated former tinplate worker from Devon who became the most prominent Radical journalist of the 1820s.⁹ By the end of the decade Carlile’s influence faded, and the Owenite movement absorbed many of his associates, along with many involved in the ‘underworld’ and broader freethinking culture. Owenism advocated a rational, scientific socialist system designed to replace competitive capitalist society with a co-operative one based around concepts of mutual aid and collective labour. Its utopian ambitions for a ‘New Moral World’ enraptured many plebeian radicals and freethinkers with its proposals for progress and liberation through alternate moral outlooks, practices, and lifestyles.¹⁰ This infidel and Freethought tradition has been traced into the mid-Victorian campaigns for secularisation, and more recently as a progenitor of late-Victorian feminism, but historians have not strongly associated it Chartism.¹¹ In fact, many of the hallmarks of Freethought – humour and satire, religious heterodoxy, political burlesque and festivity, and sexual libertarianism – were present in the early stages of the Chartist movement. The repudiation of these aspects of Radical culture in the early 1840s was therefore a major moment of change within Chartism and wider Radical politics.

Importantly this rejection was still grounded within the infidel tradition. The increasing abandonment of those aspects of infidel and working-class culture that seemed frivolous and demoralising occurred alongside an intensification of interest in other aspects of the infidel intellectual tradition, in particular its emphasis upon the destructive potential of ‘unnatural’ practices and environments on the mind and body. A core aspect of this was the belief in phrenology, the theory that the brain was the material organ of the mind. This book will outline how it was far more widespread within Chartism than previous accounts have recognised, and due to this formed an important component of the intellectual and strategic revisions of the early 1840s.¹² This utilisation of phrenology was coupled with texts of the late Enlightenment that posited mankind’s perfectibility. Authors in the Radical canon since the 1790s, in particular William Godwin and Volney, were drawn from alongside contemporary figures like the American transcendentalist William Ellery Channing and a host of British Owenite and Radical lecturers. While these figures all posited the innate perfectibility of human individuals and society through education, phrenology’s materialist definition of the mind meant that education and moral improvement would require simultaneous physical improvement. Under this influence, Chartist intellectual culture based political morality within the body, and it followed from this that the improvement of the body would have direct political consequences.

A core component of this was the social critique that had been elaborated within Owenism since the 1820s and which had come to inform ‘social Radicalism’ in the 1830s. This critique emphasised a hybridised elite, formed from aristocrats who possessed monopolies on the land and capitalists who possessed monopolies on industry.¹³ Both groups utilised these monopolies to extract from the people the total value of the produce of their labour, through forms of ‘artifice’ such as taxation, rent, or profit. For some Radicals this led to a fusion of the demand for political reform with demands for social reform. As Bronterre O’Brien, the editor of the Poor Man’s Guardian, a newspaper owned by Hetherington, wrote in 1833: ‘the working classes aspire to be at the top instead of at the bottom of society – or, rather that there should be no bottom at all.’¹⁴ After the apparent disaster of 1839, many Chartist leaders turned to this critique along with the philosophies of perfectibility. After re-appraising the early stages of the movement, they concluded that the monopolies of the aristocracy and capitalists had demoralised the people to the point that they were not effective political actors. As the popular Chartist leader Henry Vincent put it, ‘our exertions have been neutralised by the sottishness of portions of the very class we desired to benefit’.¹⁵ Phrenology, perfectibility and social Radicalism all drew these leaders to the conclusion that the people needed to be improved to overcome the rapacious effects of industrial capitalism and political corruption. It followed that physical improvement would directly combat the deleterious impact of society, consequently morally and mentally improving the people while also directly attacking the stranglehold the middle class, aristocracy, and clergy all had on working-class life. Tolerance of ‘irrational’ or ‘unhealthy’ tendencies, such as sexual libertarianism, drink-fuelled festivity, or political violence, was therefore marginalised as the leaders developing this strategy sought to avoid all ‘bestial’ activities, which could only corrupt the body and therefore also the mind. Chartism was therefore a major cause of the rapid growth of heterodox medicine in the 1840s.¹⁶

This leads to an important conclusion of Popular Virtue. Historians have tended to associate the culture of heterodox medicine and moral improvement with Owenism, whilst within Chartist studies moral improvement has tended to be viewed as a minority tendency within the ‘moderate’ wing of the Chartist movement. In this viewpoint after 1841 this tendency effectively formed a faction ostracised from mainstream Chartism, represented by the National Charter Association (NCA) and the leadership of Feargus O’Connor, after O’Connor denounced those proposing improvement as orchestrating a ‘New Move’ that would split the movement.¹⁷ This has been perpetuated by an overriding focus upon O’Connor since his rehabilitation in the 1970s, when following Dorothy Thompson studies presented him as a competent and strategic thinker rather than the dangerous demagogue of older historiography.¹⁸ The argument of this book instead follows observations made by Malcolm Chase that such a split is overstated and there is ample evidence that improvement culture became broadly practised within the movement, a position similar to Edward Royle’s argument that Chartism and Owenism considerably overlapped in cultural and intellectual terms.¹⁹ Along these lines, moral improvement was widely popular within the movement and many Chartists within the NCA and allied with O’Connor came to adopt its precepts and practices. Crucial to understanding this process is appreciating that it was a reformulation of Chartist strategy rather than a fundamental break with Chartism’s emphasis upon universal suffrage and working-class political independence. In particular, once the controversy of 1841 had dissipated improvement became central to Chartist counter-culture. By the mid-1840s even O’Connor had come to advocate it as integral aspects of the culture of his ‘Land Plan’, an attempt to relocate thousands of industrial workers to small rural farmsteads.

In short, while there were distinct disputes amongst the Chartist leadership and grassroots after 1840, there was not a fundamental intellectual or cultural split within the movement. Chartism in the 1840s came to be dominated by its moralistic counter-culture. Study of this culture reveals that it incorporated aspects of several of the different forms of socialism outlined by Marx and Engels in the third section of the Communist Manifesto. Produced in 1848, this critique of the politics of the 1840s identified several of the projects that emerged within Chartism after 1840: forms of ‘reactionary’ and ‘petty-bourgeois’ socialism that sought to return to the agrarian capitalism of spade husbandry that supposedly conformed to natural and moral law, ‘temperance fanaticism’ that sought the physical and moral reform of individuals in order to maintain ‘the existing state of society minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements’, and ‘utopian’ socialism and communism which sought experimental communities and ascetic ways of life as a means of gradually reforming ‘competitive’ capitalist society.²⁰ While Marx and Engels presented these movements as being not only discrete from one another but also in opposition to political movements like Chartism, in practice they all intersected and bled into one another. Importantly, the political culture that resulted from these influences was rooted in a deeply critical attitude towards industrial capitalism. Chartism’s counter-culture was rooted in the socialist critique of ‘competitive’, capitalist society, which it sought to overcome through reform of the working-class mind, body, and environment.

The first chapter will therefore focus on the Radical print culture of the 1820s and 1830s to revise the notion that the early Chartists were austere and moralistic, highlighting instead the populist elements of their moral politics, which was heterodox, libertarian, and incorporated amusement and humour. Importantly it was at this point that the moral critique of capitalism became incorporated into working-class Radicalism, and the impact on society on individual character (and vice versa) cemented within Radical thought. The second chapter will use the itinerant activism of Henry Vincent in the west of England between 1837 and 1839 as the central case study to establish how early Chartist activists integrated plebeian culture and everyday life into the movement, finding success but also revealing problematic attitudes towards sexuality and women. The third chapter will look at the impact of repression and imprisonment between 1839 and 1843 on Chartist leaders, and argues that this experience was the impetus for moral improvement to increasingly come to the forefront of the movement, whilst sexuality, satire, and violent acts and language began to lose their prominence. The fourth chapter will study in detail the intellectual, political, and cultural shifts within the Chartist press after 1840, in which individual moral improvement allied to a critique of capitalism became increasingly prominent. It will then outline how this led to a vibrant ideology and culture of improvement, which was particularly pursued through dietary reform and quack healthcare. The fifth chapter will expand upon this analysis by investigating how this politicisation of health and the body was allied to the desire within working-class movements during the 1840s to establish new communities that would be organised according to the supposed laws of nature, rather than the artifice represented by the aristocracy and industrial capitalism. The final chapter will discuss the legacy of this moral politics, arguing that the post-Chartist period shows no neat continuity within working-class culture and politics.

Ultimately, Popular Virtue argues that Radical intellectual and popular culture before, during, and after the Chartist era does not exhibit any straightforward continuity, but a number of points of change. The most sustained and coherent aspect of this culture was moral improvement, which was born of the repression of the movement in 1839–40, became hegemonic within the movement by the mid-1840s, and fragmented in the 1850s into numerous different successor movements, tendencies, and sects. However, Chartism’s political culture can equally claim descent from the infidel traditions, and particularly in its early stages the traditions of the Radical underworld, and through this was an important moment in gender and sexual politics. Furthermore, social critique was always a central aspect of Chartism, although it took notably different forms, ranging from the ‘social Radicalism’ of the 1830s to the