Wanting and having: Popular politics and liberal consumerism in England, 1830–70

By Peter Gurney

Nineteenth-century England witnessed the birth of capitalist consumerism. Early department stores, shopping arcades and provision shops of all kinds proliferated from the start of the Victorian period, testimony to greater diffusion of consumer goods. However, while the better off enjoyed having more material things, masses of the population were wanting even the basic necessities of life during the ‘Hungry Forties’ and well beyond. Based on a wealth of contemporary evidence and adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Wanting and having focuses particularly on the making of the working-class consumer in order to shed new light on key areas of major historical interest, including Chartism, the Anti-Corn Law League, the New Poor Law, popular liberalism and humanitarianism. It will appeal to scholars and general readers interested in the origins and significance of consumerism across a range of disciplines, including social and cultural history, literary studies, historical sociology and politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781526101815

Peter Gurney

Peter Gurney teaches British Social History at the University of Essex

Book preview

Preface

The idea that all history is contemporary history is no less true for being rather a cliché. Indeed, this book is framed, both consciously and unconsciously, by three major current debates that have exerted an influence far beyond the relatively narrow confines of academia. It seems appropriate to make these explicit and tie them to the major themes of the book. First, capitalist states across Western Europe have faced a long-standing crisis of welfare provision that has been brought to a head by a protracted economic slump as well as by changes in the structure of global capitalism, most obviously the challenge posed by emergent economies such as China, India and Brazil. At the heart of the crisis of welfare lies the problem of incentives, that is, how to motivate the mass of workers given what many regard as overgenerous state-funded benefit systems enjoyed in the West since the Second World War. In Britain, what we can call the ‘social norm of consumption’ of poor and unemployed consumers has been continually redefined by government and their entitlements renegotiated in recent years. Crudely put, this norm has been ratcheted downwards in an effort to make the incentives of the labour market bite more effectively. At least, that is the theory.

The early nineteenth century presents a very different context but there are important similarities. Early industrial workers and consumers had to be taught how to respond to market incentives, to work for wages to enable them not only to purchase commodities in order to satisfy immediate needs but also to want more goods, to expand their ‘comforts’. They were initially protected from the most pressing incentive of all – hunger – by the compact between the poor, the parish and the state codified as the Old Poor Law that had developed over centuries and which was underpinned by Christian ethics. This compact was broken partly in the belief that modern workers but also consumers would be more easily made without it; the poor needed to learn that the benefits provided by the capitalist market, including an expanding diversity of goods, would not be accessible without the pain of labour. This helps explain the disciplinary micro-politics that was such a characteristic feature of the New Poor Law introduced in 1834, including the precision of workhouse dietary regimes, which fuelled revolt among ordinary consumers. Admittedly, then as now, elites were divided and not all of them shared this harsh view. Humanitarian criticism transcended political and class lines and sometimes modified the system in practice, though by the end of the period covered by this book the new regime pressed hard on the lives of those the Victorians condescended to as ‘the residuum’ and whom we call ‘the underclass’.

Second, there is a great deal of interest among political elites as well as intellectuals across the humanities and social sciences in the linkages between consumption and citizenship. Since the collapse of ‘actually existing socialism’, mass consumerism and the march of democracy have often been regarded as two sides of the same coin. Consumer desire has been credited with helping to bring down autocratic statist regimes in Eastern Europe. In the New World Order rolled out by the United States and her allies after the Second Gulf War, the spread of free trade capitalism if not yet mass consumerism, by means of armed force when necessary, has been construed as a corollary of democratic state building across the Middle East. Very different links between democracy and consumption have been proposed, certainly, with advocates of fair trade in the West arguing that their ability to mobilise relatively affluent consumers has shown a way to break down the political apathy that is often seen to characterise the consciousness of the majority. Looking at English developments between the First and Second Reform Acts, which gave citizenship rights to middle-class men and then skilled male artisans, provides an interesting perspective on this issue. Chartists and their antagonists configured the relationship between consumption and democracy differently. For the former, democracy was a pure concept; it had a spiritual, quasi-religious significance. It was not dependent on one’s ability to consume goods but was seen as a natural or human right, though not straightforwardly. They were suspicious of the identity of consumer as a separate category and questioned the splitting of individuals into different roles, arguing that the problem was that the real producers were often unable to become consumers. Chartists contested what they called ‘the extension of commerce’, maintaining that markets needed to be controlled and arguing for community and government regulation of consumption as well as production. In short, they desired to establish, or re-establish, a society constructed around the idea of protection instead of competition, where the social norm of consumption for the majority was guaranteed at a decent level by the democratic will of the people.

For their part, the Anti-Corn Law League, the vanguard of economic liberalism in early Victorian England, championed ‘freedom’, especially freedom of exchange, which they believed would bring material but also moral improvement to the masses at home and abroad. They sought to mobilise consumers against protectionism and helped to re-evaluate the language of consumption and consumer, wrenching it free from older connotations of frivolous and feminine aristocratic dissipation, with which it had been conflated during the eighteenth century and earlier. Scared off by Chartist appropriation of the language of democracy, League spokesmen did not use democratic discourse much, though they did link up growing consumerism with the expansion of citizenship rights. Richard Cobden, for instance, saw democracy as an effect of the growth of commerce and industry – the latter were the materials out of which democracy was constructed. From this perspective, the vote was nothing less than a reward for hard work and thrifty, rational and masculine consumption practices evidenced by the accumulation of the right kinds of commodities: John Bright grasped the internal connection between a good coat and the franchise early on. Bourgeois revolutionaries like Cobden and Bright were the real economic determinists in Victorian England; such instrumentalism was anathema to Chartists for whom political democracy was never a mere reflection of prior and more fundamental economic relationships. Instead, they hoped that democracy would enable people to rise above self-interest and greed in order to construct proper communities where all would be protected from exploitation. But this could not be done piecemeal or without fundamental change.

Finally, the current economic crisis, precipitated by the often-illegal operation of banks and financial institutions, has caused an outpouring from political and to a lesser extent business elites about the urgent need to moralise capitalism. Though mostly hot air from those on the political right, critics further to the left correctly point out that the recent near catastrophe was made much more likely by the wave of deregulation initiated under Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States. Again, a consideration of the early- to mid-nineteenth-century experience provides illumination here. Chartists proffered their own solution to the demoralisation of relations of production and consumption they believed was wrought by ‘the extension of commerce’. For them, free trade as preached by the League represented the apotheosis of the separation of the economic realm from the rest of the common social life of the people, which would have disastrous results. A few of them even used the neologism ‘moral economy’ to describe the solution. Again, control of markets lay at the centre of their critique; poor consumers had to be protected from market exploitation, not by a paternalistic state but by themselves, through institutions of self-government such as consumer co-operatives and the Land Plan. The Anti-Corn Law League denounced all this. Not that their vision lacked a moral dimension. They believed that commercial freedom paid moral dividends. Free trade was a great cause that involved overthrowing an aristocratic ancien régime that retarded the consuming appetites of the majority. Liberating ‘the people’ as consumers would generate further material progress and would even give some workers the vote, as we have noted. For many of the League free trade was a religion, as they often boasted, and we should not doubt their sincerity on this score. Like all religions, it had a utopian dimension, promising a peaceful world in which the global exchange of goods would civilise both light- and dark-skinned consumers. The Tory romantic Thomas Carlyle dismissed all this as a ‘bagman’s’ or salesman’s ‘millennium’ but it was no less real for those who believed in it.

The contest between Chartism and the League was a contest between different ways of life, between competing cultures. Both sides thought they stood at the threshold of a new world and tried to force the times to run in their direction. This book argues that liberal consumerism managed to steer a course between these historical alternatives and helped defuse the heat generated by their clash. Liberal Tories such as Sir Robert Peel and William Gladstone came to embrace the free trade utopia, though they had been deeply rocked by the social and political crisis of the 1840s and sought therefore to project an image of the state as just and impartial, above the world of class but also willing when necessary to intervene to help and even protect the interests of poor consumers. The chapters that follow represent a group of studies, organised around the themes outlined above, rather than a consecutive narrative. In them, I track the momentous clash between historical alternatives that generated so much political contention in the early to mid nineteenth century and provide a different perspective on these alternatives, from the point of view of the consumer, particularly the poor consumer. I try to show how liberal consumerism helped maintain stability in a society that was on the brink of collapse but also what was lost in that victory for both consumers and citizens.

This book is marked no doubt by the pernicious influence of the ‘Research Excellence Framework’, which has increasingly determined the academic production of scholars employed by universities in the United Kingdom over the past two decades. I have tried to turn its effects to my advantage, though readers must judge with what success. On a more positive note, I would like to thank participants who commented on work in progress at conferences at universities in Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Oxford, Santa Cruz (California), Sunderland, Victoria (British Columbia) and the Royal College of Art, London. Different versions of some chapters have appeared as journal articles: Chapter 2 in Past and Present, 203 (2009); Chapter 4 in the Journal of Modern History, 86:3 (2014); Chapter 5 in Labour History Review, 74:1 (2009); and Chapter 7 in Journal of Social History, 40:2 (2006). The following people also read and commented on parts of the text, or offered encouragement and advice at various stages, for which I am most grateful: Joan Allen, Isobel Armstrong, Owen Ashton, Lawrence Black, Malcolm Chase, Paul Corthorn, James Epstein, Matthew Hilton, Gareth Stedman Jones, Joanna Innes, Jeremy Krikler, Keith Laybourn, Rohan McWilliam, Mark Philp, Paul Pickering, Norris Pope, Helen Rogers, Steve Smith, Peter Stearns, Frank Trentmann and John Walton. Thanks also to Jamie and Danielle and most especially to Tonie, for giving me hope. Finally, Rosie was my constant companion while the book was written, and though she showed not the slightest interest in it, she helped pull me through.

1

‘A new order of things’: mapping popular politics onto consumption

In July 1846 no fewer than 500 members of the Council of the Anti-Corn Law League, drawn from all over the country, packed into Manchester Town Hall. The atmosphere was both euphoric – for they were celebrating what they perceived to be a world-historic victory over the Corn Laws – and tinged with deep regret, for they were meeting to disband the organisation that had successfully spearheaded the campaign for the liberalisation of trade during the preceding seven years. There was no short supply of hubris among the speakers. Richard Cobden referred to the abolition of the Corn Laws as the most important event since the beginning of the Christian church: ‘it is a world’s revolution, and nothing else.’ John Bright declaimed that the League ‘will stand before the world as a sign of a new order of things’ and told the audience that ‘we have been living through a revolution without knowing it’. The new order Bright spoke about was one in which the power of ‘the people’, understood to mean the intelligent, respectable sections of the middle and working classes, rather than the aristocracy, would determine the course of national economic and political life. However, it also involved the widening of material prosperity that free trade made possible both at home and abroad. At the core of the campaign for free trade lay the interests of the mass of consumers, conceived in abstract terms. It guaranteed ‘improvement’ for consumers in the widest sense; the prosperity free trade promised to deliver would, it was thought, trickle down through the social structure, civilising and comforting the lives of the majority. ¹

Abolition of the Corn Laws was highly symbolic because it was seen as the first step on the road to laissez-faire, a thorough separation of the economic from the political domain, which would allow capitalists to function more efficiently and maximise output by observing the ‘natural’ laws of the market, laws that the modern science of political economy had only recently revealed. Bright and others warned the audience not to be complacent, however; only a few years previously the country had been on the edge of an abyss and social harmony between classes would only continue along the promising lines exhibited recently in northern manufacturing districts if capitalists shouldered fully their responsibilities and worked hard to increase the ‘enjoyments’ of the working class. This was a truly utopian vision, a secular religion or Weltanschauung that gave purpose to action in the present and inspired hope for a better future. Things were central to it, even the most mundane things conferring rights of citizenship and manhood. As the great liberal historian G. M. Trevelyan remarked in his monumental biography of the leader of the League, for Bright the ‘connection between a good coat and the right to the franchise seemed an obvious first postulate of civilised society; it was an instinct beyond the assault of argument, outside the proper limits of political controversy’. ² We should not be surprised perhaps that a carpet manufacturer like Bright should have such faith in the power of goods to change people’s circumstances and selves. Nor should we be surprised that critics such as Thomas Carlyle sneered at what they regarded as crass materialism, memorably condemning the League as offering nothing more than a ‘bagman’s’, or commercial traveller’s ‘millennium’. ³ For good or ill, this is the world that we have inherited.

Against free trade and free markets, activists in the Chartist movement urged protection by government and communities, which would only be achieved by the establishment of what they called ‘pure’ or ‘true democracy’. They counterpoised an alternative vision of regulated markets and commercial activity as a solution to the scarcity experienced in the present by poor consumers who could ill afford to wait until the arrival of the ‘bagman’s millennium’. Some of them, including the ideologue and radical journalist James Bronterre O’Brien, picked up the neologism ‘moral economy’ to try to communicate this stress on connection. Contesting the fashionable views of ‘social quacks’ early in 1837, for example, O’Brien argued for what he termed ‘true political economy’, which involved balance and a sense of fairness. Drawing on an idealised view of handicraft and artisan production, O’Brien praised ‘true domestic economy’ that he believed characterised relations within the home and which transgressed any simple dichotomies between production and consumption, the moral and the economic. Domestic relations involved the whole person, making it impossible to reduce individuals to hands or gaping mouths. Such truths, he argued, were disregarded by those who ‘make wreck of the affections, in exchange for incessant production and accumulation … It is, indeed, the MORAL ECONOMY that they always keep out of sight.’ ⁴ Whatever the shortcomings of this term – and we shall return to these presently – it is important to note how Chartists like O’Brien partly invented and sought to appropriate it within a particular historical conjuncture for their own ends, as a weapon in the struggle against the free trade utopia. The concept of moral economy drew on a partly imagined past in order to project a vision of a regulated economy in the future.

Nearly two years later in the radical London paper the Operative, a writer who described himself ‘A Disciple of Bronterre’ (probably O’Brien himself) provided a fascinating sketch of the world of fairs and public markets that had served ordinary consumers until fairly recently. According to the article, relations between producers and consumers had been far more direct before such forms were driven out by ‘shopocrats’ that frequently defrauded or even poisoned poor consumers. The rise of the abstract free market and free trade and the ‘revolution in the exchange of domestic produce and manufactures’ had impoverished consumers and exposed them to ‘the Maltho-Martineau-Broughamic discoveries that very nutritious and finely flavoured soup — for the poor — may be made from bone-powder, brick-dust, and hide-parings seasoned with stinging nettles, and sweet marjoram’. O’Brien and others believed that modern capitalism systematically exploited working-class consumers, stripped them of any power they had once had and interposed a rapacious class of middlemen between consumers and commodities. ⁵ Chartists were not always opposed to free exchange of goods, certainly, but the free trade project was something quite different, a key component part of what they sardonically dubbed ‘the extension of commerce’, that is, the generalisation of capitalist social relations. ⁶ They would have fully concurred with John Maynard Keynes’s later definition of free trade as the ‘most fervent expression’ of laissez-faire. ⁷

The sociologist Zygmunt Bauman predicted some years ago ‘that sooner or later, we will rewrite the history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, because we understood nineteenth-century history only as the production of industrialism’, and he went on to ask: ‘What about the production of consumerism?’ ⁸ This study is intended as a contribution to this wider investigation. For sure, early historians of consumption documented the emergence of the middle-class consumer in the eighteenth century, and that century continues to hold an enduring fascination. ⁹ However, the reach of consumer markets was limited during this period and it was only from the mid nineteenth century that the majority could afford much more than the necessities of life. This book is concerned with how middle- and working-class consumers were configured and mobilised by popular political movements during a crucial period of capitalist transition. It is about the struggle between alternative paths of historical development as they affected the mass of consumers, which played out from the early nineteenth century. It foregrounds particularly the contested and uneven development of the working-class consumer in England between the First and Second Reform Acts and explores the making of a social order in which consumer interests and consumption practices were considered increasingly to lie at the root of society, economics and politics, providing a shared focus, which transcended particular domains. It aims therefore to bring the historiographies of popular politics and consumption into closer dialogue with one another. A particular concern is with the political and ideological production of the worker as desiring consumer and with the construction of the idea that social advance could best be gauged in terms of the acquisition of material things. The intention is not to be exhaustive but to illuminate by means of detailed analysis of important sites of ideological and practical contention the three key questions that inform this work: in what ways and with what success did working-class and middle-class radicals think about and organise around consumption; how did political ideologies attempt to speak for and represent the mass of consumers; and how was the gulf between poor and rich consumers, between scarcity and excess, handled or naturalised by working-class and middle-class radicals? In fine, this study explores how new ways of being a consumer meshed with political identities and belongings. John Bright’s words provide a useful departure point: the argument of this book is that the new order that emerged during the mid nineteenth century put things firmly centre stage.

Historiographies

The field of nineteenth-century popular politics has attracted generations of historians, constituting the empirical terrain on which many important methodological and theoretical breakthroughs have been made. How relative social and political stability was maintained despite severe strains in the world’s first industrial nation has understandably exerted an enduring fascination. Writing from the turn of the century, radical liberal and Fabian historians interpreted Chartism as a more or less inchoate protest against the development of free market capitalism, limited in various ways by the nature of its critique. ¹⁰ Whether a profound caesura occurred at mid-century was a key theme in the literature from the start, with some socialist scholars narrating the decline of Chartism as a kind of fall. ¹¹ As labour and social history became more firmly established institutionally after the Second World War, the exact filiations between popular radicalism and popular liberalism began to be explored more fully. Following Eric Hobsbawm’s seminal studies, historians sought to better understand how workers had been ‘incorporated’ into capitalism, eventually accepting the economic system as the only possible framework for action. A variety of approaches were adopted: Marxist scholars emphasised structural factors such as the emergence of a ‘labour aristocracy’ as well as the deliberate defeat of Chartism by the state; while those influenced more by Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony accented shared values that encouraged the growth of ‘reformism’. ¹²

The Marxist legacy made it harder to grasp the significance of the period for the birth of the modern consumer, for if the sphere of consumption featured at all in this work it was merely as a site of class conciliation and ‘false consciousness’. ¹³ Many commentators have noted how Marx marginalised if not ignored the consumer entirely and concentrated on the experience of working people as producers, despite an early concern with the loss of customary rights such as gleaning among peasant proprietors in the Rhineland. ¹⁴ Like many other nineteenth-century thinkers, Marx believed work had an ontological significance, defining what he called ‘species being’, whereas consumption was of secondary importance or else negatively freighted. He fully grasped the messianic appeal of free trade for important sections of the middle class but read it as nothing more than freedom of capital, the motor of capitalist globalisation that would inevitably pitch class against class, thereby hastening ‘the social revolution’. ¹⁵ Moreover, Marx had little understanding of the role of consumer organising in forging political identities and class consciousness, and for an analyst of the commodity form he showed remarkably little interest in things. ¹⁶ Although his later work revealed a growing fascination with the plethora of goods that crowded the Victorian metropolis and also sketched a highly suggestive way of making sense of them with the notion of commodity fetishism, Marx tended to view commodities merely as signs of ‘alienation’. ¹⁷ Thus, he underestimated both the ability of market capitalism to spread material benefits more widely and how consumer goods or ‘comforts’ could be signs of hope and improvement, for workers as well as those better off. It is hardly surprising that critics have never tired of pointing out that, notwithstanding Marx’s prognosis, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a general if often limited and precarious rise in living standards. This blind spot on Marx’s part is one reason why the historical study of consumption has only emerged relatively recently. Much is understood about how modern workers as producers were ‘made’ by such means as the spread of the wage relation and capitalist labour market, increased competition and intensity of labour, the imposition of time discipline and the development of the factory system and so on, and we know much about workers’ responses to these changes, but the making of the worker as consumer is far more shadowy.

Little light has been shed on this subject by more recent studies of popular politics either. As the transition to industrial capitalism along with the question of ‘class’ slid off the academic agenda during the 1980s, so continuities between popular radicalism and popular liberalism post-mid-century began to be stressed. Of seminal importance here was the work of Gareth Stedman Jones, who related Chartism back to eighteenth-century discourses of reform that prioritised constitutional change, therefore minimising the Chartist challenge to the British state as well as the movement’s working-class character. ¹⁸ A strange mix of bedfellows followed his lead, becoming more or less enthusiastic advocates of the so-called ‘linguistic turn’. Some asserted ‘the basically constitutionalist nature’ of Chartism, while others went further still, claiming that constitutionalism represented no less than a ‘master narrative’, which dominated the political field. ¹⁹ Patrick Joyce, the dean of the postmodernist school, sought to substitute ‘the people’ for ‘class’ as the master category of historical analysis, a category deeply inscribed in both Chartism and popular liberalism. ²⁰ The heated debates that occurred during the 1990s over such issues were partly a struggle waged by a younger generation of historians against what they construed to be the dead weight of classical Marxism, embodied particularly by Edward Thompson’s work that was frequently misrepresented as crudely reductionist. ²¹ The current scholarly orthodoxy is that there was a fairly unproblematic relationship between earlier and later phases of the history of popular radicalism, that Chartism was not defeated but ‘mellowed’ inevitably into liberalism. ²² Popular liberalism has been read by Eugenio Biagini, for example, as an authentic expression of working-class aspirations, rather than an index of incorporation, which reached its apogee with the sanctification of the Liberal leader Gladstone as the ‘People’s William’ in the early 1860s. ²³ However, such an approach underestimates both the way in which contemporaries themselves felt a profound caesura had occurred around mid-century and the persistence of class conflict, as Philip Harling has argued in a judicious review of the field. ²⁴

Although it has not exerted the same fascination as Chartism perhaps, the Anti-Corn Law League has been well served by historians, especially in recent years. Earlier works that portrayed the League as a fairly ineffective middle-class pressure group have now been supplemented by studies that adopt a much more wide-ranging approach. Alex Tyrrell and Paul Pickering in particular have shown how the organisation attempted, with varying degrees of success, to address the concerns of working people and build an imaginative nationwide campaign around free trade ideology. ²⁵ Remarkably, however, neither the way in which the League sought to represent consumers, nor the importance of the League as a form of consumer organising, have been properly assessed. The influential work by Frank Trentmann on the Edwardian defence of free trade is relevant here, for he has forcefully argued that ideas about free trade permeated all levels of civil society, involving far more than abstruse economic doctrine and projecting a vision of how society and economy should be organised domestically and internationally. ²⁶ His claim that the ‘citizen consumer’ was a product of the early years of the twentieth century seriously underestimates the earlier contribution of the League, however, which is also best approached as an ambitious cultural project. It was no accident surely that leaders of the League spoke of the ‘religion of free trade’, as the doctrine, liturgy and symbolism of free trade culture helped imbue individual and national life with meaning, for the most zealous converts at least. Like Anglicanism, free trade was a broad church, its culture flexible enough to accommodate trenchant critics of unregulated capitalism such as Charles Dickens and others who, as we shall see, had deep misgivings about laissez-faire and ‘Manchesterism’, but who agreed with the leaders of the League that free trade represented the best hope for consumers in general, both at home and abroad. We might also note in passing how free trade culture was communicated through commodities: one thinks for instance of how the cult of Cobden, Bright and Gladstone was created by means of a plethora of commemorative mugs, plates and teapots that were produced throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. ²⁷ Cultural historians have taught us a great deal about middle-class consumption practices in recent decades, focusing particularly on the impact of more spectacular forms like department stores, but they have tended not to pursue links between politics and consumption. ²⁸ Deborah Cohen, for example, has sensitively explored how middle-class women but also men learnt to be consumers during the long nineteenth century and lays particular stress on the way in which religious hostility to consumerism during the ‘age of atonement’ in the earlier decades gave way from around the 1850s to an incarnational theology that legitimated the love of domestic things. ²⁹ Household furniture in particular came to be evaluated in moral terms, though too much weight is put on this aspect and political relationships and conflicts are largely ignored. As the preceding discussion indicates, it makes more sense to argue that free trade ideology rather than furniture helped dispel middle-class anxieties about consumerism.

Of more direct relevance to the present study is the important research of historical geographers and economic historians who have sought to map the quantitative, spatial development of the ‘mass market’ in nineteenth-century Britain, including changes in systems of retailing, wholesaling and distribution that made it possible to feed the new urban populations. ³⁰ Though older forms such as markets and itinerant traders expanded to meet rising demand, the number of shops increased in early Victorian England and the experience of shopping consequently became a more salient feature of working-class life. Between 1830 and 1853, for example, the number of shops listed in trade directories for the mostly working-class Halifax–Calder Valley area in West Yorkshire more than doubled, rising from 865 to 1,775 and reflecting the increased purchasing power of factory workers. Most of these shops sold foodstuffs, though clothing and footwear made up almost a third of the total. ³¹ Market functions were already separated into wholesaling and retailing by 1800 in many towns and this specialisation accelerated during the first half of the nineteenth century and beyond. Though continuities in retailing were certainly important and small traders were to predominate before the so-called ‘retailing revolution’ and the rise of multiple, chain and department stores in the late nineteenth century, profound changes were in train. ³² Branded goods like Colman’s mustard, Reckitt’s starch and Holloway’s pills, for example, were common before and just after mid-century, marketed nationally and puffed by advertisements that were plastered on any available space in the urban environment, much to the disgust of Thomas Carlyle, who denounced the practice as pathological, a specifically modern ‘mania’. ³³

Despite the views of some recent scholars, workers were not shut out from the development of a ‘commodity culture’ but were deeply affected by it. ³⁴ Though the emphasis in much of the historical literature has been on how the lives of ordinary people were ameliorated by the changes briefly sketched above, the experience of poor consumers was much more complex than that. Transformations on the supply side meant that workers lost what little non-market means of subsistence they had previously enjoyed, though some clung on as best they could, keeping pigs in the most unlikely circumstances, for instance; Friedrich Engels notoriously observed how Irish immigrants in Manchester let ‘the pig sleep in the room with himself’. ³⁵ Inexorably, however, the majority lost any ability they had once had to ‘gnaw it out’ during hard times, simultaneously also becoming more vulnerable to the threat of exploitation as consumers. ³⁶ Constrained by quotidian realities, their consumption practices made them an easy target. The poorest workers often shopped daily for small quantities of staple commodities such as tea and sugar and frequently had little choice but to accept underweight and adulterated goods. Vegetables and meat were usually purchased on Saturday nights after they had been paid, by which time the best produce had invariably been sold. ³⁷ The golden age for popular consumers sketched by ‘A Disciple of Bronterre’ was undoubtedly mythical; changes had been occurring since the late eighteenth century and immoral market practices went back to time out of mind. ³⁸ However, such views contained more than a grain of truth and, more importantly, they provided a useful tool with which to criticise present unfairness. They also serve to underscore how the politics of consumption has been remarkably understudied, particularly during the ‘Hungry Forties’ when consumer issues were at the centre of popular politics.

In this book, ‘hunger’ provides a bridge between popular politics and consumption. The term needs to be understood as both a noun and a verb, in the narrower sense – the pain in the gut – and in its more expansive meaning – the intense desire for things. James Vernon’s stimulating history of the former has demonstrated how even the most basic issue facing consumers, the satisfaction of daily nutritional requirements, has always been filtered through culture and embedded in a complex web of power relations. Hunger was represented, made sense of and controlled in novel ways by the capitalist state in England from the early nineteenth century onwards. Vernon sheds a good deal of light on the management of hunger, though his work is disabled by its Foucauldian underpinnings; we learn much about those nutritionists and bureaucrats working through the social democratic state who sought to handle the manifold problems generated by the persistence of scarcity but little about how plebeian consumers responded to the difficulties they faced. ³⁹ This book takes a different approach. Focusing on a narrower time period, the intention is to hold together in tension the alternative explanations for and representations of hunger by Chartists and members of the Anti-Corn Law League, in order to situate contemporary debates on hunger more concretely in their appropriate field of force. Moreover, I am also interested in the practical efforts made by these bodies to organise the political power of consumers for social change. Lastly, this study is also concerned with the way in which wanting and having were invariably intertwined within popular political discourses. Chartists wondered why the common people went hungry in a land of increasing plenty at the same time as supporters of the League celebrated the cornucopian world of goods that, they argued, free trade had brought about.

To write the history of the emergence of the consumer is necessarily, then, to write a political history. For as the anthropologist Mary Douglas has argued – and both Chartists and members of the Anti-Corn Law League fully understood – consumption raises major questions concerning the distribution and allocation of resources and is therefore centrally about political relationships, about relations of power. ⁴⁰ Although my study commences in the 1830s, this is not because this decade can be seen as the putative origin of modern consumerism. After all, in England the roots of a culture in which the consumer assumed a central importance have been traced back variously to the early modern period; the commercial revolution of the eighteenth century; the expansion of advertising and branding in the late nineteenth century; and the onset of mass consumption after the Second World War. ⁴¹ Besides the general problem of timing, it is also worth bearing in mind Margot Finn’s apposite criticism of ‘culturalist’ generalisations about the so-called modernity of Victorian consumer society; continuities were undoubtedly important and we will return to them later in this study. ⁴² Nevertheless, although the making of the modern consumer was a long-drawn-out, open-ended process, the early to mid-Victorian period witnessed a most significant confrontation that pitted competing visions of consumption against one another. The tendency of recent work to ignore or jettison notions of transition has gone too far and we still do not fully understand what changed from the point of view of the consumer in the course of the nineteenth century. Karl Polanyi, for example, saw the early Victorian decades as a watershed, and although he got it wrong about Speenhamland and ignored the experience of consumers, his approach to the general problem remains highly suggestive. ⁴³ Before outlining the structure and argument of the book in more detail, it is important to briefly look at how plebeian consumers featured in the work of those ‘social quacks’ ridiculed by O’Brien. For some prominent intellectuals, expanding the desires of poor consumers was of the utmost importance in securing national greatness. The heated debate over the treatment of the poor at the start of our period brought such ideas to the surface.

Fear and hope in the age of improvement

As an emergent form of knowledge, political economy cut its teeth on the English poor from the late eighteenth century. Searching for ways to reduce state expenditure on the poor laws, the Reverend Joseph Townsend coolly observed: ‘Hunger will tame the fiercest animals.’ ⁴⁴ However, it was the Reverend Thomas Malthus who launched what was to be the most influential intellectual assault on the existing system of relief in the late 1790s. For Malthus, the poor laws greatly contributed to the trend whereby population growth outstripped the means of subsistence and had necessarily ‘demoralised’ the labouring poor, encouraging them to have families before they were able to support them without parish relief. There was no alternative, therefore, but to abolish the poor laws entirely. ⁴⁵

Nassau William Senior sharpened his own views against those of Malthus. An optimistic bourgeois revolutionary – Marx called him the ‘bel-esprit’ of economists – Senior was appointed to the first chair of political economy at Oxford University in 1825. ⁴⁶ He agreed with Malthus that something urgently needed to be done, that the poor represented a serious drain on the nation’s finances that retarded economic growth. Senior argued, however, that reform rather than abolition was necessary in order to make workers more efficient. The Old Poor Law he thought no less than a form of slavery, which undermined the self-respect and independence of labourers. The operation of the poor laws, particularly the way wages were supplemented out of the rates by a complex system of allowances that varied from region to region, held back labour productivity and hampered the proper working of the labour market and the capitalist economy more generally. In lectures delivered at Oxford early in 1830, he sketched ‘the natural state of the relation between the capitalist and the labourer’, whereby each party benefited one another by pursuing their own interests. Basing his argument on the wage fund theory, Senior stressed how the ‘natural’ laws of the market were undermined by the poor laws, which reduced workers to the condition of slaves: ‘the instant wages ceases to be a bargain – the instant the labourer is paid, not