Bread and Circuses The Age of the Chartists 1832-1854. A
Study of Discontent.
" THE Hammonds " have added yet another to their valuable series of historical studies. It is hardly too much to say that they have invented something in the nature of a new historical form. They do not write history in the ordinary sense of the word. Nor is it merely that they describe some particular subject, such as the town labourer, or the village labourer, at a particular period of time, for they feel the urge to supply some wider understanding, some sociological or, indeed, semi- philosophical thread to guide their readers through the laby- rinth of the past.
Thus this new book, entitled perhaps a little misleadingly The Age of the Chartists, is very far from being a history of England during the years which it covers (1932-1854). Nor even is it, as they carefully explain, anything in the nature of a history of the Chartist movement. Indeed, only one short chapter out of nineteen, and that perhaps the least satis- factory in the book, is devoted to the actual story of the Chartists themselves. The book is, rather, a detailed thesis, backed by a knowledge of the period and a scholarship which by now must be unequalled, or equalled only by the Webbip, Mr. and Mrs. Hammond's argument is roughly as follows. Some explanation has to be found for the fact that the first half of the nineteenth century was a period of acute working. class discontent and smouldering revolt, while the half century that preceded it and the half century which followed it were both periods of social peace and class co-operation. The older historians offered us the simple explanation that th4 immense upheaval in the modes of production, which we call the Industrial Revolution, which occurred in this period, reduced the standard of life of the workers, and that it was the sheer drive of black poverty which drove the workers first into the Correspondence Societies, and then into the agitation for the Reform Bill, the Owenite movement, and finally into the Chartist agitation. Later research, however, has proved that this explanation will not do. It turns out, front almost conclusive statistical evidence, that the standard of life of the workers was, in spite of everything, rising throughout the whole period. Some other explanation, therefore, of the class conflicts of the age must be found, and it is to this task that the present volume is devoted, Mr. and Mrs. Hammond's method is to compare the world of early nineteenth-century England with the ancient States of Greece and Rome. They discover a startling difference between them. While civic spirit, pride in external appear- ance, amenities, and the public life of the cities of the Ancient World, was perhaps the most striking characteristic which they had, such a spirit was almost non-existent in the new industrial cities of Britain. A tremendous and half-conscious effort was made by the Romans, inheriting the Greek tradition, to make their community, their polls, a real living entity, in which even the most humble citizen could take a personal pride, and from the institutions of which even the slave drew tangible and substantial benefits. The provision of the much abused games, of baths, of pleasant playgrounds, of elegant and magnificent streets and buildings were the indirect dividend which even the slave or the propertyless pauper of the Ancient World was drawing from that civilization. They then contrast this spirit with the spirit of the new towns in Great Britain. There the very conception of such public enterprise was denied by the dominant philosophy of the day. The spirit of the time was dominated to an extent which it is impossible to exaggerate by the conception of individual competition. The. workers were not given material benefits to keep them contented. Practically no efforts were made to make their lot easier, and for their co-operation in society one thing, and one alone, was relied upon ; and that thing was the hope which was held out to each one of them that by hard work and good fortune he need no longer remain poor.
The spirit of " the career open to talent " was allowed almost for the first time to dominate the whole hope of two genera- tions. And undoubtedly it produced powerful results, for in truth it was possible in those days for a quite considerable number of lucky or laborious artisans to become rich men. But for the great mass of the workers this, inevitably, was not possible, and it is with the fortunes and reactions of this great mass, who remained workers, that the Hammonds deal. As they point out, it was not that these people now began to live in worse material conditions than they had ever known before. On the contrary, real wages almost certainly rose as compared to the eighteenth century. It was rather that the spirit of the age denied to them any place in the community. They became outcasts, and felt themselves to be outcast, with the result that they were soon in revolt against a community which had found little or no place for them.
In a series of exceedingly interesting chapters headed " The Government of the New Town," " The New Poor Law," "The Loss of Playgrounds," " Education," &c., Mr. and Mrs. Hammond show how little the early nineteenth-century British workman had of any share in the civilized life of his community. His ancient customary place in life with the institutions which had been inherited from the Middle Ages had been swept into the dustbin of history by the rise of the industrial system. The checks and consolations of custom were withdrawn from him, and the new age provided no new institutions, no new pleasures, no new recreations, but only the inexpressibly dreary streets of his slum. Little wonder that it turned the more or less contented peasant into the fiery Chartist !
In the later chapters Mr. and Mrs. Hammond trace the beginnings of some kind of institutional life in the cities. They head them " The Battle for Public Health," " The Beginnings of Popular Culture," " The Beginnings of Common Enjoyment." In the concluding paragraph of their volume they sum up the causes of the discontents of the period which they review. ..
" Tito men and women who now lived in blind streets had lived, themselves or their fathers, beneath the open spaces of heaven. In the high momenta of his history man has answered the beauty of nature with the beauty of cities, but for these exiles the dreams of mind and hand were as faint and distant as the mountains and the forests whence those dreams had come. No public grace adorned their towns ; religion was too often a stem and selfish fantasy ; musio and painting were strangers, at home among the elegant rich, but doubtful of their welcome in this raw confusion ; ships brought the riches of the Foot across the Indian Ocean, but those other ships which ' pass through the vast seas of time' never spread their splendid sails. Science herself, the goddess of the age, kept her gifts for the fortunate. For though man's power and knowledge had made a new world since Odysseus fretted for his home in Calypso's cavern, the spinner, guiding the myriad wheels that
clothes the distant East, was condemned to spend his life longing, like homer's ploughman, for the hour of sunset and supper. But the spirit of wonder which had created art and religion, music and letters, gardens and playing fields, was not dead in the toiling men and women shut within these sullen streets. That spirit could not live at peace in treadmill cities where the daylight never broke upon the beauty and the wisdom of the world." - Altogether, we have once again to thank Mr. and Mrs. Hammond for a most useful and timely volume, one whose thesis, whatever we think of it, is backed by an immense erudition. That thesis will seem to many of us incomplete, but it does, at any rate, redress the balance ; for endoubtedly the less tangible psychological factors in class conflict, which the ,Hammonds bring out so strongly in this volume, have
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