By Robert W. Morrell

The Pauper Press: A Study in Working Class Radicalism in the 1830s. By Patricia Hollis, OUP 1970. 

And

James Mill and the Art of Revolution. By Joseph Hamburger. Yale UP., 1963

The Pauper Press despite its appealing title and concisely rhetorical publicity on the inside flap of the dust cover about abusively class conscious displayed respectable reformers and outraged guardians of the peace… the turbulent underground radicalism of the Reform years is not an attempt to popularise its subject. It is a study that is both highly analytical and academic. It has an enormous amount of information but because it is presented in a manner described it will appeal, or rather be of significance to readers with a considerable knowledge of the subject already. This does not mean for one moment that there is not an enormous amount of immediately obvious and interesting reading.

Bertrand Russell might just as easily, and accurately have boon writing of The Pauper Press, when he wrote that Thomas Paine’s importance in history consists in the fact that he made the preaching of democracy democratic. It may only be a marginal difference to note that Paine’s Rights of Men was written within the law, causing the government to outlaw him; while the unstamped press, from the very outset, was outside the law. But it is very significant that popular working-class radicals connected with the pauper press, wore, Miss Hollis writes, out to smash the law (and) make it unworkable” while at the same time aggressively demanding working-class rights in the columns of their unstamped newspapers. As so many of the publishers of the unstamped press were also publishers of Paine’s writings it was no surprise to find Miss Hollis writing, re. the politics and “rhetoric” of the unstamped: “Paine phrased v the language of abstract rights, in which, for example, the National Union of the Working Classes Declaration of the Rights’ of Man, and the Radical Association’s preamble wore written, and, which echoed through the Speeches of Hetherington and the writings cf Benbow: “We bow to the Sovereign Majesty of the PEOPLE; we acknowledge no other power…….” 

Working class rights were asserted in a variety of ways. One vendor “Noah Flood”, brought before (the magistrate) said, ‘So long as ho saw starvation among mankind he would not flinch from soiling the Unstamped publications. On his release he would return to the same spot and sell them. Miss Hollis adds, “these were brave words when they meant that the magistrates would impose the full three months. Another vendor arrested for the eighth time gave his name as John Quelph, King of the Unstamped. Another vendor arrested for the third time told the magistrate ‘There is no charge against me that I know of. I am, however, proud’of the honour of going to prison for selling the Poor Man’s Guardian. The same magistrate during another case, happened to look at the Poor Man’s Guardian when the vendor quickly said to him “I am glad to see it in your hands, for the first time, a newspaper of the true sort”. A young boy vendor when being arrested cried out that he was being “murdered” and a crowd of 700 to 1000 rescued him… the police officer had to drive away for his own safety and on another occasion, after an attempted arrest a police man found it necessary to flee over the top of the house. “One person was supposed to have hired two men… to tear down the pineecards of the Unstamped; one of them was caught at Lambeth and ducked in a horsepond”. The publisher of a “calico fourpenny POLITICAL HANDKERCHIEF” told readers: “Your wives and daughters may become moving monuments of political knowledge. One shall be dressed in a description of kingeraft, another in a description of priestcraft, a third in a description of Lordcraft, or general aristocracy…. the nakedness of mankind shall be covered both as to body and mind…” Two leading vendors put out the POLITICAL TOUGHWOOD, a sheet of shaving thin plywood, as “a profession of faith calculated to ignite human understanding…” which was described by a third party as “a Seditious and inflammatory Publication.” 

In two chapters, one on the “Old Ideology” and another on the “New Ideology”, Miss Hollis interprets the content of the Unstamped Press. The structuring of the content in this way, I think, buttresses Miss Hollis’s thesis that the rhetoric of the “Old Ideology” (which looked back to Paine, Spence, Peterloo, The Buck Dwarf, etc., and denounced “Old Corruption, Priestcraft, and Taxation, language of natural rights not the language of economic analysis”) referred to a significant extent, though not wholly of course, the development of a valid (and therefore presumably politically effective) economic analysis. To reduce the content of the Unstamped to such a formal abstraction as an “Ideology” will, inevitably, elevate the attitudes of the publishers of the Unstamped themselves while at the same time relegate the responses of the working people at large as insignificant, impracticable and unpolitic, especially if they should appear to be impulsive or instinctive. 

Miss Hollis does not accept that there existed during the period of the Unstamped (o.1830-36) a “working class”, nor that the experience of the Unstamped helped to establish one. “What was ‘made’ during the 1830’s was not a class but class consciousness.” While at the same time she shows that from the proprietors of the Unstamped Press’s point of view “what mattered was not the degree of homogeneity within the respective parties” (t.e. the middle and working class) “but the size of the gap between them.” She also shows that the middle and working class were considered, by the proprietors of the Unstamped Press, to be ranged either side of “the Vote.” A less laborious and less obscure way to have acknowledged the problem of defining the “working class” would have been to acknowledge the observations of psychologists and philosophers, i.e. that people can only identify themselves in crude and uncertain terms and that any ‘group’ or ‘class’ identity must therefore necessarily be accepted as at best very crude. 

Throughout The Pauper Press reaction to the fourpenny tax on every newspaper is divided into middle class and working class. Chapters too, are designated for interpretation in this form. In her final chapter Miss Hollis writes that “Reckoned by middle class criteria” the working class (extra legal/parliamentary) campaign “was perhaps the most successful of the decade.” She contends that her study/ interpretation of the Unstamped Press will show where previous historians have failed, that by 1836 the working class radicals and the middle class were in closer “alliance” than in 1830. After 1836 government left a penny tax remaining on newspapers and “opposition to the penny stamp still remained a bond of sympathy between middle and working class radicals during the years of Chartism and its aftermath.

With an “alliance” on one hand and the “bond of sympathy” on the other Miss Hollis concludes, ambiguously, unenthusiastically, her chapter “THE MIDDLE CLASS COIMPAIGN” (for the repeal cf the taxes on knowledge) “Although few of the middle class radicals would have agreed, perhaps, their greatest success was to create a more sympathetic and tolerant attitude towards the Unstampod”. Later in the study (Conclusion) where the alliance is being emphasised, one roads with regard to the middle class campaign: “Unless middle class men were expected to join the ranks of the victims” (i.e. the imprisoned vendors and publishers of the Unstamped) “It is hard to see what more they could have done”. Apart from wondering whether this opinion was more biographical than historical it does seem that in pursuing contextual themes supporting rationalisations have crept in. 

As the foregoing shows, Miss Hollis raises some important questions. The reliance at the end of the campaign she points out, as being of considerable significant e.g. it enabled Franchise Place to help Willien Lovett to draw up “The Charter”. The representative nature of the alliance (i.e. The London Working Moms Association) and of “The Charter ” origins are contentious points. Graham Wallas in his life of Place wrote “The Working Yens Association gave Chartism its name and programme, but never had any considerable voice in its direction”. Wallace also noted that “before Place consented” to help Lovett with drawing up The Charter he made the leaders of the W.M.A. promise that they would prevent speeches against the New Poor Law or for Socialii being delivered from their platforms”. Place was aged sixty five at this time and Lovett described him as a “clear headed and warm hearted old gentleman” and there is strong evidence that would suggest that this group of working class radicals and place, meeting from half past ten till one o’clock at Lovett’s coffee house in Grays Inn Road every Sunday Morning were more susceptible to Place’s pursuasiveness than his politics. Additionally, Place was at this time disillusioned with the Whigs. Even the Metropolitan Anti Corn Law Association did not get off the ground: Instead, “Corn Law Repeal” like “Chartism” flirtation rooted itself in the Northern manufacturing’ districts. One could interpret the flirtation of the –fiddle class Complete Suffrage Union (in collusion with the Anti Corn Law League) with the Chartists (c.1841/2) as an alliance. One could also see it as an index of the worsening fortunes of the A.C.L.L. 

Miss Hollis confines her study to “The London Unstamped Press” , the provincial “Unstamped” being referred to only occasionally on points of comparison… further coverage of the provincial Unstapped would not substantially affect the analysis. The campaign against the stamp tax (both middle and working class) was “A London Campaign”. The London Unstamped it seems grew out of the enthusiasm generated by the July Revolution in France (1830) and fed on the general atmosphere leading up to the. Reform Bill Agitition. On the other hand the provincial Unstamped e.g. Joshua Hobson’ “Voice of the West Riding” (Leeds) and John Doherty’s “Poor Man’s Advocate” (Manchester) emerged as a result of the Factory Reform Bill. Clearly there is a difference of emphasis… Was the pamphleteering tradition stronger in the North? Miss Hollis, in her chapter on the “New Ideology” shows that the London Unstamped did theorise about the ethics of “laissez faire” economics and attempted to develop a counter theory. But perhaps one had to live in the “manufacturing districts” to retain an indelible (SENTENCE LOST).

J.T. Ward in his study “The Factory Movement” points cut that it was not till December 1833 that Hetherington was “converted by the operatives” cf the North “to Factory Reform” when only a few months earlier he had described Oastler and Sadler, in the Poor Man’s Guardian, as “very selfish fellows” The point is, were the publishers of the London Unstamped really knowledgeable about life, and politics, in the northern industrial centres where working class and riddle class radicals were to confront each other throughout the Chartist period? Was it significant that it took a “face to face” meeting between Hetherington and the Northern operatives, in their own environment, before they were “converted”? Was Place really knowledgeable about conditions and politics in the North? Norman McCord in his study “The Anti Corn Law League notes; that Place as late as March 1839, had no knowledge of Ardhibald Prentice. Prentice had been editor of the Manchester Times since 1828 had played a leading role in Manchester’s first Parliamentary election (September 1832); had been very influential in the Manchester Political Union, founded overtly in November 1830 but apparently existing underground till 500 members had been enrolled (this union, — like Place’s London based National Political Union was used to counter the influence cf the working class “Huntities” who were associates of the London “Rotundists”, during the Reform Bill agitation). In an article “Francis Place and Working Class History”, by W.E.S. Thomas (see: The Historical Journal 1962) Place it seems “attributed the misery of the handloom weavers in Lancashire to the profligacy of their farthers”…. and once said he would be hanged rather than visit (the) Industrial areas of the North. 

A symptom of the difficulty in assessing the significance/representativeness of the working class radical leaders, their Unstamped Press, and their “alliance” with the middle class radicals is illustrated by Miss Hollis’s handling of a chapter devoted to the IMPACT made by the Unstamped Press. This chapter I thought well written because the reader was directly involved in considering the difficulties of making such an assessment. Miss Hollis asks a series of questions which pose the problems. For example, she writes “it is hard to assess other sources of influence such as the local stamped paper read in. the public house, cr the battered copy of Paine on. the shelf of an old radical; and it is equally hard to know what would count as success. How much of the rhetoric? How much money? How large a reception? and again; “No content analysis of the Northern Star, for example, could isolate the lingering influence of the Poor Man’s Guardian as distinct from that of Owenism or Paine or the missionary work of the National Union of the Working Classes and the London Working Men’s Association delegates”, in spite of the above, rhetoric it dated, isolated and judged. For example following on from the above one reads: “O’Brien, innovate on the older order of rhetoric of 1819″ and the quote again continues “It was not just this language of 1819 was out of place; by 1850 it was without meaning and emotion”. 

Of course the working people the Unstamped and the Chartist leaders tried to speak to, and on behalf of, rust have, to a large degree, lacked many of the characteristics of the audiences who were appealed to by the middle class radicals who agitated for the Reform Bill and the Repeal of the Corn Laws. Among these “characteristics” would be respectability which in turn opened the doors of Institutions, drawing rooms, and of course commercial establishments. Then again education, which allowed them to exploit the use of rhetoric to an extent which must have been impossible for the working class radical leaders. This articulation enabled the middle class radicals, in a sense, to juggle with the laws and therefore the security of established institutions. Hamburger writes, in his study “James Mill and the Art of Revolution” of the riddle class radicals using “rhetoric, skillfully combining allusions to potential physical furor while at the same time calling for the maintenance of law and order, even the proposals for arming the middle class unions were justified on the grounds that this would protect order and property in the face of popular unrest during the ‘Reform Bill’ agitation.

Interestingly, Hamburger notes Lord Melbourne’s calmness (as”Home Secretary) in the face of the middle class threat. Whereas Miss Hollis notes with regard to The Pauper Press “Melbourne was far from being the idle dilettante of his portraits. His energy in chasing sedition was tempered only by the cause. of cautious and perhaps more liberal attitudes of his law officers”. Could it have been that rhetoric, politics and Ideology aside (in a marginal sense) in the final analysis the ruling classes knew instinctively that they had more in common with the middle classes than the “great unwashed”. (One recalls that when the riddle class Complete Suffrage Union attempted to link up with the Chartists in 1841, Cobden decided the Chartists would “be useful in our rear to frighten the aristocracy”). Clearly other criteria besides “economic analysis” and “rhetoric” were deterring events, especially where working class fortunes were concerned. . It was the traditional acceptance of assumptions like the “inevitability of machinery” and the “futility” of the “Luddites” actions which E.J. Hobsbawn pointed out had “obscured a good deal of history” because nobody researched further than these assumptions. The alternatives open to a popular spokesman (or spokemen) of working class politics during the first half of the 19th Century have almost always been structured to suit the “moral force” case. Even the “physical force” agitation which the riddle class radicals aged to obtain the Reform Bill was quietly passed over. Had the Pauper Press been less rhetorical and developed an economic analysis” what would it have achieved, on wonders? D. Read and E. Glasgow in their biography of Peargus O’Connor tried to question some of the traditional assumptions, in something like fair terms in the “Conclusion” to their study. They wrote that “The Chartist Movement could not have been conducted on the’terms of L.W.M.A. 

Later, as soon as the Charter was launched as a popular document a demagogue was needed, Lovett, Place and others at the time, followed by many historians since, have said that O’Connor’s noisy demagoguery, far from making the Chartist movement, deprived it of its success. The assumption is that Parliament and government might have conceded the Charter to a quiet rational movement. In fact, this would not have happened. O’Connor’s noisy methods may have provided parliament and government with an excuse for refusing the Charter; but in any case parliament regarded Chartist principles as quite impracticable, not worth serious consideration… Secondly, in considering O’Connor’s threatening language, we must not forget the terrible conditions of the tire. Historians can talk easily about the “Industrial Revolution”, “distress”,… and other abstractions (this biography has done the same) but to contemporaries these were not abstractions, but dark realities”. This concluding chapter was, funnily (and ironically) enough singled out by reviewers in the academic historical journals as being “unconvincing”, one noted authority on the period seeing it as “a serious weakness”, adding, he saw “no good reason for revising’ the traditionally unfavourable verdict upon its subject”. This reaction was “ironical”because Reak and Blasgow had also noted that “O’Connor’s lack of intellectual originality”, demagogory, etc., “had irritated some academic historians”. The criteria by which the effectiveness of a political activists ideas and the presentation of ahem can be measured is an imponderable, regardless of whether its O’Connor “haranguing” the inarticulate “great unwashed” or, for example, and articulate (SENTENCE LOST).

This mysterious “variable” plays its part. Hobsbawm in his short essay on Paine, was highly critical of Paine’s “political proposals” describing them as “ridiculously mode:ate. His goal, ‘Universal peace, civilisation and commerce’, was that of most Victorian Free Traders” (the validity of which need not, in the present context be examined yet simply because of this fact and the extraordinary, and indeed probably unparalleled, success as a spokesman of revolt” Paine was “an historical problem finally and unequivocally Hobsbawm writes of “this profoundly and instinctively revolutionary ran” (re: Rights of Man) “Even now, as we read those clear, simple sentences in which corr-onsense rises to heroism and a cast—iron bridge spans the distance between Thetford and the new Jerusalem, we are exhilarated and melted, and if we believe in Man, how can we fail, even now, to cheer him”. 

Joseph Hamburger’s study “deals with James Mill (who thought of the Press as the main instrument of intimidation) solely as a theoretician of Radical strategy, and examines the efforts made by him and other Radicals to shape the governing classes image of public feeling and especially their image of the popular disposition to violence”. Hamburger concerns himself specifically with that period when, Miss Hollis points out, “pressure” on the Home Secretary to suppress the Unstamped Press “was at its height”, namely, the period of the Reform Bill agitation (with which Hamburger is concerned) of 1831/2. 

The first part of Miss Hollis’s study looks at Edwin Chadwick’s middle class “Society for Promoting the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge” which had been founded as early as February 1831. This campaign never really gathered momentum until the closing years of Miss Hollis’s period. The Whig politician Lord Althorpe had favoured “Repeal” while out of office, but by November 1830 “holding office changed minds”. By Juno 1831 Place was advising other Millite Radicals to drop “Repeal” until the “Reform Bill was through”. The same Millite Radicals to drop “REVEAL” were prominent in the “Repeal Campaign” (Grote, Chadwick, Roebuck, Place, etc). also agitated for the Reform Bill and their activities re. this latter agitation and its effects upon the fortunes of the Unstamped Press,- and working class radicalism, are not covered in The Pauper Press. Miss – Hollis writes’that’it-Was’ during the campaign for the Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge that the middle class radicals developed the various techniques of “lobbying,..debating,…and organising public opinion” (p.298), but after reading Hamburger’s study I feel inclined to think that these techniques were perfected during the Reform Bill agitation (along with others more of a —ore dubious nature, which were never resorted to in support of the UNstamped.) 

While Hetherington’s Poor Man’s Guardian advertised: “WANTED. Some hundreds of POOR BEN, out of employ, who have NOTHING TO RISK”, (i.e. preferably “young unskilled and unmarried”) “some of those unfortunate wretches to whom DISTEutSS has made a PRISON a desirable home…”: Lord Brougham thought the Unstamped in the hands “of such desperate circumstances and character that neither the Univeraal and legal nor the moral sanction has sufficient hold upon them” dangerous. Brougham thought their “doctrines” alarming and James Mill thought the Rotundists “fools… rascals” and their idead “ugly”. The proprietor of the “Examiner”, a Millite journal, refused to publish his sub—editors views on the Rotundists (who were indivisible from the Unstamped) because they were so embittered: the sub—editor was Edwin Chadwick (see: S.E. Finer’s “Life…of Edwin Chadwick”). Of especial importance were the activities of the Milito radicals during the nine months leading up to the passage of the Reform Bill in June 1832. Placo (who considered the Unstamped newspapers “obnoxious”) led a campaign during this period against the N.U.W.C. and Unstamped “Poor Man’s Guardian” which Hamburger describes at “ruthless” and “unscrupulous’ 

It is difficult in the light of Hamburger’s study, to make much of Miss Hollie’s observation that “Until the summer of 1832 both the ri.U.W.C. and the P.M.G. drew heavily on current events, the king’s speech, the formation of the National Political Union, the Bristol Riots for their raw material. The P.M.G. also carried editorials on the futility of the Reform Bills while the N.U.W.C. ignored the subject (on the preceding page Niss Hollis had remarked that the N.U.W.C. “reluctantly supported the Reform Bill”). When the N.U.W.C. did debate more abstract concerns, such as working class rights, property, capital and labour, then Cleave, Hibbert, or Watson were invariably either in the chair or the leading speakers. Left to itself the N.U.W.C. debated current wrongs in the language of Old Corruption”, p.246). If Hetherington too often lapsed into the language Miss Hollis cites from the P.M.G. (d.3/12/1831. Hetherington is envisaging the demand for Universal Suffrage being met, and “the term Glasse merging into some comprehensive appellation…”) it’s little wonder that they use language of Old Corruption. Clearly what both these studies illustrate, more urgently, is the need for a thorough study of the London based N.U.W.C. and their provincial associates. 

Like Miss Hollis, Hamburger has quite a bit to say about the relationship between “rhetoric” and “political strategy/Ideology”. Hamburger’s whole study cptres around this relationship. Hamburger concludes that the oft referred to ‘revolutionary” situation that was supposed to have been imminent at the time the Reform Bill was passe was loss real than rhetorical. The Millite Radicals enjoyed access to a number of influential (and respectable) journals and newspapers: some of the letters editorials and reports they were able to grossly manipulate, even on accessions it seems suppressing reports. They had the ear of various M.P.’s and had access to Government Ministers. In as much as their Reform “agitation” can be said to have been extra parliamentary,, Hamburger contends it was geared primarily to the neverending drawing up of “Resolutions” and “Petitions” and “rhetorical” propaganda through the various communications media. Hamburger notes, for example, that the National Political Union which Place hurriedly organised to counter the influence of the “Rotundists” N.U.W.C. “sponsored no open air public meeting throughout the Reform Bill agitation”: this excludes of course the founding meeting. 

What rioting that did take place, like the Bristol Riots and the rural incendiarism of Captain Swing, for example, was propagandised by the /allies in order to terrorise the apathetic and non—reformist middle and upper classes into conceding Reform. This • rhetorical propaganda, together with the correspondence passing between the Nillite’s , Hamburger surveys in a chapter entitled “The Language of Monaco”, running into some fifty pages. One eight add that the Millite radicals paid no regard to either the short or long term effect such discreditable images of the poor and the unenfranchised would have upon their (the poor’s) future social and political aspirations. Miss Hollis points out re. the period when the Nillite radicals decided to create a public opinion favourable to the “Repeal of the Taxes on Knowledge” “tho problem was, that the public opinion the (Millite) radicals found was a working class opinion created by the Unstamped. It was unrespectable, extravagant, and beyond the law. The public opinion the middle class Radicals tried to treat from 1835 was more middle class, respectable and constitutional”. The public opinion the Waite Radicals found was not, I think, solely that created by the Unstamped Press. S.E.Finer has noted in his biography of the Miallite Radical Edwin Chadwick that he too used extravagant, rhetorical, language/images in his Reports/writings re. Poor Law and Police Worm (p.167). In doing so Chadwick consciously and calculatedly discredited sections of the community most likely to be affected by those same reforms when presented, accepted, and administered in such a spirit. Miss Hollis’s study provides abundant evidence that the Unstamped Press aspired to speak for these oppressed groups. 

Miss Hollis in a section on “The Government and the Unstamped” mentions only in passing, a pamphlet which she suggests enthused the Home Office in its campaign against the Unstamped and the N.U.W.C. No indication is given of the content or circumstances surrounding the appearance of this pamphlet. The pamphlet in question appeared shortly after the Bristol Riots of October 1831 at precisely the time when the Millite radicals under Place’s leadership were frantically trying to crush the N.U.W.C. Undoubtedly the pamphlet appeared with Place’s connivance and blessing for the author was a long standing acquaintance of his, and James Mill, and subscribed to the Benthamite creed. The author, E.W. Gibbon, a middle class radical with Quaker Connections had emerged “miraculously”, unscathed from. Newgate Prison in May 1830, after having served three years for having abducted a young girl whose only attraction, for him, had been her fathers wealth. I say this acquaintance of Place’s had “miraculously” emerged because unlike Henry Mayhew’s writings of the itinerant London population of a later date Gibbon’s 16 page pamphlet “HOUSEHOLDERS IN DANGER FROM THE POPULACE” was a scurrilous libel on that section of the community and the N.U.W.C. 

Very briefly Gibbon’s Newgate friends had initiated to him of an imminent plan to sack the town (London) in a style si-ilar tc the then contemporary riots at Bristol. The Rotundists or as Gibbon designates them “THE DESPERADOES” who read “cheap trash” (the Unstamped)’ comprising some “1,000 slovenly Huntities of weak intellect .. deficient foreheads .. and sinister expression” and the “fanatical Owenites” are to lead “30,000 .. COMMON THIEVES … 50,000 .. of the ‘RABBLE” who live in extreme poverty “within five miles of St. Pauls” and their close associates “1,000 of the lowest class of prostitutes” (these are the “mistresses of the soldiery). Every outrage imaginable is to be commited by this “populace” without regard to life or property. Circulating concur ently was another of Gibbon’s pamphlets “SWING UNMASKED: or the causes of rural incendiarism”. In this pamphlet the pauperised rural labourers are divided into two groups. Firstly there are the “physically deformed” who are cowardly” and whose “supineness” prevents them from taking any part in the rural disturbances. The second group, however, have a life style with which Gibbon sympathises: they are the “poachers …and…. smugglers… and “incediarists” whose…”judgement must be admired “for they outwit the rural Nobility, Gentry, and Clergy. Indeed, a detail by detail plan of operations for any would be incendiarist is included in the text. This group of peasants are non other than the “able bodied” paupers who courageous life style was so shortly afterwards to be severely restricted under the provisions of the Benthamite New Poor Law. The admirable antics of these “able bodied” incendiarists should be compared with the London Rotundists, of whom Gibbon specifically wrote in the “Houleholders..1” pamphlet of being “loose single men, who might set fire to London without anxiety for helplessbeings at. home “. The “Swing” pamphlet has a direct reference to “Mr Place” recommending a tract of his. The safety mechanism in both these pamphlets was the passage of the Reform Bill.

Both the tories and working class Radicals considered that there was Collusion between the Whig Ministry, the MLllite Radicals ans sections of the stamped press. Both Hamburger and Hollis allude to these charges, although perhaps somewhat ingeniously. Miss Hollis quotes a Home Office source on Hetherington speaking at the Rotunda (at the height of the Millite Radical/Whig Ministry’s campaign against the N.U.W.C./bnstamped. Hetherington described the Times as a “prostitute of the government’. Lord Chancellor Brougham was at this ti – e “feeding the Ti-es news of the Cabinet”. Hamburger shows convincingly that Joseph Parkes (Francis Place’s closest collaborator and backroom manipulator of the Birmingham Political Union’s affairs) was able to use the columns of the Times pretty freely, as circumstances dictated. 

Similarly Parkes was at this time receiving “secret correspondence” from the Attorney Gene. al Lord Althorpe (with the Pri – e Ministers connivance) suggesting that Parkes privately moderate the activities/propaganda of the JB.P.U. whose middle class radical supporters were at this time organising along “quasi-military lines”. Otherwise Althorpe said the Ministry would feel “obliged” to take steps of their own:, he also expressed some concern that this might alienate the middle class political unions throughout the country. He clearly didn’t want this to happen. Miss Hollis makes the point that Colonel Nacerone’s pamphlet “DEFENSIVE INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE PEOPLE”… “on street warfare, which showed how to make lances and how to construct barricades was common enough in middle class radical circles but very much more alarming in working class hands”. Nothing was done by Althorpe about Gibbon’s inflammatory pamphlets although Miss Hollis quotes Althorpe’s opinion/directive re. the Prosecution of Richard Carlile for advising the “insurgent agricultural labourers” in the Unstamped “Prompter” Althorpe wrote: “If we could proceed in the prosecution I am sure it would be right to do it”. At this time the N.U.W.C. leader’s letters were being intercepted (Hollis. p. 44) as were those of their associates in the provinces e.g, Manchester (Hamburger: p. 243). There does not seem to have been any similar “interception” of middle class mail, in spite of their “quasi-military organisation” at this time. 

“It has sometimes been suggested that the relationship between the (Millite) Radicals and the Whig Gov’t was one not so much of influence as of collusion, where the leaders Of the Whig Gov’t were WILLING ANDOOOPSRATIVE ALLIES” (my emphasis). Hamburger continues: “If collusion is understood to mean that the Ministers deliberately conspired with AGITATORS,(my emphasis) in order to crest situations that would provide evidence either of riotous conduct or pro-reform sentiments, it is difficult to substantiate such charges”. Considering the parties involved it would seem idealistic to expect evidence to fit the above terms of referenCe. People will act in collusion may not admit the fact publicly, nor even to themselves. Hamburger says further on: “The Millite Radicals looked upon most of the Ministers,: not as men with whom they were in collusion but. as the objects of their manipulations. It was a situation in which each group thought it was using the other for its own purposes; this did not even involve a tacit agreement, for each felt the other was at best difficult to control, and that it was a continuous and uncertain struggle for to do so”. 

Would the Shig Ministers have seen the middle class radicals (or the radicals have seen themselves) as “Agitators”? I would suspect the middle class radicals would have disliked being described thus. There was a fair bit of stigma attached to the term. (One recalls Disraeli’s reference to the term in a passage dis- crediting the Reform Ministry in his political novel “Coningsby” (Book 2. Chapter 1). Daniel O’Connell speaking in the House of Commons re. the -Iillitant Sturgeite “Abolitionists” said: “Are they idle and violent agitators, who delight in the convulsions of the State and disregard social order, men who look to the chances of revolution as holding out hope of their being possibly useful to their interests? No. They are the steadiest, soberest, most industrious and most respectable men..”). Absolm Watkin a leader of the Manchester “Reformers” (who agitated for the Reform Bill) was very careful to designate the working class “Huntites” as “Radicals” in the numerous entries he made in his “Journal’ during the Reform Bill Agitation. He was equally careful to describe his associates as “Reformers”, Middle class “Radicals” in London, or “Reformers in Manchester”, may well have accepted that they collectively “agitated” for the Reform Bill, but that they were personally “agitators” (which begged the question of their personal respectability etc., without the benefit of the annoni-ity which the group confers) is doubtful. Certainly a study which would be of value would be one along the lines of “The Language of Middle Class Radicalism/Politics 1800-18507. The different interpretations put upon middle class reformist movements, with and without a background of working class radicalism, might provide some interesting insights on ” respectability”, “public order”, and the language of “Free Trade”. 

Both of the studies reviewed heroes I found very interesting and they are no doubt of considerable value. Hamburger’s study lends itself to consistent arguementatIon, far more easily than does that of Miss Hollis’s and therefore I suppose one is inclined to consider it the more readable. But there is an immense amount of “detail in The Pauper Press which has had to be, of course, left untouched, and which in some respects may not be immediately appreciated for the reasons mentioned at the start of this review.