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Popular Humor and “The Black Dwarf”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Richard Hendrix
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Extract

In 1819 Viscount Castlereagh, England's Foreign Secretary and perhaps the most hated member of the Government, complained in parliament that the journalist, T. J. Wooler (1786?-1853), had become “the fugleman of the Radicals.” His weekly journal The Black Dwarf was circulating from radical Westminster to northern colliery districts, where it could be found “in the hatcrown of almost every pitman you meet.”

Early nineteenth-century popular radicalism took form in its journalism and its political tracts, pamphlet satires, caricatures, posters, and ballads. The best of the radical publications were shaped in turn by traditional popular attitudes and forms, including the rich resources of popular humor. Wooler's writing was unmistakably political, and often earnest in the manner of the polemical journalism of William Cobbett and Richard Carlile or the oratory of Henry Hunt. But his favorite tone was satirical, and this made him prominent among those radicals who did the most in the late Regency years to promote a public attitude of anti-authoritarianism rather than deference, of contempt for an unjust government rather than fear of it. E. P. Thompson has shown that it was “not the solemnity but the delight” with which the radicals “baited authority” that made the old order vulnerable. Wooler's journalism is a fine example of the political uses of popular humor, and a key to understanding the distinctive character of Regency radical culture.

I

Regency radicalism was a mixture of traditional and Enlightenment political ideas of natural rights and freedoms and an emerging class-consciousness of economics and society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , Fall 1976 , pp. 108 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1976

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References

1. 1 Hansard 41:103 (12 Oct. 1819)Google Scholar. The comment is quoted by Wickwar, William H., The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press (London, 1928), p. 57 (hereafter, Struggle)Google Scholar. This is still the best general account of political journalism in this period.

2. Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963), p. 722 (hereafter, Making)Google Scholar. All students of the social history of this period are indebted to this brilliant study. However, Thompson overemphasizes Wooler's “characteristically overblown style” (p. 675, and also p. 688).

3. Thompson's Making is drawn on in the following paragraphs, especially his analysis of “popular Radicalism in these years … as an intellectual culture” (p. 711). So is Hollis, Patricia, The Pauper Press: A Study in Working-Class Radicalism of the 1830's (Oxford, 1970)Google Scholar, who gives an excellent account of the emerging socialist analysis, and draws a sharp distinction between the social theory and politics of the Regency years and of the Unstamped Press. Her judgment that “the older rhetoric by 1832 seems stale, theatrical, and increasingly irrelevant, an artificial radical language” (p. 204) depends chiefly on an ideological interpretation. Her statement that “Wooler of the Black Dwarf asked only that the poor should not be taxed” (p. 205) is incorrect.

4. Poor Man's Guardian, 2 Nov. 1833. Quoted in Hollis, Patricia (ed.), Class and Conflict in Nineteenth Century England, 1815-1850 (London, 1973), p. xxvGoogle Scholar.

5. The main source for Wooler's life is D.N.B. (New York, 1900), LXII, 428.

6. The Stage was not at first of radical tendency but Wooler soon turned his attention to the theater as an institution, attacking the prevalence of petty vice and overpricing by managers. He also introduced a satirical persona called “the Lounger,” which presages his later use of the Black Dwarf.

7. Like Hone, Wooler conducted his own defense. See A Verbatim Report of the Two Trials of Mr. T. J. Wooler (1817).

8. Bentham's work was announced in Black Dwarf, 8 April 1818, and began to appear in the next issue. Ensor, 's Radical Reform Restoration of Usurped Rights (1819)Google Scholar was praised, among other works.

The Black Dwarf has been reprinted by Greenwood Press (1970).

9. Advertisement to Black Dwarf, vol. xi (1823)Google Scholar.

10. Black Dwarf, 16 Aug. 1818. Quoted in Hollis, , Class and Conflict, pp. 97–98Google Scholar. On the Political Protestants and Wooler's support of them, see Thompson, , Making, pp. 673–75Google Scholar. The first such club was founded at Hull in July, 1818. They disavowed secrecy in their discussions, partly to disarm the effectiveness of government spies.

11. The Regency radicals made important advances in cheap publication, especially after Cobbett's Political Register was reissued and dubbed “2d Trash” in November, 1816. See “C. B.'s” recommendation of “Dolby's Parliamentary Debates … in consequence of its being within the reach of those who have it not in their power to purchase publications similar in their nature, owing to the exorbitant prices they demand for them.” Black Dwarf, 10 Feb. 1819.

For circulation figures, see Wickwar, , Struggle, p. 57Google Scholar. And see Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader (Chicago, 1957), p. 326Google Scholar and Webb, R. K., The British Working Class Reader, 1790-1848 (London, 1955), p. 50Google Scholar, for the way in which such publications were passed on to other readers. Webb estimates that circulation figures should be multiplied by ten.

The Black Dwarf cost 4d from 1817 to 1819, then 6d, the minimum under the Stamp Act of 1820. The relatively high price makes the journal's popularity more remarkable.

12. Black Dwarf, 20 Aug. 1817. Quoted in Hollis, , Class and Conflict, pp. 31–33Google Scholar.

13. Black Dwarf, 8 April 1818.

14. Ibid., 3 Sept. 1817, 24 Sept. 1817.

15. Ibid., 21 Jan. 1818. The Lancashire cotton weavers were the classic victims of the new capitalism; see Thompson, Making, Ch. 9.

16. Bamford, Samuel, Passages in the Life of a Radical, ed. Chaloner, W. H. (London, 1967), pp. 20–21Google Scholar.

17. It was included in Medusa 28 Aug. 1819, and it was the first item in Black Dwarf, 25 Aug. 1819.

18. Quoted in Marlow, Joyce, The Peterloo Massacre (London, 1969), p. 185Google Scholar. The poem was published with Hunt's, HenryLetter to Radical Reformers (1819)Google Scholar.

19. Black Dwarf, 25 Aug. 1819.

20. Quoted in Marlow, , The Peterloo Massacre, p. 184Google Scholar. There were other political uses of this rhyme which precede Hone's, including Black Dwarf, 21 Jan. 1818.

22. See Thompson, , Making, p. 688Google Scholar.

22. Black Dwarf, 25 Aug. 1819.

23. Paine, Thomas, The Rights of Man, Part I, ed. Clark, Harry Haydon (New York, 1944), p. 128Google Scholar.

24. Black Dwarf, 25 Aug. 1819.

25. Ibid.

26. An Address Delivered by Mr. Wooler, 26 October 1819.

27. See Thompson, , Making, pp. 401–17Google Scholar, and Malcolmson, R. W., Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700-1850 (Cambridge, 1973)Google Scholar.

28. Bamford, Samuel, Early Days, ed. Chaloner, W. H. (London, 1967), p. 142Google Scholar. And see Malcolmson, , Popular Recreations, pp. 81–82Google Scholar.

29. Evidence of J. B. Smith and of Rev. E. Stanley, quoted in Hollis, , Class and Conflict, p. 99Google Scholar.

30. Craig, David, The Real Foundations: Literature and Social Change (Oxford, 1974), p. 58Google Scholar.

31. Prelude, VII, 685ffGoogle Scholar.

32. Pindaric Odes and Tales (1821), p. 27Google Scholar.

33. In the British Museum collection, 806 k 1. The poster is about 15″ × 22″ in two colors with more typographical variety than can be represented here.

34. See Thompson, , Making, pp. 735–36Google Scholar, and Nicoll, Allardyce, A History of Early Nineteenth Century Drama, 1800-1850 (Cambridge, 1930)Google Scholar.

35. See for example The Radical Harmonist (1820) and The Radical Chiefs (1821). In anticipating the Manchester meeting which became Peterloo, The Times complained that “worthies” like Wooler and Cartwright were being promoted to draw a crowd, and that Henry Hunt was to be “the director of the day's performance” (10 Aug. 1819); one week later the same newspaper said, “HUNT is, of course, the Punch of the whole entertainment.”

36. Cobbett, for instance, said that Swift's Tale of a Tub was the beginning of his education. Besides Wooler's motto from Pope, discussed below, there are many allusions to eighteenth-century satire in The Black Dwarf.

37. See George's, M. D.English Political Caricature (Oxford, 1959)Google Scholar and Hogarth to Cruikshank: Social Change in Graphic Satire (London, 1967)Google Scholar. On John Bull, see Hill, Draper, Mr. Gillray the Caricaturist (London, 1965), p. 46Google Scholar. On Cruikshank, see Mclean, Ruari, George Cruikshank (London, 1948)Google Scholar.

38. See Craig, The Real Foundations, Ch. 3, and Lloyd, A. L., Folk Song in England (London, 1967), Ch. 5Google Scholar. Also see Vicinus, Martha, “The Study of Nineteenth-Century British Working-Class Poetry,” rpt. in The Politics of Literature, eds. Kampf, Louis and Lauter, Paul (New York, 1972)Google Scholar. Her insightful analysis of the sharply satiric South Lancashire weaver poem, “Jone O'Grinfilt” (mentioned by Craig and Lloyd), demonstrates the uses of popular humor in social criticism.

39. Times, 11 Aug. 1819.

40. The lines are from “The First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated” (1733), pp. 69–72Google Scholar. See Butt's, John notes in The Poems of Alexander Pope (London, 1939), vol. iv, 11Google Scholar, for Pope's allusions.

41. Black Dwarf, 1 July 1819.

42. Ibid., 14 Jan. 1824.

43. Ibid., 10 Feb. 1819.

44. Ibid., 6 Aug. 1817.

45. Ibid., 10 Feb. 1819.

46. Wooler may have taken the name from Scott's novel The Black Dwarf, published in Edinburgh at the end of 1816. But in that case Wooler was being ironic, for Scott's character was a solitary misanthrope.

47. Black Dwarf, 8 April 1818.

48. Ibid., 2 July 1817.

49. Ibid., 24 Dec. 1817.

50. Ibid., 14 Jan. 1818.

51. The best of the parodies have been reprinted as Radical Squibs & Loyal Ripostes, ed. Rickword, Edgell (Bath, 1971)Google Scholar. The Political House that Jack Built sold more than 100,000 copies.

52. See Wickwar, , Struggle, p. 69Google Scholar.

53. See Ibid., p. 59, and Webb, , The British Working Class Reader, pp. 54–55Google Scholar. For another attack, see Remarks on Wooler and His Dwarf (Newcastle, 1820)Google Scholar.

54. Black Dwarf, 24 Dec. 1817.

55. One finds almost no satirical writing in the best collection, An Anthology of Chartist Literature (Moscow, 1956)Google Scholar.

56. The quotes are from “T.B.” and Wentworth Sturgeon in Notes and Queries, 3rd Series, VIII (28 Oct. 1865), 358Google Scholar.