The Artful Chartist Dodger

M. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (Cambridge University Press, 1960) p. 19.Google Scholar

C. Dickens, Oliver Twist (Penguin, 1966) and Barnaby Rudge (Oxford University Press, 1954). Cf. P. Collins, Dickens and Crime (Macmillan, 1964).Google Scholar

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Ibid.Google Scholar

Ibid.Google Scholar

The Times, 1 March 1843 and 6 March 1843. The culmination to this episode was that the government’s Factory Bill foundered amidst squabbling between different factions of the churches as to who should control the promised factory schools and bestow the benefits and blessings of Christian privilege upon the poor. Cf. J. L. and B. Hammond, Lord Shaftesbury (Penguin, 1939) pp. 86–7.Google Scholar

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‘On Sunday last a meeting was held on the hills near Accrington... there must have been 26,000 people present... They say they may as well die by the sword as by hunger.’ Liverpool Mercury, 1842 quoted in T. Newbigging, History of the Forest of Rossendale (Rossendale Free Press, 1893) p. 325.Google Scholar

D. Williams, The Rebecca Riots (Wales University Press, 1971) pp. 199, 222, 232. Williams could only trace one occasion on which Rebecca broke the Sabbath. There is an illuminating discussion of the role of Christianity in early nineteenth-century politics in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Penguin, 1968) ch. 11. For the organisation of working-class politics, see J. Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (Weiden-field &: Nicolson, 1974).Google Scholar

Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, p. 439. The double-edged morality of Christianity also troubled American slave-owners in the antebellum South. Some hoped that religious instruction would produce more obedient slaves. Others complained that it made slaves lazy, proud and’ saucy’, and encouraged insurrectionary ideas. A. J. Raboteau, Slave Religion (Oxford University Press, 1980) pp. 123, 164, 209, 290–318; E. D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll (André Deutsch, 1975) pp. 161–8.Google Scholar

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Cornwallis, On the Treatment of the Dangerous... Classes, p. 410; Worsley, Juvenile Depravity, pp. 78, 94; Beggs, An Inquiry, p. 97.Google Scholar

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Ibid., pp. 53, 192, 211–2, 215. Cf. Beggs, An Inquiry, p. 149; ‘Judges have repeatedly given expression to their feelings, that if it were not for intemperance their office would be a sinecure.’Google Scholar

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Quoted in M. May, ‘Innocence and Experience: The Evolution of the Concept of Juvenile Delinquency’, Victorian Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, 1973, p. 7.Google Scholar

Oliver Twist, p. 100.Google Scholar

The Union, January 1843. Quoted in S. Smiles, Character (Murray, 1879) p. 60.Google Scholar

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T. Plint, Crime in England (Gilpin, 1851) p. ii.Google Scholar

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M. J. Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

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For how Manchester appeared to these distinguished visitors, see S. Marcus, Engels, Manchester and the Working Class (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974) pp. 28–66.Google Scholar

Quoted in ibid, p. 46.Google Scholar

For example, The Responsible Society (Conservative Political Centre, 1959) p. 60 which rejected the view that criminals ‘are the victims of their environment’, while pointing to ‘before the war when unemployment and bad housing offered greater excuses than they do now’. Or, Sir Thomas Moore who described how in the 1930s ‘unemployment was rife and... people committed crimes of violence with robbery as a possible or inevitable consequence’, but now did it ‘almost for the fun of doing so’. Hansard, 17 December 1959.Google Scholar

Cornwallis, On the Treatment of the Dangerous... Classes, p. 408.Google Scholar

Beggs, An Inquiry, p. 66 Chadwick to Home Secretary, 1843, Public Record Office, Home Office Papers, HO 45/454.Google Scholar

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J. Kingsmill, Serious Crime in England (Longman, 1856) p. 24.Google Scholar

Day, Juvenile Crime, p. 32.Google Scholar

Hill, Juvenile Delinquency, pp. 28, 101.Google Scholar

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Ibid, pp. 191, 212.Google Scholar

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J. Clay, ‘On the Effect of Good or Bad Times on Committals to Prison’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, vol. 18, 1855, pp. 74–9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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Report of the Select Committee on Criminal and Destitute Juveniles, 1852, British Parliamentary Papers (Irish University Press, 1970), qu. 391.Google Scholar

Ibid, qu. 817.Google Scholar

M. Carpenter, Juvenile Delinquents (Patterson Smith, 1970 edn), pp. 1–2.Google Scholar

M. Carpenter, Reformatory Schools (Woburn, 1968 edn) p. 83.Google Scholar

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Cornwallis, On the Treatment of the Dangerous... Classes, p. 398.Google Scholar

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Carpenter, Reformatory Schools, p. 75.Google Scholar

Ibid, p. 337.Google Scholar

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Ibid, p. 74. Mary Carpenter, well tutored in Nonconformist philosophy by her father, was also something of an intellectual magpie. Here she was almost certainly echoing John Brewster, On the Prevention of Crimes, 1792: ‘There are cords of love as well as fetters of iron.’ Quoted in Ignatieff, p. 74.Google Scholar

J. Manton, Mary Carpenter and the Children of the Streets (Heine-mann, 1976) pp. 43–5.Google Scholar

J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy in Collected Works, vol. 3 (Toronto University Press, 1965) pp. 760, 763. Mill had added the chapter ‘On the Probable Futurity of the Labouring Classes’ after the revolutionary convulsions of 1848 in Europe. Cf. J. S. Mill, Autobiography (Oxford University Press, 1969) pp. 139ff.Google Scholar

There are, of course, observable differences between Mill and Carpenter. Mill considered that ‘the poor have come out of leading-strings, and cannot any longer be governed or treated like children’ (Principles, p. 763). Whereas Carpenter’s paternalistic (or should one say ‘maternalistic’?) emphasis required that the object of reform should be, precisely, to return the unruly to the condition of childhood. Even so, the question of ‘rule by consent’ has continued to be intimately bound up with crime preoccupations. Cf. the analysis of Britain’s contemporary ‘law-and-order’ movement as evidence of the ‘exhaustion of consent’ during the periodic crises of the 1970s in S. Hall et al., Policing the Crisis (Macmillan, 1978) and the account of the authoritarian tendency in E. P. Thompson, Writing by Candlelight (Merlin, 1980).Google Scholar

Quoted in D. Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (Allen Lane, 1975) p. 41.Google Scholar

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