The Political Unconscious in Journalistic Responses to Poverty and Protest During the Cotton Crisis

POOR REPORTING: THE POLITICAL UNCONSCIOUS IN JOURNALISTIC RESPONSES TO POVERTY AND PROTEST DURING THE COTTON CRISIS. RACHEL S. F. BROADY A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of Liverpool John Moores University for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. November, 2018. 1 Poor Reporting: The political unconscious in journalistic responses to poverty and protest during the Lancashire Cotton Crisis. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 6 ABSTRACT 7 INTRODUCTION 9 PART ONE: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 15 1. Introduction to the methodology 15 2. Sampling 18 3. Research objectives 19 4. The Political Unconscious 19 5. Influences on and challenges to Jameson 28 6. The interpretive horizons 36 7. Applying the methodology 41 8. Scholarly responses to Jameson’s methodology in The Political Unconscious 43 PART TWO: ANALYTICAL CONCEPTS AND HISTORIOGRAPHY 48 CHAPTER ONE: American Civil War 50 British opinion and the American Civil War 52 The Emancipation Proclamation 55 CHAPTER TWO: Marxism, the Cotton Crisis and Manchester 58 Marx and Engels on Manchester 60 2 Marx and Engels on the American Civil War 63 Marx and Engels on poverty and protest 64 The journalism of Marx and Engels 68 Marx and Engels in Manchester 71 Marx’s experience of poverty 74 Manchester legacy 77 CHAPTER THREE: The Press 79 The scholarly interpretation of press histories and ideology 79 Newspaper histories 82 The provincial press and the working class 93 Legislative changes 97 Political landscape in Manchester 101 The science of reporting poverty 106 CHAPTER FOUR: The Cotton Crisis 109 The scholarly debates around the causes and management of poverty 109 The historical interpretation of workers political response during the Cotton Crisis 112 The cotton industry 114 Disputed causes of poverty 116 Disputed extent of poverty 120 3 CHAPTER FIVE: Managing poverty 128 Legislation 128 Poverty in Manchester 133 CHAPTER SIX: Political agitation amid poverty 152 Free Trade Hall meeting supporting the Emancipation Proclamation 152 Reporting support of the Emancipation Proclamation 154 Stalybridge Riot 158 Reporting the Stalybridge riot 160 Press as a means of social control 162 Stevenson Square 166 PART 3: ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS 170 CHAPTER ONE: Imaginary solutions to social contradictions 170 Locating the imaginary solutions 175 Editorials engaging imaginary solutions 198 News stories 212 CHAPTER TWO: Ideologeme 221 Locating the ideologeme 221 Editorials 230 Headlines and copy 234 4 Copy and quotes 237 CHAPTER THREE: Form 242 Journalism ideology and form 242 The intro 249 The ending 252 Paraphrasing and quotes 255 Parenthetical descriptions 258 PART 4: CONCLUSION 262 BIBLIOGRAPHY 273 5 Acknowledgements I would like to express my thanks to my Director of Studies Guy Hodgson for his guidance and support during the preparation of this thesis. I also thank my supervisor Gillian O’Brien for her valuable feedback. I would also like to thank Professor Chris Frost for providing support, education and opportunity over the past two decades, in academia and in the National Union of Journalists. I am also grateful to my friends for indulging my obsession and for reading my drafts, in particular Kath Grant, with special thanks to James Draper for his introduction to academia. I dedicate this thesis to the memory of my parents who instilled in me a desire to learn and who encouraged and provided my political education from a young age. 6 Abstract The poor do not represent themselves in the Press; despite being the first victims of economic crises, they are instead presented by journalistic mediators. This thesis utilises the methodology outlined in Fredric Jameson’s seminal text The Political Unconscious Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (1981) to unearth that mediation. The thesis posits that, by examining journalistic responses to poverty and protest, during a time of recognised and short-term economic crisis, it is possible to unearth the political unconscious, and strategies of containment employed which are intended to conceal the relationship between labour and value, in order to defend the status quo. It is further posited that an investigation of three politically and commercially competitive newspapers will reveal a broad strategy of containment beyond the political binary of left and right. As such, the study considers the liberal Manchester Guardian, the conservative Manchester Courier and the radical Manchester Examiner and Times. The analysis focuses on the reporting of political agitation in Stevenson Square, Manchester, during the Lancashire Cotton Crisis and the American Civil War and around the subject of legislation employed to manage poverty. The Cotton Crisis between 1861 and 1865, saw destitution among unemployed cotton workers, who faced the Labour Test when seeking ‘famine relief’ in order to survive. This economic crisis is of recognised international political and historical significance and is well-researched, but there has not been a broad study of the journalistic response in its representation of poverty and protest in Manchester. The British response to the American Civil War, spanning the same time period, is the focus of much debate, with a focus on Manchester, as is the responses to relief payments to the unemployed, with reference to the city, but analysis of political protest in Manchester in reaction to poverty 7 legislation is scant. Further, available research, while extensive in regard to the history of the Victorian press, is less developed into the ideology of mid nineteenth-century journalism as specifically contributing to an understanding and presentation of poverty. The response of the unemployed workers is researched with regard to the experience of poverty, particularly in terms of poetry and dialect, but the journalistically reported words of their political protests during the Cotton Crisis has not, until now, been thoroughly analysed. This thesis, in considering journalistic copy totalling 43,000 words from late 1862 to early 1863, argues that the political unconscious masked the horror of poverty and mediated the collective experience of working class existence to defend the status quo. 8 Introduction Another ‘demand’ of the men is that the rate of relief be increased. In this ‘demand’ they would obtain many sympathies, if it was made with a little more politeness. This editorial comment was made by the Manchester Examiner and Times on October 11, 18621 after a meeting was held in Stevenson Square, Manchester, calling for the ‘total and immediate abolition2’ of the Labour Test ‘or the guardians must take the consequences3’. The copy accepts that the workers have ‘a right to the largest amount of relief’ but adds ‘many of us want things which we ought to have yet don’t get, without demanding them with a threat of force’. This editorial, in the radical paper which claimed support for the workers, sets boundaries on what workers can do to get their ‘demands’ met. The workers themselves set divisions between unemployed cotton workers by declaring the Labour Test as ‘only fit for the common vagrant’. On the face of it, the workers are being supported but merely asked to not to be impolite and the workers themselves acknowledge their difference to the ‘common vagrant’ in the experience of poverty which could suggest a recognised difference in expected behaviour. Yet in October 1862 a quarter of a million unemployed cotton workers in Lancashire were seeking ‘famine’ relief from ratepayers and charity,4 according to research, and, by December, the figure is reported to have been 496,8165. How were readers, then, expected to respond to the poverty faced by unemployed cotton workers when it was presented with 1 Manchester Examiner and Times, October 11, 1862, 5. 2 Ibid. 3 Ibid. 4 W O Henderson, Henderson, WO, The Lancashire Cotton Famine 1861-1865, (Manchester University Press, 1969), 53. 5 Arthur R Arnold, The history of the cotton famine, from the fall of Sumter to the passing of the Public Works Act, ((Saunders, Otley and Co, 1864), 191. 9 limitations on their protests? Why do the workers, paraphrased or quoted in copy, perceive division between those experiencing poverty? What representation of the poor is given when reporting protests about poverty related to the Cotton Crisis? Did the political leanings of newspapers inform content? The answers to these questions (and others) can be answered, this thesis posits, by utilising Fredric Jameson’s methodology to unearth the political unconscious. One general assumption challenged here is that which suggests Victorian journalism can used as the starting point in historical study, as reliable and objective, providing the first account of history and, as such, history itself is seen as accessible through that copy. By engaging Jameson’s methodology in The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act thesis seeks to ascertain if Victorian journalism carried the same ideological sign posts as Victorian fiction. Jameson considers the fashion for publishing ‘realist’ literature in the nineteenth-century in attempting to document and share the experience of poverty to the middle classes and his methodology is able to chart ‘the limits of a specific ideological consciousness and mark the conceptual points beyond which that consciousness cannot go’ 6. Put simply, it is acceptable to support the poor demanding greater relief and an end to the Labour Test so long as those demands do not challenge the historical, political and social status quo. Further, this thesis presents a literary analysis

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