Defining the Victorian Nation Class, Race, Gender and the British

Cambridge University Press 0521572185 - Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall Frontmatter More information

Deﬁning the Victorian Nation Class,Race,Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867

Defining the Victorian Nation offers a fresh perspective on one of the most significant pieces of legislation in nineteenth-century Britain. Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall demonstrate that the Second Reform Act of 1867 was marked not only by extensive controversy about the extension of the vote, but also by new concepts of masculinity and the masculine voter, the beginnings of the movement for women’s suffrage, and a parallel debate about the meanings and forms of national belonging. The chapters in this book draw on recent developments in cultural, social and gender history, broadening the study of nineteenth- century British political history and integrating questions of nation and empire. Fascinating illustrations illuminate the argument, and a detailed chronology, biographical notes and selected bibliography offer further support to the student reader. Students and scholars in history, women’s studies, cultural studies and postcolonial studies will find this book invaluable.

  is Professor of Modern British Social and Cultural History at University College London. She is the author of White, Male and Middle Class:Explorations in Feminism and History(1992) and (with Leonore Davidoﬀ) Family Fortunes:Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (1987).

 c is Senior Lecturer in Social History at Middlesex University, London. He co-edited E. P. Thompson:Critical Perspectives (1990) and is the co-editor of the journal Gender & History.

  is Senior Lecturer and co-director of the Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies at the University of York. Her publications include The Origins of Modern Feminism:Women in Britain, France, and the United States, 1780–1860 (1985), Equal or Diﬀerent:Women’s Politics 1800–1914 (1987) and Women in an Industrializing Society:England 1780–1880 (1990).

Frontispiece (overleaf ) ‘A Leap in the Dark’. Punch, 3 August 1867. As the Second Reform Bill goes through its ﬁnal stages, Disraeli carries Britannia towards an unknown future.

© Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521572185 - Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867 Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall Frontmatter More information

Deﬁning the Victorian nation Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867

Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall

          The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge CB2 1RP, United Kingdom

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Contents

List of illustrations page vi Preface viii Chronology x List of abbreviations xiii

1 Introduction 1  ,      Historians and the Reform Act of 1867 1 New approaches to political history 20 Citizenship and the nation 57 2 ‘England’s greatness, the working man’ 71   From Chartism to the Reform League 77 Arguments for reform 89 Social change and politics 102 3 The citizenship of women and the Reform Act of 1867 119   The background to the women’s suﬀrage movment, 1790–1865 121 Women and the Reform Act of 1867 130 Deﬁning women’s citizenship 160 Conclusion 176 4 The nation within and without 179   Jamaica 192 Ireland 204 The parliamentary debates 221

Appendices 234 Bibliography 262 Index 290

Illustrations

Plates frontispiece: ‘A Leap in the Dark’. Punch, 3 August 1867. As the Second Reform Bill goes through its final stages, Disraeli carries Britannia towards an unknown future. 1 ‘The mob pulling down the railings in Park Lane’. page 72 Illustrated London News, 4 August 1866 (University of London Library). 2 ‘Scene of destruction near the Marble Arch’. Illustrated London 73 News, 4 August 1866 (University of London Library). 3 ‘The broken railings at Hyde Park Corner’. Illustrated London 74 News, 4 August 1866 (University of London Library). 4 ‘Manhood Suffrage’. Punch, 15 December 1866. For critics of 75 reform like Robert Lowe, the inevitable outcome of allowing respectable working men to vote would be that the ‘unrespectable’ would also exert their influence. 5 ‘The Ladies’ Advocate’. Punch, 1 June 1867. On 20 May 137 1867, Mill’s amendment to the Reform Bill, substituting ‘person’ for ‘man’, had been defeated in the House of Commons. 6 ‘Revised – and Corrected’. Punch, 26 September 1868. In 148 September 1868, appeals by ratepaying women, single or widowed, to be included on the electoral register were heard throughout Britain. Most were defeated. The reference is to Hamlet’s words to Ophelia in Hamlet, Act III, Scene i, ‘Get thee to a nunnery.’ 7 ‘Miss Mill Joins the Ladies’. Judy, 2 November 1868. Mill’s 150 defeat at Westminster in the general election is here associated with his campaigns for women’s suffrage and the bringing of Governor Eyre to justice. Mill is shown out by the Conservative W.H. Smith, who defeated him at Westminster, while R. W. Grosvenor, the Whig–Liberal who was elected, studies his wine. Reproduced courtesy of the British Library.

List of illustrations vii 8 ‘Don Jacob Rideth His Hobby, to —?’ Manchester Central 152 Library, 1869. This undated caricature of Jacob Bright, which alludes to the chivalry of Don Quixote, may refer to Bright’s success in introducing women’s suﬀrage into municipal elections in May 1869. In the background his brother, John Bright, an opponent of women’s suﬀrage, salutes him. 9 ‘The town of Morant, Morant Bay, Jamaica’. Illustrated London 193 News, 25 November 1865 (University of London Library). 10 ‘Coaling a Royal Mail steam-packet at Kingston, Jamaica’. 194 Illustrated London News, 25 November 1865 (University of London Library). 11 ‘The Jamaica Question’. Punch, 23 December 1865. The 195 planter’s ironic question here is counterpoised to the racist description of the slouching black worker. 12 ‘Attack on the prison van at Manchester, and rescue of the 205 Fenian leaders’. Illustrated London News, 28 September 1867 (University of London Library). 13 ‘Fenian prisoners at Manchester conveyed through Mosley 206 Street on their way to the Bellevue Prison’. Illustrated London News, 28 September 1867 (University of London Library). 14 ‘The Fenian Guy Fawkes’. Punch, 28 December 1867. Here 207 the Irishman, characterised by stereotypical features and surrounded by the children of ‘excessive breeding’, is posed as a threat to parliamentary government but also as likely to blow himself up.

Figures 1 The electorate of the United Kingdom, 1866 page 3 2 Percentage of adult males over twenty-one enfranchised, 6 1861 and 1871 3 The electorate of the United Kingdom, 1866–8 245

Preface

The idea of doing this book together arose originally from conversations we were having about our individual projects, each of which was con- cerned with aspects of the politics of 1867. We should say that each of the individual essays builds upon foundations laid in much earlier and shorter versions of the arguments: Catherine Hall, ‘Rethinking Imperial Histories: The Reform Act of 1867’, New Left Review 208 (1994), 3–29; Keith McClelland, ‘Rational and Respectable Men: Gender, the Working Class, and Citizenship in Britain, 1850–1867’, in Laura Frader and Sonya O. Rose (eds.), Gender and Class in Modern Europe (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 280–93; Jane Rendall, ‘Citizenship, Culture and Civilization: The Languages of British Suffragists, 1866–1874’, in Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan (eds.), Suffrage and Beyond:International Feminist Perspectives(New York University Press, 1994), pp. 127–50. In this volume we have chosen to preserve the individuality of each project while engaging in the collective work which is here represented in the introductory essay. But our early essays have been extended and transformed through the many discussions we have had over the past few years. Their final form owes a great deal to those talks. We would like to record here how enjoyable these meetings have been. We started talking about the issues here because we were friends and we are delighted to say that friendship has been strengthened by the work. Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall would also like to thank Catherine Hall for the hospitality which so aided our collaboration. In the course of the work we have talked to many audiences, of very different kinds, in many places. We would particularly like to thank the students we have taught in various universities for how much they have taught us, not least those at Essex, Middlesex and York.We also have individual thanks to record: Catherine Hall would particularly like to thank Gail Lewis; Keith McClelland has learned a great deal from Bill Greenslade, Sonya Rose, Laura Frader, Eleni Varikas, John Hope Mason and, not least, Chris Robinson; Jane Rendall thanks Heloise Brown,

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Preface ix Joanna de Groot, Angela John, Simon Morgan, Helen Plant, Ted Royle and Allen Warren for all kinds of scholarly and friendly assistance, Adam Middleton for constant and unfailing encouragement, and the British Academy for its financial support for research for this book. Jane Rendall must also thank the Mistress of Girton College Cambridge for the use of the Parkes and Davies Papers. We are also grateful to the British Library and the University of London Library for permission to use material in their possession; to the staff of the J. B. Morrell Library, University of York, and the Local Studies Unit, Manchester Central Library; and to the National Trust for the cover illustration. Thomas Woolner’s sculpture of ‘Civilization’ stands in Wallington, Northumberland, a National Trust property. We are especially grateful to Pamela Wallhead of the National Trust, Wallington, for her assistance and to Paul Barlow for information on the sculpture. Woolner’s ‘Civilization’ (also known as ‘The Lord’s Prayer’ and ‘Mother and Child’) was completed in November 1866. It was commis- sioned by Pauline Trevelyan and Sir Walter Calverley Trevelyan for Wallington.1 Thomas Woolner wrote of his work that ‘The idea of the group was to embody the civilization of England.’ The figure of the mother teaching her boy to say the Lord’s Prayer is contrasted with scenes of cannibalism and murder from ancient British life, in a contrast identified as that between primitive habits and the ideals of a modern life. The pedestal displays a mother feeding her child with raw flesh on the point of his father’s sword. Woolner wrote of his choice to depict ‘civilization’ as a woman teaching, ‘because the position of women in society always marks the degree to which the civilization of the nation has reached’.2 This study of a defining moment in the political history of Britain is here illustrated through the imagination of an artist who draws upon gendered concepts of the modern and of the primitive to portray English civilisation.

      March 1999

1 See Raleigh Trevelyan, ‘Thomas Woolner: Pre-Raphaelite Sculptor. The Beginnings of Success’, Apollo 107 (1978), 200–5; Paul Barlow, ‘Grotesque Obscenities: Thomas Woolner’s Civilization and Its Discontents’, in Colin Trodd, Barlow and David Amigoni (eds.),Victorian Culture and the Idea of the Grotesque (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 1999), pp. 97–118. 2 MS, ‘Mr Woolners [sic] description of his sculpture at Wallington’, Wallington, Northumberland.

Chronology

1865 February Inaugural meeting of the Reform League May Surrender of last Confederate Army; end of US Civil War July General election; John Stuart Mill is elected for Westminster October Death of Lord Palmerston; Lord John Russell forms administration with W.E. Gladstone as leader of the House of Commons Black rebellion at Morant Bay, Jamaica; martial law is declared by Governor Edward John Eyre, who represses the rebellion brutally November The news of Morant Bay reaches Britain; the government is pressed to establish an inquiry Kensington Society discusses ‘Is the extension of the parliamentary suﬀrage to women desirable and if so under what conditions?’ December Formation of Jamaica Committee

1866 January Royal Commission on Jamaica meets February New Parliament meets; Lord Russell becomes prime minister; Habeas Corpus Act suspended in Ireland March Jamaica Act makes the island a crown colony Reform Bill introduced by William Gladstone May Redistribution Bill introduced June John Stuart Mill presents women’s suﬀrage petition to House of Commons The Reform Bills are defeated following revolt of the ‘Cave of Adullam’; Russell resigns Report of the Royal Commission on Jamaica

Chronology xi July Lord Derby forms Conservative administration with Benjamin Disraeli as leader of the House of Commons Reform demonstration in Hyde Park; attack on the railings Parliamentary debate on the findings of the Royal Commission August Parliament prorogued; extensive public agitation in most major cities of England and Scotland over reform Eyre returns to England September Eyre burnt in effigy at Clerkenwell Green October Formation of the Provisional Committee, ‘Extension of the Suffrage to Women Society’

1867 February Failure of a Fenian rising in Ireland and attempt to seize arms at Chester Castle Conservative Reform Bill presented to House of Commons March British North America Act establishes Dominion of Canada Attempt to prosecute Governor Eyre Women’s suffrage petition with 3,559 signatures presented to Commons by H. A. Bruce April Manchester women’s suffrage petition with 3,161 signatures presented by John Stuart Mill May Reform League demonstration in Hyde Park in the face of government ban; Home Secretary Spencer Walpole resigns; Hodgkinson’s amendment to the Reform Bill abolishing the distinction between personal payment of rates and compounding (paying the rates together with the rent to landlord) accepted by Disraeli John Stuart Mill’s amendment to delete ‘man’ and substitute ‘person’ is defeated June Murphy riot in Birmingham Dissolution of first London women’s suffrage committee July Third reading of the Reform Bill London National Society for Women’s Suffrage formed

xii Chronology August The Reform Act receives royal assent Thomas Carlyle’s ‘Shooting Niagara’ published September Rescue of Fenian prisoners in Manchester; prison guard killed November Execution of ‘Manchester Martyrs’ By-election in Manchester; Lily Maxwell votes December Second attempt to engineer rescue of Fenian prisoners from Clerkenwell; twelve killed in explosion

1868 June Reform Bills for Scotland and Ireland carried Murphy Riots Further attempts to prosecute Governor Eyre February Resignation of Lord Derby; Benjamin Disraeli forms his first administration May–September Concerted action to request overseers to place qualified women on the franchise; campaigns in registration courts November Dismissal of women’s cases in Court of Common Pleas Liberal victory in general election; thirteen women vote in Manchester December Resignation of Disraeli; formation of Gladstone’s first ministry 1869 April Introduction of second Married Women’s Property Bill by Russell Gurney; fails in Lords May Women ratepayers to vote on same terms as men, Municipal Corporations (Franchise) Act July Disestablishment of Irish church

1870 May Jacob Bright’s Women’s Suffrage Bill passes second reading by thirty-three votes (4 May) Gladstone’s first speech on women’s suffrage in opposition Bill defeated (12 May) on going into committee by 126 votes August Amended Married Women’s Property Bill passed Western Australia granted representative government

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Abbreviations

ASE Amalgamated Society of Engineers CC Cowen Collection, Tyne and Wear County Record Office, Newcastle upon Tyne CW Mill, John Stuart, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, gen. ed. J. M. Robson, 33 vols., University of Toronto Press, 1962–91 EWR Englishwoman’s Review FAC Foreign Affairs Committee FCD Davies Papers, Girton College, Cambridge MCL Manchester Central Library ME Manchester Examiner and Times MNSWS Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage MT Mill–Taylor Papers, British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics NCA National Charter Association NRL Northern Reform League NRU Northern Reform Union PP Parliamentary Papers PPG Parkes Papers, Girton College, Cambridge

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