A TALE OF TWO REVOLUTIONS

Two perspectives – Urban (Dickens), Rural (Cobbett).

French Revolution - turning point in European Politics Industrial revolution transformed Britain and the world

First… Two Empires…

Act of Union 1707 with Scotland - First British Empire – the creation of the United Kingdom. But it could have been so different… The Great Scottish Empire.

1698 Scotland attempts to set up colony in central America – it’s a disaster.

Darien - New Caledonia - cost one fifth of Scotland's wealth but was a place was a  malarial swamp, the settlers  fell sick with fever, they starved and soon fled. It was a disaster Scotland never recovered from - financial and psychological knackered Scotland surrendering sovereignty in the 1707 Act of Union with England.
Dead Cat Bounce – the Jacobite rebellion – but defeat of Prince Charles Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) at Culloden 1746 established the UK (perhaps … referendum in 2014).

Act of Union in Ireland 1801 – famine, revolution

Never waste a good crisis:

England/ UK did very well out of the French Revolution – although during the period of the Napoleonic War it was very expensive and Income tax was created in 1799 to pay for the war effort.

British Naval power was absolute (certainly after 1805) and the blockades of the French ports destroyed French trade and created a boom for British exports – to such an extent that British manufacturers were actually clothing the French Army.

With the other European armies occupied, the British started building its empire – India, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka – trading monopoly with South America.

The Transatlantic Triangular Trade – enormously profitable for Britain – 16th Century one million slaves transported from Africa to America – 17th Century three million, 18th Century seven million.

The end of the war meant the end of the boom – and this caused widespread unemployment and a steep fall in wages. In response to this the government brought in the Corn Laws (1815 – repealed 1846) which put a tariff on imported grains. (Malthus v Ricardo)

Industrial Revolution – England becomes ‘Workshop of the World’

Manchester – went from 17,000 to 180,000 people from 1760 to 1830 – the city was seen as revolutionary – it was something that had never before been seen. (Marx & Engels: Lecture 3)

Manchester was the centre of industrial revolution – 1850 it was the most important place on earth. Hell on earth – rickets and chest infections. Desperate pollution. Think of Jo the crossing sweeper from Bleak House. The workshop of the world.

Cotton was key to the industrial revolution – the raw material came from the slave plantations in the American South.

Conditions in towns and cities were dire – most people lived in slums – and Cholera was common.

Inventions (Gaslight) allowed the process to be done in enormous factories by mostly women and children.

Politics – pressure builds for reform:

The policy of brutal repression on any sort of dissent and strict penal penalties (exportation – Tolpuddle Martyrs) was effective in the short term.

Peterloo Massacre – 1819 Manchester – cavalry charged a crowd of 60,000 demanding parliamentary reform – 11 people died.

The protesters demanded that growing industrial towns of Britain should have the right to elect MPs. Less than 2% of the population had the vote at the time, and resentment was sharpened by "rotten boroughs" such as the village Old Sarum which had 11 voters and two MPs (Dunwich in Suffolk had actually fallen into the sea). Manchester and Leeds had none. Reform Act 1832.

Farming

Enclosures had ended the idea of landholding peasantry – and there was nothing to stop the transfer of the workforce from non-industrial to industrial.

Population had been rising only slowy – or not even rising – from about five million people at the end of the 17th Century until the middle of the 18th Century.

After 1770 it started to rise dramatically – doubling every fifty years after that – although Cobbett disputed that…

              1801              1831              1851
England       8.3              13.1              16.92
Wales       0.59              0.91              1.06
Scotland       1.63              2.37              2.90             
Ireland       5.22              7.77              6.51

Swing riots – rural labourers opposed to use of new advanced technology such as threshing machines – essentially rural Luddities. Riots across the south in 1830.

Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 meant that bread became cheaper but wages could be lowered because workers could survive on less. Free Trade.

The Poor

New Poor Law Act 1834. The Act stated that no able-bodied person was to receive money or other help from the Poor Law authorities except in a workhouse.

Bentham. (Utilitarianism – happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain. Utilitarianism is on first sight very appealing – we judge actions by their consequences - favouring those that promote the happiness and reduce pain. Consequentialism. The train example.) He argued that people did what was pleasant and would not do what was unpleasant - so that if people were not to claim relief, it had to be unpleasant. This was the core of the argument for "stigmatising" relief - making it, in the happy phrase of the time, "an object of wholesome horror".
The Act effectively criminalized the poor.

Cobbett (the indicated reading Rural Rides)

Cobbett was an anti-radical who became a radical – what changed him was the plight of farm workers in the early 19th Century. He thought that rapid industrialization was going to destroy traditional ways of life.

Heroic agitator – he was convinced that farmers faced ruin.
Spent about 20 years abroad (America and France) in the army but when he returned he was shocked by the state of the countryside. Farm workers were reduced to “walking skeletons”.

“When farmers became gentlemen, labourers became slaves.”

He has no time for the government that taxed the farmers, or the army who he says are free loaders, or for the church and its tithes.

Nearing 60 when he started rural rides.

Wrote the Political Register which was read by the working class

A tax on newspapers led Cobbett to publish the Political Register as a pamphlet (two penny trash pg 189) – which had a circulation of 40,000.

He was put in Newgate for sedition – and fled to America to avoid another jail term (pg 91) – was charged with libel three times after returning – including when he wrote in support of the Swing riots.

Dickens

London was the largest city – in terms of population – in the world at the time. It was the capital of the most advanced country in the world – economically, politically and industrially.

But it was overcrowded – London’s population had doubled in 50 years (1800 – 1850). Tremendous poverty, Cholera outbreaks, sanitation problems – the infrastructure had not kept up.

Dickens interested in particular times of reform – such as in Oliver Twist he’s very concerned with the Benthamite / Utiltiarian Poor Law which he saw as an oppressive regime for people.

Dickens is very disappointed and angry with parliament – he had worked as a parliamentary reporter.

Injustice – the poor
He believed the poor should be given decent homes, decent education. He claimed that the state only became involved in poor people’s lives when it criminalised them and imprisoned them.

In his journalism and his novels he was attempting to stir up the middle classes into action.

As a writer he is calling on his reader to act: “Dear reader! It rests with you and me whether similar things shall be or not.”