Abstract
[I]n our domestic capacity, with the suckling at the breast, and the stripling at the hand, the air they inhale shall be filled with the principles of reform.
These were the words of Halifax’s Female Reformers, read aloud at a public meeting on Skircoat Moor held less than two months after the Peterloo Massacre. The resolutions marked the occasion when, on 16 August 1819, a large-scale demonstration in Manchester to call for political reform was violently dispersed by military force, resulting in the deaths of 18 people and injuries to several hundred more. The event’s main speaker, the radical Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt, was arrested along with the other speakers on the hustings, and in the weeks that followed a number of prominent radicals were also imprisoned, accused of conspiring to overturn the government. Almost immediately following the Massacre, the magistrates who had ordered the meeting’s dispersal took control of the narrative of events, claiming that they had taken the necessary steps to control a revolutionary mob. Following public praise from both the Cabinet and the Prince Regent for so doing, the ‘official’ version of Peterloo was further safeguarded by the passing of the ‘Six Acts’ in 1820, which included a tightening of the laws on sedition and libel and restrictions to the right of public protest. It is in this context that this chapter examines the ways in which radicals memorialised Peterloo, establishing a counter-narrative of a peaceful demonstration brutally interrupted by a vicious militia on the orders of corrupt local officials. The assertion of this alternative version of events was in itself a form of protest, as well as a means of sustaining a beleaguered movement through the most difficult of times.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Peaceful Meeting at Halifax’, Morning Chronicle, 7 October 1819.
- 2.
The exact numbers of those killed and injured at Peterloo is still subject to some debate, though the most authoritative account to date is that in Michael Bush, The Casualties of Peterloo (Carnegie: 2005). Bush counted a total of 18 Peterloo-related deaths, though some of these occurred in violent clashes after the actual meeting had been dispersed, and not all were deliberate. See pp. 44–46.
- 3.
Robert Poole, ‘“By the law or by the sword”: Peterloo revisited’, History, 91 (2006), 255–6.
- 4.
The term ‘working class’ is used loosely here to denote those dependent for their living on their own labour or that of a family member. There has been much debate over whether the artisans, labourers and small-scale tradespeople who comprised much of the radical movement can be defined as a ‘class’, and these arguments are too lengthy and complex for rehearsal here. The terminology as used here is meant to encompass a group who shared similar social networks and outlooks as well as the experience of economic precarity, rather than a relationship to the means of production. I discuss the use of class terminology in more detail in my thesis: Ruth Mather, ‘The home making of the English working class: radical politics and domestic life in late Georgian England, c.1790–1820’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Queen Mary, University of London, 2017), 13–14. http://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/handle/123456789/24708
- 5.
Exceptions include Anna Clark’s The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the English Working Class (University of California Press: 1995), which takes a somewhat pessimistic view of the working-class domestic life, and Katrina Navickas’s ‘“A reformer’s wife ought to be a heroine”: gender, family, and English radicals imprisoned under the suspension of Habeus Corpus Act of 1817’, History, 101 (2016), 246–64.
- 6.
David Vincent’s study of working-class autobiography, Bread, Knowledge and Freedom: A Study of Nineteenth-Century Working Class Autobiography (Methuen: 1981), found only six female authors for the period 1790–1850, compared to 142 male authors. See also Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (Yale University Press: 2013), page 7 & chapter 4; Kelly J. Mays, ‘Domestic spaces, readerly acts: reading, gender, and class in working-class autobiography’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts 30 (2008), 343–68.
- 7.
Navickas, ‘“A reformer’s wife ought to be a heroine”’.
- 8.
Murrary Pittock, ‘Treacherous objects: towards a theory of Jacobite material culture’, Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies 34 (2011), 39–63.
- 9.
Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical and Early Days in Two Volumes, edited with an introduction by Henry Dunckley, volume II (Unwin: 1905/1850), 260.
- 10.
See Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, Home (Routledge: 2006) for a discussion of the complex and multi-layered meanings of ‘home’ (as distinct from ‘house’).
- 11.
For example, Helen Rogers, Women and the People: Authority, Authorship and the Radical Tradition in Nineteenth-Century England (Ashgate: 2000), ch. 1; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (Pimlico edition, 1992/1994), ch. 6; Ruth Mather, ‘“These Lancashire women are witches in politics”: female reform societies and radical theatricality in the north-west of England, c.1819–20’, Manchester Region History Review 23 (2012), 49–64.
- 12.
Anon., Brissot’s Ghost! Or, Intelligence from the Other World; Communicated to a Meeting of Those Who Call Themselves Friends of the People (J. and J. Fairbairn: 1794), 14–15.
- 13.
Leora Auslander, Cultural Revolutions: The Politics of Everyday Life in Britain, North America, and France (Berg: 2009), 51–55.
- 14.
TNA, HO79/3 part 3, fo. 447, Hobhouse to Hay, 23 July 1819, quoted in R. Poole, ‘What don’t we know about Peterloo’, Manchester Region History Review 23 (2012), 10.
- 15.
Bamford, Passages, 150.
- 16.
For detailed analysis of the injuries inflicted by the military, see Bush, The Casualties of Peterloo, esp. 3, 32, and 34, on which Bush concludes that ‘the damage inflicted at Peterloo… sprang from premeditation, design and determination’.
- 17.
For full details of the ‘Six Acts’, see Arthur Aspinall and Ernest A. Smith, ‘The “Six Acts”, 1819’, in English Historical Documents Online, volume VIII, 1783–1832 (Routledge: 1959).
- 18.
TNA, HO40/14 fo.62, Chippendale to Sidmouth, 22 July 1820.
- 19.
Katrina Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place (Manchester University Press: 2015), 105.
- 20.
Paul Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (Macmillan: 1995), 41; John T. Saxton, ‘Address to Henry Hunt Esq. from the Radical Reformers, Male and Female, of Manchester, August 16th 1821’, extract from the New Manchester Observer, included within Henry Hunt, To The Radical Reformers, Male and Female, of England, Ireland, and Scotland (T. Dolby: 1820).
- 21.
Napoleon Fitton Chadwick, the son of William Fitton and Hannah Chadwick, was baptised on 26 September 1819. See baptismal record on findmypast.com.
- 22.
See Sophie Coulombeau, ‘“The knot that ties them fast together”: personal proper name change and identity formation in English literature, 1779–1800’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of York, 2014), 74–75 and 238–45.
- 23.
Malcolm Chase has made this point with regard to Chartist naming patterns, as well as raising the valid point that a focus on naming obscures the agency of the children themselves. However, it is a practice of interest here in demonstrating one of the ways in which radicals continued to express their commitment to the radical cause in creative ways and to evoke the memory of Peterloo in spite of repression. See The Chartists: Perspectives and Legacies (Merlin: 2015), 185.
- 24.
For more on Scholefield’s extraordinary career, see Paul Pickering and Alex Tyrell, ‘“In the thickest of the fight”: the Reverend James Scholefield (1790–1855) and the Bible Christians of Manchester and Salford’, Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies 26 (1994), 461–82.
- 25.
Black Dwarf, 14 July 1819, quoted in Ruth Frow and Edmund Frow, Political Women, 1800–1850 (Pluto Press: 1989), 22.
- 26.
See Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists, 40–4.
- 27.
Manchester Observer, 23 October 1819.
- 28.
Manchester Observer, 9 October 1819.
- 29.
Michael Bush, ‘The women at Peterloo: the impact of female reform on the Manchester meeting of 16 August 1819’, History 89 (2004), 222.
- 30.
James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790–1850. (Oxford University Press: 1994), 163–4.
- 31.
Bamford, Passages, 68–9.
- 32.
Ibid., 68.
- 33.
Some Poor Law authorities published the names and/or addresses of those in receipt of relief and encouraged ratepayers to ensure that the recipients were genuinely in need: see Sheffield City Archives, JC1605: Resolution regarding personal visits to poor people’s homes, 1795 and JC1507: A List of the Casual and Regular Out-Paupers of Sheffield… Taken Sept. 30, 1808; London Metropolitan Archives, P71/TMS/588–590: Lists of the Poor. For the politics of social observation, see Sandra Sherman, Imagining Poverty: Quantification and the Decline of Paternalism (Ohio State University Press: 2001).
- 34.
Pittock, Treacherous Objects, 52.
- 35.
Diana Donald, The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III (Yale University Press: 1996), 15.
- 36.
Alison Morgan has explored the way that the mother and child were depicted in Peterloo imagery across a range of genres; see ‘Starving mothers and murdered children in cultural representations of Peterloo’, Manchester Region History Review 23 (2012), 65–78.
- 37.
Epstein, Radical Expression, 147–48.
- 38.
C. Burgess, ‘The objects of Peterloo’, Manchester Region History Review 23 (2012), 156
- 39.
Malcolm Chase, 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester University Press: 2013), 54.
- 40.
Terry Wyke, ‘Remembering the Peterloo Massacre’, Manchester Region History Review 23 (2012), 111–113.
- 41.
Ibid., 113.
- 42.
Reprinted in Manchester Observer, 25 November 1820.
- 43.
See Frank Trentmann, ‘The politics of everyday life’ in Frank Trentmann (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Consumption (Oxford University Press: 2012), 521–47, esp. 540–6 for a discussion of the interrelationships between home and family and wider society evident in consumption practices.
- 44.
Manchester Observer, 28 August 1819.
- 45.
Manchester Observer, 13 November 1819.
- 46.
Manchester Observer, 28 August 1819.
- 47.
Manchester Observer, 4 and 18 September 1819.
- 48.
Kevin Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge University Press: 1996), 108.
- 49.
Anon., The Trial of Mr. Hunt [and Others] … for an alleged conspiracy to alter the Law by force and threats; and for convening and attending an illegal, riotous and tumultuous Meeting at Manchester on Monday the 16th of August, 1819 (T. J Evans: 1820), 162.
- 50.
Anon., The Trial of Mr. Hunt, 39; Anon., In the King’s Bench, Between Thomas Redford, Plaintiff, and Hugh Hornby Birley, Alexander Oliver, Richard Withington, and Edward Meagher, Defendants, for an Assault on the 16th August … Report of the Proceedings … Taken from the Short-Hand Notes of Mr. Farquharson (C. Wheeler & Son: undated [1822]), 308.
- 51.
Bamford, Passages, 182.
- 52.
Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists (Maurice Temple Smith: 1984), 135–7.
- 53.
For example, Elaine Chalus, ‘Elite women, social politics, and the political world of late-eighteenth century England’, Historical Journal, 43 (2000), 669–97; Kathryn Gleadle, ‘“The age of physiological reformers”: rethinking gender and domesticity in the age of reform’, in Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850 (Cambridge University Press: 2003), 200–219; Kathryn Gleadle, Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender, and Political Culture in Britain, 1815–1867 (Oxford University Press: 2009); Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (Yale University Press: 2009); Sarah Richardson, The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain (Routledge: 2013).
- 54.
See note 11.
- 55.
‘Peaceful Meeting at Halifax’, Morning Chronicle, 7 October 1819.
- 56.
John Bohstedt has warned against the assumption that women, especially those employed in economically productive labour, were always the shoppers for their families; see John Bohstedt, ‘Gender, household and community politics: women in English Riots, 1790–1810’, Past and Present 120 (1988), 47. Contemporary texts, however, suggest that this was the expectation if not always the practice in radical households; for example see Francis Place, The Autobiography of Francis Place, 1771–1854, edited by Mary Thrale (Cambridge University Press: 1972), 227; Benjamin Shaw, The Family Records of Benjamin Shaw Mechanic of Dent, Dolphinholme and Preston, 1772–1841, edited by A.G. Crosby (The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire: 1991), 76–7; Esther Copley, Cottage Comforts, with Hints for Promoting Them, Gleaned from Experience: Enlivened with Authentic Anecdotes (Simpkin and Marshall: 1825), 24.
- 57.
See Steve Poole, ‘Ideas for discussion questions’, message 7, 10 June 2010. Online forum post. Protest History Forum, accessed 17 February 2017. http://protesthistory.proboards.com/post/22/thread
- 58.
See, for example, John Styles, ‘Lodging at the Old Bailey: lodgings and their furnishing in eighteenth-century London’, in John Styles and Amanda Vickery (eds), Gender, Taste & Material Culture in Britain & North America 1700–1830 (Yale University Press: 2006), 61–80; Alastair Owens, Nigel Jeffries, Karen Wehner, & Rupert Featherby, ‘Fragments of the modern city: material culture and the rhythms of everyday life in Victorian London’, Journal of Victorian Culture 15 (2010), 212–25; Adrian Green, ‘Heartless and unhomely? Dwellings of the poor in East Anglia and north-east England’, in Pamela Sharpe and Joanne McEwan (eds), Accommodating Poverty: The Housing and Living Arrangements of the English Poor, c. 1600–1850 (Palgrave Macmillan: 2011), 69–101.
- 59.
Elizabeth Hallam and Jenny Hockey, Death, Memory, and Material Culture (Berg: 2001), 5.
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Mather, R. (2018). Remembering Protest in the Late-Georgian Working-Class Home. In: Griffin, C., McDonagh, B. (eds) Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74243-4_6
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