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Victorian Pressure Groups: Directions for Research*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

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In recent years there has been considerable interest in Victorian politics and the Victorian political system. This has provided a substantial and continuing literature, much of which, however, remains preoccupied with leadership and organization at a parliamentary level. It may, therefore, be valuable to suggest an area within this most traditional of fields which might provide an alternative approach to that of “high politics”—of cabinet intrigue and parliamentary speech-making. In fact, one might ignore, for the moment, Parliament altogether, and consider that side of Victorian political activity which has been largely obscured by Hatfield dinner parties and Highbury foxing. That is, the manner in which Englishmen from outside Westminster, and perhaps from outside the formal institutions of party and government, attempted to determine the substance of issues and solutions debated in Parliament and at Whitehall.

One should avoid confusing the visible and symbolic place Parliament has occupied with the reality of political initiative. In England the rapid growth of new economies and the cities they created in the North and Midlands at the beginning of the Victorian age detracted from the centralness of London and Westminster, blurring somewhat the focus of English economic and political life, and creating new urban hierarchies consciously opposed to domination from Whitehall. Within the vast new urban centers, fed by a rural migration and accellerated by the spreading railway system, voluntary associations of all sorts became a peculiarly Victorian characteristic—serving perhaps as surrogates for a sense of community lost in the passage from a rural to an urban environment. Reading and corresponding societies, social clubs, self-help and benevolent associations, charities—this kind of activity penetrated Victorian society from the respectable working classes to the very rich. Related to this social phenomenon was a growth in local and national political associations—what one might today call “cause lobbies.” It is this type of pressure group activity, predominantly urban and probably largely middle-class, which needs to be more systematically studied. This essay will attempt to indicate the value of such research into “low politics,” and to suggest some avenues of approach.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , Summer 1973 , pp. 107 - 115
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1973

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Footnotes

*

Revised version of a paper read at the Conference on British Studies, Bay Area Section, Stanford, California, March, 1973.

References

1 See Heyck, Thomas William, “New Sources and Methods In the Study of the Nineteenth Century Parliament,” Albion, IV, 2(Summer, 1972): 6781CrossRefGoogle Scholar, for a survey of recent trends in analysis of the Victorian political system.

2 A useful essay by W. H. Chaloner on Chartist historiography to 1965 may be found in Hovell, Mark, The Chartist Movement, ed. Tout, T. F. (third edition: Manchester, 1966), pp. iiiixGoogle Scholar. There have been a number of articles and books published since that date: Boston, Ray, British Chartists in America (Manchester, 1971)Google Scholar; Harrison, Brian and Hollis, Patricia, “Chartism, Liberalism and the Life of Robert Lowery,” English Historical Review, LXXXI (July, 1967):503–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Plummer, Alfred, Bronterre, A Political Biography of Bronterre O'Brien, 1804-1864 (London, 1971)Google Scholar; Prothero, Iowerth, “Chartism in London,” Past and Present, XLIV (August, 1969):76105CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rowe, D. J., “Chartism and the Spitalfields Silk-weavers,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, XX (December, 1967):482–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Chartist Convention and the Regions,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, XXII (April, 1969):5874Google Scholar; The Failure of London Chartism,” Historical Journal, XI (No. 3, 1968):472–87Google Scholar; The London Workingmen's Association and the ‘People's Charter’,” Past and Present, XXXVI (April, 1967):7386Google Scholar; Thompson, Dorothy, The Early Chartists (London, 1971)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Weisser, Henry G., “Chartist Internationalism, 1845-1848,” Historical Journal, XIV (March, 1971):4966CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wilson, Alexander, The Chartist Movement in Scotland (Manchester, 1970Google Scholar).

For work on the repeal of the Corn Laws which has appeared since McCord's, NormanThe Anti-Corn Law League 1838-1846 (London, 1958Google Scholar) see: Aydelotte, William O., “The Country Gentleman and the Repeal of the Corn Laws,” English Historical Review, LXXXII (January, 1967 ):4760CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Calkins, Wendell N., “A Victorian Free Trade Lobby,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, XIII (August, 1960):90104CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chaloner, W. H., “The Anti-Corn Law League,” History Today, XVIII (March, 1968):196204Google Scholar; Fairlie, Susan, “The Nineteenth-Century Corn Law Reconsidered,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, XVIII (December, 1965):562–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kemp, Betty, “Reflections on the Repeal of the Corn Laws,” Victorian Studies, V (March, 1962):189204Google Scholar; Lawson-Tancred, Mary, “The Anti-League and the Corn Law Crisis of 1846,” Historical Journal, III (No. 2, 1960):162–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moore, D. C., “The Corn Laws and High Farming,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, XVIII (December, 1965):546–68Google Scholar; Read, Donald, Cobden and Bright: A Victorian Political Partnership (London, 1967)Google Scholar; Ward, John T.West Riding Landowners and the Corn Laws,” English Historical Review, LXXXI (April, 1966):256–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 The Abolition crusade in England has drawn less recent historical interest than it deserves. There are a number of older works: Coupland, R., The British Anti-Slavery Movement (Oxford, 1933)Google Scholar, and Wilberforce (Oxford, 1923)Google Scholar; Klingberg, Frank J., The Anti-Slavery Movement in England (New Haven, 1926)Google Scholar; Howse, E. M., Saints in Politics (London, 1953)Google Scholar; Williams, Eric, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, 1944)Google Scholar. There has been a recent re-issue of Thomas Clarkson's classic contemporary account. The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave Trade by the British Parliament (London, 1968)Google Scholar. These may be supplemented with Anstey, Roger, “Capitalism and Slavery: A Critique,” Economic History Review, 2nd series, XXI (August, 1968):307–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and A Re-interpretation of the Abolition of the British Slave Trade, 1806-1807,” English Historical Review, LXXXVII (April, 1972):304–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bolt, Christine, The Anti-Slavery Movement and Reconstruction (London, 1969)Google Scholar; Reckford, Mary, “The Colonial Office and the Abolition of Slavery,” Historical Journal, XIV (December, 1971):723–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Austen, R. A. and Smith, W. D., “Images of Africa and British slave trade abolition: the transition to an imperialist ideology, 1787-1807,” African Historical Studies, II (No. 1, 1969):6983.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

For the Factory Reform Movement see: Ward, John T., The Factory Movement, 1830-1855 (London, 1962)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. and The Factory Reform Movement in Scotland,” Scottish Historical Review, XLI (October, 1962):100–23Google Scholar; Cowherd, Raymond G., The Humanitarians and the Ten Hour Movement in England (Boston, 1956)Google Scholar, and The Politics of English Dissent (New York, 1959)Google ScholarPubMed; Roberts, David, “Tory Paternalism and Social Reform in Early Victorian England,” American Historical Review, LXIII (January, 1958):323–37CrossRefGoogle Scholar. To supplement the standard life by Edwin Hodder (1886) there are biographies of the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury by J. L. and Barbara Hammond (fourth edition: London. 1936) and, more recently, Geoffrey Best (London, 1964).

4 Bell, A. D., “The Reform League from its Origins to the Reform Act of 1867.” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Oxford University, 1961Google Scholar, and Administration and Finance of the Reform League, 1865-7,” International Review of Social History, X (pt. 3, 1965):385409Google Scholar; Harrison, Royden, Before the Socialists (London, 1965)Google Scholar; Leventhal, F. M., Respectable Radical: George Howell and Victorian Working Class Politics (Cambridge, Mass., 1970)Google Scholar; Himmelfarb, Gertrude, “The Politics of Democracy: the English Reform Act of 1867,” Journal of British Studies, VI (November, 1966):97138CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smith, Francis B., The Making of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1966).Google Scholar

5 Ausubel, Herman, In Hard Times: Reformers Among the Late Victorians (New York, 1960)Google Scholar; Tyler, J. E., The Struggle for Imperial Unity 1868-1895 (London, 1938)Google Scholar; Brown, Benjamin H., The Tariff Reform Movement in Great Britain, 1881-1895 (New York, 1943)Google Scholar; Sturt, Mary, The Education of the People (London, 1967)Google ScholarPubMed; Harrison, Brian, Drink and the Victorians, The Temperance Question in England 1815-1872 (Pittsburgh, 1971)Google Scholar; Petrie, Glen, A Singular Iniquity, the Campaigns of Josephine Butler (New York, 1971).Google Scholar

6 Soldon, Norbert C., “Laissez-faire on the Defensive; the Story of the Liberty and Property Defense League, 1882-1914,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Delaware, 1969Google Scholar; Bristow, Edward Jay, “The Defense of Liberty and Property in Britain, 1880-1914,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Yale, 1970Google Scholar; Welch, Sylvia A., “The Role of the Birmingham Reformers in the Movement for Change in the Education System of England, 1840-1877,“ unpublished Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 1970Google Scholar; Resch, John P., “Anglo-American efforts in Prison Reform, 1850-1900: the Work of Thomas Lloyd Baker,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Ohio State University, 1970Google Scholar; Kirk, Anthony, “The Colonial Reform Society.“ Ph.D. thesis in progress at OxfordGoogle Scholar; Malchow, Howard, “The late-Victorian Movement for State-emigration, 1869-1891,” unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Stanford University, 1972.Google Scholar

7 Swartz, Marvin, The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics during the First World War (Oxford, 1971).Google Scholar

8 Hanham, H. J., Elections and Party Management: Politics in the Time of Disraeli and Gladstone (London, 1959).Google Scholar

9 The Constitutional Yearbook, 1887 (London, 1887), pp.336–7.Google Scholar

10 Vincent, John, The Formation of the Liberal Party 1857-1868 (London, 1966)Google Scholar; Hamer, D. A., Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery (Oxford, 1972)Google Scholar. Too much recent research has focused on the Liberals. While the Liberal Party presents a more obvious forced coalition of interests, the organized pressure groups which contributed to Conservative electoral successes have been largely ignored.

11 Anyone now engaged in investigation of any of these groups should seriously consider publishing his membership lists—if only as an appendix to a work which otherwise does not follow the lines suggested here.

12 For example, it is difficult to discover the primary motive behind the anti-alien agitation of the 1880s and 1890s if attention is focused solely upon that movement. Revelation that many of the chief restrictionists. however, were also involved in an agitation for state emigration for the English poor may indicate that the principle concern for them, at least, was demographic—that is. Malthusian—rather than anti-Semitism.

13 Sources tor this kind of research include collections of lobby propaganda—which frequently advertise membership lists, subscribers and officers. These can sometimes be supplemented with diaries and letters, and information from the standard biographical and geneological sources. Much pressure group literature can be found among official government records, especially when deputations saw ministers and left behind detailed schemes for consideration. Then there are newspapers: notices of meetings, descriptios of and attendance at such meetings, accounts of other activities, and public letters. The discovery of association record books is always to be hoped for, but much can be done with these sources alone.