Avery & Blake 02 - The Infidel Stain (50 page)

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Authors: M. J. Carter

The Charter demanded the vote for all adult men who weren’t insane or in prison; a secret ballot so no one could be intimidated into voting a certain way; the abolition of property qualifications for MPs, and the introduction of a salary – at the time only men with a certain income could stand for Parliament, and they weren’t paid; the redrawing of all political constituencies so they were of equal size – it was still the case that there were parliamentary seats that were based on a voting population of a few dozen people, while others in cities represented hundreds of thousands; and annual parliaments. This last idea was impractical but was an attempt to address the problem of voters being bribed. No one, they reckoned, would be able to afford to bribe voters every year.

The Chartists were concerned by other issues such as working hours and conditions in factories and mines, low wages and the price of food – bread in particular was kept expensive by the Corn Laws, which prevented cheap foreign wheat from entering the
country while allowing the British agricultural interest (i.e. the landowners, who mainly supported the Tory party), to sell their own wheat at elevated prices. The Chartists believed that political representation was the best way to get these other issues addressed.

The grass-roots support they received was extraordinary. The three petitions in 1839, 1842 and 1848 were so huge and long they had to be brought to Parliament in carts and carriages, and it took dozens of men to carry them into the House of Commons. The 1842 petition was signed by 3.3 million men – an amazing number when you consider that England had a population of about 16 million people, half of whom were women and 45 per cent of whom were under twenty (the voting age was twenty-one). The majority of members regarded themselves as ‘moral-force’ Chartists: they wanted to campaign within the law and they hoped to persuade Parliament to give them the vote by showing the extent of the desire for it in the country. Perhaps because of their civilized behaviour, Parliament felt quite able to dismiss their demands entirely. However, others in the movement, ‘physical-force’ Chartists, thought the only way to achieve their aims would be to frighten – or even to go further and threaten force against – the Establishment to make it give them what they wanted. Aside from several much-reported small risings and demonstrations in Wales and the North, however, they never dominated the movement. Chartism disintegrated in 1848 after a vast mass meeting in Kennington in south London and the delivery of the petition to Parliament. Why it did so has been much argued over. Its leadership in particular was criticized, but the fact that the government felt quite safe in repeatedly rejecting the Chartists’ politely presented petitions must have contributed to the movement’s eventual loss of steam.

The Chartists never made common cause with the other great political movement of the period, the Anti-Corn-Law League, which campaigned for the repeal of the Corn Laws. The Chartists felt that the League, set up by rich northern manufacturers, with a middle-class membership, was a distraction from the real story – political power for the working man. They also accused the League of being a political weapon to attack Tory landowners wielded by
Liberal-voting northern manufacturers, who wanted to get rid of the Corn Laws so that they could pay lower wages to their workers.

The Chartists were not the first generation of politicized working-class radicals. The French revolution, fifty years before, had inspired decades of working-class agitators and campaigners, who had also demanded democracy, press freedom and better pay.

Richard Carlile (1790–1843), a forgotten hero of the fight for a British free press, belonged to this earlier generation. The son of a Cornish shoemaker who died when he was four, Carlile was a self-educated atheist and self-described ‘infidel’, who spent most of his career as a printer and publisher being hounded for his support for radical causes. The British government that came after the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 was unpleasantly authoritarian and obsessed with the threat of ‘sedition’. It suspended habeas corpus, passed a series of repressive laws called the Six Acts which banned all public meetings and the works of writers like Thomas Paine, and put a seven-pence stamp duty on journals and newspapers in order to crush the radical press and discourage newspaper reading by the poor. Carlile campaigned for universal suffrage, universal education, the rights of women, the regulation of child labour, and the rights of agricultural workers, but most of all he fought for a free press. He was repeatedly arrested for ‘seditious libel’ – for publishing material which might encourage people to hate the government, and for refusing to pay stamp duty on his publications.

Like many of his generation, Carlile didn’t join the new Chartist movement when it began to gather steam in the mid to late 1830s. The radical firebrands of his generation had held more extreme views than the Chartists: they were atheists, fiercely anti-church and anti-government (with good reason), with dreams of overthrowing the established order. They tended to belong to a more eighteenth-century world of looser moral conventions. They had little interest in what would become respectable middle-class values, and some of them had convictions as pimps, for drunkenness, blasphemy and extortion. By the late 1830s and ’40s, however, many of this previous generation had given up on political agitation. The historian Iain McCalman has researched what became of them, and discovered
that not a few of the best known went on to earn a living as muckraking, blackmailing journalists and pornographers, many of them operating out of Holywell Street off the Strand. Carlile himself died in poverty in 1843, having been taken in by his two sons – who to his dismay had themselves become successful pornographers. Incidentally, almost everything we know about this earlier generation of radicals comes from reports from informers recruited by the Home Office and the London police.

The Metropolitan Police had been created in 1829 under the auspices of Sir Robert Peel, then Home Secretary and by 1841 Prime Minister. For several decades afterwards they were known popularly as the ‘new police’, and also as ‘coppers’, ‘bobbies’ and ‘peelers’. The London poor and street people, whom they had instructions to move on, had less enthusiastic names for them: ‘bluebottles’, ‘bludgeon men’, ‘raw lobsters’ and ‘blue bastards’ among them.

The character of Lord Allington was inspired by the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper. Shaftesbury was a remarkable social reformer and philanthropist – but while given to occasional melancholia there’s no evidence at all that he was bipolar. A patrician and Tory to his fingertips, and, unusually for his class, a devout and evangelical Christian (unloved by his famously unpleasant, chilly parents, he was brought up by a servant who was herself devoutly evangelical), he campaigned against child labour, and for better working hours and conditions for workers, and statutory free education for all children (he was president of the Ragged School Union). He was also instrumental in the reform of the treatment of the insane, and in the campaign to ban child chimney sweeps.

His motivations were complicated. Though he felt real empathy for the poor – and for children in particular – he was obsessed with the idea that their conditions must be improved so they would have time to attend to their own salvation and go to church. Shaftesbury was also absolutely committed to aristocratic government and hated the thought of political change, but was convinced that the
ruling classes must show that they cared for the welfare of the poor, or they would be in danger of losing them to what he regarded as the evils of socialism and Chartism. Even so, he spent his whole life as a tireless campaigner for and spearhead of social reform and the betterment of conditions for the poor and their children, and he helped to set the agenda for social reform from the 1850s. In 1893, after his death, a winged statue was set up in Piccadilly Circus to honour his extraordinary achievements. It’s widely known as Eros, but in fact it represents Anteros, the symbol of selfless, nurturing love.

Ether (diethyl ether) was the first widely used anaesthetic in the West. It is a liquid at room temperature but easily turns into a vapour and can be administered on a towel or sponge. Its first published use took place in New York State in 1842, when a dental patient was given ether for a tooth extraction. Several months later a doctor from Georgia used it when removing a cyst. It seems, however, that English doctors were aware of its anaesthetic properties as early as 1840: it had been used as a tonic for decades, and the scientist Michael Faraday had noted its potential as an inducer of unconsciousness as early as 1818. So I’ve allowed myself a little poetic leeway in suggesting that it may have been discussed or even used informally by doctors in London in 1841. Less dangerous when applied in large doses than its successor, choloroform, ether had a very strong smell like nail varnish remover, gave the user a very sore throat and streaming eyes and was also highly flammable.

Acknowledgements

I first stumbled on the historian Iain McCalman’s book
Radical Underworld
(1988) in the London Library in 2012. The story of a generation of poor aspirational political campaigners and would-be writers turning into pornographers and extorters just as the Chartists were becoming a mass movement seemed to me completely fascinating, and I owe him a great debt – as well as having stolen some of the more lurid details and names from his books and articles. I’ve read a great deal about London, but I was particularly inspired by (and shamelessly plundered) Judith Flanders’s
The Victorian City
, published in 2012 (as well as her other excellent books on nineteenth-century social history, especially
Consuming Passions
(2006)), and Jerry White’s
London in the 19th Century
(2007). On Chartism I found Malcolm Chase’s
Chartism: A New History
(2007) and David Goodway’s
London Chartism
(2002) particularly useful. One of my other secret weapons has been Kellow Chesney’s terrific
The Victorian Underworld
, first published in 1970.

I owe huge thanks to my agent of over twenty years, Bill Hamilton, a constant source of encouragement, support and good sense. And to Juliet Annan, my UK publisher, who kept sending back the manuscript until it was the best I could do, and whose editorial nose I utterly trust. Thanks also to my US publisher, Sara Minnich, whose comments were exceptionally useful. Caroline Pretty, my copy-editor, was once again a pleasure to work with. Finally, I owe an undischargeable debt to John Lanchester, who, as always, told me to take out the boring bits.