The Great Turning Points of British History (20 page)

Other radicals, however, including key figures such as William Cobbett whose hugely influential
Political Register
played a vital part in popular politics, believed that the bill would make a difference and they must support it. It was the alliance from ‘outside’, of pressure from both middle-and working-class reformers across town and country, that ensured the success of reform. But Westminster still held the key and in the 1830s the House of Commons was at the political heart of Britain and its empire. A dramatic second reading in the Commons secured the bill by one vote as Thomas Babington Macaulay (later to be celebrated for his
History of England
) described to a friend,

Such a scene as the division of last Tuesday I never saw, and never expect to see again. If I should live 50 years – the impression of it will be as fresh and sharp as if it had just taken place. It was like seeing Caesar stabbed in the Senate House, or seeing Oliver [Cromwell] taking the mace from the table, a sight to be seen only once and never forgotten.

Macaulay’s speeches – arguing for ‘reform in time’, claiming that the particular genius of the constitution was its capacity to reform itself, and explaining why Britain, unlike its continental neighbours, had escaped revolution – were powerfully persuasive. ‘All history is full of revolutions,’ he argued,

A portion of the community which had been of no account, expands and becomes strong. It demands a place in the system, suited, not to its former weakness, but to its present power. If this is granted, all is well. If this is refused, then comes the struggle between the young energy of one class, and the ancient privileges of another.

In the Commons there was sufficient support for reform, but the Lords with their Tory majority and strong contingent of bishops was a different matter. In September they threw out the bill and there were riots of workers in Derby, Nottingham and Bristol. As one Whig peer understood all too clearly, ‘the bill at last must be carried by force or fear, not from conviction or affection.’

In May 1832 the prime minister, Earl Grey, faced with the intransigence of the Lords, made the shocking demand that the king should create fifty new peers as the only way to secure a majority. The king refused, Grey resigned and the duke of Wellington attempted unsuccessfully to form a government. These were the celebrated Days of May when Britain came very close to revolution. Petitions poured in from all parts of the country; the novel idea of a run on the banks – ‘To stop the Duke go for Gold’ was the slogan – was proposed, and the banker Nathan Mayer Rothschild had to come to the rescue; 200,000 delegates met in Birmingham and heard Attwood hint that armed insurrection might be necessary. The king had to return to Grey and the bill went through.

Why did it matter? The Reform Bill, as John Bright the Quaker reformer put it, was ‘not a good bill, though a great bill when it passed’, for its implications were substantial. The same people went on ruling Britain, the aristocracy maintained their dominance in government until the 1870s, patronage did not disappear and nor did deference. Few middle-class men went into the Commons. Yet something very important had happened. An aristocratic Whig government had to bow to popular pressure, just as the Tories had done in 1829. They had opened a door that they would have much preferred to keep closed. They hoped the business was finished; of course it was not.

Many of those working-class reformers who had been bitterly disillusioned by the betrayal of their hopes with the 1832 Act were pivotal to the formation of the Chartist movement that sought universal male suffrage and played a vital part in the politics of the later 1830s and 1840s. The Reform Act specified for the first time that it was men who could vote. In August 1832 a petition to the House of Commons from Mary Smith of Stanmore asked for the vote for ‘every unmarried woman having that pecuniary qualification whereby the other sex is entitled to the said franchise’. Smith was a wealthy Yorkshire lady and saw no reason why those who paid taxes should not have a share in the election of their representatives. She had no success but her petition was symptomatic of new claims being made by women, claims that would not be met for more than a century.

Meanwhile the newly enfranchised middle class did flex their muscles on the slavery question. In the election that followed the Reform Act supporters of anti-slavery organized on a large scale to ensure that candidates would pledge to vote for emancipation. In the new session of Parliament slavery was abolished, though apprenticeship, a system of forced labour, remained.

Meanwhile, decisions about the character of the nation had repercussions far beyond. In 1833 in debates over the new Charter Act for India it was made clear that while representative government was appropriate for white Britons, a benevolent despotism was the most suitable form of government for India, while in Ireland, that ‘metropolitan colony’, new forms of coercion were introduced that would not have been tolerated on the mainland. The year 1832 stands for a critical moment in the history of both nation and empire.

1800
Act of Union
. This was forced through the Irish parliament by British Prime Minister Pitt after the failure of the United Irishmen’s rebellion of 1798. The Irish were now represented at Westminster. Pitt promised Catholic emancipation would follow but the entrenchment of the Protestant ascendancy meant that this was long withheld.

1807
Abolition of slave trade on British ships
. 1807 finally saw the abolition of the British slave trade after campaigns on an unprecedented scale had been waged on and off from 1787, led by Clarkson and Wilberforce. ‘The sense of the nation has pressed abolition upon our rulers,’ was the judgement of the influential
Edinburgh Review.
The declaration of the Republic of Haiti also played a part, for French competition in the Caribbean sugar trade was much reduced.

1815
Battle of Waterloo
. This was the final defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo and the triumph of Britain as a world power. Conquests in the Caribbean, India and the Cape meant that the empire had expanded greatly and Britain ruled approximately a quarter of the world’s population.

1819
Peterloo Massacre
. The end of the French wars saw extensive demobilization and unemployment. Political demands first articulated by radicals in the 1790s were revived and a mass meeting in St Peter’s Fields in Manchester, addressed by the great orator Henry Hunt and demanding political reform, turned into the massacre of Peterloo when the militia fired on unarmed protestors.

1829
Catholic Emancipation
. This was finally granted after years of agitation in Ireland, led by Daniel O’Connell. ‘We are men and deserve to be free’ was the cry of the Catholic Association, which mobilized huge numbers of men with the support of ‘their’ women across Ireland and forced the civil equality of Catholics on an unwilling Tory administration. A struggle for repeal of the Union soon began, however, for emancipation did not put an end to Ireland’s grievances.

1833
An end to slavery
. A rebellion of the enslaved in Jamaica in 1831 and a popular campaign across Britain led to the abolition of slavery from 1 August 1834. Forced apprenticeship (brought to an end in 1838) and £20 million in compensation convinced the West Indian interest to accept this. A Charter Act for India increased the role of the British government in India and reduced the power of the East India Company.

1846
Repeal of Corn Laws
. Another popular campaign, this time spearheaded by middle-class free traders, resulted in the repeal of the Corn Laws, long regarded as a symbol of the continuing power of the landowning classes. Prime Minister Peel’s decision split the Tory party, opening the way for Disraeli’s rise to power.

1848
Revolution in Europe
. Revolutions erupted across continental Europe and there were extensive fears in Britain that Chartist demands for parliamentary reform, including a universal male franchise, could not be contained. On 10 April London was barricaded with troops at the ready but in the event the demonstration on Kennington Common presented no threat.

1849
Advancement for women
. Bedford College was opened, initially to train women teachers, and among its pupils in the years to come were Barbara Leigh Smith and George Eliot. This was one of the signs of the development of the women’s movement that emerged in the 1850s, committed to education, employment and suffrage for women alongside an end to the sexual double standard.

Traditionally, the Crystal Palace has been seen as the starting point of a great Victorian era of peace, industry and empire – and so it was, though we now know that it was also something much more. This spectacular centrepiece of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, opened by Queen Victoria on 1 May 1851 and straddling the year until it closed its doors officially on 11 October, celebrated with more than a touch of complacency the peaceful triumph of Britain’s unique compound elite, part-aristocratic, part-capitalist. Britain had escaped the revolutions that had plunged continental Europe into social division and civil war in 1848, and the planning and execution of the Great Exhibition in 1851 was naturally timed to remind the world of that fact.

The festival celebrated Britain’s industrial supremacy, both in its form and its content. A vast shed – a blend of greenhouse, railway terminus and museum, half again as long as the Millennium Dome built 150 years later – the Crystal Palace was constructed from prefabricated and interchangeable parts made of the most modern materials, iron and glass. It was deliberately filled with products of great size and ingenuity to shock and awe – huge blocks of coal, the largest steam locomotives, hydraulic presses and steam-hammers, a scale model of the Liverpool docks with 1,600 miniature ships in full rigging; sewing machines, ice-making machines, cigarette-rolling machines, machines to mint medals and machines to fold envelopes.

If the exhibition was open to all nations, the results were confidently expected to demonstrate British superiority. The aim was to show the global dominance that Britain had achieved not by rapine or conquest but by virtue and hard work – steam engines and cotton-spinning machines were held up by the novelist Thackeray as ‘trophies of her bloodless wars’.

But that complacent picture does not capture the sheer exuberant messiness of the Crystal Palace, or the full range of excitements through which it prefigures the modern life that we live today. Though responsibility for the Great Exhibition was vested in a Royal Commission crammed with the great and the good, and led by the prince consort, a free press kept up a loud and rowdy running commentary, and every segment of a diverse and disputatious public opinion – including the large majority who were formally excluded from political representation – offered up its own views. When after three weeks of more exclusive viewing by the ‘respectable’ public the Crystal Palace was opened to ‘shilling tickets’ on 26 May, the floodgates were opened and six million people poured through them in the next four months.

In fact, the Great Exhibition gave a decisive push to physical mobility – travel to it has been called ‘the largest movement of population ever to have taken place in Britain’ – and it can be said to have kick-started the entire apparatus of the modern tourist industry: the railway journey, the package holiday, the hotel (or at least the B&B) and the restaurant were all to be transformed from elite into popular experiences. Thomas Cook alone brought 165,000 people to the Crystal Palace from the Midlands on cheap excursion trains.

To orient these strangers, street signs of the modern type had to be invented. To comfort them, public lavatories were for the first time installed. London, which had been used to dominating national attention in the eighteenth century but had had to share the spotlight with the great cities of the north in the early nineteenth, once again became the nation’s cynosure. In the following years, it increased its share of the national population and began to resume a stature that it has never since lost.

What had the masses come to see, and what did they make of it? Undoubtedly they were awed by the great machines and demonstrations of power. They would also have been aware of the formidable police presence – anything from 200 to 600 policemen. On the other hand, they had a huge variety of sights to choose from – there were 100,000 exhibits – and could gravitate freely to those that pleased or intrigued them. These were often trinkets and gadgets on a human scale that people could relate to, could imagine in their homes: consumer goods of paper and glass, new styles of furniture, brands of toothpaste and soap.

A visit to the Crystal Palace was not supposed to be a shopping expedition. Exhibitors were not allowed to display prices or to sell over the counter. But supply and demand could not be so easily kept apart. Brochures, posters, trade cards and price sheets proliferated. Outside the Crystal Palace, the rest of London did its best to capitalize on the visitors. Historians now think that the modern age of advertising was opened by the Great Exhibition – the primitive shop signs, handbills and small-print newspaper adverts of the eighteenth century were gradually transformed by a panoply of new technologies, leading to the billboard, the illustrated display advertisement, the department-store window. Among the visitors in 1851 was a 20-year-old draper’s apprentice from Yorkshire, William Whiteley, who was inspired to move his theatre of operations to London and who in the 1860s expanded his draper’s shop in Westbourne Grove into Britain’s first department store, Whiteley’s, the Universal Provider.

These surging crowds and their clamour for goods and thrills drew snooty criticisms of vulgarity, and we have long been familiar with comments such as John Ruskin’s – he called the palace ‘a cucumber-frame between two chimneys’ – and William Morris’ – he called it ‘wonderfully ugly’. The likes of Ruskin and Morris were offended because the palace’s projectors had portrayed it as a chance to refine popular tastes, whereas they saw only crowd-pleasing cheapness.