Travelling, Skirmishing and Sharp-shooting (1841–44)

Abstract

In the summer of 1841, in the midst of a severe agricultural and commercial depression, and as Barnaby Rudge rolled on from its Scott-like beginnings towards its Carlylean conclusion, Lord Melbourne’s weak administration tottered. The new-look Conservatives under Peel, together with the group who had crossed the house in the so-called ‘Derby Dilly’ (the Whig defectors Stanley, Graham, Richmond and others) combined forces with the ultra-Radicals for whom Melbourne’s cautious, aristocratic Whiggery had been too little, too late. Posterity has long since pardoned Peel and vindicated his equivocations — by 1870 Forster could claim ‘we were [ignorant] how much wiser than his party the statesman then at the head of it was’ — but in 1841 his involvement in the repressive measures of 1819 had not been forgotten by the public or press, nor had his initial opposition to Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform. His efforts to rebrand the Tories as a party of enlightened Conservatism made him appear shifty and deceitful, and he was loathed by Liberals, who equally feared a return to the reactionary politics of a previous era or the usurping of their own position as the party of moderate reform. Until the end of Peel’s administration in June 1846, Dickens’s talents as a journalist, and support as a popular public figure, were repeatedly sought after by different opposition movements and pressure groups.