Abstract
The next two chapters have the same purpose as Chapter 4. They will investigate the political fitness, absorbability and impact of the working men, enfranchised in 1867, 1884 and 1918, in the varying terms understood by contemporaries and present-day analysts. We will contend that, through their organisations of self-help, self-defence, worship and enjoyment, and through the vibrant working-class press, many manual workers were being attached (or at least having existing attachments strongly reinforced) not just to democratic, but liberal-democratic, values and aspirations. It is centrally important that this was substantially happening in the decades before formal inclusion began, as well as acceleratingly thereafter. We shall also argue that, at least to the extent required by the expanding polity and its elites, this rendered many working men politically fit: some received training in leadership, rather more in the skills and advantages of organisation; many more probably gained a sense that consultation about matters intimately affecting them was a matter of right, duty, habit, even enjoyment. Working-class connections to civil society also reinforced ‘fitness’ by strengthening attachments to liberal values. This was true both generally, and in the important specific sense that the newly-included citizens were enduringly unlikely to make expensive demands through the political system on the developing industrial and capitalist economy that it might be unable to bear. Finally, and partly underpinning this, civil organisation also became the means whereby working men were not just politically included, but also incorporated into the status-giving and negotiational structures of the expanding polity.
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Notes
See Raphael Samuel, ‘Comers and Goers’ in Dyos and Wolff (eds), The Victorian City ch. 5; Martin Daunton, Coal Metropolis (Leicester, 1977).
Martin Gorski, ‘The growth and distribution of friendly societies in the early nineteenth century’, Economic History Review 51,3 (1998) 489–511.
Shani D’Cruze and Jean Turnbull, ‘Fellowship and Family: Oddfellows Lodges in Preston and Lancaster 1830–90’, Urban History 22,1, May 1995, 25–47.
Mike Savage, The Dynamics of Working Class Politics (Cambridge, 1987).
On the domesticating effects of larger and more comfortable housing at the end of the century, see Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, Studies in English Working-Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), ch. 4.
Outside London, geographical segregation was for a long time limited. However, its effects were greatly enhanced by the fact that working people generally journeyed to work before, and left it after, those in the classes above. See Richard Dennis, English Industrial Cities of the Nineteenth Century; A Social Geography (Cambridge, 1984), chs 4 and 5.
Martin Daunton, House and Home in the Victorian City (1983).
For temperance Chartism, Lilian Shiman, The Crusade against Drink in Victorian England (Basingstoke, 1988), ch.2.; for some union attitudes, see
Anthony Delves, ‘Popular Recreation and Social Conflict in Derby 1800–50’ in Eileen and Stephen Yeo (eds), Popular Culture and Social Conflict (Brighton, 1981).
Alan J. Lee, The Origins of the Popular Press 1855–1914 (1976).
Amongst many sources on these, see Virginia Berridge, ‘‘Popular Sunday Newspapers and Victorian Society’’ in G. Boyce, James Curran and Pau line Wingate (eds), Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (1978).
Pat Hollis, The Pauper Press (1970), p.119.
J.A. Epstein, ‘Feargus O’Connor and the Northern Star’, International Review of Social History, XXI, 1 (1976) 51–97.
Hugh McLeod, Class andReligion in the Late-Victorian City (1974), chs 1 and 3.
See David Howell, British Workers and the Independent Labour Party 1888–1906 (Manchester, 1983)
Bill Lancaster, Radicalism, Co-operation and Socialism: Leicester Working-Class Politics 1860–1906 (Leicester, 1987).
For this habit in another, much later, context, see Geoffrey Nulty, Guardian Country 1853–1978 - the first 125 years of Cheshire County Newspapers Limited (Warrington 1978), p. 72.
Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London 1795–1840 (Cambridge, 1988).
Quoted in G.A. Cranfield, The Press and Society: From Caxton to Northcliffe (1978), p. 166.
See Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1840–1914 (Cambridge, 1991).
For argument, see Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The Language of Chartism’, James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working Class Radicalism and Culture 1930–60 (1982), pp. 3–58.
J. M. Baernreither, English Associations of Working Men (1889), p. 162
Eric Hopkins, Working-Class Self-Help in Nineteenth Century England (1995), p.9.
Dot Jones, ‘Did friendly Societies Matter? A Study of Friendly Society Membership in Glamorgan 1794–1910’, Welsh Historical Review 12 (1985), 324–49.
See P.HJ.H. Gosden, Self Help: Voluntary Associations in Nineteenth Century Britain (1973), p. 42.
See George Unwin, Industrial Organisation in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Oxford, 1904)
Henry Pelling, A History of British Trade Unionism (Harmondsworth, 1987), p. 11.
John Rule (ed), British Trade Unionism 1750–1850 (1988).
G.D.H. Cole, A Century of Co-operation (Manchester, 1944), p. 148
Robin Thornes, ‘Change and Continuity’, in Stephen Yeo (ed), New Views of Co-operation (1988).
John Langton and RJ. Morris (eds), Atlas of Industrializing Britain 1780–1914 (1986), pp. 194–5.
I. Prothero, Artisans and Politics in early Ninteenth-Century London: John Gast and His Times (Folkestone, 1979).
See K.S. Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (1973); McLeod, Class and Religion.
Jeffrey Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society 1870–1930 (Oxford, 1982).
See Eric Hobsbaum, Primitive Rebels (Manchester, 1971).
E. T. Davies, Religion in the Industrial Revolution in South Wales (Cardiff, 1965).
R. F. Wearmouth, Methodism and the Struggle of the Working Classes (Leicester, 1954), p. 110.
Hopkins, Self-Help p.34; see also Shani D’Cruise and Jean Turnbull, ‘Fellowship and Family: Oddfellows Lodges in Preston and Lancaster 1830–90’, Urban History, 22, 1 (1995), p. 30.
Alun Howkins, Poor Labouring Men: Rural Radicalism in Norfolk 1870–1923 (London: Routledge, 1985), p. 52.
John Rule, ‘The Property of Skill in Manufacture’ in Patrick joyce (ed), The Historical Meanings of Work (Cambridge, 1987).
E. W. Brabrook, ‘Friendly Societies and Similar Institutions’, Journal of the Statistical Society, 38, 2 June 1875, 204.
Charles More, Skill and the English Working Class 1870–1914 (1980).
Howkins, Poor Labouring Men; David Neave, Mutual Aid in the Victorian Countryside: Friendly Societies in Rural East Yorkshire 1830–1914 (Hull, 1991), p. 72.
See Douglas Kirkpatrick, The Unfriendly Friendly Societies (Unpublished BA Dissertation, University of Salford, 1990).
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© 2002 John Garrard
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Garrard, J. (2002). Working Men and Political Fitness: Access to Civil Society. In: Democratisation in Britain. British Studies Series. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-1938-0_6
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