Victorian Politics and the Linguistic Turn

Victorian Politics and the Linguistic TurnAuthor(s): Michael BentleySource: The Historical Journal, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Sep., 1999), pp. 883-902Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3020925 .

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The Historical journal, 42, 3 (I999), pp. 883-902 Printed in the United Kingdom (C I999 Cambridge University Press

VICTORIAN POLITICS AND THE LINGUISTIC TURN

MICHAEL BENTLEY University of St Andrews

ABSTRACT. This article subjects a variety of works on nineteenth-century politics to critical analysis, focusing on recent work in biography, popular politics, and on those works that have shown an interest in post-structuralist approaches. Mostly it examines texts produced between I993 and about 1997 with a view to sensing an historiographical mood. Although the argument urges an open-minded reception to the linguistic turn in historical work, it brings the work of some of its adherents - perhaps especially James Vernon - under critical scrutiny and concludes that a price has been paidfor the attempt at constructing a 'cultural politics'. In particular the article expresses alarm at the apparent incoherence and sub-literacy of some post-structural statements.

Burckhardt held out the hope that one could cut across the grain of a culture and expose its section. Few would expect to make this cut in the complexities of our own day, a fortiori in current historiography where the timber is so green and new: doing so certainly lies beyond the hope of the present writer. In this short essay I attempt a reading of some publications on nineteenth-century British politics between about I 993 and I 997 with a view to suggesting a few moods and tendencies. Most of the material deals with elements of 'popular' politics, though some of it concentrates on ideas concerning leadership or personality. Some of it again, an increasing proportion, bears the stigmata of postmodernity. Among the latter, I merely touch on here the work of Patrick Joyce, since that has been so much remarked elsewhere, but look instead to a couple of writers from the younger generation. I choose to arrange the discussion by beginning with treatments of leadership, progressing to more popular themes examined by their authors through a traditional methodology and then conclude with a discussion of works which are patently influenced by post-structuralism or some notion of a 'linguistic turn' which most historians of Victorian popular politics seem to blame on Gareth Stedman Jones.1 That this conclusion is slightly risible does not invalidate what they have written in its shadow, which is proving long as well as dark.

I

Leadership retains its allure among political historians of the nineteenth century, whether in the synoptic form of Peter Clarke's account from I9922 or in detailed studies of policy in its relation to personality. David Steele's Palmerston and Liberalism comes to

1 Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of class: studies in working class history, i83s-'982 (London, I993), especially 'Rethinking Chartism', pp. 90- I 78, which 'assign[ed] some autonomous weight to the language within which it was conceived' (p. I07).

2 Peter Clarke, A question of leadership: Gladstone to Thatcher (London, I992).

883



884 HISTORICAL JOURNAL

mind3 or perhaps the forthcoming studies of Salisbury and Baldwin on the Conservative side of politics.4 Among the Whigs and Liberals, the cull from I 997 brings two leaders under fresh illumination: Lord Melbourne, Grey's successor as Whig leader in the I83os, and (as ever) Gladstone who this time finds himself horizontal on the psychiatrist's couch.5 These studies share a fascination with the personal or psychological as an explanation for the political. In Melbourne's case his inadequacies as a human being -'less than a full man', as Philip Ziegler dismissed him in an earlier biography6 - led to an inevitable concentration on his catastrophic marriage to Caroline Ponsonby, who would have immiserated any husband even without her ever having set eyes on Byron's superior equipment. His, Melbourne's, need for love and respect led equally to the young Princess Victoria and the early years of her reign when the prime minister became her tutor and guide, until she, too, threw off Melbourne and ran into the arms of Albert, clear that her former hero had been no Peel and, it had to be said, less than a full minister. Gladstone, meanwhile, has his diaries ransacked by the current co-editor of an American journal called Psycho/Histogy who seeks evidence of a certain 'consistent effort on Gladstone's part to maintain within himself a coherent and stable psychological state'.' These projects are not intended, all the same, merely to reconstruct interest in prurient elements in two leading personalities, though the rich survivals to which both of them give rise makes the thought a tempting one. Rather, they set out to provide a facet of political behaviour by relating it to private predicament.

Few predicaments matched Melbourne's. Political life before i827-8, minus office and plus Caroline, offered scarce enchantment. His landing ofjunior office in Ireland, the death of Caroline, and then the chance of the Home Office in Grey's government in I 830 brought a change in fortune but also several pecks of trouble as Grey's own difficult personality subverted the whig leadership and left Melbourne, hardly the coming man, as the only one for all that who was not mad and was not Brougham. The first place lacerated so tender a skin. Armed only with 'a thin streak of indifference ',8 Melbourne failed to understand the occasional enthusiasms of Whiggery which made the behaviour of those around him seem bewildering or malevolent. Mitchell's dwelling on a lack of ideology, religion, principles, or axioms, and his burdening Melbourne with the conviction a la Salisbury that nothing really matters very much, is welcome in the current historiographical mood which, reacting against the evacuations of high- political historians in the i 960s and I 970s, has tended to turn the Whigs into an earnest gathering of Guardian readers avant la lettre. Mitchell's Melbourne has no difficulty with the remark that lent him posthumous celebrity - that things were coming to a pretty pass when religion was allowed to interfere with a man's private life - for he appears here as a man deeply unmoved by the heart of religion if not the head of theology. He felt depressed, not uplifted, by the spectacle of his 'Whiglings', for they tended to be

3 E. D. Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, i855-i865 (Cambridge, I 99 I) . 4 Salisbury will be served by an official biography by Andrew Roberts, a further biography by

E. D. Steele, and a study of his circle and ideas by Michael Bentley (all forthcoming). For Baldwin see an important new biography by Philip Williamson, also forthcoming.

5 L. G. Mitchell, Lord Melbourne, i779-i848 (Oxford, I997); Travis L. Crosby, The two Mr. Gladstones: a study in psychology and history (New Haven, I 997).

6 Philip Ziegler, Melbourne: a biography of William Lamb 2nd Viscount Melbourne (London, I976; repr. I987), p. 365- 7 Crosby, The two Mr. Gladstones, p. 225.

8 Ziegler, Melbourne, p. 365.



HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 885

young, showing themselves 'mad about religion'.' Of course one needed a national church 'for the instruction of the People and for the maintenance of the rational purity of religious doctrine'. But this seemed consistent with a view of Anglicanism that Mitchell apostrophizes as 'common sense written up as theology'.10 Liberal Anglican, in any strong sense, Melbourne was not.1"

At Mitchell's hands, indeed, Melbourne becomes an embodiment of the loose mentalite characterizing that eighteenth-century Whiggery about which this author has written so well - 'a conviction that politics should be the preserve of a propertied elite, led by London-living, cosmopolitan grandees; a belief that the countryside was an unfortunate mistake, only to be thought about as an ideal and the wistful acceptance that the claims of religion, while intellectually of consuming interest, were probably untrue'.12 Conceived as a guide to policy, this temperament translated into a mood of withdrawal from dirigiste activity on the part of central government and a reliance on local sources of authority. 'It was better to put up with a little rick-burning', from the home secretary's point of view, 'than to overreact.'13 Enemies described his procedure as indolence; but Mitchell is persuasive that it amounted to something else: a theory of the possible and desirable. 'He had no great programmes to promote, no deep beliefs to vindicate. He set little store by the exercise of power, except to use it to observe other men's natures, and to divert himself.'14 Friction entered when others among the elite had the irascibility of Palmerston, the impishness of Brougham or simply a more general wish that the government ought to be attempting significant deeds. Melbourne was quite happy simply to stay there and would have taken as compliment the French ambassador's criticism of the Whigs that 'ils sont et ils restent'.15 Mitchell feels some unease, therefore, with labels such as 'Whig' or 'Radical' when thinking about his hero's politics. Melbourne's very strength lay in his ambiguity because he could find fellowship with so many politicians, even those like Peel outside his own party.16 Yet the strength turned out to be its own weakness. The deceptions and rhetorical twists after i837 produced secondary tumours with no obvious site for a primary. '[C]ancerous problems', Mitchell reports 'had slowly eaten into the government's coherence. '17

This perspective has some value and rescues the project from a disappointment echoed in some reviews that the book says nothing new. Certainly Ziegler's biography scooped the personal material about Melbourne's women and enthusiasm for flagellation. Against that, however, Mitchell has a far broader archival base and a more generous assessment of Melbourne as a prime minister. He does not repeat Ziegler's accusation that 'he debilitated his own party and allowed the country to drift rudderless towards disaster'.18 Instead he focuses on Melbourne's tactic of withdrawal from controversy and difficulty in the light of an embarrassing marriage and a sense of loss when Victoria took her affection elsewhere. He also gives Melbourne's intellectual ability full weight, an attribute often suppressed by those who want to make him sound pathetic. That said, the lack of space for a ground-breaking book becomes obvious at many points. One suspects that the project has been a long-term one, punctuated by Ziegler's life in I 976 and Mitchell's own biography of Fox in I 992. Mitchell looks for

9 Mitchell, Lord Melbourne, p. 31. 10 Ibid-, PP. 33, 37. 1" Cf. Richard Brent, Liberal Anglican politics: Whiggery, religion and reform, i830-4i (Oxford,

I987); Peter Mandler, Aristocratic government in the age of reform: Whigs and Liberals, i83o-i852 (Oxford, I990). 12 Mitchell, Lord Melbourne, p. 2I. 13 Ibid., p. II9.

14 Ibid., p. I53- 15 Ibid., p. i68. 16 Ibid., p. i88. 17 Ibid., p. 207.

18 Ziegler, Melbourne, p. 363.




new angles and material, especially in the observations of the French ambassador, Sebastiani, though chunks of untranslated French do not always add markedly to his account and will be found unintelligible on modern campuses situated in the unfortunate countryside. His English prose has a pleasing urbanity, none the less; he is always worth reading and his touch in what must be to him a less than familiar period stays sure, apart from a quixotic determination to make Peel's father an ironmaster, which is not quite what he was.

Psychology runs beneath the surface of an account that stresses Melbourne's lack of anyone to love: Mitchell's parting shot.19 In the case of Travis Crosby's depiction of Gladstone it erupts on every page. In its first formulation, this announcement of psychology threatens to send the reader to his bed. 'The approach that follows is based on a loosely knit group of ideas known as stress and coping theory. These will be supplemented by life-course and life-cycle theories, the psychology of control, and cognitive dissonance theories.'20 Happily these do not appear very often. For Crosby, who is an accomplished historian across a wide range,21 has really written a short life of Gladstone in which the personal and psychological facets, especially those revealed in the diary which is the books's central point d'appui, become topics for special attention rather than peripheral comment. The two Mr Gladstones discovered by Crosby amount to the public and the private: one personality marked by apparent rationality combined with force of intellect and religion, the latter a darker side coloured by an obsession with order and control (self-regarding and other-regarding), a fund of irrational anger stemming from an evangelical upbringing, a need for perpetual exculpation. Obsession will surprise no one who has read the diaries or even followed the events of Gladstone's life and his responses to them. Less familiar is a concentration on his 'rescue work' with prostitutes as some form of stress indicator, or a reading of his withdrawals from Peel's ministry and then his own as instances of a psychological withdrawal. To make such charges stick requires compelling evidence and Crosby does well to marshal what can be got. But it also needs an especially clear understanding of what the function of psychological description might be taken to involve in an historical account.

The diaries and the family letters at Hawarden supply the framework of material and when that corpus of evidence can tell an important story, the book finds much to say. Within the family, Gladstone's relationship with his wife Catherine and sister Helen come under particular scrutiny: the first because of her centrality to Gladstone's domestic arrangements, the second because her defection to Rome in I842 brought a crisis of major dimensions in the diary. Catherine learned, in fact, both to manage her husband's over-achieving existence but also to carve out a life for herself through philanthropic work in which she took a genuine and deep interest. In the second half of their marriage, she moved, at least physically, away from Gladstone, often leaving him to cope by himself when her commitments took her elsewhere. It remained one of the century's great marriages all the same. Helen was quite different. The room that she gothicized at Fasque still stands tribute to her individuality and strangeness and she presented her brother with a problem that he handled badly, even within the universe ofjudgement that marked Anglicanism in the i 840s. Crosby is surely right to dwell on Gladstone's mental and spiritual violence to her: indeed he could have exploited it

'" Mitchell, Lord Melbourne, p. 276. 20 Crosby, The two Mr. Gladstones, p. 5. 21 See Travis Crosby, English farmers and the politics of protection, i8i5-i852 (Hassocks, I977);

idem, The impact of evacuation in the Second World War (London, I 986); Crosby and Geoffrey Cocks, eds., Psycho/history: readings in the method of psychology, psychoanalysis and history (New Haven, I 987) .




more. Other familial relations make less impact on his text, which is a pity because in Gladstone's relationships with the seven surviving children a great deal of evidence exists about his psychological make-up and assumptions. The diary is often laconic about them - itself a form of silent evidence - but the rich archives of three of the four sons hold important lessons about the two Gladstones whom Crosby seeks to distinguish.

Areas on which he does dwell with some success include (inevitably) the prostitution/ flagellation nexus of the i840s and, among political events, Gladstone's resignation of the party leadership and later return via Midlothian. The first is explained (or perhaps only illuminated: Crosby leaves his reader unsure) by 'multiple concurrent stress ',22 a phrase that none of us would use but which each understands all too well. The recourse to helping fallen women and then later to the whip as an instrument of correction become mechanisms for 'coping' with other pressures and disappointments - the loss of Hope and Manning to Rome in the wake of Helen, loss of office after Maynooth, the family financial collapse in I847. Another form of coping - aggression followed by withdrawal when it fails - Crosby places at the centre of explanation in I 874-5 to make sense of Gladstone's odd behaviour and sees in the 'return' a revival of his control- obsession that withdrawal had been unable to feed.23 There may be nothing in any of these opinions but Crosby does at least face awkward questions and envisages Gladstone as a peculiar, frequently bewildering, and sometimes unpleasant personality, as did many of his contemporaries. That he displayed unnatural anger and aggression in certain circumstances, best loved in his 'strong sentiment of revulsion' for Disraeli,24 certainly requires explaining. Crosby's location for this explanation lies in Gladstone's evangelical upbringing but this seems a touch crude, as does the general treatment of religion in this volume, its greatest weakness.25 Not everything in the world, pace university counselling services whose tone this book sometimes radiates, can be reduced to stress; and Gladstone's spiritual position neither emerged from a stress-response nor served as a form of 'coping' as Crosby rather implies. He stands on stronger ground, perhaps, in considering political issues and the psychological elements reflected in Gladstone's treatment of them, yet even here the 'significant psychological dimension' of Gladstone's involvement with Ireland26 seems more plausible than demonstrated while the bombardment of Alexandria struck this reader as better explained by policy and party than by the prime minister's control-obsession.27

Both Melbourne and Gladstone suggest, through their involvements, a place for women in an account of high politics, at least at the level of their having supplied suitable salons. Caroline Lamb, it goes without saying, did not. But Lady Melbourne, the prime minister's mother, had drawn the great and good to family soire'es simply because of 'the attraction of a woman who allied intelligence with discretion',28 smoothing the way to social and political advancement. Gladstone, too, learned to busy himself with women who were far from fallen in order to give himself some purchase on political society during the dog-days of the i 850s. In particular he developed his relationship with Harriet Sutherland who made notable use of her social status as a duchess 'to manage a salon for [Gladstone's] benefit'29 and introduced him to those who mattered among the Whig peerage. She gave him his sea-legs in that society - one that would be of immense importance to him until the lurch towards democracy and

22 Crosby, The two Mr. Gladstones, p. 70- 2 Ibid., pp. I52ff. 24 Ibid., p. 74.

25 Crosby sees the 'unintentional inculcation of anger and hostility' as a 'part of the affective inheritance of Evangelicalism': ibid., p. I5. 26 Ibid., p. II9. 27 Ibid., p. I73-

28 Mitchell, Lord Melbourne, p. 7. 29 Crosby, The two Mr. Gladstones, p. 99.




eruptions of Irish nationalism created waves that would have unsettled any sailor. Aristocratic women of this stamp come still closer to centre stage in K. D. Reynolds's recent Oxford thesis, now published in the Oxford Monographs Series.30 Though she confirms the importance of well-known notables - Emily Palmerston, Harriet Sutherland, Frances Londonderry, Anne Athole, Mary Derby - Reynolds presses the case for studying this class at a more general level of understanding by dwelling on special functions implicit in the relationship between aristocrats and their wives. She rejects a 'separate spheres' approach at this social level, arguing that a better metaphor would turn on the idea of 'incorporation'. Women of this class could, when they demonstrated interest and aptitude, play an important role in sustaining a husband's career, enhancing the political authority of the family in its local and county context and enjoying the 'legitimate influence' that such a family could attract as a matter of right unless her copy-book had been blotted in the manner of Lady Holland or the duchess of Manchester. This privileged role did not endure: Reynolds thinks it paramount during the early and mid-Victorian period before the franchise-extensions bit into it.31 So long as it did, on the other hand, it presented Whig leaders such as Palmerston, Granville, and Hartington with a device for strengthening the grip of the old houses and families in the Victorian Liberal party - for those who resisted the charm of male leaders might find it harder to resist the blandishments of their ladies. To this extent Reynolds is persuasive in her assertion that the time has come 'to put women into the history of the British aristocracy, and the aristocracy into the history of British women',32 though the Whig emphasis in the book may well have given rise to refractions from uneven sources. Tories, as ever, defy grid and corset.

II

The character of popular Liberalism, rather than the constitution of its elites, also preoccupies a number of recent studies. Those that have taken the linguistic turn may be shunted into the next section of this discussion. Plenty have not, perhaps through indifference or animosity, perhaps through enviable ignorance. Because the jargon of post-structuralism has its dismaying aspects, there is even a sense of relief when the reader finds a straightforward account of nineteenth-century politics which sets out to identify a theme and then analyse its career and importance. Such a paragon is J. P. Ellens whose Toronto thesis on church rates was published by Penn State in I 994.33 In many respects this is a model doctoral dissertation: exhaustively researched, carefully crafted, pleasantly written. That it now has an over-heroic title is not likely to be the author's fault; and if the volume is seen as a limited study of a particular subject, rather than as an introduction to or explanation for Gladstonian politics, then it has real value. The topic of church rates litters Hansard during the i 85os and anyone reading the primary sources during the middle years of the century will know that the passion for ending them inflamed nonconformists quite as much as attacks on them rendered Lord Robert Cecil incoherent in his anger. But the story of this impost, from its becoming seen as monstrous in I832 to its eventual demise in i868, is told for the first time here as a

30 K. D. Reynolds, Aristocratic women and political society in Victorian Britain (Oxford, I988). 31 Reynolds, Aristocratic women, p. I43. 32 Ibid., p. 3. 33 J. P. Ellens, Religious routes to Gladstonian Liberalism: the church rate conflict in England and Wales,

i83-.i868 (University Park, PA, I 994).




connected story that forms an interesting strand in the weave of politics and religion in early Victorian society.

Like James Vernon, whose account will be examined later, Ellens lays stress on Sturges Bourne's Parish Vestries Act of I8I8 which biased attendance and voting in vestries in favour of the more prosperous ratepayers. This did not accentuate the church rate issue in itself, but it meant that, once it had been raised as a popular grievance, those protesting against church rates would now complain at patently unfair voting in their local parishes since churchmen were likely to preponderate among the more substantial ratepayers.34 At the same time, the drive to build 'government churches' after i 8I5 increased the need for revenue. What turned a Dissenting resentment into outright denial is hard to say with certainty, though Ellens conjectures that the bishops' vote against reform in the House of Lords debate of I83I may have set the sense of outrage in motion. Undoubtedly the riotous Manchester vestry of I 832 can be put into this frame and the beginnings of resistance elsewhere during the same year - Birmingham, Wakefield, Huddersfield, Bristol, Lambeth - argue that some breeze had begun to blow - 'a historic divide', Ellens calls it.35 Further breezes from Ireland, in the controversy over church cess, and from the Municipal Corporations Act in i 835, which allowed powerful Dissenting interests more expression in the localities, pushed the movement forward. But it also suffered from its own success. For many, the issue of church rates should be seen only as a fraction of the larger struggle against the entire concept of a state church; and this greater ambition played a consistent role both in dividing Dissent and strengthening the forces of resistance among those churchmen fearful that abolishing church rates would produce a domino effect and lead to voluntaryism across the board.36 Meanwhile, an extraordinary narrative abbreviated as 'the Braintree case' had begun to run its course in the courts. The Unitarian silk-crepe manufacturer Samuel Courtauld began an agitation against the churchwardens in this Essex locality as early as i837. Two cases emerged from it: the first, settled in i84I, rendered church rates illegal if proclaimed by churchwardens alone; the second and more famous, decided by the House of Lords in i 853, further invalidated rates made by churchwardens and voting ratepayers if the latter constituted a minority of the whole. This breaking of the power to levy rates against resistance, coupled with the rhetoric of the Liberation Society, gave the movement a different thrust in the i85os and it was that against which Cecil and his allies so poisonously railed. Miall had no interest in attacking church rates as long as they gave a lever towards shifting the greater incubus. Churchmen, on the other hand, often saw tactical advantage in conceding the abolition of what had mostly gone anyway in return for Dissenters keeping their noses out of church affairs. The offending impositions went with a whimper in i868.

Ellens understandably listens hard for the bang. The success of Dissenting politics in the I 830s, he believes, 'seemed to be foundering by I 838 on the church rate question'.37 He sees the thirteen church rate bills brought before parliament between I 853 and I 859

as portents of significance.38 He sees the Palmerston government after i 859 divided and concerned over the issue and the Conservatives as guilty of having 'lost a great opportunity' to propose a plan for effective church rate reform during the same period. By the time he reaches the conclusion of his narrative, Ellens is describing this relatively minor issue as 'a sustained political and ecclesiastical conflict that for thirty-six years

3 Ibid., p. I4. 3 Ibid., p. I9. 6 Ibid., pp. 58-6I. 37 Ibid., p. 68. 38 Ibid., p. ii6.




had caused greater rancour and strife than any other in the nineteenth century'.39 The Tractarians? Chartism? The Corn Laws? It seems fairly simple to find more compelling alternatives. Nor is it obvious that church rates brought Gladstone and nonconformity under their joint banner from i 868. Yet Ellens is persuasive in recalling an important paradox that the church rate issue had helped contemporaries to appreciate.

Religion by i868 had become freer of state control, as both Gladstone and the Nonconformists desired; but the state, in becoming more liberal, had also become denuded of religious influence. This conclusion represented the defeat of Gladstone's primary goal ... to maintain an Anglican Christian conscience in the state. Equally, it marked a substantial departure from the common Nonconformist aim as late as I834 ... to rely on state sanctions to enforce nondenominational Christian religion in public life.40

The parliamentary cross-currents that helped bring this situation about are well analysed in this study and researchers will need frequently to go back to it in order to freshen their understanding of the I 85os and i 86os, while regretting that Ellens did not spend more time on the broader relation to church and state about which he writes suggestively in his concluding pages.

Those wider currents in Liberalism have pulled historical attention towards popular politics. Two of them come into view here from i 996: a collection of essays edited by Eugenio Biagini and Martin Hewitt's study of Manchester and its working class between the reform acts.41 The former is to some extent a collection of conference papers from a symposium on 'Liberty and public control in the radical tradition' held in Newcastle in I 993. Conference-goers will know what to expect from such volumes, even when organizers believe themselves to have imposed a coherent theme. In this case the problem is accentuated because the volume announces a different theme from that supposedly imposed on the conference in the first place; and its title, with its three diffuse terms of' citizenship', 'community', and 'collective identities', warns of what is to come. Most of the pieces have something to do with radicalism at some level or in some way: perhaps that is a theme of a sort. A clump of chapters talk about Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. There is a cluster concerned with free trade. But Jose Harris's otherwise excellent Neale lecture on British sociology, revised for this volume, makes little sense in a section of its own. And several others struggle to feel either relevant to the 'theme' or related to one another. Despite Biagini's zeal in introducing the volume, it often reads as though a dozen manuscripts were thrown at the ceiling and printed in the order that they came down, leaving the head spinning and the subject-matter radically unclear. The essays themselves are frequently attractive and sometimes very good but they do not make a book that is about anything coherent.

Closest to an inquiry into 'civic virtue' and 'active citizenship', which the blurb makes central, is Pat Thane's study of female Liberals in the I 920s. She introduces key players - Margery Corbett Ashby, Eleanor Rathbone, Eva Hubback, Violet Markham, Lady Denman, Margaret Wintringham - and then concentrates on the Women's Liberal Federation and the texture both of its political activity and its rhetorical appeal. This allows her to place the subject within a discourse about woman-as-citizen and citizen-as-imperial-subject which situates the 'feminism' of the decade in a subtle and changing matrix. The essay complements Martin Pugh's review of Liberals and the

3 Ibid., p. 263 4 Ibid., p. 27I-

4' Eugenio Biagini, ed., Citizenship and community: Liberals, radicals and collective identities in the British Isles, i865-i93i (Cambridge, I996); Martin Hewitt, The emergence of stability in the industrial city: Manchester, i83s-i867 (Aldershot, I996).



HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 89I

issue of female suffrage before the First World War, though Pugh's questions are different and more straightforward with an occasional whig undertone hymning 'progress'. On free trade, pieces by Anthony Howe and Frank Trentmann want to move away from an understanding of the doctrine that rests on knee-jerk atavism among politicians to a deeper location of the subject within political economy; but their agreement stops there - Howe seeing free trade as a crucial precondition for the development of a consistent New Liberalism, Trentmann more concerned to criticize the same group for not thinking through the implications of their political economy.42 Jonathan Spain's essay on the Cattle Diseases Bill of I878 is excellent for pointing out the politics of resisting slaughter on free trade grounds when confronted with Rinderpest; it remains hard to see what it has got to do with ' citizenship' or ' collective identities'. Similarly, John Shaw holds the attention closely in a well-crafted essay on the Highland land campaign, but it works better as an historiographical analysis than as an entree into 'land, people and nation'. Biagini's own essay likewise turns on a historical relation: the bond between Mill's understanding of ancient Athens, reflected in his review of Grote, and his own 'chance of playing " Pericles " in the Westminster assembly in I865-8 ',4 an unfortunate ambition since Mill was frequently regarded in the lobbies during that period as little more than a figure of fun, caught up in a world he could not begin to understand.

No one denies that 'Liberalism', 'citizenship', and 'community' provide distinctive but related languages in the period covered by Biagnini's volume. Nor is there any doubt that fundamental thinking remains to be done in understanding how these various vocabularies spiral around one another and eventually lift in a common vortex. But an explanation for their mutual involvements eludes, as it must, a venture of this kind. It requires a systematic study - possibly from the same pen rather than from a circus - that will begin with the building blocks of Victorian thought and read forward their mutual encounters and transformations. What this book offers is some samples of what might be done but in a way that provides items of partial description rather than an archeologie du savoir, which is what the subject involves. It also involves language as an idea, one which calls for a self-conscious or (as they say) 'reflexive' engagement with semiotic assumptions, the universe of ' signifier' and ' signified'. Perhaps an important way in which Martin Hewitt transcends the conceptual coherence of Biagini's volume lies in his willingness to consider poststructural sublimities of this kind, before opposing and ending them.

Hewitt's title reverses the bias of Biagini's: it seems to be about something simple. This is deceptive, for the book is not about 'stability' in a generalized sense. It is not even, at a deeper level, about Manchester. Rather, it refers Hewitt's highly conceptual treatment of a well-known national problem in the history of the British working class to the case of Manchester. The subject is really ' i848' as a putative divide in working- class history. Chartism rose, chartism fell; thereafter came accommodation, ameli- oration, incorporation as the working class lost its utopian visions and sought respectability under the leadership of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers and its labour aristocracy - this is the familiar narrative that Hewitt seeks to question and undermine. He substitutes a form of continuity thesis - not the usual one - that allows a genuine, unadulterated working class and its consciousness to survive i 848, to resist, at least in Manchester, forms of middle-class 'moral imperialism' and to adopt

42 Biagini, Citizenship and community, pp. 2 I0-I I, 249-50. 43 Ibid., p. 39.




conciliation as a form of tactical withdrawal and re-grouping rather than an abandonment of ideology or a confession of embourgeoisement.

This account has a 'challenge and response' mode of organization. Hewitt has to begin with Manchester itself in order to show that it is not as peculiar or uncomplicated in its patterns of employment and social structure as people often think a cottonopolis might be. The point is to remove any sense of a sharp divide in working-class experience at mid-century: it was embattled before, embattled after.44 Next we have an acknowledgement of assault from the 'middle-class moral imperialism' that impressed R.J. Morris when he examined Leeds.45 Hewitt finds it in Manchester in the Athenaeum, the Lit. & Phil., the collapse of party structures, attempted evangelicalisms, cohesive association in chapel and school, a retreat into a view of the working man as 'a machine for burning tobacco and swallowing beer' 46 This deals with challenge in the first hundred pages; the rest of the book concentrates on responses. It groups them under four defiant nouns - rejection, repudiation, resilience, continuities - words that virtually contain in themselves the thesis of the entire monograph. What is rejected is middle-class religion. It should be noted, however, that Hewitt is not a Thompsonian clone, offended by opiates. He stresses the reality of working-class religion in the i 850s, but argues that it 'was of a quite different nature to the religion which [the middle classes] wished to spread'. And the quantitative data does not help a picture of successful evangelicalism, with perhaps only I 5-20 per cent of the Manchester population regular attenders and a further 30 per cent as occasional visitors.47 A second form of hegemonic encroachment might be sought through education - 'useful knowledge' - which could be given a spin favourable to the interests of its proponents; and in the Athenaeum and the Manchester Mechanics' Institute bases existed to make the project feasible.48 Unlike Morris's Leeds, Hewitt's Manchester reflects a failed project. Working men would go to classes, perhaps, if they could afford it. But they would continue to go to the pub, too, and their discussions would take shape in their own language and on the basis of their own experience. That experience proved most resilient in leisure-pursuits 'from rat-fighting to burial clubs to music hall', over which the middle classes could hardly conceal their antipathy or contempt, not to mention working-class recourse to the street with the young enjoying their ' kite-flying, hooping and cricket, as well as stone-throwing and snowballing in season', the less young 'chatt [ing] from doorways or promenad [ing] along popular thoroughfares '.4

Does all of this supply a case for persistent working-class consciousness? It depends what one does with it. The changes in language that few would want to deny in working-class utterance after i85o do not in themselves, Hewitt contends, argue the collapse of working-class identity.50 Accommodation can be brought into focus as a strategy rather than a capitulation. Perhaps the language of populism lying around the corner when once the linguistic turn has been made shows nothing more than that. ' The language of populism was not an alternative to the language of class, it was instrumental

44 Hewitt, The emergence of stability, p. 65. 45 R. J. Morris, Class, sect and party: the making of the British middle-class, Leeds, I82o-I85o

(Manchester, I990). 46 Hewitt, The emergence of stability, p. 82. 47 Ibid., p. I20.

48 Cobden's Liberals lay behind the establishment of the Athenaeum in I 836 - 'an association for the commercial middle classes in Manchester', Hewitt writes, 'and especially young men drawn to Manchester by employment in its mercantile sector' (p. 75). 49 Ibid., p. i85.

5 Ibid., p. I95.




to it.'5' Perhaps. But it is important to be clear what Hewitt wants in order to make sense of what he finds. He wants a style of argument that reverts to explanation rather than the description that he takes to lurk round the linguistic bend. He wishes to make an ontological point, therefore, before his hermeneutic one: there is (and was) a real world; the denial of that world in unanchored discourse leaves reality inaccessible. Class forms a central structure in Hewitt's discerned reality of the I85os and he is not going to let it go. Of course, this 'class' gives a distinctive account of itself in a decade quite different in its demands from the days of Chartism. Nor is it clear that those days provide a sensible comparator. The left has provided so orgasmic a moment in its retrospective depiction of the 183os and early i840s, after all, that subsequent years could only become, as Hayden White said in a different context, a form of post-coital depression. Once move away from that model of proletarian excitement and a persistent working class can be made for the I850s without the need to turn anywhere. But this rich, complicated, difficult book hides its simplicities beneath a formidable forensic intelligence. Scolar/Ashgate deserve congratulation for seeing the importance of its contribution as well as Hewitt for having made it.

Liberal politics in early Victorian England begins to take on a different tinge in the light of studies such as these. They provide an indication of a mood in the localities which goes some way to explaining the development of Liberalism as a movement spun around notables - 'local urban cliques', as Miles Taylor called them in his book about parliamentary radicalism52 - who were precisely those men against whom radicals railed and from whose middle-class moral imperialism the working classes sought escape. This does not argue the superfluity of parliamentary dimensions: Taylor is certainly right to insist on a radicalism that expressed itself through a constitutional perception of how politics ought to operate. Overviews of the period, moreover, such as Alan Sykes's impressive contouring of Liberal politics,53 can only hope to make sense of the broad sweep by concentrating on the Westminster scene. All the same there exists a world of nascent Liberalism in local environments from the I 85os which may help cast doubt on what has become in recent years an orthodoxy engaged in pushing the origins of this mood back into the I830s or I 82OS.54 Joining up the parallel universes of constituency and leadership remains problematical because they were not seeking to achieve the same objectives and there are signs that Gladstone (or, more accurately, 'Gladstone') is becoming overworked as a symbiotic instrument. The question of symbolic description takes one back to thejunction in the road where Taylorjoins hands with Hewitt. 'There is a danger', the former writes, 'that in substituting political and populist explanations for those of class, the main aim of class explanations - how to account for structural change -is lost sight of, and all that is left in place is an unmediated history of ideas, beliefs, and representations.'55 They had both been led to this thought, presumably, not so much by the history of Manchester as by the New Manchester History.

51 Ibid., p. 205.

52 Miles Taylor, The decline of British radicalism, I847-I860 (Oxford, I995), p. 344. " Alan Sykes, The rise andfall of British Liberalism, I776-i988 (London, I 997). 54 Besides Brent and Mandler (see n. i i), cf. Ellis Archer Wasson, Whig renaissance: Lord Althorp

and the Whig party, I78,-I845 (New York, i987), and Jonathan Parry, The rise andfall of Liberal government in Britain (London, I 993). 55 Taylor, The decline of British radicalism, p. 338.




III

Popular politics used to have its vertical and horizontal structures: sections, organizations, and strata. Since the I98os a mood has arisen that wishes to transcend them by asking historical questions designed to take the argument beyond 'structures' in order to inquire about the role of language, representation, identity, narrative, and (inevitably) 'discourse' in political life. Until recently this contagion avoided nineteenth-century Britain, apart from a reflection in the lonely writings of Patrick Joyce and flurries in Social History.56 But post-structuralism has now arrived in some force and the remainder of this survey will comment on the phenomenon, with Victorian historians - especially those chilled by theory - in mind. Two points seem urgent by way of preface. First, this orientation draws on a climate of opinion that now inhabits every part of the humanities from English literature to anthropology, from sociology to aesthetics: it is not a 'fad'; it will not go away in the foreseeable future; its adherents are not insane. It was inevitable, as Joyce has tartly observed, that at some point or other British historians would have to take account of western intellectual history in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Responding to the various messages uttered by post-structuralists therefore demands attention and thought rather than the mindless dismissiveness which historians tend to direct at the long-haired. Secondly, post-structuralists in the historical field free themselves from structures only to confront a couple of alternative forms of mental cramp. They have to prevent their own version of epistemology from becoming self-destructive and they must, in their search for meaning(s) in contemporary discourse, escape the temptation to produce a description of little explanatory value and no small degree of arbitrariness. These problems afflict bothJames Vernon's study of popular politics in the first half of the nineteenth century and, to a lesser extent, John Lawrence's treatment of similar themes in the second half.57

Vernon's book, which appeared in I 993, needs critical attention - partly because it has not had much, partly because it makes substantial contentions, partly because it is the sort of account that has given post-structuralism a bad name. Virtually everything that could go wrong with an academic monograph - argument, evidence, internal logic, prose, presentation - takes a tumble at some point or other and detracts from the undoubted importance of the central contention: that a 'cultural politics' exists to be studied and that a sensitive treatment of such a theme could throw new light on how Victorian politics functioned. Vernon believes himself, indeed, to be offering 'a new

56 For PatrickJoyce, see his Work, society andpolitics: the culture ofthefactory in later Victorian England (Brighton, I 980); Visions ofthepeople: industrial England and the question of class, i848-I9I4 (Cambridge, I 99 I); Democratic subjects: the self and the social in nineteenth-century England (Cambridge, I 994). Joyce also contributed to the discussion in Social History prompted in I992 by an article by David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, 'Social history and its discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the politics of language', Social History, I7 (I992), pp. I65-88, a reply byJon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, 'The poverty of protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the politics of language - a reply', ibid., i 8 (I 993), pp. I-I 5, and a further reply by PatrickJoyce, 'The imaginary discontents of social history: a note of response to Mayfield and Thorne, and Lawrence and Taylor', ibid., i8 (I993), pp. 8I-5. Neville Kirk's critique- 'History, language and postmodernism: a materialist view' - appeared in the same journal in I994 (I9, pp. 22I-40).

57 James Vernon, Politics and the people: a study in English political culture, c. i855-1867 (Cambridge, I 993); Jon Lawrence, Speaking for the people: party, language and popular politics in England, I867-I9I4 (Cambridge, I998).




cultural history of the meanings of politics'. He deems his book 'audacious '.58 What he actually knows about is Oldham, predominantly, with subordinate roles for Boston, Tower Hamlets, Lewes, and the county constituency of Devon. The differences between these places, which one might have thought considerable, are held to be less pressing than their similarities and to reflect 'the existence of a national political culture' which Vernon decides to represent under a number of headings - organization, print, party, local and national leadership, personality - which are intended to take the reader towards a new narrative of nineteenth-century politics. This narrative turns on the notion of 'closure'. We are encouraged to see a transition from a culture in which the excluded exercised forms of spontaneous power in their styles of organization, their meetings, the fear in which political leaders are supposed to have held them, towards a developing constriction of that culture in the vice of party which operates as a counter- emancipatory force, suffocating a persisting radical Independency and imposing a managerial form of politics sometime after I867 or I872. In fact the non-libertarian function of party and the shift towards a closure in radical politics are neither audacious nor new and one is left with a constant sense of lunging at straw men in this text with its frequent references to received wisdoms and whig myths which no one has taken seriously for the last thirty years. None the less, Vernon's understanding of his task allows him to point to interesting aspects of local and popular politics. He is good on the details of electoral procedure and ritual, if often implausible about what to make of them, and has a persuasive chapter on the iconography of leadership and the various languages within which political leaders might be presented to their public(s). He presents a cogent demonstration, were one still needed, that Edward Thompson's notion of class - the structure par excellence - does not work as an analytical category in the England of the I83os and I840s.

But this is a depressing and sometimes silly book. Several pages of perfectly sensible description of politics in Oldham or Boston or Lewes will be followed by a cosmic e'clat

which leaves one incredulous or irritated. The chapter on 'Power imagined', for example, is full of windy remarks about the content of a popular mind for which Vernon provides little evidence. The term 'Town Hall', deployed in Lewes, is taken as evidence for the ability of the inhabitants 'to ascribe the building with [sic] the identity of their choosing'. The swearing in of a new mayor in Boston would always leave the audience 'struck with awe' (an emotion difficult to document). 'But, of course, awe was not enough; the inhabitants had to be drawn into the performance, hence the obsequious final act, the strewing of flowers at the feet of the new mayor, which also conveniently incorporated two powerful symbols of purity and rebirth, children and flowers. In many ways the ceremony's very structure ... provided a perfect visual metaphor of the town's official politics.'

Quite what a non-post-structuralist is to make of that first non-sentence goes beyond this reviewer's competence. If, on the other hand, one begins from where Vernon begins, then even parliamentary elections become 'a ritual process [sic] through which constituencies talked to themselves, creating narratives that expressed their sources of unity as well as their sources of difference'. Or take the woman who made a lot of noise at the declaration in Oldham in i 868 and was taken by observers to be raving. Here she appears as emblem of the 'relative ease with which brave women could transcend their allotted feminine role and claim their rightful place in the community's great

58 Vernon, Politics and the people, pp. 6, 339.




melodramatic election saga [sic]'.59 These movements are taken from a single chapter but devotees will find much more of the same. Far more concerning, however, are instances where Vernon seems not to understand elementary historical logic or indeed the logic of his own position. On p. I19, for example, we are told about a banner, originally hailing from Tower Hamlets but later deployed in a variety of interesting ways for which a history can be firmly reconstructed. This is impeccable. Then comes the following sentence. 'As this is the only surviving early nineteenth-century political banner for which we have a history, we must assume that the multiplicity of uses in its long and varied past was not untypical.' Vernon thus reaches the one conclusion which the survival of a sole artefact renders untenable. Similarly we are told that the appearance of colours - blues, oranges, pinks - in the early days of party implies a suspicion of party when there seems no obvious reason, Vernon's meta-narrative apart, why colours and clubs cannot be seen as extensions of party.60 Again, the investing of political leaders with 'almost superhuman powers', which Vernon clearly demonstrates, is held to reflect 'their followers [sic] own sense of political exclusion ,61 when even three seconds' thought about the degree to which unexcluded Americans did the same to their own leaders might have given pause.

Vernon's reference to 'the very structure' of local politics inevitably gives rise to post- structuralist difficulty; nor is the instance unique. For all his language about preserving instability in meaning and avoiding all forms of closure, Vernon finds it impossible to write history at all without doing so: the dilemma in any relativist epistemology.62 A

Janus-face appears best in his pictures, of which the book contains many. They are supposed to supply, presumably, their own form of' text' to be 'read'; but Vernon does not hesitate to tell his readers how to read them when it suits his argument. A statuette of W. J. Fox

portrays him as an earnest but ugly and squat man, uncomfortable with his body which is braced, upright, legs apart and arms crossed. A serious, scowling and disproportionately large face sits uneasily on his diminutive body. Underneath, on the pedestal, the words 'EDUCATION', 'REFORM',

'LIBERTY' and 'FREE TRADE' are inscribed almost, conceivably, as an explanation or apology.63

This is closure, and closure on the grounds of pure whim. When, similarly, we are presented with Benjamin Grime's 'vivid account of Oldham's politics during the first half of the nineteenth century', we are enjoined to see it as 'a rubric through which [sic] otherwise impenetrable references can be deciphered '.64 Yet the whole thrust of a post- structural understanding lies in the denial of keys and codes that unlock closed systems.

Beyond logic, evidence, and epistemology lies the text itself and the need to represent historical thought in correct and lucid academic prose. Vernon describes his own prose as 'turgid' in an optimistic disclaimer. I should judge it to be sub-literate. Quite what Cambridge University Press thought it was doing in allowing such writing to appear under its imprimatur leaves one stunned: it does no service either to the author or the Press. Strings of subordinate clauses appear as 'sentences', nouns as adjectives, inappropriate words whose etymology Vernon plainly does not know, as in 'rubric' above or 'onerous crime', an undergraduate level of punctuation with abominations such as 'Tory's' as a plural possessive or 'Baine's' as a singular nonsense. One finds

5 Ibid., pp. 55, 7I, 8o, 92. 60 Ibid., p. I72. 61 Ibid., p. 266. 62 For Vernon in theoretical mood, see his 'Who's afraid of the linguistic turn?', Social History,

I9 (I994), pp. 8I-97. 63 Vernon, Politics and the people, pp. 235-6. 64 Ibid., p. 276.




oneself marking the book like a student's essay - ringing all the errors, underlining the deadening clich6s: 'right on cue', 'down to earth with a bump', 'brave new world', ' chip off the old block', ' the proverbial street corner', ' the gift of the gab', ' the stuff that legends were made of', ' noses out ofjoint', ' down to earth [again] with a thump', and an ultimate vulgarity in ' Anglicanism ruled OK', a phrase more appropriate to a graffito than a CUP monograph.65 Vernon can argue, if he wants, that this medium is part of his message, and that he seeks to corrode the formalities of prose. Yet linguistic incompetence hardly advances the linguistic turn. Whatever the epistemology of the author, languages have structures and H. W. Fowler, dead before he could become postmodern, still has his uses for the decentred subject.

The last section of Politics and the people sets out to argue that popular 'constitutionalism' - the changing pattern of assumption and perception about what the English constitution meant or ought to mean - provides a ' master-narrative' for the nineteenth century; and this idea leads directly to James Vernon's more recent compilation of essays on that theme.66 This is a better volume in all respects and the idea on which it rests is potentially a fruitful one, especially if it were placed in the widest of social frames and not mostly limited, as here, to popular culture. To take a phenomenon that itself defies structure, such as the notion of an English constitution, and bring to it the approaches of a post-structuralist epistemology makes good sense and some of the essays in this collection offer fresh thinking for that reason. Of course, the usual bind operates: (s) he who is opposed to structure will tend to take a non-structural view of the project in order to avoid undesirable forms of closure.67 This means that not all the pieces are actually about what the title implies, including the editor's. Two of them do approach it - the best two pieces in the book, both of them from America. James Epstein's beautifully judged meditation on how competing understandings of the constitution affected the ways in which a radical might mount a defence in the court- room against sedition in the I790S makes compelling history. Godwin's predictable advice to appeal to human rights and damn the consequences was not only avoided by Joseph Gerrald in I 794 but in a sense had to be, if Gerrald were to produce a powerful impression within the discursive limits that dominated the environment in which he delivered it. His memorable performance did not get him off: nothing would have achieved that. But in at least announcing the 'sedition of a literary gentlemen ',68 Gerrald showed both the constraints of constitutional language and its wandering boundaries during a decade of deep introspection about what the constitution meant. Anna Clark's piece on parliamentary reform has to work more indirectly because the constitutional topos of the I 790S did not make sense in the i 86os or i 89os. She begins from a familiar post-structuralist concern with women and gender, but she innovates impressively by showing how a refusal on the part of radicals through all the reform acts to see the need for enfranchising women as human beings rather than as property- owners carried implications for the emancipation of men, too. She dovetails the constitutional language of reform into the domestic language which it often echoed,

65 Ibid., pp. 82, 86, I07, I48, i6o, 220, 253, 260, 272, 279. 66 James Vernon, ed., Re-reading the constitution: new narratives in the political history of England's long

nineteenth century (Cambridge, I996). 67 Here the bind results in some sublime 'Notes towards an introduction' which made this pre-

post-structuralist laugh quite unworthily. 68 Cockburn's remark: James Epstein, "'Our real constitution": trial defence and radical

memory in the Age of Revolution', in Vernon, ed., Re-reading the constitution, p. 47.




asserts the interdependence of approaches to male and female voting, and charts the ways in which that interdependence modulated from I 832 until the First World War.69

Other pieces work well in themselves as studies of particular phenomena -Jonathan Fulcher on parliamentary reform, Dror Wahrman on public opinion, Ian Burney on coroners' inquests, Antony Taylor on anti-monarchism - and make well-researched cases for their respective areas of specialism, as one would expect in young scholars at the research fellowship stage with doctorates behind them and much data to publish. Wahrman's contention that the stress seemingly placed on public opinion in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England needs reducing to a few years in the second decade of the nineteenth century, when it became a usable rhetorical strategy for highly period-specific reasons, is important and stimulating.70 Taylor's view that republicanism acted as a channel of protest for those disillusioned by Gladstonian Liberalism's pretensions also throws new light in a dark corner.7' Yet these approaches never cohere into facets of an argument about 'the constitution'. Nor, despite its supposed concentration on constitutional history, does the editor's contribution. It would have done so had he carried out what one assumes was the project he originally had in mind: to inspect the assumptions about a British constitution to be found in the writings of Macaulay, Stubbs, and Maitland. Instead he becomes side-tracked by their historiographical assumptions and how Stubbs and Maitland come to reject Macaulay's romantic vision in favour of a modernist paradigm that he takes to be infected by Gladstone's governments, the suffragettes, and the independent labour movement, going considerably beyond (and beneath) the estimable 'John Burrows' (sic). He should be admired for his heroism, granted his own difficulties, in offering so confident a critique of three of the greatest prose-writers of the nineteenth century and locating their arguments in places that would have amazed all three. The author is indeed dead. Even so, it is hard to see how we are brought any closer to 'narrating the constitution' which was supposed to be the point.

So we go, finally, to where we should have gone in the first place, for no one has done more to press the postmodern moment in modern British historiography than Patrick Joyce.72 His essay is about the narrative structure of Victorian politics and never veers away from relevance: it presents a post-structuralist version of how the 'political unconscious' of the Victorian masses might be accessed by understanding certain rhetorical tropes and their role both in legitimating popular politics and energizing political leaders seeking support. The trope he chooses to stress is that of melodrama and he has two arguments about it, one weak and one strong. The weak case he is able to

69 Anna Clark, 'Gender, class and the constitution: franchise reform in England, I832-I928',

in Vernon, ed., Re-reading the constitution, I832-I928', pp. 239-53.

70 Dror Wahrman, 'Public opinion, violence and the limits of constitutional politics', in Vernon, ed., Re-reading the constitution, esp. pp. II2-22.

71 Antony Taylor, 'Republicanism reappraised: anti-monarchism and the English radical tradition, I850-i872', in Vernon, ed., Re-reading the constitution, p. I76.

72 Eulogies ofJoyce will flow most naturally from the pens of his allies. But those who disbelieve what he has written about the nineteenth century - among whom the present writer stands - might take time to consider his achievement within the historical profession. Not only has he shown a consistent integrity concerning his own philosophical stance but he also has demonstrated courage in defending a style of argument that others frequently find irritating or unintelligible. Those who loathe his vision could do worse than emulate his determination to make history an intellectual engagement with contested epistemological assumptions rather than a form of meccano.




demonstrate quite quickly: that politicians such as Bright and Gladstone deployed melodrama in their rhetoric as part of their commitment to movement within Liberalism - a feature Gladstone greatly stressed after i 867 - 'and its absolute dependence on exciting stories' which brought forth, Joyce says, 'a culture grounded in the exciting story itself, the optimistic, utopian narrative'. By looking through Bright and Gladstone's published rhetoric he picks up this theme and is especially persuasive in finding The Bulgarian horrors pervaded by melodramatic form.73 This much one can do by glancing at the Midlothian speeches and Gladstone's pamphlet. To substantiate the strong argument, however, far more would be required and it may be that Joyce's essay is simply too thin to give him the richness of allusion and context that his propositions warrant. For in his strong argument Joyce wants to say that melodrama offers an opening into the substratum of popular imagination because of its appeal to the powerless:

It has been observed how the empowerment brought by melodrama involved the ability to say the truth out loud: the eternal verities could be named without embarrassment, and the crust of convention, fear and silence broken. The powerless could be given a voice ... It is this twin function of speaking to both demos and the powerless, inserting the latter into the former, that to my mind gives it its fascination as a means of understanding the political unconscious, particularly in its Victorian realisations as popular radicalism and popular Liberalism.74

This may be so. Like all interesting historical ideas, it demands demonstration, on the other hand, and it seems not at all apparent how this could be shown, even if a thousand pages were available rather than the twenty-five here. That contemporary tropes entered the language of politicians hardly moves beyond platitude. Suggesting that melodrama functioned as more than an ingredient in political rhetoric and ought to be considered a primary constituting element in perception is not in itself an absurd contention but any verification will rest on explanatory criteria that are themselves contested and which Joyce may choose to reject - leaving his 'modernists' with a problem of their own creation but himself with a credibility gap that he may struggle to bridge.

In Jon Lawrence's Speaking for the people many of these difficulties discover some resolution, for Lawrence is the welcome face of post-structuralism. From the appearance of his stimulating piece on local Toryism in I993,75 it was apparent that he would take langue et parole in a more subtle direction than previous authors and see language as a crucial instrument in the translation of material forces rather than as a substitute for them. His reaction to StedmanJones's mild initiative has none of the woodenness of the Great Betrayal tendency but there is a reaction all the same: he seeks an account of politics that moves beyond 'class' qua structure while retaining an explanatory force of the kind that class afforded. He finds it, largely, in the concept of' representation' which works bi-focally: it is concerned with what it means to speak for a constituency in its generalized sense and it picks up the postmodern wavelength of representation as depiction and imagining. His book seeks to drive this insight through party politics as a cultural form between the i86os and the First World War. Much of the argument begins, like Vernon's, with a view of place (Wolverhampton this time) but Lawrence transcends locality in a way that Vernon never achieves and composes an argument that

7 PatrickJoyce, 'The constitution and the narrative structure of Victorian politics', in Vernon, ed., Re-reading the constitution, pp. I97-203. 74 Ibid., p. I85-

75 Jon Lawrence, 'Class and gender in the making of urban Toryism, I880-I9I4', English Historical Review, io8 (I993), pp. 629-52.




has resonance for all of England and that is situated in a complex historiography. His argument also turns Vernon downside up. Rather than present party as penitentiary, shackling popular passion, and immuring it, Lawrence constructs a view of party that impresses by its inability to control The People and the consequent urgency of its practitioners constantly to involve themselves with those whom they represent. And although he shares the compulsion of historians of popular politics to investigate the root of radicalism and a new labour movement, Lawrence never loses sight of Conservative politics and its power to turn material self-interest into a style of democratic appeal.

He begins with a historiographical excursus of seventy pages which should become recommended reading on any bibliography concerned to introduce to students the problems of 'popular politics' in its nineteenth-century context. This takes one from Thompson and the early formulations of a class-based analysis, through Stedman Jones, Joyce, and Vernon and towards a series of recommendations about method. Lawrence plainly accepts Stedman Jones's point that '[t]here are no simple rules of translation from the social to the political'76 but cleaves nevertheless to a sense of the social as bedrock for historical explanation and a view of language as somehow chained to that bedrock. This means that any helpful sense of language must arise from a social location rather than, pace Stedman Jones, 'formal party discourse'77 if one is to study how a cultural politics impacts on its constituency. Needless to say, this idea of a reception-politics has its own problems: on one set of assumptions, indeed, it amounts to a dangerous impossibility. But for Lawrence it stands at the centre of what he wishes to attempt because his book rests on the assumption that 'because this relationship is one of " representation " it must constantly be negotiated and renegotiated - the "formal " politics of political organizations can never be a complete and faithful reflection of the interests (objectively or subjectively defined) of those who are represented '.78 From the delicacies of 'negotiation' we move to the conclusion of 'interdependency' - 'the assumption through this study ... that the "local" and the "national", " popular" and "elite" are interdependent (and mutually determining) aspects of politics'." Note, here, the parenthesis and feel its weight. The contention does not restate the proposition of the sentence within which it is situated; it eases the reader towards a more ultimate pole of persuasion and casts a buoy over the conceptual undertow in what will follow.

What follows in fact is Wolverhampton: nearly a hundred pages of it. The fundamental conversations there rest on the withering of 'a demoralized and largely defunct Liberal party' at the hands of a Tory upsurge and Labour politics. This urban Toryism relied on treating the working man (principally) for what he was rather than for what he ought to be and established a platform based on leaving him to his Tory- protected pursuits and pleasures, his beer and his football.80 This in turn threw Labour into a difficulty. Granted the unpopularity of the former Liberal politics, a Lib-Lab language would lead nowhere - better Salisbury than Gladstone, as it were - and a Labour advance would involve needing to take votes from the Tories rather than the Liberals. Perhaps this predicament helped lend Labour language in Wolverhampton a sub-Tory patina, with its stress on environmental improvement as the key to social betterment, and contributed to the particular problems discovered by Lawrence in the relationship between leaders and led in the Labour community.8' Very few Labour leaders lived with or near those whom they 'represented'; they beat poverty by moving away from it and sometimes recommending that others did the same. They became

76 Quoted in Lawrence, Speakingfor the people, p. 5I. I77 Ibid., p. 52.

78 Ibid., p. 6i. 7 Ibid., p. 63. 8 Ibid., pp. I07-8. 81 Ibid., p. I5I-



HISTORIOGRAPHICAL REVIEWS 90I

'culturally "apart"' and have, of course, remained so ever since on their journey towards ample houses in Frognall.82 The expansion of some of these notions into a national context in the final three chapters of the book convert a good doctoral thesis into a satisfying book. Some of the earlier contentions do not translate, for Wolverhampton is not England. But Lawrence finds reinforcement in Labour 'carpet- bagging' politics and the resistance it brought in its train.83 Above all, he finds it outside ' class' as a structural determinant. He chooses to present an English politics of Labour within which notions of educating an undeserving underclass into the conditions of a true citizenship exercises the Labour voice quite as much as does any coherent claim to ' rights'. There exists half a case, indeed, for implying that Labour was more worried by King Mob than the Tories.

Disencumbering the ground of high politics as a political structure and class as a socio-economic one opens the door to Lawrence's method and conclusions. Those who remain reluctant to relinquish either of these may legitimately question whether his notion of their representatives' standing 'apart' could not be expanded until, by the time one reaches ministerial office, the apartness has become a chasm. From such a vantage-point, language operates not as an instrument of negotiation but as a means of avoiding any. Management of the localities is left to those who know about it. Management of strategy is left to those capable of influencing it. The model of intra- party communication espoused with differing emphases by Vernon and Lawrence requires their assumption of mutual-determinacy for its working and specific languages as the mark and measure of that mutuality. But the world of high politics also enjoys governing by words84 and does so for its own purposes: an austere thought excluded from all these studies as though by silent and prior agreement.

Perhaps the disparate works considered in this brief essay reflect to a degree the current state of play in the historiography of Victorian politics. There is a continuing interest in aspects of personality and political leadership. This is not unaffected by intellectual moods since the i 960s but they relate more to the need for social situation and a ' cultural' portrait than to epistemological considerations. Among historians of popular politics, a post-Thompsonian backlash seems well underway; but it would stretch the evidence to suggest that it is informed in many cases by the demands of the linguistic turn. It has begun, all the same, to reflect a concern among the marxisants to rebut it in a Descent into discourse fashion.85 The argument of Martin Hewitt reviewed here best reflects this mood of sophisticated rejection. Further, one has the beginnings of a school of post-structural criticism, instantiated here in Vernon and Lawrence, that seeks to bring to the nineteenth century some of the approaches and persuasions that form part of the larger movement towards a postmodern style of analysis. Where it goes from here (or there, since the world has moved on since I997) depends on whether the resolution

82 Ibid., p. I6o. Frognall became a celebrated term of abuse in the vocabulary of Harold Wilson as a way of getting at the Gaitskells who lived in Frognall Gardens, Hampstead (Ben Pimlott, Harold Wilson (London, 1992), p. 2 I 3). But of course its vibrancy goes back to Ramsay MacDonald whose residence from I 925 was Upper Frognal Lodge. See David Marquand, Ramsay MacDonald (London, I977), pp. 399-400. 83 Lawrence, Speakingfor the people, pp. 233-40.

84 Andrew Jones, 'Where "governing is the use of words"', Historical journal, I9 (I976),

pp. 25i-6. 85 Bryan Palmer, Descent into discourse: the reification of language and the writing of social history

(Philadelphia, I990).




of these various tendencies is to be gained through historical intelligence - the arena in which Hewitt's Manchester meets Lawrence's Wolverhampton, as it were - or whether scholars will prove happy to parrot mantras about 'discourse' until their opponents collapse through fatalism or sheer boredom. In one sense the argument may be sharpened by reading more theory rather than less. Those with most to say at the moment about the generative power of language are not British, male and modern but North American, female and medieval;86 and the insights that Victorian historians might bring to bear on their period may deepen if they tear themselves away from Chartism to think more broadly about their problem. But nothing in the work surveyed here suggests grounds for pessimism or panic. Dealing with a relativist universe is a predicament that goes back at least to Oakeshott and Becker and Beard; in asking historians to think about the linguistic turn, a new generation - for this is a generational disposition - merely presents its own form of challenge and one that should be met rather than dodged or dismissed. It may be that Victorian historians are not for turning. If not, then they ought to have a better reason for repose than a refusal to fly their eyrie.

Because I do not hope to turn again Because I do not hope Because I do not hope to turn Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope I no longer strive to strive towards such things (Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)

86 One thinks especially of Nancy Partner of McGill University and Gabrielle M. Spiegel of Johns Hopkins. Foundational in Partner's writing is 'The new Cornificius' in Ernst Breisach, ed., Classical rhetoric and medieval historiography (Kalamazoo, MI, I 985), pp. I 5-59, and 'Making up lost time: writing on the writing of history', Speculum, 6I (I986), pp. 90-II 7. For Spiegel, see in particular her 'History, historicism and the social logic of the text', Speculum, 65 (I990), reprinted in Spiegel, The past as text: the theory andpractice of medieval historiography (Baltimore, I 987), pp. 3-28.



Victorian Politics and the Linguistic Turn

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