1AKING

[ISTORY
^RITINGS ON
H ISTORY
AND CULTURE
P. THOMPSON
 M A K IN G HISTORY:
WRITINGS ON HISTORY AND CULTURE
M aking H istory:
Writings on
History and Culture

E P THOMPSON

THE NEW PRESS

NEW YORK
 Copyright 1994 Dorothy Thompson

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any

form without tlie written permission from the publisher and autlior.

Published in 1$ United States by The New Press, New York

Distributed by W.S5T Norton & Company, Inc.,
500 Fih Avenue, New York, NY 10110

Thompson, E. P. (Edwarj 924-93

Making histoiy: writings on lstory and culture / E. P. Thompson
p. cm.
Ineludes bibliograpliftll rcferences.
ISBN 1-56584-216-2 ISBN 1-56584-217-0 (pbk.)
1. Great BritainHistory. g. English literatureHistory and
criticism. I. Title.
DA32.A1T46 1995
941dc20 94-29225

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94 95 96 97 9 87 65 4 3 2 1
 Contents

Preface Vil
Introduction vii

Mary Wollstonecraft 1
Eleaiior Marx 10
Honiage to Tom Maguire 23
Williani Morris 66
Christopher Caudwell 78
In Defence of tre Jury * 141
Peterloo P l6 7
Sold Like a Sheep for 1 191
History and Anthropolagy ' 199
Left Revieto 226
Edgell Rickword * 234
Country and City 242
George Sturt 254
Tlie Grid of Inlieritance 261
Happy Faniilies 299
Herbert Gutnian 310
Which Britons? 319
Conunitnient and Poetiy 330
Powers and Nanies 340
Agenda for a Radical History 358
 Preface

Collected here will be found historical cssays froni the past

thirty ycars. I llave not included my more directly political and
pcace-rclated cssays, some o f wliich are still availablc. or have
I included cssays on thc romantic poets. I hope to makc a
collcction of tlicsc later.
My tlianks are due to Cambridge University Press, Dissenl,
Essays in Labour History (edited by John Saville), Iridian
Historical Review, William Morris Society, New Society, London
Iieview o f Books, New York Review o f Books, Radical History
Review, Socialist Regisler, Past and Present Society and The
Times Lilerary Supplement.

E.P.T.
August 1993
 Introduction

These essays were handed ovcr for publication by Edward a

fortnight bcforc he died in August last year. During the previous
six montis he had been making a carefi.il selection, and this, the
ordcr and the suggested title are all his. Most o f tliese pieces have
appearcd over the years in a vvide spread o f joumals, many o f them
now virtually inaccessible.
The divisin of the book into two parts, Persons and
Polemics, reflects two aspects of Edvvards writing. On the one
hand re-examination and rehabilitation of the lost or misinterpreted
figures in history - from William Morris to the voiceless agricul-
tural protesters of the eighteenth century. On the other die
polcniical attacks, brilliant and unforgettable, on fellow historians
widi vvhom he differed in this collection seen in Happy
Faniilies or Peterloo, elsewhere in his fatnous demolition of
Louis Althusser.
Reference is made in Edward's preface to a collection o f essays
on the Romantics, the preparation of which was fairly advanced at
tlie time of his dcath. One of the essays, Hunting the Jacobin Fox
appears in the current issue of Past and Present (Spring 1994); tlie
complete volume will appear in due course. Other as yet unpub-
lished or uncollccted material, including a volume of poems, is in
preparation.
One project should be especially mentioned here. Edward was a
prolific letter writer; for him letters were an important fonn of
communication, as friends and collcagues will recall. Many o f his
most Creative ideas as well as his humorous and relaxed coniments
are to be found in his letters. We are asking anyone who has
letters from him to let us know and if possible to let us have
either the originis or copies. At some fiiture date it is hoped to
publish a selection.
Dorothy Thompson
Martin Eve
26 May 1994
 Mary Wollstonecraft

On the day after Mary Wollstonecraft first niade love to William

Godwin she retreated in conccni and sclf-doubt: Considcr wliat has
passed as a fever of your imagination ... and I will bccomc again a
Solitary Walker. Claire Tomalin, in her bright new biography,
gives us this passage, but not that other haunting sentence: I
perceive that I shall be a child to the end of the chapter
We are all, cverjr one of us, in some part of ourselves children
to tlie end of the chapter. \$flfl|stonecraft didnt always nianage her
personal life wisely. or, when one comes to think of it, did
Coleridge, De Quinccy, Wordsworth, Hazlitt ... need one go on? I
have no objoction to reniinders that persons of genius sliare all tie
nfirmities of other moteis. The ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ o ffiia n itie s to which they
were liable, often liclp us to understand also their genius. But it is,
in the end.3the plus of genius, and not the lowest conimon
denoniinator of infimiity, which gives their lives importance.
I do object, on W ollstonecraftfeftbp? to the inequitable treat-
nient which she has received at tlie hands bf historians and critics.
She is seen less as a significant intellcctual, or as a courageous
moralist in an exceptionally exposed position, tlian as an Extraordi-
nary Wonian. And the moral confusions, or personal crises, of a
woman are always somehow more than those of a man:
they engross all other aspeets of the subject. As, indeed, from the
inexorable faets of the womans situation they often tend to do.
Wordsworth liad an illegitimate daughter in revolutionary France: he
carried her around intermittently for a few years as a prvate guilt, but
his daughter didnt encumber lihn in more practical ways. Woll
stonecraft also liad an illegitimate daughter in revolutionary France;
but the having was a ratlier different matter, and tliereafter she carried
her around (with tlie help of a loyal maid) through France, England,
nortliem Europe. It was not a carefully guarded secret, to be tumed up
by biographers in tliis century. Out-facing the world, she walked
with Fanny tlirough tlie London streets.
2 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

A diffcrent mattcr. And it malees her life a subject peculiarly

difficult to handle. We are all interested in sexual relations; we are
all willing to moralisc about tlrem at the drop o f a hat. And the
mention of Wollstonccrafts ame is like the collapse o f a whole
hat-shop: it tums up the moralising volume-control somewhere in
our intestines. We have scarcely begun to establish the faets before
we begin to mix them up witli our own moralising additives:
scandalised, or apologetic: or pm iring or condescending. What we
make of her is already mixed up Wlth what have made of
ourselves; it is something different <from her ctvwn taut, unrelenting
sclf-making.
There have been perhapsF dozen serious biographies: the first,
by William Godwin, appeared within a year of her death. None of
them wholly satisfies. One tensn is tliat Wollstonecraft presents
not one subject, but two: and it would take unusual versatility to
unite both in a single stucp From one aspcct, she was one of the
five or six truly significant ultra-radical intellectuals in England in
tlie 1790s: she must be placed beside Paine and Godwin: beside
the Coleridge of the WatuEflM Flower of the Cambridge Inelli-
gencer. or Thelwall of the Tribune and the Rights o f Naure. In
this company, she requSey" n p manner of condescension because
she happened also to be a woman. or did she ask for such. It was
her notion that mind has no sexf: she measured herself as an
equal in the republic of tire intellect.
But from another aspect, Wollstonecraft was reminded by every
fact of naturc and of society that she was a woman. She was not a
mind which has no sex, but a human being exceptionally exposed
within a fcmininc predicamcnt. Long before she died. she was
seized upon by fricnd and by encmy as an excmplar. She noted
this in her late Lellers from Swederv.

All the world is a stage, thought I; and fcw are there who do
not play the part they have learnt by rote; and those who do
not, secm marks set up to be peltcd at by fortune; or rather as
signposts, which point out the road to others, whilst forced to
stand still thcniselvcs amidst the mud and dust.

Not many men are expected to justify in every encounter o f their

 MARY WOLL S T ONE CR AF T 3

lives their published professions. The author of the Vindicatin of

the Rights o f Woman was exposed in her every motion. The
world observed her successively as a mannish joumalist: as a
rejected lover (of FusellVas a soured spinstcr (tlie wrong side of
30); as a discarded mistress (of Imlay); as the mother of an
Ilegitmate child; as an attempted suicide.

What said I within nyself, this is Miss Mary Wollstonecra,

parading about witli a child at her heels, with as little ceremony
as if it were a watch just bought at the jewelers. So much for
the rights thought 1 ....

Tlie characteristic response is that of Archibald Hamilton Rowan,

the Irisli patriot. It is fair to add that he became her friend, and
perhaps was thus educated a little out of his prejudices.
The final episode of her life has much of the contrivance of
fiction. When she married William Godwin it was much as if De
Bcauvoir, soon after writing The Second Sex, liad married Sartre at
the zenith of his rcputation,jjtiOj3^^& died in childbirth. What
a temptation her life provides JilSIK j^udge-nudge sort of
biographer. And what materials survived her. After her death,
Godwin - candid, benevolent, and stricken (perhaps for the only
time in his life) by emotions which he could not rationalise -
thought it an act of piety to publish her Posthumous Works,
including her letters to her feckless and foot-loose lover, Imlay. It
was not an act of piety. She could not llave wished it so. No
rejected lover, man or woman, imploring for love in the face of
equivocation or indifcrence could wish to be so exposed.
But there was more. Wollstonecrafts marriage to Godwin, in
her last year, was conducted ffom independent neighbouring
establislunents. Godwin objected to marriage on principie, and
Wollstonecraft accepted his views up to a point: they were each to
continu to conduct an independent life, received ffiends (of either
sex), and visit socially as independent persons, not as man-
and-wife. Henee domestic arrangements were conducted often by
letter: usually affectionate, sometimes loving, sometimes querulous
or recriminatory, sometimes just arrangements for dinner or the
tlieatre. And all that lot survives also. This is fortnate again for
4 MAKING HI STORY

biographers. But I doubt how far any o f us vvould vvish to be

judged - or judged in a public sense - on evidence o f tliis casual,
and essentially unconsidered kind.
So thcre are two possible subjects here, and the best two
biographies, hitherto, have taken opposite courses. The standard
academic biography by Ralph W ardle is painstaking and, on
occasion, pedestrian; but it maintains a seriousness tovvards its
subjects intellectual identitfc, examhiing her writings with care but
tuming its back upon any sustained analysis o f her sexual
predicament. Wollstonecraft, one feels, rnight have approved this
approach. More renentlv George has published in the
United States, but not, so far as I am aw a re ^ in Britain, a
higlily-intelligent analysis (One Woman's Siuation,' Illinois, 1970)
of her subjects personal evolution and predicament. Both books
are to be strongly recommended, although neither, in my view,
even when taken togetherBgive a fiill view of Wollstonecrafts
originality and ^tjtuye
1 liad hoped to wQlfrMf Tomalins book, and in a way I
do. Tlie books fev WadHe and George are better. But Tomalin has
attacked \ja subject wijH 2$fc. Spe^has tumed up a -fgW new facts,
althougli her documpnfcitigiii (deliberately) sd '^ b p p ^ that it is
difficult see what is new* and ?fp& she has borrowed from Wardle
and others. She has read^ luiliid her subject td place her in a
context: the placings succeed on occasion, ufteb they concern
personalities and not ideas. The chapter on Wdlfctonecrafts expcri-
cnces as govemcss to LcSSl and Lady JtijKsborough is perceptive -
the best treatnient of this which I have rcad. And the book flows
along nicely - an inquisitive feniinine narrative which readers will
enjoy. The book will ccrtainly go: it is a calculated book club
choice.
It is this fact which relieves me from an inliibition against
saying that I dislike it a good deai. It is a book which diminishes
tlie staturc of its subjcct. And, by a sick irony, it docs this in ways
which are supposedly characteristically feniinine. Whcrevcr Tomalin
deais with central political or intellectual issues, her manner and
her matter is commonplace, personalised, or crassly philistine. Her
French revolution is a madly-interesting scene with swinging
intellectuals followed by a predictable plebeian Terror. (In England,
 MARY WO L L S T ONE CR AF T 5

it was the signal for everyone to rush to extremes.) Tomalin is

against extremes, and, as the book proceeds, it becomcs apparcnt
that no one is vvholly balanced and mature except the autlior:
certainly not Wollstonecraft, for whom she is always making
sophisticated psycnoIogCT* allovvances. After all, Wollstonecraft did
not have the bfeljHrt of reading Frcud, Durklieim or Kenneth Tynan.
Tlie political philosophy of Godwin and of Holcroft is sketched in
boldly: their enthusiasm for perfectibility was such that they
envisaged the end of all superstition, crinie, war, illness and even
... sleep and death itself. Any attentive reader of Jilly Coopers
weekly colunui jll know hersHf j*tefl|than that: and, since this is
so, Tomalin need.caffy her investigaflMli of Godwras thought no
furtlier.
It follows that Tomalin is very little interested in Woll-
stoneras thought either. She u n d ii^ ^ B h jP th e RightH of Man-,
condescends to the V i n d i c a t i o n T discusscs the late
(and Rlportant) Letlers from Sweden at alKBy contrast, she hovers
Jingetingly above cach personal encounter or prvate letter, and
pokes around knowingly for hidden sexual motives. While only a
few lines of the Vindication are cited, we have passage aer
passage o f the letters to Imlay, some of them provoking the most
interesling questions: could tliere be %n allusion to a flirtation witli
another nian here?
The basis of Wollstonecrafts precarious independence, and the
very precondition of her ever writing the Vindmttion, was secured
when she was befriended by that very remarkable Dissenting
publisher, Joseph Joluison, who provided her with regular work, an
income, and lodgings. Tliis is the only episode in her subjects life
which has Tomalin baffled. Johnson (49) was beffiending Mary,
youiigish (28). And yet tliere is no evidence as to even a putative
sexual encounter. For Tomalin, this is utterly improper. She implies
(witli no evidence) that perhaps Joluison was a homosexual; or,
when he invited Mary to work for liim, "perhaps he was in a
manic moment such as come to certain asthmatics. At any rate,
Johnsons interest in women as anything otlier tlian friends was
either extremely discreet or, more probably, non-existent. And (a
final solution) they played at fathers and daughters.
Women as anything otlier than friends - could our sexually
6 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

hyperconscious age condenm itself more clearly tiran tliis? We

know notliing about Johnsons sexual incliuations and (one might
add in passing), since we do know notliing, speculation on the
subject is more suited to a gossip column tlian a history book.
What we do know about Johnson is that he was a good judge of
authors; he published ultra-radical and feminist books throughout
tlie 1790s; he was the friend of other writers with feminist
sympathies - Mary Hays, William Frend, George Dyer - and liis
loyalty to diese people and causes led him in the end to prison.
When Wollstonecraft arrived on his doorstepj Jolinson needed a
rcliable full-time editorial assistant: his need and her ability and
predicament matched each other. Is it not conceivable that they
actually became fre neis, agreeing to set aside or distance Tomalins
obligatory anything other than? It is even possible that tliey were
playing at being comrades in a common political and intellectual
endeavour - a game which I fear our own sophisticated world
would regard with knowing disbelief.
But it was tliis M tm S ^ ^ i i t a r i a i i comradeship for wliich
Wollstonecraft attem praf to t the ru S f Against Rousseaus
sophistry, that educated women would lose their power over m a i.l
she replied: Tliis is the I aim at. I do not them to
have power over men; but over themselvesB To attempt this
self-detemiination in her own life, entailed a disregard for conven-
tion which required qualities which can easily be labelled as
domineering, wilful, egotistical. To attempt this also meant tliat she
must suffer in her own experience as she pressed against each one
of those boundaries which she liad already defined in her writings.
As Margaret George has written: With that detemiination to be
free Mary proceeded to successive revelations of the limits -
external and self-iniposcd - of her freedonv. With extraordinary
tenacity, she hcrself sought to bring those two subjeets - her
philosophy and her biography - into one: as Godwin vvrote, she
liad through life tramped on those rules which are built on the
assumption of the imbccility of her sex. She was bound to suffer;
and her suffering, expressed in letters never intended for publica-
tion, and in a style of self-dramatising, over-artieulate sensibility
nurtured by Rousscau's Confx.sions and the Sorrows of IVerlher, is
altogcthcr too hcavy* for tlic flip insensibility of our own times.
 MARY WOLL S T ONE CRAF T 7

So Wollstonecraft has bccome a bit of a bore. Each gcncration

does hcr over again in its ovvn iniage. Tile anti-Jacobins did her as
a prostitute. The bourgeois feminists did hcr as a bourgeois
feminist. More recently, in 1947, two American Freudians (one,
shaiiiefully, a woman) did her over as a bitch motivated by
penis-envy: the shadow of the phallus lay darkly, threateningly
over all tliat she did. As against this, ^om alins doings are greatly
preferable. Wollstonecraft - or Mary, as she must always cali her
^ is now seen as a preniatuffljinliabitant of our own literary and
feminine nortli London: p re n p K re o t only. ift the fact of living in
the I790s but also in disnlavUr J l i fl immaturities which, from
tlie composure o f our advanced wc may easily detect,
smile at, but malee allB B U M g for. Every mature professional
woman today, who has w'orked hard at hcr tdgfbnships, come to
tenns vvith her sexuality, and who is never manic or extreme in
her feminism, can recognise instantly in Tomalins Mary tiiat
exasperating neighbour, or od coll S friend, who is always getting
into muddles and - in the moment of denouncing us for our
conventionality - falling fat on her own face. And every unin-
fonned malo reviewer can E lw m M ^ H ^ & 8 q u a Ilv clearly. For
tlie Daily Telegraph Magazine, tlns is the Ibook of the week:
Mary liad an acute shortageWf worldly wisdoni; she fell in love
with channing rotters; she g a j | jjM F to a tragic bastard - a
niagnificent and touching failure. Prediwfflly, she leads The Times
review page as Poor Mary: her Ufe is seen as a comedy which
(we are chivalrously wamed) it is too easy to laugh at.
I do not find Wollstonecrafts life fiimiy. or can I see it as any
kind o f failure. I see her as a major intellectual, and as one of the
greatest of Englishwomen. There were scores of thousands of women
in the 1790s who were domineering, or who professed sensibility
excessively, or who got into personal muddles; just as there were
scores o f thousands o f men who were vain, cock-sure and who drank
too much. But there was only one Wollstonecraft, just as there was
only one Paine. It is the plus that matters. Large innovations in
tliought and sensibility often arise after so many and so prolonged
premonitions that tliey appear to us, in retrospect, as mere common-
places. Paines Rights o f Man and Wollstonecrafts Vindication both
have this air: it is a puzzle that no one liad written tliem before.
8 MAKING HI S T ORY

But no one liad. And, once written, the temis o f argument were
forever changcd. It is difficult to know wliich book proposed the
larger claims: but since women make up one half o f the species,
tlie honours may rest with Wollstonecraft. Her arguments, in this
book and in otlier places, could have been niade with more system.
But tliey were not negligible: tliey could be repressed, but tliey
could not be expunged. or w e r^ th e y repressed as utterly as
Tomalin, in her final chapter, proposgjPShe has siniply looked in
the wrong places. She mould baje looked, instead, at the Shelleyan
tradition carried tlirough to Tilomas Hardy and William Morris: or
at Amia Wheeler and William Thompson: at Owenites and
free-tliinkers.
or is this all. Paines book is better written, better structured.
But Wollstonecrafts is the more complex sensibility. She by no
means swam along ^ S l y with the current o f 18th century
rationalism: she oen stmck across it, creating within it a romantic
and critical eddy. She liad suffered too niuch in her own human
nature - and she lia d ^ fe ^ M ^ S ^ ^ ^ ^ c -.lo se lv P Paris at the height
of tlie Terror - not to fij^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ S o n s about Godvvinian optimism.
More than t h i J i n O E W a i S ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ S of the annunciation of
bourgeois feminismjj she was one of those most alert to the
limitations of bourgeois political thought. As a woman, she liad
fully experienced the forc of property rights, both in personal and
in social life; and she knew the hollowness of programmes o f
mcrely-political emancipation to people held in economic depend-
ency. Henee her writing always showed an alertness to social
injusticc, and - as in her Letters from Sweden - a disgust at
asccndant coniniercialisni. In this way, she spliced togetlier femin-
ism and social radicalism at the very start.
As for her life: 1 know that I would not have lived it so well,
and I think it arrogant in any biographer to assumc, too easily, that
it could have been lived better. This was not, after all, north
London in 1974. It was a rough time: and the place was lcss
provided with our niodem supportive amcnitics. (There was not,
come to think of it, a Tavistock clinic to takc ones horrors to, or
a social worker to advise her on her bastard cliild.) She fell into
one or two holes: and she dug hcrself out, with her own nails. She
never asked anvone to extrieate her. cxcept for linlav. and she had
 MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT 9

- or do we not allow tliis now? - a little claim 011 him. Even from
Imlay she would accept - if affection had dicd - no alms or
maintenance. She wcnt on her own way, as a solitary walker. She
not only took upon herself thc full conscqucnccs of her convic-
tions, in a world whosc mies she had not made, but she had thc
resilience to get up (she, a deserted mistress fished out of the
Thames) and resume her work of inragining the rules for egalitarian
comradeship once more.
We have rarely seen A r equal in our history. To Tomalins
mature assessment, I prefer infinnHtyRhe words of Virginia Woolf,
where she speaks of xa# high-handed and hot-blooded manner in
which she cut her way to the qlljVfc o f l i f e J And as Woolf well
knew, liigh-handedness brings HwWi its revenges. Wollstonecraft
was prepared for these: but what she does not deserve is the
revcfgS o f Poor M ary! blazoncd across a complacent press. She
needs no ones condesccnsion. She was poor in nothing. She was
never beaten. And the evidence lies in tliat part of her which
remainffl a child to the end o f the chapter. For that part of her -
the refusal to become careful and knowing, the resilient assent to
new experience - is exactly that part which most of us are careful
to cauterise, and then to protect witli the callouses of our
worldly-wise complicities.
From New Sociey, 19th September 1974, reviewing Claire Tomalin's
The Life and Death o f Mary Wollstonecraft, Weidenfeld & Nicholson
 Eleanor Marx

This book has already received a generous welcome, and t

deserves to do so. Ja my own view it does not fiilfil the promise
of the first volume (Eleonor Marx: Family Life, 1855-1883),
published five years ago. But it is a work o f vitality and of
scholarship, and it draws more fully upon unpublished correspond-
ence of Eleanor Marx and of Engelss circle than has ever been
done before. So it is, and is likely to remaiii, an important study.
But it is not an objective study. The reader who does not like
to be manipulated - to be nudged through the evidence towards a
prescribed conclusin, now asked to tum his head this way and
now ordered to cise his eyes, and now shown only an approved
portion of the evidence - such a reader will still prefer Chushichi
Tsuzukis ten-year-old biography.
Tsuzuki lays out very clearly, and sometimes tersely, the
evidence, and invites the reader to form a judgement. K app does
not. She is wholly entitled to write a very different, and (as she
supposes) less acadmica biography. This will be, for many
readers, the virtue of her book. It is, without any pretence,
engagingly partisan. She seeks to enter without reserve into the
consciousness of her heroine - or hero (for in the longest, 180-page
section of the book, Engels displaces Eleanor as the central figure).
She quotes liberally from her (or his) letters, sees the world
(usually an obtuse and intractable world) through their eyes, enters
with wit and matice into their quarrels, encounters the dramais
personae of the British and European socialist movements (usually
a bungling or treacherous, and always a politically-backward cast)
as Eleanor or Engels cncountered them, and generally she lays
about her with zest and humour.
All this is good fun, and sometimes it really is. The very
interesting (if sad) long section on Engels is called The Last
Lustre of the General. We must certainly hope that this is far from
the last, but it must certainly be a late lustre o f Yvonne Kapp; and
 ELEANOR MARX It

it is thc lustre of an indomitablc and loyal orthodox Communist

who is posscssed of thc superb confidcnce and maturity gaincd by
standing in one place while an obtusc and intractablc vvorld pcrsists
in its wilfully trcachcrous and backward courscs. Elcanors suicide,
she iniplies, was influcnccd - if not provoked - by her lack of
preparedness for a similar expericnce. The mainstream of the
British working-class movement - her native element - was
flowing ever more swiftly, broadly and deeply into cliannels far
removed from Marxism, to leave her in a rivulet whose currcnt
would not be strong enough to bear her forward. Eleanor, who
was political from top to toe, had thought to see the dawn of a
new world. For her the light receded and she would not stay.
Tliis is not convincing. But that suicide has now been discussed
a good deal before a British public wliich has even witnessed it on
televisin. It might be more respectful to this very political and
gifted English daughter of Marx to on her contribution to
the early socialist movement. A n d J jH B f f l good fun of Kapps
polemic does not J s jg us so far. For tJfl? tliing it camiot be
sustained witliout doing repeated injustice to all fellow socialists
who lay outside the immediate guidance of tlie Engels family
circle. For another it requires situating ourselves totally within this
circle and accepting it at its own valuation.
One is irritated less witli Tussy(Eleanor), whose loyalty to
the General is wholly forgivable tlian with Engels himself: and
also with Kapp. By tlie time o f his last lustre Engels had lived
for fifty years in England; and yet, inside his residence in Regents
Park Road, he might have been living inside some time-warp in the
Tardis. The English shadows which flitted outside remained (as
tliey did not for Marx) 'thenC. Their art seems rather better tlian
their literature and their poetry better than tlieir prose, he remarked
in a generous mood in 1884. By 1894 he was ten years more
grumpy and less generous: when Dr Ludwig Freyberger (soon to
niarry Louise Kautsky and move into Regents Park Road) tumed
up from Vienna, Engels announced to Sorge tliat he had already
shown the English that more medicine is leanit on the Continent
than here, the clumsy people here cannot come up to the Vienna
standard, British practitioners were inferior in physiology, pathol-
ogy, surgery, etc etc. Yvonne Kapp snorts at this, but when Engels
12 MAKI NG HI S T OR Y

repeatedly offers judgements as to the British Socialist movement

and its personnel of a similar ill-informed and rancorous levity, she
neither snorts or hems or haws. She receives his writ with the
dedication of a devotee.
Now let us put the record down a little more coolly, and take a
closer vievv. Eleanor Marx Aveling and Edward Aveling were on
tlie Executive of the SDF in 1884 and formed part o f the cabal
which, provoked by Hyndmans dictatorial methods, resigned to
fomi the Socialist League. In this secession (which may have been
a tactical error) they were ully supported by Engels, on the
grounds that the whole Federation was really nothing but a
swindle. Tliis general (but not very precise or political) judgement
suffices as a guide for Kapp for the next 600 or so pages:
Hyndman and all the SDF are dismissed (until in 1896 the
Avelings rejoin it) as a swindle. W e have Engelss autliority for
this, after all.
Next the Avelings (for at this stage they acted together) served
on tlie executive of the Socialist League. Engels advised that the
League was strong enough only to run a monthly joumal; William
Morris (and the majority) wanted a weekly joum al around which
they could build the League. After 15 montlis Morris liad his way,
and Eleanor and Aveling took the opportunity to withdraw.
Eleanor wrote to her sister, L au ra# A n awfiil mess theyll make of
it eer long. By dint of much arguing the General and I induced
Ed[ward] to give up the sub-editorship. Edward really has not the
time ... and more important, there is no one here really dependable
to work with ... we have no-one. The position - a frequent cry -
was impossible. Here all is a niuddle, chorused Engels: Tlie
tuming of Commonweal into a weekly - absurd in every respect
- has given Edward a chance of gctting out of his responsibility
for this now incalculable organ .... It would be ridiculous to expect
the working class to take the slightest notice of thcse various
vagaries of what is by courtesy called English Socialism, etc. etc.
etc. Kapp evidently approvcs their political realism and sagacitv,
noting that Aveling was replaced by Bax, and that Elcanors
International Record was taken over by May Morris who liad not
quite the same facilities as Eleanor to gather detailed news from all
over F.urope. includiug Russia. as well as botli Nortli and South
 ELEANOR MA R X 13

America.' Exactly so: the ncw socialist weckly (and, as t provcd

to be for at least two years, very much the bcst socialist weckly
appcaring in Britain) was as a delibrate act of policy deprived of
Elcanors Services and Engclss incomparable information.
Next the Avelings werc off (in the autumn of 1886) for their
lecture tour of tie United States, to which another story attachcs.
Retuming, they gave up time and cffort to lecturing at Radical
Clubs. This was uscfi.il work, but did it really entitle Engels to
write, like a gushing aunt, that at present the Avelings are doing
more than anyone else here, and being more effective ...? If all
goes well, he crowed, it will push the Social Democratic
Federation as well as the Socialist League into the background.
Tliis is oddnsince members of both those bodies, as well as tire
indcfatigable Fabian, Bcrnard Shaw, were busy lecturing to Radical
Clubs in the same period. (But Engels, inside the Tardis, could not
be expected to know that). Next, th e ^ 8 8 7 Annual Conference of
the League, which, after a finely-balanced argument, voted to
abstain from parliamentary action. I liave argued, in my William
Morris, that the parliamentarians forced the wrong issue in the
wrong way, thereby forcing Morris into anarchist arnrs. The
decisin, Kapp notes, carne dangerously near to rendering the
Socialist League impotent. Neither Eleand# or Aveling allowed
their ames to go forward for election to the Central Council.
My point is that the tactics of the Avelings (forced on at every
stage by Engels) were self-fulfilling. Whenever political disagree-
rnents arse, the Avelings withdrew from engagement and drove
their allies into their opponents anns. Everyone else was always
impossible: we have no-one (although Emest Belfort Bax, the
only pronrinent English Socialist who was sonretimes admitted to
the Tardis on Engelss sociable Sunday nights, was sometimes
acclaimed as onrs). So the Avelings fall back on the Bloomsbury
Socialist Society. Now if anyone else liad fallen back on a society
with such a ame, Yvonne Kapp would have split our sides witli
the bolts o f her sarcasnr. But on this occasion she tells us almost
nothing about this society (and less than Tsuzuki) and does not
even mention tlie activities of Alexander Karley Donald, its leading
political liglit, a solicitor, litterateur and heavy political realist,
who once liad the temerity to advise William Morris to loiver his
14 MAKING HISTORY

moral tone, thereby occasioning a very distinct heightening o f the

moral atmosphere.
Some eight years and 400 pages
Avclings have been in and out o f other
ILP (and very little light is throw n on
this rcmarkable summary:
later, by which time the
organisations, including the
this episode), Kapp malees

By now there is no need to labour the point that Eleanor, as a

genuine M arxist and thus the least dogm atic o f any for her time
and place, did not really give a fig for these sects as such even
when she worked with them in a disciplined fashion. Always she
had homed her way unerringly to such groups in which she sensed
this instinctive urge to socialism: to any zone where her words
would fall on fertile ground. By the late 90s, the SDF appeared to
her more socialist - and to have more influence - than any other
existing o rganisation^o she rejoined it.

But this is the problem. W e most o f us have difficulties in

choosing, and in sticking to our chosen organisations, even when
we suppose ourselves to be genuine M arxists or other kinds of
superior pigeon with unerring homing instinets. But it is difficult to
work loyally with any organisation or to be regarded as a loyal
comrade - if we do not really give a fig for them. And this was,
very specifically, Eleanor M arxs problem, and one which was
bequeathed to her by her father and by Engels. She had the vices
entailed by her birth and her virtues. The loyalty which she gave
abundantly to her fathers memory, to the General, and, with
tragic tenacity, to Aveling, led her to feel that she and this
iinmediato familial circle (sometimos even callcd the party)
allowed her to dispense with lesscr loyalties to her comrades in the
English movement. If these made mistakes (and she, and Engels,
sometimes identified these mistakes very tellingly) she was ab
solved of any duty to stand by them, or seek to correct them. She
and Aveling simply had to home their way unerringly to their next
abodc.
The instinctive urge of the party, however, sometimes sccms
more like a wholly subjcctive gut-rcaction.
It included, for historical reasons dating from the break-up o f
 ELEANOR MARX 15

tlic First International, an instinctive liorror of anytliing showing

oven tolcration towards anarchism - a horror which Kapp fully
sitares. This horror alienated Eleonor front William Morris, Dmela
Nicuwenhuis, and even (later) froni Keir Hardie and Tom Mann.
Engels and Eleanor kept thc Frcnch, Germn, Dutch and American
contrades infonned as to the sins of thc British movement in
correspondcnce which is both bitchy and lacking in any political
propriety. Undoubtedly they felt deeply, in their familial bones, tliat
the intemational revolutionary socialist movement was something
that they owned, as an inlteritance front Mohr.
When Lafargue, having been bontbarded for years with letters as
to Hyndntans unspeakable vices, neglected to invite him to an
organising conference to plan the intemational conference of 1889,
he was hauled over the coals by Engels: the Federation is
unquestionffly more i m p o r t a n t ^ H ^ D s ... Hyndntan would
not have hanned any of you.j^M W ra^^K C app, adds, Lafargue
liad added to his folly by writing to William Morris personally ...
Eleanor liad something to say about th is frP a u ls writing to Morris
was a great mistakc, (she tickcd off her sister, Laura Lafargue):
Morris is personally liked, but you would not get a 1/2 dozen
workmen to take him seriously Paul would have done better to
have left all the invitations to be the Tardis. But thenl
perhaps, it would have tumed out that we have no-one.
Yvoime Kapp has released so muh more damaging trivia from
the Bottigelli archives that it is gfflaordinary that she should rage
so sardonically at those who speak of a Marxist dique witliin the
intemational movement, or who arge (with Bax JH who liad every
opportunity to observe) that Engels sought to foist Aveling as a
leader upon the English movement. Her evidence confinns both
points, although I dont tliink that either point strikes a deatli-blow
at Engels or at Marxisni. Engels was ageing, very set in his ways,
very Geman, and exceedingly busy with 101 important and
signifcant intellectual tasks, as well as a few insignificant and
meddlesome ones. When he really put his mind to a problem, and
infonned himself adequately, his political judgement was always
weighty and somedmes superb. But when he did not he was
opinionated, obstnate, and arrogant. The British movement liad
long been his blind spot, since he could never forgive the working
16 MAKING HISTORY

class for abandoning the Chartists o f his youth. As R. Page Amot,

a Communist scholar oldcr tlian Yvonne K app and as loyal as her,
if not as orthodox, has noted: A part from tliose admitted to his
immediate family circle, there is no Englishinan or Scotsman for
whom Engels had a good word to say. But to any who were so
admitted Engels was more pliant. As Eleanor wrote in panic to her
sister Laura in Engelss last year (when the Freybergers moved in
on him) you know very well that anyone living with the General
can maniplate him to any extent.
The Avelings did not live witli Engels, although it would appear
(Kapp is unable to clarify the point) that there must have been
times when tliey, like the Lafargues, were living o j f him. They
were his main informants on the English movement (infonnation
which, with his own uncharitable additives, he relayed around tlie
socialist world), and they stood between him and that movement.
On account of Aveling,JBem steip - who had every opportunity to
observe - later recalled, many people kept away from Engelss
house. One such person was Mrs Schack, who had been active in
tlie Geman womens movement. Kapp nudges us towards a
hilarious and satirical vievv o f this officious lady: She was strongly
opposed to the introduction o f State licensed and supervised
brotliels and very keen on what Engels designated Free Trade in
whoresV Are we to suppose from this that State licensed brothels
are a correct Marxist demand, objected to only by pious bourgeois
women? Perhaps we are not; we are only supposed to see Mrs
Schack as hysterical and ridiculous. This is an example o f K apps
common game of playing both ends against the middle. One end is
the absolute priority of political over personal criteria and the
absolute political authority of Engels and o f Tussy; while Kapp
acknowledges Avelings sexual and financial ofFences, diese are
seen as something quite distinct from his political soundness
Avcling was always to be found on the correct side o f the
political fcncc. The other end is the assumption that almost all tlie
personal attacks on Avcling were caused by anti-Marxist political
motivation, and a rcadiness to use any kind of personal gossip to
devalue Aveling's critics. If the gifted socialist agitator J.L. Mahon
also refused to work with Avcling (and it is clcar that Engels made
this a condition of his support for Mahons propaganda) tlicn wc
 ELEANOR MARX 17

are allowcd by Kapp to suppose that tliis was only bccausc he was
a self-rcspecting worker with a puritanical streak who was
shockcd by the Avelings common-law marriage.
When I first wrote my study of tVilliam Morris over twcnty
years ago I inelined to Kapps judgement, and gave both Elcanor
and Engels the benefit of the doubt. But slice that time the
Engels-Lafargue correspondente has become available, and I have
consequcntly siiarpened my own judgement in revisin. Engelss
lofty dismissal, 1 1887, of the existing socialist movement in
Britain as a number of small diques held togetlier by personal
motives, comes uneasily from a man who was at the centre of the
smallest and most personally-motivated dique of all. Tlie Avelings,
having hurried on the split in the SDF, failed then to give a fiill
connnitment to the Socialist League, forrned a faction within it,
and forced on a furtlier split wliich destroyed their own creation.
Engels, who indignantly rebutted each and every attack on Aveling
as the malicious slander of political enemies, was both the captive
of Aveling and his political mentor. His personal motives (loyalty
to Tussy) were admirable. But in the result he contributed in a
small way to the confuO T ^B W ^W ear^^uivenient and to tlie
disrepute into wliich British Marxism' fcll.
Aveling (it scems) surrounded himself with bouncing cheques
and le otlier people to settle his bilis and to comfort his discarded
mistresses. The notion that these prvate vices can be segregated
from his public and political virtue will not hold ice. His was tlie
behaviour of an litist, Ndio rnade a tolerable and entertaining
living for himself in tlie top storey of a poor movement. But what
of that other notion, so prevalent now that it may be called a
stereotype, that Eleanor all along was the noble and innocent
victim o f his abuse? Her suicide projected this interpretation
backwards, across the previous fifteen years; by killing herself as
she did, in a final protest against him, she rejected the ame she
liad long chosen - Eleanor Marx Aveling - and re-entered a
purified history as Eleanor Marx.
But I do not think this notion will do eitlier. Eleanor also first
entered the movenient as a special person, an litist, the daugliter of
Mohr. She could not possibly have been otlier. She was spoiled by
Engels and invited instantly into the control-room of the Tardis. His
18 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

sardonic contempt of those bungling English socialists rubbed off on

her. She was an enthusiastic Bohemian who shared Avelings theatri-
cal anibitions and who enjoyed his round of one-act plays, sentimen
tal comedies and xoirees. It is difficult not to see the Avelings in the
1880s except as a double act. If Dr Aveling enraged the American
socialists by charging them 25 dollars for corsage bouquets, Mrs
Aveling was the one who wore them. I think it probable that in these
early years she found Edwards flouting of bourgeois financial
proprieties to be daring and amusing. She leamed, to her grievous
cost, otherwise. But in those days they certainly appeared to outsiders
as a marital package. When Bemstein spoke in the advanced Fabian
household of the Blands of the Avelings, there was suddenly a
suspiciously unanimous chorus of praise o f them. Oh, the Avelings
are very clever peoplef Ol everybody must admit that they have
been of great Service to the movement, and so forth. It is always
remembered that Shaws Dubedat (as natural as a cat, he moves
among men as most men move among things) is derived from
Aveling; it is less often recalled that (in Bemsteins view) the
delibrate blindness and deafhess of Mrs Dubedat in respect o f all
that was said to the detriment of her husband is equally derived from
Eleanor:

Of course when he says he doesnt believe in morality, ordinary

pious people think he must be wicked. You can understand,
cant you, how all this starts a great deal of gossip about him,
and gets repeated until even good friends get set against him?

The important word is delibrate.

In her socialist propaganda work in the 188()s Eleanor was an
cnthusiast. I find in an od notebook a letter of hers proposing in
October 1885 that a Christmas Trcc be organised for the childrcn
of the Socialist Lcaguc:

We cannot too soon makc childrcn understand that Socialism

rneans happiness. Pcrhaps some friends (1 tremble a little at the
thought of Bax) will objcct to a Christmas tree. lf they or he
shd 1 will only rennd them of the origin of the Christian
festival of the beautiful od Pagan fcast that celebrated the
 ELEANOR MARX 19

birtli of light. Lct us, like thc Christians, adopt this od story to
our purpose. Is not Socialism the real new birtli, & with its
light will not the od darkness of the earth disappcar?

This is the Eleanor whom Marxists have always chcrishcd, thc

passionate daughter of Marx who disprovcs in all her life the libelling
of the family as cold-blooded materialists. Yet we have also to
remember that tlie cnthusiastic comrade, who combines a ready
resource of emotion witli an absolute conviction of her own political
integrity, can sometimes be an unsettling, even disruptive, fellow
worker. Yvonne Kapp gives us a curious insight hito the aftennath of
Bloody Sunday (1887). The demonstrators were prevented from
entering Trafalgar Square by over 4,000 plice and 600 guardsmen.
Tlie Radical, Irish and Socialist crowds were ingloriously routed, 200
of them to hospital. The next question for the movement was what to
do next week - whcthcr to rush the Square once m oE or whether to
demnstrate in Hyae Park. Eleanor, writing to sister Laura, had not a
momcnt of doubt:

We shail urge going to fear many will fiink ....

If we can induce them to go next Sunday, it will mean very
wann work. Last Sunday the troops had ammunition ready and
stood with f iS E bayonets. Next Sunday I think it very possible
thcy will actually fire. That would be very useful to the whole
movement here. It would compleja the work some of us have
been doing this long while past, of winning over tie better
Radical element to S o cia lisK d

A delcgate meeting of Radical clubs was called to take thc

decisin, and a witty Radical reprter noted:

In front of the platfonn sat Lady Macbcth Aveling and the

redoubtable Edward, D.Sc. They were of course in favour of a
spirited dash at Trafalgar Square; and very fine it was to sce the
lofty scom of Lady Macbeth when any speaker on the pacific
sidc rose to address the meeting. When the resolution proposing
the Hyde Park meeting was read Lady Macbeth tunied to
Edward, D.Sc., and hissed C-o-w-a-r-d-s! between her teeth.
20 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

Among tliosc whom Eleanor implicd to Laura were funks was

William Morris, slice he was less tliau convinced that tlie
unlcashing of the military upon an unanned crowd would be very
useful to the whole movcment. And Yvonne Kapp notes approv-
ingly: While Eleanor learat from Bloody Sunday that the working
class liad not yet enough experience o f struggle, Morris drew tlie
conclusin that it liad not yet enough education or organisation to
engage in struggle. Tliis is untrue, as Kapp must know, since she
has just quoted Morriss own hidgement on the niatter: he proposed
tiat the demonstrators should innnediately leam to struggle more
effecively, by organisation, Jcrowd discipline and drill, and a due
System of scouts, outposts and supports
Eleanor maintained this faith in the educative valu o f a severe
defeat, which would make the real class struggle apparent and
bring recalcitrant Britain into line with the Continent. In the last
year of her life. whffej gsistiim the engineers in their long lock-out,
she admitted in a letter to Natalie Liebknecht that we are
hopelessly beatciv Tt is true - ... entre nous - the beating may, in
tlie long run be as u s e f u l to ^ ^ ^ ^ g , more useful perhaps, than a
half-hearted Bvictoryj . . . Tliis did not prove to be true, and, in
general, too many of Eleanors political judgements are spoiled by
this kind of wann-hearted and wilflil political emoting.
Eleanor Marx was not the incomparable paragon and the
all-wise Marxist homing pigeon tliat Yvonne Kapp would have her
to be. Such hagiography tds* up ^gdimyjishiiijg tlie subject. She
was, however, a yery remarkable and gifted socialist, whose gifts
and whose Services grew greater in Her later years. The difference
can be seen during the New Unionism, from late in 1888 onwards,
when Eleanor identified especially with the Gasworkers and Gen
eral Labourers Union. In doing so, she ceased to act as an litist, a
special person, and ceased to skate in circles on the surface of the
movcment. She also disengages clearly from the figure of Aveling,
being clearly accepted in her own right by Will Thome and his
brethrcn. And also by the sisters of the unin, whom she played a
most significant part in organising and tlien in assisting with the
humdrum chores of weekly unin work.
One must always admire Tussy for her fight, her wamith, her
enthusiasm and her loyalties. 1 have argued that we cannot and
 ELEANOR MARX 21

should not always admire her for her poltica! judgement and
actions, because this cntails injusticc to her fcllow socialsts and
(more seriously) an almost religious belief in thc all-wisc guardian-
ship o f some Truth in thc Marx and Engels circlc. But we can,
after 1889, increasingly admire her for her judgement also, as wcll
as for a ncw humility which she learned in thc course of her own
personal tragedy. Much of her intcmational work, not only for the
large International but also for smallcr confercnccs of miners and
glass-workers, was tedious, backstage, and unrewarding: cndless
translations, much correspondence, interpreting and hosting of
delegates. Her practical work among the profoundly exploitcd
womeu o f the East End remains to us as an example. Her many
lecturing trips in the 1890s (sometimes still with Aveling) to
branches o f the ILP or SDF in the North of England, Scotland and
Wales were warmly received and selflessly given. There were no
corsage bouquets to be gained in Aberdeen, but much good and
reciprocal comradeship.
The greatest tragedy, as it seems to me, is that when she carne
to her end -^and she liad a right to choose tliat end - she did not
realise how much she liad come to be loved and honoured in the
movement, and how clearly her many friends dissociated Aveling
from her. She felt more apart from that British movement than she
needed to have felt. As to the suicide self, there is still something
unexplained. There is that curious letter, six montlis before the
event, to her half-brother, M arxs natural son, Freddie Domuti: I
am so alone, and I am face to face with a most horrible position:
ulter ruin - everything, to the Icist penny, or utter, open disgrace.
But even after that letter she took Aveling back and nursed him
through an operation. And when Freddie called on her, she could
not bring herself to tell him what the crisis liad becn. Certainly
utter, open disgrace could not have referred to the fear that she
would be left alone, exposed as Avelings discarded mistress. She
was long innured to that kind of gossip, and anyway - as she
demonstrated in that year by coming to the hclp of Edith
Lanchester - she liad not changcd her views on free marriage. As
Kapp suggests, some new but major default by Aveling upon
political or trade unin fimds, oFering the altemative of full
repayment or his imprisonment, might ft the letter; and yet. if that
22 MAKING H I S T O R Y

had been so, surely Avdings enemies would have forced the
matter into the light?
Something had happened, which even her contemporaries could
not know about or gossip about. Tsuzuki hints, but Kapp does not,
at what this could have been. Tussys deepest secret, which she
had only learaed on the General Y death, was that Freddie was,
not Engelss, but her own fathers natural son. K apps earlier
volume gives the fullest account o f these circumstances, and the
shock of their disclosure. This disclosure injured Eleanor at the
centre of her psyche - her loyalty to M ohr and her cherished
image of a blissful family life, She could easilyM in her frst
emotional response, have sobbed about it on Avelings shoulder.
Now, like a cat rnoving gjjiong women as most men move among
things, Aveling rnight have offered an ultimtum: your money or I
tell. The utter, open disgracc' would not for Eleanor_but for
what she cared for even more, the honour o f her father, the family,
tlie party, the enemies, acioss. the conti-
ncnts, would rage and lampoon and, evenS prse, would laugh. And
so, indeed, they might in those days have done. She would
certainly have preferred to d i e l maybe even did d ie S radier than
that tliis could come abqi. she did not withold that secret
for ever, but she witheld it for a further fifty years; and with that
she would have been sati<Sk_,
In all this the evidence presents a gap which, as Yvonne Kapp
writes, can be filled only by pur guesswork!^ For many otlier
gaps in Eleanors life guesswork no longer is needed: Kapps two
overflowing volumes have more than filled them up. I have argued
with some of her conclusions and against some of her metliods.
But I must insist once more: these volumes are a notable
achievement of scholarship and of lively exposition, and are wortliy
of their subject.
Froni New Society
 Homage to Tom Maguire

As thc writing of labour history becomes more professionalised, so

the centre of interest sliifts from front-line engagements to tlie
disputes and strategieal plans of GHQ. In the Colindalc Library, thc
Public Record Office, the national archives of trade unions, the
Place or Webb Collcctions, the tcchniques proper to a constitutional
or economic historian can be employed. Tlie dubious reminiscences
of local worthies can be disregarded (unless required for colour),
tlie regional skirmishes oatf be disniissed with an irritable footnote,
and the historian can get down in eamest to national minute-books,
Congress proceedings, intrigues among the leadership, and under-
hand political agreements.
And yet - how far are the techniques of the political or
constitutional historian adequate to deal with the tensions and lines
of growth in movements which (until tlie highly bureaucratised
post-1945 era) have always been mceptionally responsive to
problems of local social and - local splits and
breakaways - ground-swells of opinin at the rank-and-file level?
Tlie national historian still tends to have a curiously distorted
view of goings-on EHHJ the p ro v ir^ ra. Provincial events are seen as
shadowy incidcnts or unaccountable spontaneous uphcavals on the
periphery of tlie national scene, which the London wire-pullers try
to cope with and put into tlieir correct historical pattem. And
provincial leaders are conunonly denied ftill historical citizenship; if
mentioned at all, they are generally credited witli various wortliy
second-class abilitiesJ* but rarely regarded as men witli tlieir own
problems, tlieir own capacity for Initiative, and on occasions a
particular genius without which national programmes and new
political philosophies can never be wedded to movements of men.
Henee labour liistorians tend to fall into a double-vision; on the
one hand, there are the mass movements which grow blindly and
spontaneously mider economic and social pressures: on the other,
the leaders and manipulators - the Places, the Chartist joumalists,
24 MAKING HISTORY

the Juntas and parliamcntarians - who direct these elemental forces

into political channels. And where this superficial national approach
is beginning to give way to a more m ature school o f local histoiy,
employing sociological teclmiques, nevertheless \ve still find that
the national and local pictures are rarely put together.
The early years o f the ILP provide a striking example of this.
Tlie ILP grew from the bottom up: its birthplaces were in those
shadovvy parts knovvn as the provinces. It was created by the
fiising o f local elements into one national vvhole. From the
circumference its members carne to establish the centre ... 1 Its
first council seat was won in the Coin Valley: its first authentic
parliamentary challenges carne in Bradford and Halifax: its first
conference showed an overwhehning preponderance o f strength in
the North of England:2 its early directories show this strength
Consolidated.3 When the two-party political structure began to
crack, and a third party with a distinctively socialist character
emerged, this even occurred neidier in Westminster or in the
offices of Champions Labour E lector but amongst tie milis,
brickyards, and gasworks o f the West Riding.
Unless we register this fact, it is fiitile to speculate on the true
origins o f the ILP. Certainly H ardie and Burgess and Blatchford
were the foremost propagandists for an independent p arty o f labour.
Certainly Champion worked for it, and so did M ahon, the
Avelings, and the Hoxton Labour League. so - for that m atter -
did Hyndman when he first founded the Democratic Federation,
and Engels in liis Labour Standard articles o f 1881, and the
pedigrce is a great deal longer than that.4 Indecd, diere w as no lack
o f prophets. The probleni was to transate prophecy into stable
organisation and mass enthusiasm. Morcover, local grievances,
severe industrial disputes, mass disaffection amongst Liberal voters
these in themsclves were not sufficient to bring tlie tliing about.
The 188()s saw more than one falso dawn the crofters stmggle,
the socialist propaganda among the Northumberland minis during
the strike o f 1887, the municipal revolt at Bolton in 1887.5 ln
every case the socialist pioncers threw their hats in the air; in
every case they retired disappointed and puzzled, as the electorate
swung back to od allcgianccs, the ncw organisations crumbled, the
councillors were re-absorbed by the Great Liberal Party.
 H O M A G E TO T OM MAGU1RE 25

The customary national picture of the West Riding break-

through attributes the emergence of the ILP to one event - the
great strike at Mamiingham Mills, Bradford. Pressed forward
blindly by economic hardship and the effect of President
McKinleys tariffs, the good-hearted Nonconfonnist Yorksliire
workers tumcd instinctivelP fo the arms of Nunquam and Keir
Hardie. But this will not do at all. It does not explain why a strike
at one firm could have become the focus for the discontent of a
whole Riding. It does not explain the nature of this discontent. It
does not explain why the Yorkshire ILP was so deeply rooted, so
stubborn in face of Liberalgblandishments, so competently led. It
passes Oyer incidents of equal Biportance to the Manningham
strike. It implies an appalling attitude of condes^Hion towards
these provincial folk who are credited with every virtue except the
capital human virtue of conscious action in a conscious liistorical
role.
If we must counter-pose to this legend our own propositions,
then they are these: the two-party system crackcd in Yorkshire
bccause a very large number of Yorkshire working men and
women took a conscious decisin to fomi a socialist party. The
fertilisation of the masses with socialist ideas was not spontaneous
but was the result of the work, over many years, of a group of
exceptionally giftcd propagandists and tradc unionists. Tliis work
did not begin with street-comer oratory and end with the singing of
the Marseillaise in a socialist clubroom, although both of these
activities played their part; it required also tenacity and foresight,
qualitics o f mass leadership and the rare ability to relate theory to
practice without losing sight of theory in the press of events. And
if we must have one man who played an outstanding role in
opening the way for the ILP, tliat man was a semi-employed
Lecds-Irish photographer in his late twenties - Tom Maguire.

O f course, an individual does not create a movement of

thousands: this must be the product of a community. And the
West Riding woollen district, in the 1880s, was a distinctive
conununity, with conunon characteristics imposed by its staple
26 MAKI NG HI S T O R Y

industries, geographical isolation, and historical traditions. Al-

though the population was rapidly swelling and absorbing imrni-
grants,6 Yorkshire traditions vvere vigorous, local dialect almanacs
still thrived, the Yorkshire Faciory Times niade a feature of
dialect stories and verses, and in the more isolated areas, like the
Coin and Calder and Holme Valleys, memories were long. In
such communities, an alien agitator from outside would niake
little headway; but once the local leaders moved, the whole
community might follovv. Leedsi, on the western edge o f the
vvoollen district, was a more cosmopolitan city, with more
diverse industry, a larger professional and clerical population, and
a recent influx of Jewish workers into the ready-made clothing
trade.7 New ideas, new national movements, tended to extend
their influence to the woollen distriets, not directly from London
but by way of Leeds; ^ ^ t e x t i l c * workers leaders leam t their
socialism from the Leeds and Bradford Socialist Leagues; Ben
Tumer, the dialect poet from Huddersfield, was initiated into the
movement when he flitted for two years to Leeds.8
It is important to recall h e far independent labour was already,
in the mid-1880s, part of the structure o f this community. In one
sense, the ILP gave political % xpression to the various fomis of
independent or semi-independent working-class organisation wliich
had been built and Consolidated in the W est Riding in the previous
thirty years - co-operatives, trade unions, friendly societies, various
fomis o f chapel or educational or economic self-help. Among these,
the co-operative societies were strongest;y George Garside, who won
the first ILP seat in the Coin Valley, was a prominent co-operator.10
The trade unions were the weakest. In the late sixties or early
seventies trades councils existed in Leeds, Bradford, Halifax, Hud-
dcrsfield, and Dcwsbury; but by the early cighties all had disappeared
except for those at Leeds and Bradford, and these survived in
attenuated form through the support o f skilled and craft unions.11
When the Bradford Trades Council invited the TUC to meet in their
honre tovvn in 1888, one of the reasons given was the fact that the
work-people engaged in the staple industries of the district are in a
very disorganised State;12 a Bradford Congress would boost local
inrale - as indecd it did, although in unexpccted dircctions. Ben
Turncr's history of the early years of the textile unin is a record of
 H O M A G E TO T OM MA G U I R E 27

crratic spurts of organising, followcd by dissolution and apatliy; We

wcrc all poor folks with poor incomcs and poor trade and hadn't thc
visin that we ought to llave liad.13
If thc indcpcndencc of labour found cxprcssion in sonic parts
of the conununity's lile, there was littlc cvidcncc of this in thc
carly cightics in thc political complexin of thc West Riding. It
required a nevv gcncration, and thc new militan! unionism, to twist
sclf-hclp into socialist campaigning. The prcvalcnt tone of thc
earlier ycars is ono of surfeited, self-satisfcd Libcralism. Local
papers wcre busy celebrating the improvements in standards of lifc
sincc the hungry fortics, and recalling for the hundredth time the
wisdom o f the repeal of the Com Laws. Local historians, with
genuinc feeling, commendcd the passing of the sanded floors and
ccllar-dwellings and oatmeal diet of the days of the poverty-
knockersT and some looked back, almost with nostalgia, to the
fiery wool-combers and the Chartist weavers with their torchlight
meetings.14 In March 1885 a gathering of Chartist veterans took
place in a Halifaxjemperance hotel; after an excellent repast and
an address reviewing the progress^raT^H people since 1844, the
best thanks of the meeting were moved to Mr Gladstone and his
govemnient for passing into law those principies which we have
endeavoured during a long life to enjoy. The motion was seconded
by George Webber, at one time the most intransigent of physical
forc leaders. Tlie majority of those attending the meeting, the
report concludes, have become men of business and in some cases
employers o f labour; and the reprter could not pass over the
opportunity for taking their Uves as a text for a small piece on tlie
rewards o f ccononiyBindustry, and temperance. 15 Even Erncst
Jones's Chartist stalwarts liad found their place in Smiless
Vallialla.
Indecd, it is difFicult to recognise tlie Bradford of Jowetts
rccollcctions - squalid back-to-back, opon privy middens, an
infant mortality rate (in some distriets) of over one in four1(i -
in the complaccnt compilations of a committce originated by Sir
Jacob Behrcns to inquire into the Condition of thc Industrial
Classes in 1887.17 Here the statistics are carefully compiled, the
risc in the wages o f the skillcd workers abundantly proved, the
abolition o f some of the worst abuses of thc fortics noted. And
28 MAKING HISTORY

yet, less than tliree years later, not only the Yorkshire Faciory
Times, but also local Liberal and Conservative papers carried
exposures o f decaying slums, insanitary conditions, appalling
social evils.18 W hat made tlie difference?
It is true that a new generation w as arising w hich dcmandcd
more o f life than had contented their parents. In the 1850s the
crampcd blocks o f back-to-backs were at least a step forward
from the cellars, and the warren-like folds o f earlier days; in
the nineties the ending o f all back-to-back building w as to be a
leading point in ILP municipal cam paigns.19 B ut too much
inluence in this chango o f Outlook should not be attributed to
tlie Education Act o f 1870. The ILP strongholds, Bradford and
Halifax, were also the strongholds o f half-time working; children
went into the milis at the age o f 10, on passing Standard III,
and in Halifax, by a little-known local exemption clause, tliey
could commence w o ^ R h e n barely literate.20 M oreover, in the
previous twenty years the enforcement o f the Factory A cts in tlie
W est Riding had been**notorious for its laxity.21 12 per cent o f
those married at Bradford Parish Church in 1887 still signed
their ames with a cro ss22
or should too much weight be placed upon the argument
tliat the general improvement in trade in the later eighties
emboldened the textile workers and placed them in a strong
position for strike action and organisation. This w as certainly a
factor in the success o f the Leeds unskilled agitation among the
bricklayers labourers and othcrs. B ut the textile industry presents
a very different picturc. The W est Riding woollen trade provides
a notoriously dangerous field for generalisation, owing to its
manifold subdivisions, local variants, and specialised niarkets;
where American tariffs might create chaos in the fine w orsted
industry o f Bradford tlicy would lcave Batley, the new shoddy-
opolis, unaffcctcd.2-' Nevertheless, ccrtain conunon features may
be indicatcd. (1) Yorkshire cmployers had been spoiled by the
abnonnal boom years, 1870-74, a boom to which thcy lookcd
back, even in the nineties, w ith nostalgia; during this period
there was a spatc o f mill-building, inflated valuations. and profits
were admitted to be inordinately large.24 (2) In the ciisuing ten
years, tariffs (cspecially in G cnnany and USA), kccner world
 H O M A G E TO TOM MAGU1RE 2')

compctition, and thc onsct of thc grcat dcpression, led to a

markcd decline in profits, sharp local compctition, and readjust-
ments within the industry;25 but despite a falling-off in overtime,
and the onset of periods of short time, thc volume of trade
continued to expand and fas a Leeds observer noted) in many
trades the sum o f profits has becn to some extent kept up by
the increcised volume of trade.26 Between 1886 and 1890 (the
year of the McKinley tariff) problcms of compctition and
readjustment were intensified. (3J Thfdghout these fifteen years
(1875-90) we have nothing approaching a dcpression of the kind
niet by the cotton industry in ftfe ^ffir-war years of this century.
Vast fortunes coiMiued to be amassed, and the brunt of the
crisis was borne by the textile workers whose wages deelined
throughout the period.27 This decline toss cffccted ihrough direct
wage reductions; increased mcchanisation and intensification of
labour; and the increasing proportion of women to niale workers
in the industry. (4) Thus we h S flin * th e ' WOol textile industry of
the late eighties an extreme example of Tljj^ gulf*which oponed
between the labour aristocracyjar a T M tMSKilled workers at this
time in other industries. Despite a few pockets of organised rnale
aristocrats - power-looin over-lookers, card setters, warp dressers,
and the like28 - thc bulk of the labour forc endured a
stationary or declining standard of living. The high proportion of
women and juvenile workers, and the variations and jealousies
between town and town, mili and mili, and even shed and shed,
placed almost insuperable difficulties in tlie way of trade-union
organisation.2y Mens wages were continually forced down to the
level o f the women, and throughout the district thc custoni of
the family wage prevailed. (5) In these conditions, general trade
unionism could scarcciy get off the ground unless backed by
exceptional resources. The skilled trade unionists camiot be
blamed for indifference; in 1876 the Bradford Trades Council
ntade a sustained attcmpt to organise the dyers, but only ten
workers attended a well-advertised meeting.30 The Weavers
Union, Consolidated after the Huddersfield strike of 1883, hung
on for several years only by the skin of its teeth.31 It was the
enonnous publicity provided by the Yorkshire Faclory Times,
founded in 1889, by the successfiil struggles of the unskillcd
workers in London and (above all) in Leeds, and the indefatig-
able activity of socialist and new unionist propagandists which
provided the catalyst for the movement o f 1890-93.
Even so, a paradox must be noted: it was not the success,
but tlie partial failure - the impossibility o f complete success -
in the tradc-union field, which tumed the textile workers into the
channels of independent political action. Had tlie Manningham
Mills strike ended in victory, like the struggles o f dockers,
gasworkers, and building workers, then Bradford night not have
bccn the birthplace of the ILP. Defeat at Manningham, and the
precarious nature of the partial organisation achieved elsewhere,
were a spur to political action - and for three leading reasons:
First, the bittcr indignation aroused by economic oppression and
social injustice, against which industrial action appeared to
provide no effective remedy, was bound to break out in the
demand for an independent class party opposed to the parties of
the employers. Second, if the causes o f poverty could not be
removed, its ejfecs could be tackled by resolute independent
action in the field of local govemment: henee the great
importance of the early campaigns o f the ILP in the West
Riding on unemployment, against the half-time system, for fair
contracts, school milk and medical Services, on sanitary problems
and artisan's dwellings, nurscry schools and slum clearance.32
Tliird, the complexity and subdivisions o f the textile industry,
and the preponderance of women and juvenile workers, together
with the sub-contracting and sweat-shops in the Leeds tailoring
industry - all these gave overwhelming point to the demand for
the Legal Eight Hour Day. Political action was seen as the only
effective remedy for industrial grievances.33
The appeal of the Legal Eight Hour Day had a massive
simplicity; it appeared to offer at one blow results which
trade-union action could only hope to achieve after many years
of hazard and sacrifice; it might go some way towards relieving
unemployment as well. Moreover, the demand was in the direct
linc of the strongest West Riding traditions: Oastler and the Ten
Hours Movement: the more recent campaign of the Factory Acts
Reform Association, whose cfforts to win the nine-hours day
resultcd in the W /i hour wcek in 1874. The cxperience of half a
 H O M A G E TO T O M MA G U I R E 31

century had led Yorkshire workers to bclieve that argumcnts that

a shorter working day would lcad to lower wages and loss of
trade to foreign conipetitors, wcre no more than employers
propaganda points.34
Here we have some of the ingrcdicnts from which the West
Yorkshire ILP was made. A close-knit community, in which tlie
independence of labour found social, economic, religious expres-
sion. An industry facing readjustment and competition. Declining
wages and appalling social evils. Tremendous problems in tlie way
of effective trade-union organisation. A strong tradition of cam-
paigning for legal protection in industry and limitation of hours.
And to tliis tradition, another must be added: the tradition of the
political independence of labour. The Chartist organisation had
survived in West Yorkshire as long as in any part of the country.
Halifax was Ernest Joness VJbnstituency, and while Chartist
sentiments were appeased b ^ th e adoption of Stansfeld, tlie friend
of Mazzini, as one of tlie two members in 1859, tlie fame broke
out afresli during the Refonn League agitation. Jones stumped the
West Riding, addressing enomious crowds; he was invited to stand
both 1 Dewsbiifyflld Halifax, and although he preferred Manches-
terf Ihe Halifax meP revdtgPBjfttet1 one of their sitting members,
the local mill-owner Akro^ffiPfaPF sponsored tlie independent
candidature of E.O. Grecning, the Co-operator, vvho achicvcd the
very Hfespectabl^jjpoll of 2,802.fi 'EHfc* was iii 1868: lads in their
teens at the tiillfe would be 859*6mKt) years of age when the ILP
was formed. WhaffiTohn Listertfiiftested Halifax for the ILP in
1893 his etedtion manifest* appealed to Radicaf Halifax, and his
supporters recalled the traditions of Greening, Jones, and (local
veterans) Ben Rushton and John Snowden, and demanded indig-
nantly whether a Wliig should be allowed to sit for such a
borough.36
All the same, we should not seek for an unbroken independent
labour tradition, from Chartism into ILP. On its dissolution
Greenings lection connnittee handed on its fimds to the Halifax
Liberal Electoral Association; and were not thosc man-eating tigers,
Geo. Webber and Ben Wilson, toasting Gladstone in lemonade in
1885? In 1884 19-year-old Tom Maguire was writing to the
Chrslian Sbdatisl* waming that land nationalisation might prove a
32 MAKI NG HI S TORY

diversin from tlie niain assault on thc bastions o f capitalism, as

Com Law Repeal liad proved before:

Do you not remember, good folk, the Briglit and Cobden cry of
Free Trade and Corn Law Rcpcal, which along with capitalis-
tic conibination, anniliilated Chartisni, the only genuinc political
niovement o f mdem times in favour o f the pcople? ... Emcst
Jones and Brontcrrc O Brien are forgotten, ridieuled, out of
history. Jolin Bright and Richard Cobden are household words.37

The surviving Cliartists, and many o f their sons, had come to tcmis
with Liberal Radicalism; they wcre (as Engels said) the grandchil-
dren o f thc od Cliartists who wcre now cntering the line of
battlc,3R rediscovcring Chartist traditions from family or local
folk-lore or published reminisccnces.39 A quite remarkable propor-
tion o f the young men and wonien prominent in thc early
Yorkshire ILP clainied Chartist forebears or the influence of
Chartist traditions in their childhood.40 Eli, love, you cannot
understand now, one Chartist great grandfather said to a little girl
who was to beconie a leader o f the Bradford textile workers, but
vvlien you gct to be a big girl I want you always to think for the
pcople, and live for thc pcople, for it will be a long time before
they can do it for themsclves. 41
One further ngredient nnist not be overlookcd: Radical Noncon-
fomiity. We niay leave on one side thc fiitilc and unliistorical
argument that goes by the lame, M ethodism or M arxism ? Tlic
attempt to suggest that the ILP was founded by a slate o f Methodist
parsons and local prcachcrs is even more wildly inaccuratc than thc
attempt to attribute it to the singlc-handcd clTorts o f Engels and
Aveling. O f tliose prominent in its formation in Yorkshire, Tom
Maguire was an atheist with an Irish-Catholic background; Isabclla
Ford a Quaker; Ben Turner and Alian Gee (a late convcrt from
Libcralism) were secularists;42 A lf Mattison was a disciple o f Edward
Carpcnter; John Lister a Catholic; Walt Wood, the gasw orkers
leader, would appear to have becn a happy pagan - as may liavc boen
Paul Blaud and Tom Paylor;4-1 only Jowett, W.H. Drew, and perhaps
Balmforth o f I luddersfield, among the initiators o f the niovement.
sui't'ost thcinsclves as active Nonconfoi nnsts In truth. Radical Non-
 HOMAGE TO TOM MA G U I R E 33

conformity liad bcconic a rctnrding social and poltica! influcncc in

thc cightics, its face set in a perpetual grimacc at thc Establishcd
Church and the Anglican landed aristocracy; the face was, only too
often, the face of a niill-owner, like Alfred Illingworth, the Noncon-
formist worstcd-spiimcr, whom Tillctt fought in West Bradford. The
Bradford textile workers owed their socialisni no more to the Mcth-
odist Church than the peasants of South Italy owc their conuuunism
to the Catholic; and if the socialists succeedcd in swecping whole
chapel-flills of the former into the movement, by their broad, unsec-
tarian, ethical appeal, thc crcdit is due to thcm and not to the
Nonconformist Establishnicnt which fought thc ILP every inch of
the way.
Once the brcak-through had been made, it is true that the
movement gained a moral dimensin; that Radical Christian
tradition, which had been seen before on a Ludditc scaffold and in
Chartist chapis and camp meetings, swept the West Riding like a
revivalist campaign; we meet again the full-toncd moral periods,
the Biblical cchoes, the references to the Sermn on the Mount.44
It is not a question of creed, belief, or church, but a question of
language, a question of moral texture. It was as rnuch a revolt
agciinst organised Christianity as a form of Christian expression.
The Yorkshire ILP was a sturdy cross-bred. Its leaders owed much
of their theory to Marxist propagandists; but they preferred tlie
moral exhortations of William Morris to the doctrinaire tones of
Hyndman, and they were happier with NunquanT tlian with
Quelch. When they found out that Tillett was a Congregationalist,
it niade a fine propaganda point with the electoratc.45 But this was
not among their reasons for their choice of him as candidato; he
was selected as a prominent new unionist and a socialist.46
Nonconfomiity - Radical Nonconformity - was outraged. The
Bradford and District Nonconfomiist Association passed a unani-
mous resolution of confidence in Alfred Illingworth, MP, the
widcly-estcemed Nonconfomiist, and a correspondent to thc
Bradford Observer wrote of the ILPs intervention in terms that
suggest they were guilty of sacrilege:

A humble but ardent supporter of a politician whom I regard as

a constan! and sagacious servant o f God and thc pcoplc, how
34 MAK1NG HISTORY

coiild I scc w ithout sorrow , and I niay say horror, the entrance
o f M r Ben T illctt to fasten likc a v ip er on his throat?47

M r lllingw orths throat now and, the im plication runs, G ods throat
next. T he N onconform ist A ssociation callcd a public meeting in
support o f both, w ith a pride o f reverends on the platform . Tilletts
follow ers packcd the m eeting, an d D rew and Pickles intcrceptcd
Jovvett - on his w ay to a C o-operative m eeting w ith the cry: You
are ju s t the m an w e w a n t'. A t the p u b lic m eeting, Briggs Pricstley,
M P, presided, fresh from an im popular piece o f parliam entary sabo
tage against a F actory Bill. O ne after the other, tw o reverends wcre
shouted dow n; then the audience storm ed the platform , pushing up
Jow ett, M inty, and Pickles (dubious nonconform ists, these last two),
and rcm aining in u p ro ar until Jow ett w as allow ed to move an
am endm ent. Im pressively he w am e d the clcrgy: I f you persist in
opposing the labour m ovem ent there will soon be m ore reason than
ever to com plain o f the absence o f w orking m en from you r chapis:

T he labourers w ould cstablish a L ab o u r C hurch (cheers and

B ravo Jow ett) and there they w ould chccr for Jess Christ, the
w orking m an o f N azarcth (cheers).4X

T h e L abour C hurches in B radford and Lceds, w hen they wcre

cstablished, w ere not only undenom inational; it is also diffcult to
describe tlicm as C hristian o r religious in any sense cxccpt that o f the
broad ethical appcal o f the religin o f socialism w hosc text was
M o rriss Fcllow ship is L ife. T hey retained sufficicnt ceremonial
forms, and a sufficient adm ixturc o f C hristian speakers, for the
N onconform ist m em bers to feel at home; but the liym n niight be
M aguires H ey for the D ay! and the serm n might be by Edw ard
C arpcntcr from a text from W hitm an. C arpenters friend and disciple,
A lf M attison, w as First secrctary o f the Lceds L abour Church, while
the serm n at the Bradford L abour C hurch, on the occasion o f the
foundation confercncc o f the ILP, w as prcaclied by G eorge Bernard
Shaw - a tactful but uncom prom ising address which ended with the
avow al that he w as an allieis!.41-' W e m ust not underestimate the
im portance o f the religious associations draw n upon in the specchcs
ot' II. i k Iic or Tilk'tt. thesc reverberated in the hearts o f a generation
 H O M AG E TO TOM M A G U IR E 35

who liad pickcd up tlicir little education in Sunday school or chapul

But these owed little to any doctrine o f personal salvation or personal
sin; the sin w as thc sin o f thc capitalist class, and salvation must
come through the efforts o f tlie working class itsclf, expressed
through solidarity and brotherhood, and aspiring tow ards a co-
operative commonwcalth. Tom Mami, when he stumpcd Yorkshire,
liad little Christian charity to spare for non-union nien or blacklcgs,
even though he w as vvilling cnough to employ the parable o f the
Good Saniaritan as a scourge 011 the back o f the Ossett Corporation
which liad let out its scavenging by contract.50 Tlie broad ethical
appeal was the same, whether it w as voiced by the Quaker Isabella
Ford, or M argaret McM ilIan (Edcate every child as if it were your
ow n), or by the free-thinker Charles Glyde: I wish to treat all poor
as I would my own fathcr, mother, sister, or brother.51 In the early
nineties tliis ethical appeal gave fervour, self-confidence and stamina
to the movement; later, when it was taken out o f its direct social
context and transfonned into platfonn rhetoric by such men as
Snowden and G rayson, it w as to smudge political understanding and
weaken the movement. But in 1892 this authentic moral revolt was
one o f the first indications to a cl b o |se rv e r that the 1LP liad come
to stay; it is o f the people - such * ill be the secret o f its success.
The letter is from Tom M aguire to Edward Carpenter:

Now the mouiitain, so long in labour, has been delivered o f its

mouse - a bright active cheery little mouse with ju st a touch o f
venom in its sharp little teeth ... Our mouse though young in
the flesh is od in the spirit, since to my own knowledge this is
its third reincarnation ....
You will find in your travels tliat this new party lifts its head
all over the North. It has caught tlie people as I imagine the
Chartist movement did. And it is o f the people - such will be the
secret o f its success. Everywhere its bent is Socialist bccause
Socialists are the only people who have any message for it.52

II

No man liad worked hardcr for this than Maguire. O f poor

Irish-Catholic parentage, singlcd out by the priests for his intclli-
36 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

gence, he liad found his own vvay to secularism at the age of 16?
joined the Democratic Federation at 17, was finding his feet as an
open-air propagandist and a lecturer in the debating clubs and
cofFee tavcrns in his IHth year.53 J.L. Mahon was in Leeds for a
period in 1884, and stmck up a friendship with him. When the
split in the SDF took place, Maguire sided with Morris and was
placed on the Provisional Council o f the League. He comnieuced
the work of building a small Leeds branch, while also giving aid
to Bland, Minty, and Pickles in Bradford.54 By October 1885 there
were sixteen Cfds socialists in good standing: most were young
industrial workeff uneniployed or on snort tim e*^ i
He weiit1through the whole gamut of exiSSeitices which niade
up the lives of the pioneers; the open-air work, the occasional big
nieeting for Morris or Annie Besant, the attacksE- especially from
his od Catholic associates (we shall live their narrow fiiry down,
he wrote to M a h o n ^ f lw j^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ B p tin g s wlicn propaganda and
pleasure were first prcniiscs
were opened, tlie songs and camaraderie of the fervent sect.58 A
poet, and a man of great intcllectual vigour and curiosity, he was
naturally drawn to Williani M o rra s side of the niovement. But
more than most , tliat the early
propaganda was too aW ^C gto afflljfeve a wide popular'appeal. As
early as 1884 he singled out the Eight Hours Day demand as of
prime importance;5y although*- as a photographers assistant - he
was not a trade unionist himself, he was directing the Socialist
League, in 1885, towards work among the miners and the ASE/'
From the maturity of his late twenties he looked back tolerantly
upon these years. We were kindly, well-disposcd young chaps, he
wrote, whose object was the lntcmationalisation of the entire
world. As time went by, and no progress was made (after four
years propaganda the League branch was only 30 strong), the
socialists began to divide:

Sonie thought that we might advantagcously limit the scope of our

ideal to the five continents, while directing our operations more
immcdiatcly to our own locality. Othcrs were strongly of the
opinin that our ideal was too narrow, and they proposed as the
object of the society the internationalisation of the known and
 H O M A G E TO TOM MAGUI R E 37

undiscovered vvorld, with a view to the eventual inter-solarisation

o f the planets .... They entirely ignored the locality to which, for
the most part, they were comparative strangers ,...61

The divisin so parodied followed closely the divisin betwecn the

anarchists and parliamentarians in the national Socialist League. In
the wrangles o f 1887 and 1888, the Leeds branch sided with the
parliamentarians; after 1888, vvhile the Leeds and Bradford Leagues
maintained their link with the national body, sold their quota of
Coinnumweal, and regarded William Morris with undiminished
affection, they took less and less notice of London goings-on. Tliey
subscribed now to Keir Hardies M iner, 2s. 6d. was scraped
together for the Mid-Lothian election finid; and while Maguire still
contributed poems and articles to Commonweal, he also maintained
a link with Mahon, who liad now broken with the League and who
produced in 1888 bis blueprint for a labour party, The Lctbour
Progrcunme62 After the Bradford TUC of the same year, the
Yorkshire Socialist Leaguers directed their energies towards the two
main objectives: the conversin o f the trade unions, and propa
ganda for an indcpendent party of labourrA definite step is now
bcing taken towards the fonnation o f a Socialist Labor Party in
Leeds, declarcd a handbill o f autumn 1888, which announced
lectures by Maguire on The Need o f a Labour Party, and by Tom
Paylor, on The Lesson o f the Trades Congress.63 When Mahon
and H. A. Barkcr launched their Labour Union, Maguire and
Pickles (o f Bradford) were among the signatories.64 After Maguires
death, a correspondent in the Yorkshire Factory Times conuncnted
on the breadth o f bis reading and tlie volume o f propaganda work
which he undertook in these years - Three lectures each Sunday,
and two, and occasionally three, in the course of the week, in
addition to articles, poems, and Ietters to the press.
The propaganda gained growing audiences in the coffee tavems,
Radical clubs, and at the open-air spouting place - Vicars Croft.
But the Leeds Trades Council was a strongliold of the Liberal
skillcd unionists, and - except in the ASE - no headway could be
madc. The break-through, when it carne, carne in spectacular
fashion. Some bricklayers labourers, attending an open-air nieeting,
stayed on to discuss their grievances (rathcr aimlessly) with
38 MAKING HI S TORY

Paylor and Sweeney. The Leaguers offered their clubroom for a

comnrittee meeting of thc men 011 the next Sunday. On 30 June
1889 3,000 labourers attended a meeting at which they were
addressed by Maguirc, Paylor, and other socialists; 200 ames were
handed in for tlie nevv unin; a committee elected; within a week
sevcral thousand labourers were on strike for a l/2d. an hour (from
5d, to 5'/jd.); witiiin five weeks the unin was 800 strong, and the
strike had ended in victory.45 a week later the great Dock Strike in
London began.
It is a comment upon the divorce between the skilled unionists
and tire unskilled that the labourers turn^ to tire socialists ratlrer
tiran to the Leeds Trades C ounciljon which the skilled building
unions had long been represented. Fronr the outset the skilled
unionists in Leeds tegasdSf the socialist intervention with undis-
guised hostility, wlrile er*ii Yorkshire Factory Times published
a grunrbling, suspicious editorial.
The socialists for their part were elated, and were not above
rubbing salt in the woutid: We are endeavouring to organise thc
unskilled labourers in all branches o f iirdustry in tire town, since
the aristpCrps o f j^bour tdtc i ^ E t e g in organising tlw jnt?? But no
one anticipated the nearly incredible surge o f unskilled agitation
which engulfed the West Riding in the next twelve nrontlrs. Trade
was brisk, and Maguire repeatedly urged tire workers to seize their
opportunity; in Decenrber he was addressiirg a denronstration o f the
newly fomred Leeds Secon o f the Gasworkers and General
Labourers Union (enrbracing already' gasworkers, nraltsters, dray-
nren, general labourers, dyers, and clainiing a niembership o f 3,000)
and urging thenr to press honre their advantage wlrile the enrploy-
ers could not afford to tarry;68 a niontli later he was exhorting a
meeting of clayworkers and brickyard labourers to go with the
flowing tide.69 Mattison, the young skilled engineer, helped out
the Gasworkers as secretary; he rccallcd later the shock o f surprise
when Will Tirme carne up to help, with his hcavy rrawys boots
and knotted red handkerchief.70 Week after week, Maguire, Paylor,
Sweeney, Cockayne, and Tunrer attended denronstrations, assisted
strikes, presided at the fornration of nevv unions: tranrway workers,
bine dvers, Corporation workers, plasterer's labourers, paviours
t . , 1 ...... , Ipinic s IMmuivi s in Iu w o rk e rs In O r l o b e r IKK1) c>()0
 H O M A G E TO T O M M A G U I R E 39

girls struck at Messrs. Arthurs tailoring works, against the

dcduction of Id. out of every Is. eamed in paymcnt for motive
power on their sewing-machincs; despite the sclflcss assistance of
Isabella Ford71 and Maguire, and the ambiguous support of the
Trades Council,72 tlie strike ended aer the sixth week in a sad
collapse.73 But tlie defcat scarcely checkcd the advancing wave of
unionism. In late October 1889 the Leeds Tailors Union (catering
at first chiefly for Jewish workers) was formed, with Maguire in
the chair.74 The Tailoresses Union continued to grow, with the
particular assistance of Isabella Ford. When some 3,000 tailoring
workers went on strike, M agui was adviser, organiser, and poet,
writing for tliem The Song of tlie Sweaters Victim, tlie singing
of which by several hundred Jews in their broken English may be
better imagined tlian described:

... every worker in every trade,

In Britain and ererywhere,
Whether he labour by needle or spade,
Shall gather in his rightfiil share 75

In March diese new unions still rcniained outsidc the Trades

Council, and liad grouped in a new body called the Yorkshire
Labour Council.76 The first M a y L e e d s *H'*celebrated
by this Council, in association with the Gasworkers. The
procession alone was estimated at 6,000, headed by the banner
o f the Leeds Jewish Tailors, Pressers, and Machinists: a band
playing the Marseillaise: 1,100 Jewish tailors: 900 slipper-
niakers: 800 gasworkers: dyersRmaltsters, teamsters, and labour-
ers. Between the slipper-makers and the gasworkers there
niarched the sniallest and proudest contingent - 40 niembers of
the Leeds Socialist league. Maguire presided at the niain plat-
fomi, where the denionstration was swelled by several thousand,
and a resolution passed endorsing tile necessity of an Eight
Hour Day ... as the first step towards the abolition of national
and industrial war; the overthrow of race hatred; and the ultiniate
eniancipation of Labour.77 The Amiual Report of tile Leeds
Trades Council for 1890 mentions fbeither May Day or the gas
strike, but recorded the Councils resolution in October (on a
40 MAKING HISTORY

small majority vote) that a general Eight H o u rs legislative

measure is impracticable.78
Maguire, Paylor, M attison - all w ere in their early twenties
when this suddcn elevation from the status o f a sect to that of
leadcrs and advisers to the unskilled o f h a lf a populous county
took place. They had no national advisers. M orris w as retiring in
disgust from the anarchist playground w hich the London League
was becoming; anyvvay, he w as w riting N ew s from Nowhere,
which his Leeds followers read eagerly in the odd half-hours
spared from unin organising7y although he found tim e to deliver
his last notable address for the League, on T he Class Struggle, in
Leeds in M arch 1890. It is a noble and far-seeing lecture, but its
only practical proposal w as that a G eneral Strike for socialism
might be the best next step m for w hich advice M aguire and Paylor
moved a hearty vote o f thanks.80 F orty miles aw ay, at Millthorpe,
Edward Carpenter watched events w ith awe; he had no advice to
offer, and his influence upon the Leeds socialists m ade itself felt in
other ways.81 Cumiinghame G raham helped w ith a fleeting visit, as
did Thome. The only national figure w ho kept his finger on events
in Leeds was M aguires od friend, J.L. M ahon o f the Labour
Union; and his reputation w as m uch tam ished by the failure o f the
London Postmens Union.82 The Leeds and B radford socialists were
virtually detachcd from London and throw n upon their own
resources; in M ay 1889 they held a joint dem onstration at the
famous Chartist meeting-spot, Blackstone Edge, w ith the Lancashire
branches o f the SDF;83 in July o f the sam e year a Yorkshire
Socialist Federation was set up.84 But their own resources w ere not
slcnder. The years o f seemingly fm itless propaganda, when the
joint forces o f Leeds and Bradford socialism had tram ped like a
group o f youth hostclicrs, sprcading the gospcl in villages and
singing M orriss songs in country laes,85 had not been wasted.
Maguire and Jowett, in their very early twenties, botli showed
astonishing maturity; they had gained a fiind o f experience, a clear
thcory o f politics, and a sclf-confidcnce and lan, which prepared
them for thosc vintage years, 1889-92, when (in Ben T u m e rs
words) it was not alone a labour o f love, but a labour o f joy, for
the workers scemed aw ake.86
T he clim ax to Leeds new unionism , and the final p ro o f o f the
 H O MA G E TO T OM MAGUI R E 41

ability of Maguirc's small group, carne in the gas strike (or

lock-out) of June-july 1890. The rapid organisation of the previous
winter had won, without a struggle, sweeping gains for the nien,
including tlie eight-hour day. In the sunimer of 1890, when the
demand for gas fell off, the Gas Sub-Committee of the Liberal-
dominated municipal counctf, dctcrmincd to counter-attack with all
the forces at its conunand, and to enforce the withdrawal of certain
concessions.87 A short, buH violent and extremely ill-tempered,
struggle ensued. The Gas Comntftce alienated general working-
class and ntuclt tniddfe-dass SCtttttneitt by its stupid and high-
handed tactics, particularly 1 bldbdtsHt ^attempts to displace local
nien by blackle*jL irttptjrted (Often under false pretences) from great
distances and at gret-ltSt to the ratepayers. Worse, it made itself
ridiculous in a hundred vagfys; the villain in the public eye was its
chainnan, Aldcrman G51stoia| wcll known for his Radical Home
Rule SpOedfta'^nd his laims to be a friend of the working
classes^ atiSflier Liberal councillor set Leeds laughing by his
rcnderings of ^ H w B ritan n ia for the entertainment of blacklegs
temporarily hodsed in the Town Hall crypt. Ridicule grew as those
fevv blacklegs who vvere transported to the gasworks tumed out to
bft/incapable of perfonning the vvork, or asked to be sent home at
the towns jpense. At the height of the struggle, a ludicrous
procession moved through the surging crowds in the town centre;
several hundred blacklegs, headed by cavalryBsurrounded by a
double file o f plice, and a file of military, and followed by the
Mayor and magistrates. As they passed beneath tlie Wellington
Road railway bridge coal, sleepers, bricksBbottles, and assorted
missiles were hurled down by pickets and sympathisers upon the
civic procession. Arriving in the new Wortley gasworks in a very
excited and exliausted State, the blacklegs at once held an
indignation meeting in protest against their inadequate protection.
Then *- when pickets climbed on the walls to shout - they fled
over the rear walls by the dozen until only 76 remained inside.
For several days the town was like an anned carnp. On one side,
Hussars witli drawn swords patrolled the streets in defence of the
Liberal Gas Committee; on the other, railwaymen, Corporation
workers, and even (it would seern) individual policeman, combincd
to give inforniation to the pickets. When the strikers retumed, with
42 MAKING HISTORY

alm ost com plete victory, it w as estim ated th a t the affray had cost
the tovvn 20,()00.KH
M aguire and Paylor, and their leading converts among the gas-
w orkers, W alt W ood and C ockayne, b ore the brunt o f the struggle.
They tried

to get the crow d into peaceful w ay s, b u t blood was shed

nevertheless. h i the m om ing afte r th e first night o f the riots, it
w as a sight to sec the leaders o f th e unin telling the menibers
o ff to duty, arranging picketing w ork, an d getting the men who
had been deceived ... o f f h o m e .89

M aguire, rather th an T hom , deserved th e copy o f C ap ita l which

Engels gave to the victor o f the stru g g le.90 M oreover, in the height of
tlie struggle he saw his political o pportunity, an d struck lime hard.
H e addressed both o f the m ass dem onstrations on the tw o Sundays of
the strike, and droMp. lim e the lesson o f th e independence o f labour.
I f the Leeds G as Com m ittee persisted in th eir course, he said, the
Liberal p arty o f the tow n w ould g e t su ch a knockdow n blow as they
w ould never recover from H o w long (he asked) are the working
classes o f this tow n going to re tu m people to th e C ouncil w ho, when
retum ed, use the forces o f the to w n ag ain st th e w orking classes? 91
From this point on, m any skilled unionists in Leeds began to tum
aw ay from L iberalism .92
I f tlie first strong link in tlie chain w hich led to the IL P w as forged
in the gas strike, it also led to the breaking o f the last link w hich
bound the Leeds socialists to the S ocialist L eague. T he occasion w as
a quarrci in the local club. T hose o f us w ho had to do witli the
gasw orkers, in rcsponse to the m en s w ishes and in accordance w ith
our ideas o f policy, considerad a L ab o u r Electoral L eague should be
form cd, M aguire w rote to C arpcntcr. O ur A narchist friends, who
w ere conspicuous by their abscnce in the gas fig h ts, told the people
that no policy should be entcrtaincd but physical fo rc:

I adm it the L abour Electoral m ove is not all to be desircd, but it

sccm cd the ncxt inunediate stcp to take in order to kccp the
L abour unions m ilitant, and to em phasise the conflict o f the
w orkers and the cm ployers.
 H O M A G E TO T OM M A G U I R E 43

The incidcnt disgustad him: as usual witli Socialists when they fall
out, all kinds o f personal attacks and insinuations have becn tlie
order o f tlie day.y3
Tlie niajority o f the Lceds socialists went out with Maguire, to
be followed, shortly after, by the Bradford Socialist League. Both
groups formed socialist clubs, and soon, as a more stablc fomi of
organisation, these adopted a Fabian disguisc; over the next year a
rash o f Fabian Socicties sprcad across West Yorkshire, until the
London Fabians becanie quite uneasy at the threatened permea-
tion.y4 But the Fabian Society offered no more prospect for turning
the mass industrial rfffct fflto polinC&f channels than had the
Socialist L eaguff and it was only ^yfth * T n P fonnation o f the
Bradford Labour Uniofl tliat tfie poliftcaf wing a H m movement got
under w a y # 'l tliought o f a B w move, HjBalled Ja l B i BartleV', then
a sub-editor on the Workman s 77/^Bj wrfo initiated the first
meeting:

On Sunday, April 1891, first steps for putting it

into operation. That particular Smiday ... was a bright sunshiny
day. I went to Shiplera ... in order to consult Mr W.H. Drew. ...
He was attending anniversaryServicfl at Bethel Baptist Chapel,
but during a lull in the proceedings I called him out to the
chapel-yard. Here we talked over the situation ,...95

When the Bradford Labour Union^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ g founded in May it

was under the heading fedependent ^ H b o u r Party. Suddenly a
ame was coined that Hit off genius of the English people,
Maguire later said. From this moment itS w ent like wildfire.96
Why was its birtliplace Bradford and not Leeds?

III

Leeds was to provide a remarkable example of arrested develop-

ment. Despite its early vigour, the movement met repeated barriers;
the first authentic ILP councillor in Leeds was not elected until
1906, when Jowett had already done fourteen magnificent years of
service on the Bradford Council - eight miles away! But if we
note the social and industrial contrasts, sonie of the reasons becorne
44 MAKING H I S T O R Y

apparcnt. Lecds was not as close-knit a coniniunity as other West

Yorkshire towns: its industries were more diverse. The unskilled
malc workers were in general successul in improving thcir
conditions as a result of the new unionism, and some of their
discontcnt was dispcrsed: the gas strike was short, sharp, and
victorious whcre that at Manningham Mills was long, humiliating,
and a dcfcat. Social antagonisms were modified by the interpolation
of niany intermedate strata between the mass o f the workers and
eniployers, including those skilled workers who owed a traditional
allegiance to Lib-Labism.
lt is this last fact, above all, which accounts for the failure of
the Leeds ILP to gather the momentum o f Bradford. Although the
new unions affdiated to the Trades Council after the gas strike, and
the Yorkshire Labour Council was dissolved,97 the od guard on
tlie Trades Council maintained a controlling influence. In Septem-
bcr 1891 they seemed to be drawing togetlier^w ith a successfiil
mass demonstration addressed by Mann and Tillett; and a Labour
Electoral Union was sponsored by the Council, on independent
lines.98 But the Trades Council insisted on niaintaining tlie right of
veto over the Labour Union, and the od guard sought to exercise
this in the Liberal interest; finally, in 1892, it severed its
connection witli the Union, which became the Leeds IL P 99 Henee
the inipressive unity between Trades Council and ILP which was
the leading feature of dcvelopments in Bradford, Halifax, and the
hcavy woollcn district was never to be found in Leeds.
Tliis political friction was only to be expected in a centre where
the Trades Council liad a history covering a quarter-ccntury, and
the lcadcrs of the skilled unions liad a place in tile Liberal
firmament. But the problcni was aggravatcd by socialist errors and
accidents of person. In 1890 Maguires od friend, J.L. Mahon,
retunied to Leeds. Maguire liad defeets as a political leader - he
was without personal ambition and incapablc o f political guilc. In
the intcrvals between storms (when necessity drove him to the
front) he preferred to advisc from the background.100 He allowed
Mahon - who shared nonc of his dislike of the liniclight - to
assume the leadership of the Leeds niovement; perhaps he was glad
to be relieved of the rcsponsibility he liad borne for so long.
Mahon was a man o f great abilitv: the idea o f Labour Unions
 H O M A G E TO T O M M A G U I R E 45

was largcly his. He had done stalwart Service for tlie Socialist
Lcague in tlie past. But now his many defects were gaining on his
virtues. He was vain, incurably quarrelsome, and givcn to intrigue,
and he inspircd neithcr loyalty or trust. It would be tedious to
rccount the rows that gathcrcd around him betwcen 1890 and 1893.
He wrangled inside the Gasworkers Union:101 he was prominent in
a sensational row between the Gasworkers and the Trades Council
over the School Board clcction of Noveniber 1891:102 he allowed
himsclf to be drawn into a long and unsavoury public quarrel with
John Judge, the leader o f the od unionists.103 Finally, he allied
hintself wholeheartedly with Champions attenipt to nobble tie
ILP in 1892. He flaunted TW^ syitipathies* in an attempt to shock
Liberal working men from their allegiance.104 With Champions
money^ and under Champions day-to-day dircction, he stood as
Independent Labour candidate for South Leeds in September 1892
a by-elcctiotil which endednF riot and anticlimax, but which did
as much s dJything to^ B PxBs IWWKfii'Skd taunt of Carlton
Club money $hih ij_p at ts foundation
c o n f e r d l t f i . a c u n n i n g C a r p e n t e r wrote to
Mattison, - I cant say I ^ jB S him. I wonder how Maguire feels
about it all.1"6 But M ag u ir^ P opinions are not recorded. Mahon
and Champion between them nearly succeeded in smashing the ILP
on the eve o f its foundation; and jfe Maguires od ffiendship for
Mahon, and his hatred for personal rancour and intrigue, led him to
retreat into his shell.1*
In the woollen districts the development was quite different.
Here the origins were less spectacular: but when the movement
began in eamest, the entire trade-union movement swung round
behind it. In 1886 that other remarkable young Yorkshire socialist,
Ben Tumer, could only get two other members for a Huddersfield
branch of the SDF.108 The Bradford League, in its early years,
depended a good deal upon speakers and guidance from Leeds; it
paid serious attention to the trade unions only after the Bradford
TUC of September 1888.loy The extant minute-books of the
Bradford Trades Council have a hiatus between July 1889 and
January 1893. As the fornier minute-book closes, tlie Trades
Council clairns to represent 3,000 workers, mainly outside the
textile industry. Its secretary, Sani Shaftoe, is a prominent unionist
of tlie od Lib-Lab school, and the Council is still negotiating
humbly vvith the Liberal Association for a member on their School
Board Eight. When the latter minute-book commences, the Council
claims 10,000 members, Drevv o f the weavers is on its executive,
Shaftoe has disappearcd, Covvgill - an ILPer from the ASE - is
secrctary, and the Council is fimctioning in cise alliance with the
ILP.110
Three events dictated this transform ation; the publication of the
Yorkshire Factory Times, the influence o f the Leeds unskilled
agitation, and the events surrounding the M anningham Mills strike.
Andrews, tlie proprietor o f the Coton Factory Times, started the
Yorkshire joum al largely as a commercial venture; it was his
policy to employ the local unin men as correspondents, and Drew,
Bartley, Tunier and Gee vvere placed on the staff, with Burgess as
the first editor. Its influence achieved in a few months what the
painstaking efforts o f liad failed to achieve in years. Its
dramatic effect in th ^ w o o lle n districts, as propagandist for trade
unionism, has been described in the vivid pages o f Ben Tum ers
reniiniscences.111 Bad niasters were exposed, grievances aired,
successes advertised. W ith the textile workers on the move, the
unskilled struggles in Leeds spilled over into the towns and
villages to the West, swelling the tide. Maguire, Paylor, Tunier,
Mattison, organised the gasworkers and clayworkers at Halifax,
where 9,000 were clainied at a demonstration in the autunui of
1889.112 Railwaynien were organised in other towns. In Deceniber
1890 the Manningham strike commenced.
This strike, whicli at its peak involved nearly 5,000 workers and
which dragged through a bitter wintcr until the end o f April 1891
has oftcn bcen described. Hcre we may select only certain features
for conunent. (1) Contrary to the general inipression, it was not the
niost-dcpressed but the bettcr-paid workers - velvet and plush
weavers - who initiatcd the strike. The several thousand unskilled
wonicn and girls who later thronged the streets carne out in
sympathy or were forccd out by the finu in order to cnibarrass the
strike finid.113 (2) Sympathy was aroused for the strikers, not only
by their incxpcrience and pitiful plight, but also by the explanation
of S.C. Listcr that it was nccessary to bring down their wages to
 I I OMACE TO TOM M A G U I RE 47

Crefcld. Tliis continental thrcat' tlic Yorkshirc Factiy Times took

up as a distinct challenge to til (lie textile workers n the two
colindes o f Lancashirc and Yorkshirc. 1'** (3) Tlic outstanding
organisers o f the striko - Turner, Drew, and Isabclla Ford - wcrc
proclaimed socialists; Turner, living in Lceds, was in constant
contact witli tlic Lccds socialists, although his carlicr c.xpcricnccs in
West Yorkshirc, where he liad rcceivcd generous assistancc froni
Liberal unionists o f the od school, led him to takc up a mediating
role. (4) It was the repeated attempts by cliicf constable, watch
comniittcc, town clerk, and M ayor to prevent the strikers and
sympathiscrs from holding meetings, at first in halls, and tlicn in
customary open-air nieeting-places (thus provoking the famous riots
in Dockers Square) vvhich, willy-nilly, forccd to the very forefront
the question o f independent political action. lt was this struggle
wliicli induced tlic strikers to fetch up Ben Tillett for a great
protest meeting; and he voiced tlieir sentiments when he declarcd
that at election times the people can teach would-be Cacsars -
town clerks and M ayors and watch committces - a salutary
lesson.115 A ftcr tlie strike was defeated, tlic Faclory Times
conunented:

The operatives have from the first bcen fought not only by their
own employers at Manningham but by the whole of the monied
class o f Bradford. From the highest dignitary down to the
lowest corporate oflficial law and order has bcen against
them.116

In futuro, wamed Drew, when presenting the balance slicct of the

strike, capitalists will Iiavc to rcckon with whole communities of
labour rather tlian sections. 117
This, tlicn, was tlic background to Bartlcys discussion with
Drew in the yard of tlic Bothel Baptist chapcl. Even so, the
formation o f tlic Bradford Labour Union was only ono in a
chain of similar attempts, each of wliich liad bcen re-absorbed
vvithin the Liberal Party;11H and at any time in the next year the
Labour Union might have met with tlic same fate. Its pro
grmale, like that of tlic Colnc Vallcy Labour Union, was largcly
a list o f radical-democratic demands, adapted from Mahons
48 MAKING HISTORY

Labour Programme o f 1888 which clearly provided the model

Despite the admonition, Workmen, Remember November plac-
arded in the streets from the time o f the Manningham strike,
only one Tradcs Council nominee was successfiil in the 1891
municipal elcctions, and he was the staunch od unionist, Shaftoe,
who - when he had done his duty by securing guarantees from
the Council for the riglit o f public meeting - fell back into the
Liberal Party, which rewarded him with nomination to the
bench.12,1 Moreover, the Bradford and Coin Valley Labour
Unions had the utmost difficulty in finding suitable candidatos to
nurse the constituencies. Tillett and Mann were up to their necks
holding the Dockers Union together, and beating off an employ-
ers counter-attack; Shaw said the Bradford working men should
choose one o f their own number, and not run after tlie tall hats
and frock coats.121
At length Blatchford was persuaded to nurse East Bradford, only
to withdraw, without an apology to the electors, when the
launching o f the Clarion absorbed all his tim e.122 Tillett was
persuaded to stand for Bradford West only when presented with
1,000 electors signatures, and after a deputation from the Labour
Union had visited the Dockers Annual Congress.123 Mann, when
invited by Coin Valley, held aloof longer; he was wondering
about permeating the Church; he had his eye on the ASE; he was
doubtful about parliamcntary action; he thought the Coin Valley
men should get down to trade unionism and municipal action
beforc they talked of Parliament.124 The Yorkshire men had to
solve their problems on their own.
In truth, it was a miracle that the Labour Unions survived
into 1892, and multiplicd so fast. Tliis could not have been done
without a resoluto and capable local socialist leadership, aided by
the inflcxibility and stupidity o f the local Liberal employers. It
was a longer stop than wc realisc from the running of occasional
Labour candidatos for council or school board, even against
official Liberal nominecs, to the fonnation of an independent
party, pledgcd to a socialist progranune. The Labour Union men
was assisted by the uncompromising advocacy of Blatchford and
Burgcss; by the proportional representation systcni operating in
local board clections, which cnabled them to win spcctacular and
 H O M A G E TO T O M M A G U I R E 49

moralc-building victories;125 but above all, by the advance of the

Tradcs Council niovement.
The Trades Councils, even more than the Labour Unions, were
tlie organisational unit upon which the West Yorkshire ILP was
based. Among Trades Councils re-formed or formed at this time
were Halifax (1889), Huddcrsfield (1890), Keighley (1890), Brig-
house (1892), Spen Valley (1891), the Heavy Woollen District
(Dewsbury & Batley, 1891); the Yorkshire Fedcration of Trades
Councils - tlie frst county fedcration - was founded in 1893.126 In
almost every case, these were formed by socialists and new
unionists with the direct aim of promoting independent political
action; in some cases, the Trades council formed the local ILP as
its political arm.127 The socialists no longer sowed tlieir propaganda
broadeast or at thinly-attended meetings; tliey directed it first and
foremost at the unionists, urging them to take political action, at
first in the field of local politics.

Men o f an antagonistic class [declared Maguire, addressing a

demonstration of 2,000 gasworkers and labourers at Dewsbury in
July 1891], were sent upon their various public boches to
manage tlieir towns affairs. Men who polluted rivers and filled
the air with smoke from theirjchimneys were sent to their
Council chambers to carry out tlie Acts of Parliament to prevent
the pollution o f rivers and the air.128

Since the Trades Councils were young, the socialists encountered

little opposition. At Bradford, Shaftoe was too good a trade
unionist to stand aside from the tide of new unionism; he played
his full part, speaking often alongside Paylor, Tumer, and Drew,
becoming secretary of the newly fonned Woolcombers Union,
and althougli he was known to oppose the ILP he held his
silence during Tilletts 1892 candidature.129 At Halifax the
Liberis delivered thcmselves into tlie hands of the ILP by an
act o f crass stupidity. Beever, the President of the Trades
Council, liad been converted to socialism and was taking an
active part in the local Fabian propaganda in late 1891, but
another prominent and influential member, Tattcrsall, was still a
mcniber of the Liberal executive. In 1892 both Beever and
50 MAKING HISTORY

Tattersall vvere sacked, one after the other, by the same fimi; the
rcason given, they did not want anyone in their employ who
was engaged in setting labour against capital.1130 It was well
known in the town that tlie most influential partner in the fimi
was also a leading member o f the local Liberal caucus, and the
indignation in the town was so intense that testimoniis were
raiscd, demonstrations held, a Labour Union formed - the month
after Tattersalls dismissal - on the iiiitiative o f the Trades
Council, and a month later Keir Hardie was addressing a mass
meeting which resolved that the time has come when a national
and independent Labour Party must be fornted. 131 Two months
later again, in November 1892, Beever, Tattersall, Lister, and one
other 1LP candidate were swept on to the town council, while in
January 1893, in the ILPs first parliamentary by-election, Lister,
tire local squire, mine-ownc and Fabian, who liad come to
socialism by wayTOl M arxal Capital and Tom Maguire, polled
3028 votes a g a i i i s i d i |p ^ a j p ^ W and the Tory 4,219.
Indeed, tliis last incident points the pattenT which can be seen
througliout the W<3j| j,eeds tlie Liberal Gas Commit-
tee. At Coin Valfe^ g Liberal member, Sir James
Kitson - the Camegiq tB- the West Riding, whose fimi
ex-Royal Commissioner o f(Jib o u r Tom Mann described as
having worse conditions Mj than could be found in any other
engincering firm iq *... Leeds.132 At Halifax the Liberal em-
ployer, sacking tlie Trades Council leaders. In a dozen boroughs
and urban districts Liberal councillors refusing trade-union de-
rnands for fair contracts or artisan dwellings. In Holmfirth tlie
Liberal Association which rejectcd the eight-hour day to the
disgust of the miners delegates who forthvvith rcsigncd.133 In
Shipley the Liberal caucus, where three men were ruling the
roost, which held down Radical contendcnts.134 hi Bradford the
worsted-spinning Liberal Nonconfomiist MP and the Liberal
Watch Conunittee. In every case social and industrial agitation
on questions in the inimediate, everyday experience of the
working people, confrontcd the face - sonietinies complaccnt,
sometimes opprcssive, sometimos just plain stupid - of cstab-
lished Libcralism. As the people recoiled in confusin and anger,
tlic socialists scized their opportunity and founded the ILP.
 HOMAGE to t o m m a g u i r e 51

IV

How far vvas tlie Yorkshire ILP an authentic socialist party? How
far was it a late product of Liberal-Radicalism, carricd by a
temporary tide of industrial and social unrest into independent
political chamiels? The cvidence is conflicting. Lister, in bis 1893
contcst at Halifax, went out o f his way to cniphasisc that he vvas a
labour, and not a socialist, candidate.135 Caiculations at Halifax and
Bradford suggcst that a fair number of votes were drawn froni
former Conscrvative electors, but undoubtedly the niajority carne
from Liberal electors or from young men voting for the frst
time.136 In 1897 Tom Mann fought a by-election at Halifax, polling
2,000 votes. In an after-the-poll speech he paid tactful and generous
tribute to Lister, but -

most excellent man as he was ... his particular appreciation of

Socialism, his method o f advocating Socialism, his speaking of
it as advanced Liberalism ... was one of the chief reasons he
liad succeeded in getting the number of votes he liad. (Clieers.)
In his judgement the Socialist movement generally, and the
Independent Labour Party particularly, did not at the Iast fight
rcach that particular stage when the issues were sufficicntly
clearly defined .... He contended that there were more Socialists
in Halifax today tlian there were when Mr Lister polled 3,800.
(Clieers.) 137

Tlie frst years o f the Halifax ILP bear out this judgment; cndless
bickering and defcctions in the 600-strong branch called upon the
time of Hardie, Mann, and even the Annual Confercncc and
revealed how many disgruntled Liberis and even Torios had becn
swept into the movenicnt in 1892.
No doubt this was true elscwhcre, and helps to explain a ccrtain
decline in support in the late nineties. It is true also that socialist
demands were sometinies tacked on to liberal-dcmocratic demands
in an almost ludicrous nianncr, to disarm opposition or as a casual
afterthought.138 But this is only lialf the tmth, and the less
important half. The Yorkshire ILP was a party o f youth; its leaders
- Maguire, Ben Tumcr, Jowett - were young; the men and women
52 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

who staffed the Labour unions and clubs, the Labour churches, the
trade unions and Trades Councils, werc often in their twenties. And
the young pcople were socialists - ardent followers of Hardie,
Morris, Blatchford, Tillett, Mann. When Blatchford accepted the
East Bradford nomination he was uncomproniising in his socialist
advocacy: the earth and all tliat tlie earth produced - the tools
they used, the land and all the capital belonged to the people. Tlie
Yorkshire Factory Times commended this doctrine in its editorial,
as

the foundation upon which tlie Independent Labour Party must

be built. It is a rock, and is irremovable. It is as firmly fixed as
the earth itself. It is a Une of demarcation over which neither
Liberal or Tory may pass and retain his creed.139

It was this socialist conviction which prevented the Bradford men

froni surrendering to Liberal blandishment, when Tillett was offered
a straight fight with the Tory in West Bradford.140 The young
socialist delegates gave an overwhelming rebuff to Mahons attempt
to draw the socialist teeth of the ILP at its first conference. In
October 1894 the delegates at the Yorkshire Federation of the ILP
were dissuaded from voting for a change of ame to the Socialist
Labour Party only by the advocacy of Maguire who (at 29) was
as od a Socialist as any in the room.141
In prvate - it is true - Maguire liad his doubts. There were
troublcs enough in the early ILP - cnough to make him wish to
concntrate on his writing for tlie Factory Times and Labour
Leader, or to prefer a part in the unemploycd agitation to your
damned party politics and silly quarrels.

People cali thcmsclvcs Socialists (he wrote to a friend], but

what they really are is just ordinary men with Socialist opinions
hung round, they havcnt got it inside of them .... Its hard, very
hard; we gct mixed up in disputes among ourselves ... and can't
keep a straight line for tlie great thing, even if wc all of us
knovv what tliat is.142

No doubt, as a confirmed atheist. he distrusted the spell-binding

Come to Jess' appeal which the ncw men like Snowden werc
bringing into the movement. His carly maturity scemed to be
giving way to a prematuro middlc-agc, hastened by illness and
perhaps by the lurking awareness that he was soon to be etcmally
elbowed out of place after onc sniall scrappy peep at the big
show'. Not yet 30, he was to be found more and more often
drinking in the Leeds Central ILP Club, telling stories of the od
days like an old-timer, and entertaining the company with
anecdotcs and songs. He eontinued his part in the uncmployed
agitation, concealing from cverybody the fact that he was practi-
cally onc o f the uncmployed him self. Early in March 1X95, in his
thirticth ycar, he collapsed with pneumonia; his comrades found
him without food or fire in the house; he died on X March,
reftising the Services o f a priest: I will stand or fall on the last
twelve years o f rny life and not on the last five minutes. His
funeral was attended by a demonstration almost as large as those of
18X9-90, in which Jewish tailoring workers and Irish labourers,
gasworkcrs and ILP councillors, all joined. With his dcath a phase
o f the movement comes to an end.144
The young men o f the Yorkshire ILP owed much to Maguire.
He liad been the point o f junction between the theoretical
understanding o f the national leaders, the moral teaching of Morris
and Carpcnter, and the needs and aspirations of his own people.
Nothing in history happcns spontaneously, nothing worthwhilc is
achieved w ithout the expense o f intellect and spirit. Maguire liad
spent his cnergics without restraint. A poet of real talent, his
feelings liad been assaultcd by the filth o f Leeds; the rag, shoddy,
and wool-combing industries, with their toll of discase and the
dread anthrax. His bitter experiences while organising the tailor-
esses were recordad in his M achine Room Chants\ sometimes in
the moving tales o f poverty:

No, I w ouldnt like to dic, sir, for 1 think the good Lords hard
On us conunon w orkin women; an the like o' nics debarred
From H is high, uncertain heaven, where fme ladics all go to.
So 1 try to keep on living, tliough tlie Lord knows how I do.

sometimes in humorous sketches o f the problcms of the organiscr:

 M A K IN G H IST O R Y
54

They say I ani cutting the other girls out

Who work for their bread and tea - no doubt;
But, tliank you! Englands free,
Te-he!
I will do as 1 like as long as I dar,
Whats fair to me is my own affair,
And n i please myself anyhow - so there!
Says tie Duchess o f Number Three.
And tlie Number Three Department girls
They copy her hat and the cut o f her curls -
Tis a touching sight to see,
Dear me!
Her slightest word is their sacred law,
They run her jmd stand her jaw,
Contcnt to or flaw
. hi the Duchess igB'umber Three.

If many of the Yorkshire young people liad in fact got socialism

inside of tlini, ti f e ( r S S ^ ^ | of its quality - the hostility to
Grundyism, tile wami espousal of sex equality, the rich intemation-
alism - owed much to Maguire. It is time that tliis forgotten
provincial was admitted first-class citizenship of history, and
time also that we discarded the theory of tlie spontaneous
combustin of the Yorkshire ILP.

Notes on the South Leeds Election

On the rcsignation of the Liberal membcr for South Leeds in

August 1892, J.L. Mahon at once wrote to Champion for his
support in fmancing an Indcpendent Labour Candidato in a
thrcc-corncrcd contcst. I ani rather sick of helping backbonciess
people into Parliament, Champion rcplied (27 August 1892).
However, aftcr various possible candidatos liad been approachcd
without success (Mann, Hammill, Clem Edwards, Solly), Cham
pion urged Mahon to stand himself. Champion saw his own part
as that of an authoritative Pamell, and wrote to Mahon (5
Scptcmbcr 1892): lf as 1 am rather inclincd to do, I go in for
 homage to t o m m a g u re 55

taking hold o f thc 1LP and rnnning it for all it is worth, I mean
to llave as lieutenants men who won't scuttle at thc first sliot
and will agree with me tliat our only chance is to go for the
Liberis all along the line without gloves. It is possible, given
pluck to put out 50 Liberis at the next election by rnnning men
in 10 seats and voting Tory in thc other 40. That will cause
somc little fuss, and will probably put in a Tory Govt. holding
powcr at the swect will o f the ILP. But it will makc thc Labour
question in general and 8 hours in particular what thc Irish
question has been made by similar tactics ... * While Champion
scoured the London clubs for money, Mahon implemcnted this
policy and mounted a campaign on aggressivcly anti-Gladstonian
lines. From bis lcttcrs Champion would appear to have
suffering from delusions of grandeur: he wrotc of his conversa-
tions with Chambcrlain; his financial resourccs; his personal
adherents' in various towns; his intcntion of sending the Liberis
back to opposition; of buying control of the Workman's Times;
of exposing all ncw unin lcaders who refused to speak for
Mahon. He sent a strong-arm man from Liverpool (14 Septcmbcr
1892): tlie handiest man with his fists of my acquaintance ...
very good tempered doesnt drink, and never hits anybody first.
But he knows his business and will half kill the biggcst
Irishman in Leeds in two minutes. Votes wcre not a scrious
considcration - the main thing is to stoke up thc anti-libcral
feeling for the future. Whcn Keir Hardie carne up to help
Mahon, Champion wrote (20 Septcmber 1892) please assurc him
from me, that if he will come and see me on his arrival in
London, I shall be able, and willing, to render him independent
of any attacks he may mect in his Constitucncy for helping
you.
Mahon's election manifest was a long anti-Gladstonian ha-
rangue, culminating in a series of Radical (but not socialist)
demands. The provocation offered to Liberal electors was only
too successful. Mahons main election mccting was packcd with
Gladstonian supportcrs - with tlie Irish most prominent; ncitlicr
the candidate, or Tom Maguire (tic Chainnan), or H.H.
Champion himself, could gain a hearing; and the mccting ended
I violent riot (Leeds Mercury, SheJJield Daily Telegraph, 19
56 M A K I N G H IS T O R Y

Septem ber 1892). T hrec days la ter M a h o n w as disqualified from

standing ow ing to an erro r in his nom ination papers, and the
incident endcd in general ill-will.
Cham pion and M ahon rem ained in correspondence and confi-
dently expectcd to dom nate th e first IL P Conference: on 4
N ovem bcr 1892 Cham pion w as w riting there will practically be
none there - outside the local m en - b u t m y men. Even Hardie
w as m arked down as going on all right ... I f he goes on as he is,
I would help him and forgive him his in-and-out-running just
after the election. Malion, fo r his p art, w as advising Yorkshire
audiences to support those in favour o f C ham berlains Labour
Programm e unless the L iberis brought out a better one (Keighley
N ew s, 10 December 1892). H is final action in the Yorkshire ILP
w as to denounce John L isters candidature at H alifax in Februaiy
1893. This curious combination o f P am ellite tactics, T ory money,
arbitrary intrigue, an apparently pro-T o ry interventions, lielps to
explain the set-back suffered by the Leeds ILP, the bittemess of
feeling betvveen od and new unionists on the Leeds Trades
Council, and the profound suspicion w ith which some Socialists
(who knew o f Champions and M ahons strategy) regarded the first
year o f the ILP.
From E ssays in L ahour H istury, ed. Jo h n Saville

Notes

In collccling m aterial for this essay I am indeblcd lo M rs Florence

M allison (the widovv o f A lf M atlison), M iss N orah T urner (daughler
of Sir Bcn T urner), and M r A.T. M arles, first secretary o f the Leeds
Fabian Sociely, for help, inform alion, and the loan o f documents.
Ainong olher dcbts I mus nicnlion the kindness o f the iibrarians or
ofiicials o f the Brollierlon Library, Leeds; the Bradford Trades
Council; the Bradford Iudepcndent Labour Party; and tlie Coin
Vallcy Labour Party.

1 J. Claylon, The Iiise and D ecline o f Socialistn in Great Brlain

(1926), p. 82.
2 O f 115 delgales, 24 carne from Bradford, 8 from Leeds, 6 from
Huddersficld, 3 from Halifax, and 8 from olher parts o f West
Y o rk s h ire . R ep o rt o f the F irst G enera! Conference, II.I' (1 8 9 3 ).
 H O M A G E TO T O M MAGU1 RE 57

3 Of 305 branchcs lisled in tlie 1895 Directofy, 102 were in

Yorkshirc, followed by Lancashire (73), Scotland (41), London (29).
O f Yorkshires share \ve find Bradford (29). Coin Valley (11),
Spcn Valley (9), Leeds (8), Halifax (8), Huddersficld (8), Dewsbury
(5). ILP Directory (Mancliesler, 1895).
4 For Champion, see especially H. Pclling, The Origins o f he Labour
Partv 1880-1900 (1954), pp. 59-64. For Mahon, see E.P. Thomp
son, William Morris, Romantic lo Revolulionary (1955), pp. 614-16,
where, however, Ihe direct influence of Mahons Labour Union
niodcl upon the Yorkshire labour unions is under-eslimated. For
forerumiers of the independent labour pattern, see above, p. 271,
nole 1, and his Land and Labour LeagueY Bulletin o f the
International Institute o f Social History, Amsterdam, 1953.
5 For Northumberland, see Thompson, op.cit. pp. 517 IT. For Bollon,
see Dona Torr, Tom Mann and H is Times (1956), i, pp. 251 ff.
6 Census figures: Leeds (1851) 172,000, (1901) 429,000; Bradford
(1851) 104,000, (1901) 280,000.
7 See Joan Tilomas, History o f the Leeds Clothing Induslry (Yorkshire
Bulletin of Economic and Social Research, 1955), Chapter Two.
8 Ben Turner, A hout M vself (1930), pp. 78-9. Turnerhad made contad
earlier ivitli the SDF and liad been attached to a London branch.
9 Amongst the voluminous local literature, the fejowing are of valu
in niarking the independent tradition: G.J. Holyoake, History o f
Co-operation in H alifax (1864); Owen Balmforth, Huddersfteld
Industrial Society (Manchester, 1910); and reminiscences of
Jolui Hartley (Todmorden & D istrict News, July 1903) and Joseph
Greenwood (Co-Parlnership, September 1909) - both of tlie strong
Hebden Bridge Society.
10 Garside, born 1843, liad a long record in the ASE, radical politics,
and co-operative produclive venlures, before his election to tlie
County Council for Slaithwaite in March 1892: Yorkshire Factory
Times (herealler referred to as YFT), 26 February 1904.
11 Sliaoe, secretan to the Bradford Trades Council, was a skep and
basket-maker; Bune, the Leeds secretary, was a brush-niaker. In
1880 tlie Bradford TC represenled Warpdressers, Slonemasons,
Joiners, Plumbers, Lithographers, Engineers, Letterpress Printers,
Tailors, Moulders, Hamniermen, Dyers, Brush-makers, Skep &
Basket-makers, Coach-makers, and Coopers. But six monthly meet-
ings in 1881 were abandoned with no quorum or desultory
conversalion. (Bradford TC Minutes, 24 September 1880 et seq.)
The Leeds TC liad 33 socielies afliliated in 1883; 25 in 1887.
(Animal Report, 1894, p. 3.)
58 M A K IN G H IS T O R Y

12 Circular, daled 1887, in Shaftoe Cutting-book (in possession of the

Bradford TC).
13 Turner, op. cit. p. 93.
14 J. Lawson, Leters lo the Young on Progress in Pudsey (Stanningley
1887); F. Peel, Od Cleckliealon in Cleckheaton Guardian, 25
January lo 4 April 1994.
15 B. Wilson, The Struggles o f an O d Chartist (Halifax, 1887), 40 pp.,
p. 40.
16 See Jovvelts foreword lo F. Brockway, Socialism over Sixty Years
(1946), pp.H3-24.
17 W. Cudworth, Condilion o f the Industrial Classes o f Bradford &
District (Bradford, 1887).
18 See, B .g., Ilalifax Guardian for 12 articles on The Sluins of
Halifax conimencing 17 August 1889. Tom Maguire contributed a
series of articles on Insanitary Leeds to the Leeds Weekly Express,
and see also Maguire and other contributors to Hypnotic Leeds
H te c d s , 1893), cditcd by A. Marles.
19 Turners j ^ ^ ^ H jddsegs. for Batley in 1893 in Turner,%p. cit. p.
171; 1 8 i n T. Paylor, Leed%fo r Lahour
(Leeds, 1905), etc.
20 In 1885, 18)312 half-timers vvorked in llie worsted induslry alone,
92 per cent fljj^^M S^HsyiffltCudworSSfcj^Sf. p. 10); in 1898,
half-timers were employed within the Bradfbrd borough
boundaries, and * 0 8 6 witliiii Halifax (The Trade Unionist, Novem-
ber 1898). On the questiou of the local exemption standard see the
evidence of R. Wa/fflfntftrM s^ K m T nf the Half Time Coiniuillce
of ths fJUT tefore llic R.C. on 2^;j?18927 xxxv, Group C, 3662
et seq.-, and of G.D. Jones, 3855 et seq.
21 An od Birstall Jady rccalled: The nuill-ovvners were very" fule in
dodging faclory inspcclors .... Tlicy liad a big whisket handy in the
sheds, and when they expected the inspector, vve young girls were
popped underneath the baskets until he liad gona Heckmondwike
D istrict News, 14 August 1926.
22 Cudworth, op. cit. p. 20.
23 In 1885 Norlh America did not fcalurc among Batleys narkels but
was the sccond export niarket for Bradfords worsteds. R.C. on
Depression o f Trade and Induslry (1886) I, pp. 757178.
24 Evidence of Mark Oldroyd of the Dewsbury and Batley Chambers
of Conunerce, ibul., iii, 14,' 105-7.
25 Evidence of H. Mitchell of the Bradford Chamber of Conunerce,
ihid., ii. 3764 et seq. The export of raw material and semi-raw
material (tops) yvas compcnsating for the decline in worsted slutTs.
 H O M A G E T O T O M MA G U 1 R E 59

26 //)/., ii. 6494 et seq.

27 The amount of thc decline was an endless source of controversy; but
friendly and unfriendly sources agree upon the fac. Cudworlli, op.cil.
p. 41: During the past ten years deductions have bccn inade in wages
and quietly submilted lo by the workpeople. See YFT, 20 September
1889 (Leeds Wage lableS, 1872-89); 10 July 1891. R.C. un Labour,
1892, xxxv, C, evidence of Gee, Turner and Drew, passim, especially
5092, 5124, 5389-411, 5675; 5554 (family wage); 5469, 5548-9
(Maimingham Mills). For a suntmary of evidence presented by the
weavers leaders before the Royal Conunission, see Tont Mann, An
Appeal to the YorkRire Textile Wiff&s (Huddcrsfield, n.d., ? 1893).
28 Minutes of power-loom overlookers in possession of Bradford
Trades Council; M iirtg ^ jT Card Sttfs and Machine Tenters in
possession of exisling unin.
29 II is importa ni to note B3R even on thc crest 8f the new unin
wKtc, wfflWlte hssfStance of the Y&jfl&ffie vk&ory only Ej, in
9 of the Hudderslield weavers were orgauised; 1 in 13 in the heavy
woollen district; and 1 in 16 in lite Bradford district. R.C. on
Lahour, 1892, xxxv, C; evidence of Gee (4790); Drew (5455-8);
Turner (5682-3); see D rew g commcntJ5499) when people get
down lo tlie pilch lo which the textile operatives are in the W.
Riding, they have very littlc hcart for anything [and] ... cannot
a fiord even ... the subscription.
30 Bradford TC Minutes, 29 November 1876. See also Walter Batcson,
The Way Wem^ame (Bradford, 1^ O ^ B l i O s s i s t a i i c e ' t h e
dyers by Shaftoe, who worked alongside of tliern as if he was a
dye-liouse worker himsclf, and not a member of ... an exceptionally
skilled Irade - skep-making.
31 B. Turner, Heavy Woollen Textile Workers Union (YFT, 1917), pp.
61-3.
32 The bes! accounts are in Brockway, op. cit. Chapler Two, and M.
McMillan, The Life o f Rachel McMillan (1927), passim.
33 The comparison with Ihe cotlon industry, with its slrong unionisin
ainong tlie niale spiimers, and the unin leaders opposition to the
Legal Eight Hour Day, is instructive.
34 See the evidence of J.H. Beever, secretary of the Halifax Trades
Council, when questioned by Mundella at the Royal Conunission;
Well supposing you lost the trade? - Which I do not think
probable. Suppose you did and you liad passed an Act of
Parliamcut, wliat vvould you do tlien? - Past experience does not
send us in Ihal direction. R.C. on Lahour, 1892, xxxv, C,
10,040-10,047.
60 M A K I N G H IS T O R Y

35 Minutes of Ihe Eleclion Coininiltee for M essrs Greening and

Slnnsfeld, 1868 (in our possession).
36 Jolm Lislcr, The Early Hislory o f the ILP M ovenient in Halifax,
MSS. in the Maltison Colleclion, Brolherton Library; and Election
Manifest and copy of H alifax Free P ress in the same collection.
37 Christian Socialisl, Scplember 1884.
38 K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence (1943 edil.), p.
469.
39 Bcn Wilson, op, cit. was publishcd in 1887; J. Burnleys Chartist
novel, Loaking Jbr the Dawn (Bradford, 1874); Frank Peel, Risings
o f the Luddites, Chartists and Plugdrawers (Heckmondwike, 1888).
A gcntlcman nanied Aurelius Basilio Wakeiield, one-time secretary
to tlie Leeds coniniiltee of the Labour Representation League, was
indefatigable in the 1870s and 1880s, delivering lectures on Ernest
Jones.
40 C.L. Robinson, firsl ILP councillor in Bradford, liad imbibed
Chartist principies as a boy, was an adm ircr of Ernest Jones, and
founder of a Republican Club in Bradford in 1870 (YFT, 15
January 1904). See also Tawrsall, YFT, 22 July 1892; Ben Riley,
YFT, 17 June 1904; B y t Turner, A hout M y se lf pp. 28-9, 66; Philip
Snowden, An AutobiographyJ/)9?>4), i. pp. 18-19.
41 YFT, 22 July 1904.
42 Ben Turner carne lo regard hiniself as an undenoniinational (or
perhaps Benlurnerite?) Christian, but he never belonged to any
Cliurch (information from Miss Norah Turner). For Gee, see YFT,
15 July 1092.
43 YFT, 5 February 1904, and Labour Leader, 20 April 1901, for
biographies of Wood and Bland.
44 At the nass cxccution of Luddites in 1813, the prisoncrs sang
Mcthodist liynins on the scaffold. The oulstanding West Yorkshire
Chartist leader, Bcn Rushlon, was an cxpellcd local preacher.
45 See YFT, 17 J u lv 891: 'Ben is a d e ep C hristian - an earnest,
everyday Christian .... Ha is a t hum e tea c h in g tra d es un ion isin o r
preaching the religin o f Christ. '
46 Wlien Tillen at firsl rcliiscd to stand, J. Bcdford (of the General
Railway Workcrs), E.D. Girdlcslonc, and G.B. Sliaw were each
nvited to stand. YFT, 15, 22, a n d 29 M ay 1891.
47 B radford Observar, 9 and H June 1892.
48 lbid. 14 June 1892; Brockway, op. cit. pp. 40-1.
49 B radford Observar, 16 January 1893.
50 D ewshurv Reprter, 8 June 1895.
51 YFT, 14 O ctober 1904.
 HOMAGE TO T OM MAGU1RE 61

52 IsabcIIa Ford (ed.), Tom Maguire, A Remembrance (Manchcsler,

1895), p. xii.
53 bul. pp. ix-x, xiii: Maltison Letterbook.
54 For the early history o f the Lccds and Bradford Lcagucs, sce also
Thompson, op. cil. pp. 488, 491-4, 496.
55 Correspondencc of the sccrelary, Socialisl Lcague, in the Interna
tional Inslilulc of Social History, Anislerdam; M aguire lo Mahon,
Oclobcr and Novcinber 1885.
56 Ihiil. Scptcinbcr 1885.
57 Sce E. Carpenlcr, Ky D ays and D reams (1916), pp. 134-5; Maltison
Notebooks.
58 The Socialisl Lcague slood definitely for a brotlierhood buill on
pur com radeship .... T he Pars Com m une and Chicago Martyrs
andiversarics we ttsed lo look forw ard lo .... Songs and speeclies
wcre a fealure o f those gatlierings. W. Hill lo A. M altison, n.d. in
M altison Lellerbook.
59 Christian Socialisl, Seplembcr 1884.
60 See M aguire, T he Y orkshire M iners, Commonweal, Novcmber
1885.
61 YFT, 4 Novetnber 1892.
62 Commonweal, 28 A pril 1888; Thom pson, op. cil. pp. 614-15. Jowelt
was advocaling an independenl L abour Party in 1887 {BradJ'ord
Ohser\>er, 8 Fcbruary 1887).
63 Handbill in M altison Collection.
64 Thom pson, op. cil. pp. 615-16.
65 M aguires notes in Commonweal, 10 A ugust an d 16 Novetnber
1889; Thom pson, op. cit. pp. 6 1 8 -2 0 ; YFT, 2 A ug u st 1889. Tom
P aylor w as al this tim e an insurance agent; Sw eeney a hoot and
shoe worker.
66 lt com plaincd al lite ncw unions w hicli accepted as leaders
outsiders w ho rnay have som e other object in view litan the sol
inlerest o f lite w orkers. Joined by a few m alcontents frotn otlicr
associations these are organizing atlacks on the od and tried
officials o f the Congress. YFT, 3 0 A u g u st 1889.
67 C om m onw eal, 6 July 1889.
68 YFT, 13 D ecem her 1889.
69 Ibid. 20 D ecentber 1890.
70 L eeds W eekly C itizen, M ay 1931.
71 1.0. F ord carne from a w ealllty Q uaker fantily at A del G rangc, near
Leeds. Site liad helped M iss P aterson w itli the W om ens Provident
Lcague. In th e sunu ncr o f 1888 site assislcd th e W cavcrs' U nion
d u rin g a strike in Leeds, a n d from th a t tinte forvvard w as associalcd
62 M A K I N G H I S T O R Y

w ilh all thc new u nin struggles involving women. Report and
Balance Shce o f Ihe W est R id in g P ow er Loom W eavers Associatiun
Scpleinber 1X88; an d YFT, I N o v em h e r 1889.
72 YFT, 1 N ovem her 1889, a n d (for S w e e n e y s criticism s o f he Trades
C ouncil o f iciis) 10 Ja n u a ry 1890.
73 YFT. 25 cloher 1889 to 27 D ec em h er 1889.
74 Ihid. 1 N ovem ber 1889.
75 Toiii hlaguire, a R cm einhrance, p. xvi; slide o f th e song in Mrs.
M allisons possession.
76 YFT, 7 a n d 28 M arch 1890.
77 Ihid. 9 M ay 1890; L eed s W eekly C itizen, M ay 1931.
78 Leeds T C A n n u a l R ep o rt for year en d in g 31 M ay 1891, p. 6.
79 Ii appearcd in inslalm ents in C om m onw eal throughou t 1890.
80 Leeds M ercury, 26 M arch 1890; T hom pson, op. cit. pp. 632 IT.
81 O n 12 M arch 1890, in the m id st o f the new unin struggles,
C arpenter w as w riting to M attison: A n interesting book has turned
up, by H avelock Ellis, callcd T h e N ew S pirit - on Whitman,
Tolsloi, Ibsen, H eine, & otliers. E verything seem s to be rushing on
faster & fasler. W here are w e going? N iagara, o r the Islands of tlie
B lest? M attison Colleclion.
82 Sec Thom pson, op. c it. pp. 6 5 2 -3 . M ahon an d D onald addressed the
first dem onslration o f the Leeds gasw orkers, YFT, 13 D e c e m h e r
1889.
83 Commomveal, 4 M ay 1889; L eeds W eekly C itizen, 29 A pril 1929.
84 Ihid. 10 A ugust 1889.
85 See F.W . Jowclt, What M ude M e a Socia list (Bradford, n.d.).
86 Turncr, A hout M y s c lf p. 80.
87 For the full case o f the G as C om m illee and the u n io n s reply see
thc letters exchanged belween Aid. G ilston. an d T om Paylor in the
Leeds M ercury, 27 and 28 June 1890.
88 T he best accounls o f the slrikc are to be found in the Leeds
M ercury, Com monweal also carricd (very slridcut) reports w rittcn
by an anarchist.
89 YFT, 5 Fehruary 1904; Tom M aguire, a Rcm em hrance p. xv.
90 W. Thronc, M v Life 's B attles (1925), p. 131 f.
91 Leeds M ercury, 30 June 1890.
92 A rthur Shaw o f thc ASE, Prcsidcnt o f Leeds T rades Council in
1894 and 1896, relates how - before thc gas slrikc lie workcd
witli ardour and pcrscvcrance for lile succcss o f thc Liberal P arty.
During thc slrikc lie wilncsscd a Liberal Councillor and professed
fricnd o f Labour entertain thc blacklcgs with "B rito n s never shall
be slavcs . O thcr Liberis provided thcm will beer and tobceo.
 H O M A G E TO T O M M A G U I R E 63

wliilc at llic same lime (he Lecds gasworkcrs were provided wilh
militar)', as another mark of Liberal fricndship. This decided me. I
vowcd I would never again assist eilher of thc Poltica! Parties. J.
Claylon (ed.), IVhv I Joined thc independent Lahour Party (Lceds,
n.d.).
93 Tom Maguire, a Reincmhrance, p. xi.
94 By lite end of 1892 ttere were Fabian Societies at Batley, Bradford,
Copley (ttear Halifax), Halifax, HolmTirlh, Huddersfield, Leeds, and
Sowerby Bridge; Castleford and Dewsbury were added before May
1893. List o f Memhers (Fabian Society, October 1892) and Tenth
Animal Report of Fabian Society, April 1893. A correspondent in
lite Lahour Leader, 20 April 1901, notes tliat the Bradford Socialist
League ailerwards nterged into tlie Bradford Socialist Society and
linally became a branch of the Fabian Society. The Halifax Fabian
Society was especially effeclive in its propaganda; see Lister MSS.
History.
95 Lahour Leader, 13 April 1901.
96 Dewsbury Reprter, 13 October 1894.
97 At the same lime the Leeds TC changed its ame to the Trades and
Labour Cottncil.
98 Leeds TntftfflslCouncil, Animal Report, 189$, pp. 1-2, 6. This was
lite successor to the Labour liad been
founded aficr thc gas%trike, wilh Maguire as sccrctary and the
formidable od unionist, Judge, H ^ I S I iIS I^ P t ', 78 July 1890, and
Jbr Judge, 1 July 1892.
99 Annual Report, 1893, p.5.
100 T il retire into the comer and write po et$ , lie dcclarcd ater the
gas strike (Tom M a g ta rS a Remembrme, p. xiijf'See also letler
quoted in Thompson, op. cit. p. 703 n. 1: Totn .. sinks liis own
individualily and allows otlier people to rnn away wilh his ideas,
etc.
101 Mahon was elecled paid assistant secretary of the Yorkshire Dislrict
of llie Gasworkers on a slender majority vote in July 1891. YFT, 10
July 1891.
102 YFT, 20 Novemher 1891.
103 Ibid. 26 February 1892.
104 Information frotn Mr A.T. Marles.
105 See Note on the South Leeds Eleclion, pp. 315-6.
106 Edward Carpenler to Alf Mattison, 2 October 1892, Mallison
Colleclion.
107 On lite occasion of the first National Conference of the ILP
Carpenler wrote to Mattison (13 January 1893): (I see tliat od
64 M A K IN G H IST O R Y

fraud Mahon has got there - Champion too!) I am glad you didn.
yield to Mahon about going, and Tom M. I tliink in his heart
cannot be sorry that you were elected. Mattison Collection.
108 Article by Turner in Yorkshire Evening AfeHw^l924, in Mattison
Cutling-book.
1U9 Obituary of Paul Bland, Labour Leader, 20 April 1901.
110 Bradford TC Minutes, in possession of Bradford Trades Council.
111 Turner, Heavv Woollen Textile Workers^Union, pp. 65-7WTlie paper
opened up a new vista. We scoured Yorkshire textile areas for
members, and the Unioffl grew froijt a few hundreds to a few
thousands. See aba P a $ on its effect, in YFT, 25'JDecember 1891.
112 Commtmwfjf, R Octobefc. 1889? John Lister, a learned antiquarian,
was later to vvrite: T learned many useful, practical lessons from
sonre of thesc agitators who ... knew far more about the
industrial ratory of (tur country than I . Lister MSS. History.
113 YFT, 19 1891.
114 Ibidj 6 February 1891. But a Germn manufacturer wrote to tlie
Observar from Crefeld and claimed that their average
wages were higher than litse in Listers milis.
115 Ibid. 24 April p L
116 Ibid. 1 May 1891.
117 Ibid. 17 July 1891.
118 The Bradford Trades Council was considering contesting East
Bradford with a Labour candidate in 1885 (TC Minutes, 10
February 1885). But in 1888 the Liberal Association could only be
persuaded with great difliculty to adrnit a Trades Council nominee
to the Liberal Eight for the School Board. (Minutes, 6 November,
and entries lo 4 December 1889). However a Labour Electoral
Association had been formed in 1888, and socialists like Bland,
Cowgill, Concitan and Bartley were inaking ihemselves felt on the
Council. But the LEA was hamstrung by Liberal-Socialist disagree-
mcnls, and Jowelt, who was secretary, let it die. Labour Leader, 20
April 1901; Brockway, op. cit. p. 31.
119 For Mahon's Programnie, see Thompson, op. cit. p. 615, note 2. For
the Bradford Labour Union progranime, see Labour Union Journal,
30 June 1892. For Coin Valley, see Mann, op. cit.
120 Bills and eleclion leaflcts in Shaftoe Cutting-book.
121 YFT, 29 May 1891.
122 Ihid. 15 and 22 January 1892.
123 M inutes o f 2nd Annual Congress o f D ockers &c. (Septcniber 1891),
pp. 25-6. The signaturas have bcen bound and are preserved by the
Bradford Trades Council.
 H O MA G E TO TOM MA G U I R E 65

124 Minutes of Colnc Vallcy Labour Union (in posscssion nf C V

Labour Party). For un cxaniplc o Mnnu's vicws on (he priorily of
(rucie unin and municipal work over purlininciUary, scc (he irtide
Unionisl <{ Traites Councll Recan, 5 Scplcinber 1891; for un
cxuiuplc of a reproof ainicd al Mann, scc cdilorial, Toin Mann and
Ihc Rcprcscnlation of Labour, YTT, 2R Auyusl 189!.
125 F.y. al Huddcrsncld in February 1891, wlicn Balniforlh (oppcd (lie
poli in (lie Scliool Board clcclions.
126 YTT, 10 February 1893.
127 The Hcavy Woollcn Dislricl Trades Council was fornicd in July
1891, wilh Ben Turucr as sccrclary, and in only lwo inonlhs was
inlcrvcning in local clcctions. Minulcs, 15 Scptcnibcr 1891 (in
posscssion of Miss Nora Turncr).
128 YTT, 10 July 1891.
129 Bradford Ohserver, 14 June 1892.
130 YTT, I July 1892. The Jirm was Clayton, Murgatroyd <6 Co.
131 Lisler MSS. Hislory and cultings in Mallison Collcclion, and YFT,
20 Noveniher 1891.
132 Trade Unionisl & Trades Council Record, 7 Novenibcr 1891.
133 TFT, 7 Augusl 1891,
134 Ibid. 14 Augusl 1891.
135 Elcclion Manifcslo and Lisler MSS. Hislory; HaliJ'ax Free Press,
January 1893.
136 Snowden, op. cil. i. p. 69: The 1LP was allracling in (he main (he
young inen vvlio wcrc nol ycl volers.
137 Ilalifax Guardian, 6 Marcli 1897.
138 lu February 1894 a rcsolulion was passed al (lie Yorkshirc
Federal ion of Trades Councils urging (he govcrnnicnl (o Takc up a(
once (lie qucslion of (lie nalionalisalion of (lie land, nincrals,
railways, and all (lie nicans of production and dislribulion, as a
nicans of liclping lo solve Ihc uncmploycd qucslion'. 17*7. 16
February 1894.
139 YFT, 10 July 1892.
140 Scc Burgess in (lie Labour Leader, 20 April 1901.
141 Dewsbury Reprter, 13 Oclobcr 1894.
142 Tom Klayuire, a Remembrance p. vi.
143 Snowden, op. cil. i, p. 82.
144 Tom Mayuire, a Remembrance', T. Maguirc, Machine Room Chants
(1895); J. Clayton, Befare Sunrise (Manchcslcr, 1896); niisccllanc-
ous cutlings in Turncr and Maltison Scrapbooks, and Mallison
Nolebook.
 William Morris

I have in no way altered my opinin that - if we are to

acknowlcdgc William Morris as one o f the greatest o f Englishmen
- it is not because he was, by fits and starts, a good poet; or
because o f his influence upon typography; or because o f his high
craftsmanship in the decorative arts; or because he was a practical
socialist pioneer; or, indeed, because he was all these; but because
o f a quality which permeates all these activities and which gives to
tliem a certain unity. I have tried to describe this quality by saying
that Morris was a great moralist, a great moral teacher. It is in his
moral criticism o f society (and which o f his actions in the
decorative arts, or in A nti-ScrapeJ or the renewal o f interest in
Icelandic Saga, was not infomied by a fundamental criticism o f the
way o f life o f his own time?) - and in the crucial position which
this criticism occupies in our cultural history at the point of
transition from an od tradition to a new 1 - that his greatness is to
be found. And tliis greatness comes to its full m aturity in the
political writing and example o f his later years. I have gained the
feeling that - perhaps through fear o f controversy and out of
respect for admirers o f W illiam M orris who do not share his
political convictions - this Society has tended to be reticent on tliis
matter. But M orris was one o f our greatest men, because he was a
great revolutionary; a profoundly cultured and humane revolution-
ary, but not the lcss a revolutionary for this reason. Moreover, he
was a man working for practical rcvolution. It is tliis which brings
the whole man together. It is this which will niake his reputation
grow as the years advanee.
English revolutionarics in the past 100 years have been men
without a Rcvolution. At times they have convinced themselves o f
the Revolutions inuninence. H.M . Hyndman, when he founded the
Social Democratic Fcdcration in 1882, looked forward to 1889 as
 WILLIAM MORRIS 67

the probable date of its conmiencement. For a time Morris (whose

thiiiking was greatly influenced by the Pars Commune) shared this
cataclysmic Outlook. But when he foundcd the Socialist League in
1884 he liad already grown more rcticent: our immediate aim
should be chiefly educational ... with a view to dcaling with the
crisis if it should come in our day, or of handing on the tradition
of our hope to others if we should die before it comes.
Five years later again, when writing News from Nowhere,
Morris postponed the commeneement of the Revolution to 1952. In
the sixty years that would intervene he foresaw much troublesome
and wearisome action, leading to the triumph of demi-semi-
Socialism, which would improve the condition of the working-
class while leaving its position unchanged. At the end of this vista
of refonn he still saw an ultmate revolutionary confrontation; and
in one o f his last lectures #delivered in 1895, the year before his
death - lie avowed:

I have thought the matter up and down, and in and out, and I
cannot for the life of me see how the great change which we
long for can 8ne o t l ^ H j ^ ^ ^ ^ B E u r b a B iO iid suffering
of Inc kind .... We are living in an epoch whcre there is
combat be l i co m m erci^ S ^ ^ of reckless waste,
and communism, or the system of neighbourly conunon sense.
Can that combat be fought out ... without loss and suffering?
Plainly speaking I know that it cannot.

He was a revolutionary without a Revolution: more than that, he

knew that he did not live within a revolutionary context. He did
not, like Cromwell, have Revolution thrust upon him; or did he,
like Lenin, build a dedicated party witliin a society whose
revolutionary potential was apparent. hi the eyes of his opponents
he was the very type of the socialist trouble-maker or (as tliey
would phrase it today) the maladjusted intcllcctual. He wanted to
stir up revolt where Jilo revolt was. He wanted to rnake contcnted
rnen discontented, and discontented men into agitators of discon-
tcnt: it is to stir you up not to be conten with a little that I am
hcre tonightS And he spent his energy recklessly during the last
fificen vcars of lit life. &jth ini pf creating a revolutionaiy
68 MAKING HISTORY

tradition - both intcllcctual and practical - within a society unripe

for Revolution.
Tliis is, of coursc, thc role for which the romantic poet is cast,
and many have been content to disniiss Morris, the revolutionary,
with tliis platitude. The late romantic poet, author of The Earthly
Paradise, and the utopian dreamer, author o f News from Nowhere,
are confiised in the same sentimental - or irritable - portrait of
baffled unpractical idealism.
The portrait is false. For one tliing, the convention supposes an
effervescent iconoclastic youth, succeeded by premature death or by
a respectable and pedestrian middle-age. Tliis was not the course of
Morris life. Certainly, he rebelled in his youtli. It was a moral
rebellion, stenuning from the romantic tradition, nourished by
Carlyle and Ruskin. The enemy was bourgeoisdom and philistin-
ism. The tilting-grounds in his holy warfare against the age were
the visual arts. The battle vas joined with fervour, but it had
scarcely started when - as happened with more than one Victorian
rebel - the enemy opened its ranks to receive him with acclaim.
Morris, in his late thirties^ seemed doomed to enter the family
lbum of Victorian men of letters. Tliat tedious poem, The Earhly
Paradise, was taken into tlie bosom of that very bourgeoisdom
and philistinism against which Morris had risen in revolt. So
costly were the producs of the Firm in the decorative arts that it
was forced to depend upon the custom o f the wealthy. And while
the Morris fashions began to pentrate the drawing-rooms of the
sclcct, the Railway Age and the architects of Restoration continucd
to desecrate the outside world.
Tliis was thc first time that success spelt failure to Morris: he
savoured thc futility of his revolt like gall. Am I doing nothing
but make-bclicf then, something like Louis XVIs lock-making? he
askcd. And - when supervising work in thc house of the Northern
iron-mastcr, Sir Lowthian Bell - he tumed suddenly upon his
patrn like a wild animar and declarad: I spend my life in
ministering to thc swinish luxury of the ricli.
He repudiatcd success as othcr mcn repudate caluniny. He
plunged into more intricatc problems of craftsmanship at the Firm.
He sustaincd his hatred of modcm civilisation by translating
I t 1 ______ I I .. ----- u : Lln 1_____l____1 , .
 W I L L IA M M O R R IS 69

grcat campaign for thc protcction o f ancient buildings. He oponed

his inoming paper and was astonished to find that Britain was on
the ove o f a major war, on bchalf o f the Turkish Empire. His
rcsponse was to become an agitator.
Tliis agitation was to carry him, by way of an acute personal
and intellectual crisis, into the cmbryonic socialist niovement,
which he joined in his fiicth year. From this time forward lie was
to see w ar - whether overt, imperialist and bloody, or stealthy,
rcspectable and bloodless - as the authentic expression of the
Victorian ethos. It was from the circumstances of war that he was
to draw one o f his most evocative images o f capitalist society:

Do not be deceived by the outside appearance of order in our

plutocratic society. It fares with it as it does with the older
forms o f war, that there is an outside look o f quite wonderful
order about it; how neat and comforting the steady march of tlie
reginient; how quiet and respcctablb tlie sergeants look; how
clean thc polished camin ... thc looks o f adjutant and sergeant
as innocent-looking as may be1 nay, the very orders for
destruction and plunder are given with a quiet precisin which
scems the very token o f a good conscience; tliis is the mask
that lies before tlie ruined comfeld and tlie buming cottage, and
mangled bodies, the untimely death o f worthy men, the
desolated lime.

Tliis second rebellion was at one and the same tne the consum-
mation o f liis youthful revolt and the gnesis o f a new revolution-
ary impulse within our culture. This time there was to be no
reconciliation. The Victorian middle-class, which dearly loved an
idealist refomier, was shocked not so much by his rebellion as by
its practical fomi o f expression. M r Morris ... is not content to be
heard merely as a voice crying in the wildemess, complaincd one
aggrieved leader-writer, he would disturb the foundations of
society in order that a liigher artistic valu may be given to our
carpets.
For Morris broke with the conventional picture o f the rebellious
romantic in another respect. In everything to which he tumed his
hand he demanded o f himself practical niastery. As he tunicd to
70 M A K I N G H IS T O R Y

the dye-vat and to the loom , so he tu m e d his hands to the work of

making a Revolution. T liere is no w o rk w hich he did not take
upon himself. H e spoke on o pen-air pitches, S unday after Sunday,
until his health broke down. H e ad dressed dem onstrations o f miners
and o f the unem ployed. H e attended innum erable committee
meetings. H e edited C om m onw eal, an d sold it in the streets. He
appeared, as prisoner and as w itness, in th e plice courts. I cant
help it, he answ ered a rep ro o f from his closest friend, Georgie
Bum e-Jones. T he ideas w hich have tak en hold o f m e will not let
me rest .... One m ust tu m to hope, and only in one direction do I
see it - on the road to Revolution: everything else is gone ....
And yet, for all this evidence o f p ractical personal commit-
mcnt cannot the charge o f m isguided rom anticism still be
sustained? W hile M orris accepted alm ost in tofo the economic
and historical analysis o f M arx, he alw ays avow ed tliat his
special leading motive in becom ing a revolutionary socialist was
hatred o f m odem civilisation. It is a shoddy ag e , he roared at
a Clarion reprter. Shoddy is King. From the statesm an to the
shoemaker all is shoddy! T he reprter concealed his boots
further beneath the table: Then you do not adm ire the comraon-
sense John Bull, M r M orris? John Bull is a snpid, nnpractical
o a f' w as the reply. N othing iniuriated M orris more than the
complacent philistinism o f the practical m an, unless it was the
complacent philistinism o f the practical one. T h a ts an impos-
sible dreani o f yours, M r M orris, a clergyman once declared,
such a society would need G od Almighty H im self to manage
it. Morris shook his fist in reply: W ell, danm it, man, you
catch your God Almighty w ell have H im .
But as we draw further from his time, it is M orris, and not his
critics, who appears as a realist. He w as a healthy man, living in a
ncurotic society. I speak o f m oral rcalism, not the realism o f the
practical revolutionary. As leader o f the Socialist League he made
blunders enough - Engels liad justification for his irritable charac-
terisation o f him, in prvate letters, as a settlcd sentimental
socialist. But Engels underestimated the vigour o f that long
tradition o f moral criticism which was M orris inlieritance. With his
rich historical cxperience, and his concrete responso to social
reality, Morris had astonishing insight into the linos o f growth, the
 WILLIAM MORRIS 71

elemcnts o f dccay, within his culture. In Icctures, spccchcs, passing

notes in Commonweal, he cast his eyes forward to our time. He
foresaw (in 1887) that the opcning up o f Africa would lead to the
cnding o f the G reat Deprcssion, followcd by a grcat European war,
perhaps lengthcned out into a regular cpoch o f w ar. He foresaw
Fascism. He foresaw (and regrettcd) the Welfarc State.
The enemy, as in his youth, was still bourgeoisdom and
philistinism. But now he stood appalled before the destructive
urges which he scnscd within the Victorian middle classcs, whom -
he said - in spite o f their individual good nature and banality, 1
look upon as a most terrible and implacable forc:

Tlie most refned and cultured people ... have a sort o f

M anichean hatred o f tlie world (I use the word in its proper
sense, the home o f man). Such people must be both the enemies
o f beauty and the slaves o f necessity . . .

Tlie utilitarian, competitive ethic he now saw as the ethic o f Cain;

he liad always known that it murdered art, he liad come to
understand that it murdered m a n g dignity as a creator in his daily
labour, he now discovered that it couldfffflm aiikiiid. He spoke
in a lecture o f the strength o f that tremendous organisation under
which we live .... Rather than lose anything which really is its
essence, it will pul the roof o f the world down upon its head. He
was consumed with the urgency o f tlie socialist propaganda. If
capitalism were not to be displaced by a clear-sighted constructive
revolutionary movement, if it were to end in mere deadlock and
blind insurrection, then tlie end, tlie fall o f Europe, may be long in
coming, but when it does, it will be far more terrible, far more
confused and full o f suffering than the period o f the fall of Rome.
In this tonnented ccntury such insights are worth more tlian a
pedantic sneer. It is as if Morris liad cast his eye over Gallipoli
and Passchendaele, over purge and counter-purge, over concentra-
tion camps and scorched earth, over the tragedy o f Africa and the
other tragedies to come. A t times one feels, indeed, that he
deduced from the acquisitive ethic within class-divided society an
Iron Law o f Morality no less rigid than Lassalles Iron Law of
Wages. Into the maw o f the Age o f Commerce honour, justice,
72 MAKING HISTORY

beauty, pleasure, hope, all m ust be cast ... to stave off the end
awhile; and yet at Iast the end m ust com e. H e might have found
the proof, the culminating logic, o f such a Law in our own
ingenious devices for annihilation.
Morris was sceptical - especially in his last years - as to the
tendency towards the immiseration o f the niasses within capitalism.
But he was convinced o f the tendency tow ards the moral immisera-
tion o f the dominant classes. W hence w as this terrible diagnosis
derived? It carne, by one road, from C arlyles denunciation of a
society where cash-payment is the sol nexus o f m an with man; by
another road, from his own study o f the conditions o f nineteenth
century labour and productive relations; by yet another, from
M arxs moral indignation, and its foundation in the manuscripts of
the early 1840s. M orris did not use the tem alienation, which has
regained currency today; but he w as -9 and rcmains - our greatest
diagnostician o f alienation, in term s o f the concrete perception of
the moralist, and within the context o f a particular English cultural
tradition. From these economic and social relationships, this moral
logic must ensue.
And this logic demanded that the ethic o f atomised, acquisitive
society be opposed by the ethic o f community. As between these
two there could be no shadow o f compromise. It w as tliis logic
which drove Morris to the street-com ers, to play the fools part as
revolutionary agitator in the com placent streets o f G ladstones
England. And here we meet with the second great irony o f M orris
carcer. For a second time his rebellion met with success; and for a
second time success was flavoured with gall.
This is not to say that M orris section o f the movement the
Socialist League was successful. It petered out into anarchist
tomfoolery, leaving Morris stranded in his Hammersmith Socialist
Society. But, indirectly, the propaganda hclped to set a mass
movement in motion: and, indeed, the direct political influence of
Morris is often under-rated. By the early 1890s men whom M orris
liad helped to convert wcre lcading dynamic popular niovcmcnts:
Tom Mami and the new unions: Blatchford and Clarion, the
Socialist Leaguers, Jovvctt and Maguirc, vvlio were architccts o f the
Yorkshire 1LP. And yet this was not the success for which M orris
 W1 LLI AM MOR R I S 73

Hcre lies thc dilem nu of thc revolutionary within a society

unripe for revolution. If he stands aside froni thc niain currcnts o f
social change, he bccomes purist, sectaria, without influcncc. If he
swims with the currcnt, he is swcpt dowmvard by thc flow of
reformism and conipromise. I thc 188()s Morris liad lioped that thc
propaganda would make Socialists ... cover thc country with a
network o f associations composcd o f men who fcel their antago-
nism to thc dominant classes, and have no temptation to waste
tlieir time in the thousand follics o f party politics. At that time he
was an uncompromising anti-parliamentarian. A parliamentary so-
cialist party would, he thought, enter into a path of conipromise
and opportunism: it would fall into the error o f moving eartli and
sea to flll the ballot boxes with Socialist votes which will not
represent Socialist men.' Tlie Lrollicking opportunism o f the
Fabians, and especially o f Sidneyi Webb, met with his absolute
opposition. W ebbs mistake (declared Morris) was to over-estimate
tlie importance o f the mechcmism o f a system of society apart from
the end towards which it may be used.
The end he himself always described as Conununism. When, in
the nineties, the whole movement set in the direction of piecemeal
refonu, eight-hour agitation and parliamentary action, he welcomed
this as a necessary process in awakening the aspirations o f the
workers. But, in his last lectures, he asked repeatedly how far the
bettennent o f the working people might go and yet stop short at
last without having made any progress on the dired road to
Conununism?

Whether ... the tremendous organization o f civilized commercial

society is not playing the cat and mouse game with us
socialists. Whether the Society o f Incquality might not accept
the equasi-socialist machinery ... and work it for the purpose of
upholding that society in a somewhat shorn condition, maybe,
but a same one .... The workers better treated, better organized,
helping to govern tliemselves, but with no more pretence to
equality with the rich ... than they have now.

Herein lies his realism, overlapping his own circumstances, and

searching the dilenunas o f our own time with a moral insight so
74 MAKINU H1S 1 U K Y

intense that it can be mistaken as callous. When the prospect of

thc capitalist public Service ... brought to perfection was put
before him, he reniarked tliat he would not walk across the Street
for the rcalisation of such an ideal .
The nub of tlie questioq lies in the concept o f conununity.
Webb and the Fabians looked forward to Equality o f Opportunity,
within a competitive society: Morris looked forward to a Society of
Equals, a socialist conununity. It is not a small difference that
divides these concepts. In one - however modified - the ethic of
competition, the energies of war. hi the other, the ethic of
co-operation, the energies of love. These two etliics Morris
contrasted again and again by the ames o f False and True Society:
False Society, or Conunercial War: and that true society of loved
and lover, parent and child, friend and friend ... which exists by its
own inherent right and reason, in spite o f what is usually thought
to be the cement of society, arbitrary authority.
It was the greatest Bshivement o f Morris, in his full
maturity, to bring this concept o f conununity to the point of
expression: to place it in the sharpest antagonism to his own
society: and to em boda it in imaginative tenns and in the
exalted brotherhood and hope o f the socialist propaganda. To
this he sununoned all his resources - his knowledge o f medieval
and of Icelandic society, his craftsmans insight into the proc-
esses of labour, his robust historical imagination. He had no time
for noble savages, and even less for the Fabian nostrum of State
bureaucracy. No amount of mechanical manipulation from above
could engender the etliic of conununity; individual men (he
said) carniot shuffle off the business of life onto the shoulders
of an abstraction called the State. Contrary to the prevalent
opinin, Morris welcomed all machinery which rcduced tlie pain
and drudgcry of labour; but dccentralisation both o f production
and of administration he believed esscntial. In True Society, the
unit of administration must be small enough for every Citizen to
fcel a personal responsibility. The conununity of Conununism
must be an organic grovvth of mutual obligations, of personal
and social bonds, arising from a condition of practical equality.
And bctwccn False and True Society there lay, like a river of
fire, the Rcvolution. It was thc work of a realist to indcate
 WILL1AM MORRIS 75

wliere that rivcr ran, and to hand down to us a tradition o f

hopo' as to thc lands bcyond thosc dcadly watcrs.

In conclusin, if thcre is one part o f my long study of Morris

which - in thc light o f thc political controversics o f rcccnt ycars -
would sccm to be a fruitful arca o f rc-cxaniination, it is in thosc
passages where 1 scck to relate the basis o f Morris moral critique
o f socicty to the M arxist tradition. The question is complex, and
lcads into an intricatc succcssion o f defmitions. 1 feel now - as I
did then - that M orris and M arxs critique o f capitalisni are
complementary and reinforce each other. Tliere can be no question
o f disassociating the two. Moreover, I would wish to retract
nothing o f w hat I have written o f M orris profound debt to
writings o f M arx; these gave to his own criticism much o f t
fom i and some o f their forc.
But I have tended at certain points to suggest that Morris moral
critique o f society is dependent upon M arxs economic and
historical analysis, that the morality is in some ways secondary, tlie
analysis o f povver and productive relationships primary. That is not
the way in which I look upon the question now. I see the tw
inextricably bound together in the same context of social life.
Economic relationships are at the same time moral relationships;
rclations o f production are at the same time relations between
people, o f oppression or o f co-operation: and there is a moral logic
as well as an economic logic, which derives from these relation
ships. The history o f the class struggle is at the same time thc
history o f human morality. As I strove to stir up people to
reform, Williams Morris wrote in his Preface to Signs o f Change:

I found that the causes o f the vulgarities o f civilization lay

deeper than I liad thought, and little by little I was driven to the
conclusin tiat all these uglinesses are but the outward expres-
sion o f the innate moral baseness into which we are forced by
our present fonn o f society ....

This is the phrase - innato moral baseness. And if capitalist

society in Britain today displays fewer o f tlie extreme hardships
and oppressions o f M orris day, the innate moral baseness o f the
76 MAKI NG HI S TORY

acquisitive ethic, and of exploitive rather than co-operative social

relationships, givcs rise to nevv inliumanities, to the atomisation of
social life, and to the greater intemational idiocies.
Thcrc is nothing here vvhich contradicts Marxs analysis. Wliat I
ani insisting on is not only that Morris discoveries are complemen-
tary to those of Marx, but also that they are a necessary coniplement,
that without this historical understanding of the evolution of mans
moral nature (tp ffiich Marx scawsrfy retumed after the 1844 MS) his
esscntial concept of the whole *man becomes lost, as it has so often
been lost in the later Marxist tradition. A generation is now arising to
whom the i%ks|1 critique of society makes a more direct appeal than
the tradition^) analysis tM Eam om ic causes. For this generation,
Morris $ have lost, in the passage of years, none of their
pungency and f o i^ ^ ^ ^ js n M a lB |js e e Marxs genius in transfonn-
ing the traditions of English economic theory and of Geman philoso-
phy, so they should see how Morris transfomied a ^ S a l tradition of
liberal and humane critiplfeiti of society, and hraMlie brought this into
the common revolutionary stream. And if*$W^0fihievement had been
more widely recognised, perhaps fcvver Marxists would have been
found who could have i^^Sm&j$he overthrow of capitalist class
power and productive relationships could - by itsclf load on to the
fruition of % Communist community: that, if tlie fonns of economic
ownership vere pight, the would follow. Tliey would have
realised - as Morris proclaimed in all his work - tliat the construction
of a Communist commuiift^ would require a moral revolution as
profound as the revolutkm in ecgqpmic and social power.
It is because William Morris, in imaginative and in day-to-day
polemical writing alike, sought to body fortli a visin of tlie actual
social and personal rclations, the vales and attitudes consonant
with a Society of Equals, that he remains the greatest moral
initiator of Communisni within our tradition.
A lecture lo the William Morris Society, 1959.

Note
1 A posilion wliich has recenlly received a frcsli and penctrating
appraisal in Mr Raymond Williams Culture and Society.
 Christopher Caudwell

Christopher St. John Sprigg (Christopher Caudwell) was killed in

action, forty ycars ago, on February 12tli, 1937, on thc Jarania
River, covering with a machinc-gun the rctreat o f his fellows in the
British battalion o f the International Brigade. He was then twenty-
nine years od. He was unknown to the intellectual world, evcn o f
tlie Left. AH his signifcant works - / Ilusin and Realiy, Sludies in
a Dying Culture, Further Studies, The Crisis o f Physics, and
Romance a nd Realism 1 - were published posthumously.
All tliese works were written in two years, 1935-36, years in
which his output included also poems and short stories (mainly
unpublished), freelance joumalism, detective novis. He also joined,
at the end o f 1935, the Poplar branch o f the Communist Party, and
took an active part in branch life.
There was also, throughout tliis period, a voracious ingestin of
new reading. Caudwell was self-tauglitL he liad left school (for
joumalism) before he was fffletitii and he was never exposed to
fonnal advanced education.
Caudwell defies the usual gftereotypes o f the literary Left o f the
Thirties. Tliese stereotypes are, jf f l any case, o f questionable
validity. Even so, Caudwell does not belong to the ambience of
Left Review, the Left Book Clubs or Unity Theatre; and he liad
avoided public school and university altogether. He disliked, and
avoided the conipany o f intellectual circles, even (perhaps espe-
cially) o f the Left. He appears to liave liad few friends, and to have
developed his thought in isolation. His style, with its polemical
attack, its lack o f any reverence for the deniarcation-lines of
disciplines, its inipatience o f scholarly apparatus, must appear
strange, even vulgar, to todays practitioners o f the Marxism of
the Academy. And there can be no doubt that Caudwell wrote too
much and wrote too fast; some parts o f Ilusin and Reality were
written (in the sumiller o f 1935 in Comwall) at the rate o f 5,000
7X MAKING HISTORY

words a day. This book, at least, he w as able to prepare for the

press. All the rcmaindcr was lcft in m anuscript (sometimes
corrected, sometimes requiring further revisin) when he left for
Spain. We cannot be certain as to the authors own intentions with
these unfinishcd manuscripts.2
AH this is unpromising. lt is not difficult to see Caudwell as a
phenomenon - as an extraordinary shooting-star Crossing Englands
empirical night - as a premonitary sign o f a more sophisticated
Marxism whose true annunciation w as delayed until the Sixties.
But we would be foolish to expect m uch more o f such a brief,
intense and isolated intellectual episode. The image which comes to
mind, involuntarily, is that o f fire: a consciousness too bright and
self-consuming - images o f buming, o f ignition, o f phosphores-
cence, carne readily to Caudwells own pen. T hat being said (and
tribute having been paid) it is easy to tidy Caudwell away, as an
episode in the pre-history o f British M arxism.
I camiot accept this conclusin. Some p art o f Caudwells
thought seems to me more signifcant than this, and its impulse
is not yet exhausted. Studies in a D ying Culture played a
signifcant part in the intellectual biography o f my own gener-
ation. Recent studies by younger scholars seem to me to
misunderstand what were Caudwells central and m ost Creative
preoccupations. Moreover, as our own preoccupations change, so
Caudwells work presents itself for a new kind o f interrogation.
In his Foreword to Studies Caudwell asked, rhetorically, for an
explanation o f the anarchy o f bourgeois intellectual culture:
Either the Devil has come amongst us having great power, or
there is a causal explanation for a discase common to cconomics,
Science, and art. But in the past two decades the Devil has
come amongst Marxists, having excccding great power, productive
of a comparable anarchy. lt is no longer possible to suppose a
Marxist orthodoxy against which Caudwell can be judged,
confinned or found wanting. We can no longer ask whether
Caudwell was or was not corrcct; we have to approach his
work with a rencwed attention, and examine whether he may
have offered Solutions to diffcultics which are far from being
resolved. This changos the whole character o f the necessary
investigation.
 CHRISTOPHER C A U D WE L L 79

II

But to writc about Caudwells thought brings one, at once, face to

face with a problcm of unusual difficulty: what was Caudwell's
thought about? The question scems to cali for two quite easy
answers. First, Caudwell was centrally concemed with problems of
aesthetics and of literary criticism. A serious recent study assunies
(but does not show) that IIlusin and Realily was his major work;
indubitably it was his most mportant production.3 This is the
received view; it has not been contested; and one suspects that
younger Marxists today do not read Caudwell at all unless they are
interested in aestlietios, and that tkose tiflto do content themselves
witli an impatient survey of Illusion and RealityA
If Caudwells central work was about literary criticism, in any
o f its gencrally accepted connota^^S thenAve must accept the
judgement tliat this work remains of interest only in a disconcert-
ingriadmonitory way. Rayntond1 W ilip i* noted, in Culture and
Soclely, that Caudwell has actual literature that is
even interestingH his discussion* is not even specific enough to be
wrong.5 I do not wish to contest this judgement.6 or do I think
that i f can bd' evaded by sliifting Trom Caudwells
criticism to his aesthetics. Caudwell concemed
with the function of l i t e r a t u r e h e develcfped interesting
arguments frorn cultural anthropology which bear upon aesthetics.
But I cannot see tliat large claims can be made for Caudwells
aesthetics if it cannot be shown that he was engaged in any cise
way with the study of lBeriry artefacts. The arguments remain as
assertions, insecurel grounded upon unexamined evidence. So tliat
we are now forced back upon the second, and easier, ansvver to our
question. Caudwells thought - so runs the answer - was about a
great many things. He was brilliant and versatile. He moved
eloquently among problems of physics, philosophy, literary criti
cism, anthropology, neurology, psycho-analysis, and so on. He said,
perhaps, notliing defmitive about any of these. But we have - as
Professor J.B.S. Haldane noted in an early review - a quarry of
ideas. With singular unanimity, commentators on Caudwell have
grasped at this conclusin. It is the consensus (sometimos grudg-
ing) reached in the famous Caudwell controversy in The Modern
80 MAKING HISTORY

Quarlerly in 1950-51. It is a conclusin also of Mulhern

Caudwells work is best seen not as a System to be appropriated
as a whole, but as a copious source o f insights and arguments
necding critical reflection.7
But here tire difficulties enlarge. One quality in Caudwell which
attractcd, and sometimes bemused, liis contemporaries was the
extraordinary width o f his intellectual range. But what if this width
went along with error and shallowness in each field which he
touched? Tliis would appear to be another conclusin in todays
received wisdom. Eagleton has expressed it with eloquence:

Insulatcd from much o f Europe, intellectually isolated even

within his own society, pemieated by Stalinism and idealism,
bereft o f a tlieory o f superstructure, Caudwell nonetheless
persevered in the mistorically hopeless task o f producing from
these mipropitious conditions a fully-fledged M arxist aestlietic.
His work bears aH the scars o f that self-contradictory enterprise:
speculative and^er^Se, studded with random insights, punctuated
by hectic forrays into and out o f alien territories and strewn
with hair-raising theoretical vulgarities.8

This passage niight usefully be examined. We have, once again,

the quarry o f ideas (studded with random insights); but, with
random, we must suppose the quarry to produce many kinds of
stone as well as much useless shale. It is, again, assumed (but
not shown) that Caudwells project was to construct a Marxist
acsthctic. But how far can that otlier assumption (now widely
accepted as a revealed truth) as to the utter poverty and
provincialism o f the thought available to a British Marxist in tlie
Thirties be sustaincd? In the bibliography to Illusion and Reality
(ovcr 500 titlcs) one is struck by the pre-eminence o f anthropol-
ogy,9 an attcntion appropriate in a work which was sub-titled, A
Study in the Sources o f Poctry.10 Psychology and neurology also
takc a promincnt position. How far was this enterprise insulated
from much of Europe? Allowance must be made for changing
fashions and for the slow cstablishment o f certain reputations.
But it may be notcd that the bibliography ineludes works by
Bukharin, Cassirer, Croce, Durkheim, the Gestalt psychologists
 CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL 81

Lcvy-Bruhl, Malinowski, Piaget and Saussure, as well as Freud,

Jung, Adler, Pavlov, Van Gennep, Planck, Ribot, Roheim, Sapir
and so on. There are gaps, of course, but tliis can scarcely be
described as insulation.
But the most striking phrase in Eagletons summary is punctu-
ated by hectic forrays into and out of alien territories. The
bibliography suggests tliat tlie territories which Caudwell inliabited
most securely while writing Illusion and Reality were anthropology
and psychology (vvith neurology) and that, if anytliing, the forrays
were into literature and linguifgfCS. But v&at is that word alien
doing there? Must genetics, , anthropologyBmathematics, neurology
and physiology be alien to literary pursuits, irrelevant to an
investigation into Ote sourqjs, of poetry? One fears that tliis is,
indeed, the implicacin.
The dissociation between science and art was, in Caudwells
view, a prime symptom of the culture. Indeed,
he argued tliat this culture could be seen to be dying because of its
inability to hold Jagralfer in place a unitary
world-view. His argumcnt here was strenuous, even obsessive, and
we can scarcely meet him, in his own chosen temis, if we
disregard it. But yet, how far d i a v ^ ^ m a p r n ^ j really succeed
in straddling the ^ ^ P h alv es of our how are we, who
fall within one or the other, to decide?
Whatever virtue exists in The Crisis in Physics and in two of
the Fnrher Studies rests upon their general competence in areas
wliich are normally ierra incgnita to poets, critics, historians and
sociologists. I am certainly unable to judge this virtue. Moreover,
certain of Caudwells argunients rest not only upon the supposition
tiat he has correctly understood the knowledge of the science
contemporary to him, but also - as in his argument about the
cortex and the unconscious in Consciousness - upon whetlier the
science then available to him has stood the test of the past forty
years. To sit in judgement on these copious insights we are forced
to convene an inter-disciplinary committee. But the experts, as
always, fail to speak with a united voice. When his work was first
presented it was commended by scientists as eminent as Haldane.
But there followed, in 1951, a devastating judgement from a
scientist of unusual breadth of knowledge, J.D. Bemal: lt is
 82 MAKING HISTORY

largcly on account o f his use o f the Ianguage o f popular Science

tliat C audw ells vvork has had ... such an appeal to intellectuals,
particularly to literary intellectuals. H is formulations, Bemal ar
ges, were not only schem atic or, somet mes, plainly wrong,11 but
they vvere accom panied by a capitulation to contemporary bour-
geois scientiic philosophy.
This w ould seem to leave us w ith a negative judgement of
finality. And yet, em bedded in B e m a ls critique (to which no other
scientist had an opportunity to reply 12) there is a large reservation
which has gone unnoticed: flt is tru e th at Caudwell criticised,
brilliantly and destructivelyjfethe philosopliical conclusions o f bour-
geois scientists ... So C audw elFs criticism s o f bourgeois Science
w as (his stem est critic allows) b rilliant, and it is not easy to see
how a mere populanse could m ount such a critique. And are we
entitled to absolute confickyice in the judgem ent o f Bemal (and of
other critics in that ccmtigjversy) as to w liat w as, or was not,
bourgeois about the s c je ^ S or the psycho-analysis o f their time?
For these same critics were, at th at sam e tim e, apologising for or
applauding Z hdanovs crass interventions in Soviet intellectual life,
Stalins m asterful solution o f the problem s o f linguistics, and the
revolutionary character o f L ysenkos genetics. Indeed, this may
have bcen one reason why the Caudw ell C ontroversy ever broke
the surface o f the British C om m unist P arty s nonnally monolitliic
press. In those w orst years o f the intellectual Coid W ar the
intemational Conununist movement had em barked on a rigorous
campaign to correct or expose all bourgeois heresies, and the
assault on Caudwell w as perhaps seen, by the directors o f the
P arty s press, as a small purgative exercise in the Zhdanov mode.
I suggest, with hesitation, that C audw clls scientific incompetence
has not been finally shown. I f the vocabulary o f neurology,13 of
physics, and o f linguistics have been revised since his time, the
problems which he pointed tow ards (with an inadequate vocabulary)
may still remain. As we shall see, C audw ells preoccupations within
the Sciences were not substantive but cpistcmological. Even so, just
as we cannot reasonably offer Caudwell as a literary critic, so we
cannot suffer him as a scientist. Perhaps, tlicn, he was no kind o f
spccialist, but should be seen simply as a Creative M arxist, or a
M arxist philosopher, who could deal brilliantly and destructively
 CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL 83

with the mcthods and conclusions o f bourgeois scientific or literary

study? But tiiis leads us into furtlicr difficulties again. For it raiscs at
once the question: was Caudwell a M arxist at all? And, if so, o f what
kind?
Undoubtedly Caudwell supposcd himsclf to be a Marxist. He
was also an active Comniunist, and his conunitnicnt lcd hini to
tliat dcatli on Jarania Ridge. That death, in its tum , tlirew light
retrospectively upon his intcllectual conunitment, authenticating it
beyond interrogation. But, while honourable, his political judge-
ments are not tliercby shown to have been always wise or
philosophically well-founded. His Studies assume tlirougliout an
orthodox antinomy between a dying bourgeois culture, on one
hand, and an ascendant and healthy Soviet and Coniniunist culture
on the otlier. The Soviet Union appears, not as a subject for
enquiry, but as a rhetorical affinnative antithesis to the maladies o f
tlie capitalist world; and these rhetorical flourishes date his work as
surely as the rhetorical anti-Jacobinism dates the later work o f
Burke or much o f the work o f Coleridge. W e must agree that this
is so, although in none o f these cases does th i s a a t i n g altogether
disallow or overthrow the ulterior argument. But, in Caudwells
case, it has often been asked whetlier tiiis ulterior argument was
Marxist at all?
Once again, it is Raymond Williams v<Ho defines the problem
with the most accurate touch. He shows, with reference to Illusion
and Realiy and Further Studies, i that certain o f Caudwells
definitions appear to revalue M arxs basic conception o f the
relation between social being and social consciousness. This might
(he adds in passing) be an improvement o f M arx, but the
question is left unresolved: it is a quarrel which one who is not a
Marxist will not attempt to resolve. Williams, whose relation to
Marxism has becomc increasingly cise and complex, would not
(one supposes) take the same exit today; indeed, he has recently
signalled that his views o f Caudwell have undergone some
revisin.14 For it is a point o f some substance. If Caudwell liad in
fact offered an improvement o f M arx, and opened the way to a
resolution o f rather familiar difficulties, then tiiis would raise
immensely the interest o f Caudwells work. At the time when
Culture and Society was written, Williams was mainly concemed
84 MAK I N G H I S T O R Y

vvith identifying thcse dificulties and dening tliese contradictions.

Today we should be more concemed witli moving on to resolu-
tions.
That was not, however, tlie spirit in which, several years before,
the Caudwell Controversy had been conducted. As one might
expect, in that place and at that time, the argument was initiated
(by Maurice Comforth) on tlie grounds of whether Caudwell was
or was not a proper and orthodox Marxist, according to an
orthodoxy increasingly petrified by Stalinist doctrine.15 Despite the
efforts of Caudwells defenders,16 the argument never succeeded in
escaping from the terms in which it had at first been set.
We are in dificulties. Caudwell (it is agreed) was a poor critic.
His credentials as a theorist of aesthetics, as a scientist, and as a
Marxist have all been questioned. His political judgement was
honourable but naive. But in tliis train of argument something has
been left to him, and this has not (to my knowledge) been
adequately examined. I will not go over my tracks again. Instead, I
will propose, assertively, a different way into Caudwells work.
This must commence by down-grading IUusion and Reality very
severely. But then we must up-grade, equally finnly, Studies in a
Dying Culture, some part of The Crisis in Physics, and several of
tire Furiher Studies. The strengths found here will enable us to
retrieve a part, but only a small part, of Illusion and Reality. Only
this procedure can lead us to Caudwells central theoretical
concems.
Caudwell was an anatomist of ideology. He was obsessed with
the characteristic illusions of the bourgeois epoch, with the logic of
thcse illusions (their epistemological expression and their epistemo-
logical conscqucnces), and with the way in which, possessed by
thcse illusions, we stand in our own light. Caudwells insights
were not only copious: thcy were comiccted by unitary preoccupa-
tions. Thesc prcoccupations carry him quite far into significant
qucstions in cultural anthropology, linguistics, psychology, philoso-
phy, and also, possibly, in physics and ncurology. Insofar as certain
of thcse same idcological illusions had penctrated decply into
orthodox Marxism also, so that what wcnt by the ame of
Marxism was standing in its own light, Caudwell was potentially a
hcrctic within the orthodox Marxist tradition. He may or may not
 CHRISTOPHER CAUDW ELL 85

have known tliis: we should at least note that his dismissal o f

convcntional M arxist reflection tlieory was blunt, even brutal, and
suggests a conscious polemic. His heretic potential was, anyway,
sensed subsequently by the orthodox and by fellow hcretics alike:
tliis alone can explain the sudden blossoming, at the zcnitli o f
ideological Stalinism, o f the Caudwell Controversy, like a crimson
cactus in flower in the sand-hills o f The M odern Quarerly. For
that argument was, at root, a displaced and ill-conducted argument
between dogmatic and Creative Marxism, for which the structures
o f the Communist Party offered no other outlet. And, finally, it
will be argued, Caudwells heresy, or his Creative impulse, is not
exhausted yet.
III

Let us, then, enter Caudwells world froni a new direction. Illusion
and Reality is in no respect to be seen as his niajor work. It was
written while Caudwell was undergoing a self-conversion to
Marxism, from late 1934 to the auturnn o f 1935. I do not wish to
labour its deficiencies, but will assert these as I find them. Despite
an impression gained from the chapter-headings, -o f massive and
complex organisation, it is an ill-organised, involuted, and repetitive
book. In the frst two chapters, and thereafter in passages in the
later chapters, Caudwell draws on occasion to advantage upon the
findings o f antliropologists as to the function o f song and verse in
primitive and tribal societies. Tliis proper junction between antliro-
pology and aesthetics was not original, but Caudwell gave a new
emphasis to this junction within temis o f a Marxist exposition. The
Creative possibilities o f this approach were realised, Iess in
Caudwells own work than in that o f those most directly influenced
by him: notably, in George Tliomsons Aeschylus and Alhens
(1941) and in his lucid M arxism and Poetry (1945).
There follow four chapters on the developnient of English
poetry - chapters (and a notorious table) which have only been a
source o f embarrassment to Marxist critics. Then we pass, by way
o f some uneven (but sometimes interesting) passages on Ianguage
and epistemology, to tliose chapters (The Psyche and Phantasy,
Poetrys Dream-work) in which Caudwell seeks to come to temis
with contemporary psychoanalysis. In general, Caudwells nose is
86 MAKING HISTORY

pressed too closely against the window-pane o f his recent reading,

and the interval between ingestin and critical reflection has been
too brief for him to get his thoughts into order. Finally, we come
to some euphoric conclusions about Conimunist art, in which the
influence of Bukliarins optimistic public rhetoric (1934) 17 can be
clearly seen. Assertively iroughout the book the bourgeois (an
epochal noun) has been denounced, but since the denunciation lacks
specicity, the tone becomes overbearing and pharasaical.
It is a bad book. Tomforth and Mulhem have correctly
indicated certain deforming weaknesses, and in particular the
analytic preference for simplistic binary oppositions: Man/Nature:
Science/Art: Instincts (or genotype)/Society. Other criticisms, as to
Caudwells idealism, are (I will arge) less well-founded.
The relatiori betweeiu Ii^B n and Reg[ity and the Studies still
needs clarifcation. I have alvvays supposed that the Studies are the
later vvork; many passages in both works are clearly and closely
related, but JB every case the statcment in the Studies is more lucid
and more cogent. The account given by Caudwells latest editor
confinas this seqifflre^18 Caudwcll commenced Studies in a Dying
Cilture late in 193K shor befle joining tlie Communist Party,
and a first draft was completed in April 1936. All the studies
(including Further Studies) were part of a single conception.
Caudvvell liad planned to use, as an epigraph to all tlie studies, a
quotation froni Lenin: Communism becomes an empty phrase, a
mere facade, and the Communist a mere bluffer, if he has not
worked over in his consciousness the whole inheritance of human
knowledge. ly This is a quite extraordinary project, to undertake in
real camest and to conunit to paper. During the sununer and
autumn of 1936 revisin and expansin continucd: the study on
physics was expanded (in The Crisis in Physics) to book-length.
Romance and Realism is another expanded study, and a further
study, on biology, rcmains unpublishcd. It is not possible to say
how far Caudwcll considered any of the work to be completed:
some part clearly stood in necd of revisin, and has suffered from
inexpert editing.20
So the studies are, not the maturc Caudwcll, but as mature as
Caudwcll became. For opposing rcasons they were deprived o f the
full luht of critical attention wlicn thcv appcarcd Studies in a
 C H R IS T O P H E R C A U D W E L L 87

Dying Culture (1938) was obscured, as by a magnesium fiare, by

the illuniination of his self-sacrifice in Spain: friends were elegaic,
critics were subdued. Further Studies (1949) appeared in some of
tile worst ideological moments of the Coid War; danined or
ignored by an ascendant conservatism, it aroused tlie suspicion of a
consolidating Stalinism. or was this suspicion without sorne basis.
For Caudwells reputation liad by theti begun to acquire a kind of
underground, proto-revisionist status.
Caudwells style was Me occasion for this suspicion: it has
often been tliought to be difficult. Initiating tlie debate in The
Modern QuartH/, ComfblR ^gued tllHt,, the difficulty arises
because his tliought is nebulous, shifting, eclectic and inconsistent;
because he clothes simple* things in a veil of obscuf phrases, and
drags with him the confusions of bourgeois i9!logy. Caudwells
style ... is not yet the style of a Marxist. Let us take, from the
first few pages o f Sludies in a Dying Culture, a sample of this
style: Shaw (he i a r u u i m ^ f M ? h e represents human
beings as iValking nnellects:

Fortunately tliey are not, or the human race would long ago
have perished in some dream-fantasy of logic and metaphysics.
Human beings are mountains of unconscious being, walking the
od grooves o f instinct and simple life, witli a kind of
occasional phosphorescence of consciousness at the summit. And
this conscious phosphorescence derives its valu and its power
from the emotions, from the instincts; only its fomi is derived
from tlie intellectual shapes o f thought. Age by age man strives
to make this consciousness more htense, the artist by subtilising
and intensifying the emotions, the scientist by making fiiller and
more real the thought form, and in both cases this is done by
buming more being in the thin fame. Shaw, however, is
obsessed with the pur fame, phosphorescence seprate from
being ...
This mixed thought and feeling of consciousness is not the
source o f social power, only a component of it. Society with its
workshops, its buildings, its material solidity, is always present
below real being and is a kind o f vast reservoir of the unknown,
unconscious and irrational in every man, so that of everyone we
88 MAKING HISTORY

can say his conscious life is only a fitfiil gleam on the mass of
his whole existence. Moreover, there is a kind o f carapacious
toughncss about tlie conscious part o f society which resists
change, even vvhile, bclow these generalisations, changes in
material and technique and real detailed being are going on.

It is the tensinA*bctween mans being and mans consciousness,

which drives on society and makes life vital. (SDC, 5-7).
Two comments spring to mind. J |t s t , this is not tire style of a
Marxist, in the conventions sanctioned as correct in Conimunist
publications of 1946^16 (but very much less in the Thirties): it is
Caudwells own style. He has thrown away the crutches of
authorised texts, and is^ B E in g on his own. Everything tliat he
writes is thought through afresh and is expressed in his own way.
But (the second conunent) it is not always thought through
consistently. For the passage exposes him to t h b criticisms ex
pressed by C o m f o ^ ^ J ^ : ,jg*we*to taS . 'tlie emotions
and the instinets (ffom which consciousness derives its valu) as
being, ultimatelya Sliiftufl| ia , being to be
taken as instinct and simgtggj j y or as society, which is always
present below real being7 Inconsistent^ is the tensin which
drives on society between being and consciousness, or between
social being and social consciousness (tw a different propositions),
and can a tensin drive society unless some ulterior dynamic
gives rise to this tensin?
Caudwells style is fluent, cogent and asgertive. There are repeti-
tions - repeated nodal points of argument to which we retum again
and again: notably, the compulsive naturc of market relations in
contradiction to the bourgeois illusion of freedom. There are also
lcsions of logic, shifts and junips: there are long views which are
sometimes very much too long - whole historical cpochs character-
iscd in a paragraph, or passages of scicntific allusion which are not
always apt. There is also, on occasion, a niillenarial or messianic
tone. It is a dying culture, and the altemative - Comniunism -
appcars olear, absolute and immanent. Caudvvell is throughout impa-
tient of mediations; the passage from economy to ideology is swift
and compulsive. Abovc all, the dialcctical modo of analvsis in his
hands lcads to an over-rcadiness to propose binary oppositions: there
 C H R I S T O P H E R C A U D W E L L 89

are, frequently, only two fomis or two choices; we move always

among antinoniies, and society or ideology arrange themselves around
two poles. Even the passage we have considcred nioves always
bctwcen being/consciousness: value/fomi: the artist/the scicntist; in-
stinct (eniotion)/thought.
But the passage prompts a tliird conmicnt. It succeeds, in places,
in conveying a metaphoric nicaning which is not co-incident with
its apparent rational argument. Caudwell is polemicising against
Sliaws belief in the solitary primacy o f thought; liis emphasis
falls upon the immense inertia o f habit, custom and tradition
(mountains o f unconscious being, walking the od grooves o f
instinct and simple life), upon the social detennination o f tliought
(Society ... with its material solidity .... a vast reservoir o f the
unknown, unconscious and irrational in every man), upon the
precariousness o f consciousness ( occasional phosphorescence) and
yet upon the ardour and consuming forc o f the intellectual
enterprise (bum ing more being in the thin fame). The passage
has, as it were, a dual life: a rational argument, imprecise and
shifting in its terms, and a metaphoric and allusive life, persuasive
and suggestive and o f greater vitality. T hat the two lives do not
cohcre should properly arouse suspicion: logic is becoming subser-
vient to rhetoric. But the vitality o f the metaphoric life - which is
tlie signature o f all o f Caudwells best writing - suggests a
different kind o f confidence in handling ideas, and a capacity to
precipitate abstractions into concrete images. W here the two lives
do cohere (and tliey often do in the studies) the imagination seizes
upon the concept and endows it with passion.
W hat then is conununicated is not ju st a new idea (or an od
idea freshly conununicated) but a new w ay o f seeing. For such
images may be both concrete and conceptually ambiguous, in tlie
sense that they caimot easily be slotted into the categories which
we have prepared in our minds to receive them: mountains o f
unconscious being, phosphorescence. Henee they prompt uncasc,
they generate further enquiry, they challenge habitual mental
routines. It is this kind o f challenge which Caudwell presented to
his generation, and we caiuiot understand this if we discard his
mctaphors, disregard his antithetical figures, reduce his tliought to
expository precis, and then m easure it beside a precis o f M arx or
91) MAKING H ISTORY

Stalin or Althusser. For what we have then lost, with Caudwells

style, is Caudvvells way of seeing.
His way of seeing, liis mode of apprehension, was dialectical.
This tells us little: the tem can cover as many sins as virtues. It
can indcate mere schematism, barren and wilfi.il paradox, inflated
mystification, as wcll as the binary oscillations and polar antitheses
of which we have already convicted Caudwell. These certainly are
present, but tliey are not all that is present. He also has a way of
seeing coincident and opposed potentialities within a single mo-
ment and of following through the contradictory logic of ideologi-
cal process. This strength is not only a way o f seeing, it is a way
of teaching others how to see. After Blake and Marx, this faculty
of dialectical visin has been rare enough for us to regard it with a
spccial respect. or was this visin easily attained. It was attained,
although only insecurely, in his final year o f writing, and it was
tlie product of a cogent and clearly-developed interactionist episte-
mology. This is what we must now examine.

IV

To attempt to work ovgr tlie whole inlieritance o f hmnan

knowledge would be to go on a fools errand if one did not
suppose there to be some uniting stmetures or qualities to be found
in this inlieritance. Caudwell supposed these to be epistemological
and ideological. He studied tliought, less in its producs tlian in its
process. He watched hiniself as he tliought. He watched hiniself as
he lovcd. He cven watched love as he loved -

A wind impalpable that blows one way

All the mind's stiff and treelike qualities ...

To be in love, when flesh usurps the brains forsaken zone'

prompted a sensc of epistemological crisis:

When 1 could bite my tongue out in dcsire

To have your body, local now to me,
You wcre a woman, and your proper image
Unvarying on the black screcn of the night.
 CHRISTO PHER CAUDWELL 91

Wliat are you novv? A tliigh, a smilc, an odour:

A cloud o f anccdotes and fed desires
Bubblingly unfolds inside niy brain
To vex its visin with a monstrous beast ...2I

Fulfilled love, by breaking down thc distancc bctwecn subject and

object, proposed questions, not about loving, but about knowing.
We recall also thc rcfercnces to thc occasional phosphores-
ccnce o f consciousness, and to the artist and scicntist buming
more being in the thin flame. The images appealed to him. But
we should go on to note that they were something more than a
gesture o f rhetoric. In Consciousness he asks: What govems the
tiny localisations o f conscious light in the vast Arctic night o f tlie
cortex? (FS 192-3). A good question, perhaps, but not one to
which we should anticpate an answer. But Caudwell does, then, go
on to propose an answer, in terms o f the relation between the
thalamus and the cortex. This is decidedly unsettling to a literary
consciousness, which does not like to be seen in such a material
aspect. And it is interesting that it lies almost wholly outside tlie
tenns o f todays dominant M arxist consciousness also - at least o f
that part which has been defmed asBW estem Marxism. It is one
thing to assert, as an abstract proviso, that all matter, society and
culture are mutually related or mutually detemiiningw it is quite
another thing to examine, or even to arge about, their mediations
and determinations; and another thing again to take this argument
into the privacy o f our own theoretical heads, and to suggest that
even Theory itself may be composed o f the affective heating o f
cortical traces. This is, presumably, an example o f a hectic forray
into alien territories.
For much Western Marxism has been able to dispense with
material (and sometimos even historical) determinants of thought,
unless in a last instance way, as a kind o f pre-tlieorctical
proviso. By obscure and not-always-acknowledged routes (one
being phenomenology) this Marxism has arrived at the oddly-
idealist conclusin that all that can be known to thought are
thought and its ideal malcriis: we may correctly examine a
catcgory but not a cortex. To examine a cortex, during the
coursc o f an epistemolgica! enquiry, would be, according to this
92 MAKING HISTORY

orthodoxy, to surrender to the m ost vulgar positivism or behav-

iourism.
Yet, oddly enough, Caudwell him self polemicises stridently and
evcn repctitively against m echanical m aterialism and positivism.
And (what is equally odd) the burden o f the criticism brought
against him in the M odern Q uarterly controversy o f 1950-51 was
that o f idealism. It is necessary to sitate Caudw ells writings
against the background o f epistem ological ^ re fle c tio n - th e o r y th a t
intellectually-constrictive orthodoxy w hich, descended in some part
from M aterialism a n d E m pirio-C riticism , had been congealed by
Stalin and dispersed throughout the intem ational Communist move-
ment as doctrine. In his sum m ation to th at controversy, Maurice
Comforth (who subsequently w rote som e better philosophy than
this) expressed the conunon-sense o f his own orthodox generation:

It is a fundam entalE dea o f m aterialism (I quote 'Stalin and add

my own italics) that the m ultifold phenom ena o f the world
constitute diffrent Jhrins o f m atter in m otion, and that matter
is prim ary, since it is tile ^ o u r c e o f sensations J id e a s , mind, and
that mind is secondary, derivative, since it is a reflection of
matter, a reflection o f being. 22

W hat is implicit here is that m ind affords some kind o f copy of

matter, although a copy distorted by ideological illusions. A
uniting theme o f all the studies (o f which The Crisis in Physics
was originally one) is a critical cxamination o f exactly this
proposition. Although I camiot recall any place where these are
citcd, Caudwell might well have been exploring the consequences
imposcd by M arxs first two theses on Fcucrbach.23 These conse
quences wcre detected equally in the arts, the Sciences, and in
philosophy. The bourgeois, brought up on a diet o f dualism,
camiot conceive that subjcct and object are not mutually exclusive
oppositcs, But in fact, complete objectivity brings us back to
complete subjectivity and vice versa. (R(trR 56).
The chief defect o f all hitherto existing materialism, M arx had
writtcn, is that the object, rcality, sensuousness, is conceived only
in tlio form of the o b jec t or c o n lu m p la tio n , but not as h u m a n
sensuous activitv. practica, not subjectivcly. 'flu s it liappcned that
 CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL 93

tlic active side, in opposition to matcrialism, was developcd by

idealista - but only abstractly, since, of course, idcalisni docs not
know real sensuous activity as such. With Stalin Marxs human
sensuous activity, practice have been forgotten, and tlie subject/
object duaiism has retumed (inind is seconclary, derivative) with
tlie additional authority of being thc doctrine of the First Proletar-
ian State. Now Caudwell does not waste breath denying that being
is historically prior to thought: Thought guides action, but it learns
how to guide /rom action. Being must historically and always
precede knowing, for knowing evolves* as an extensin of being.
(SDC. 4) But neither matter/mifld or being/knowing can be seen in
temis of primary and (derivative) rfilations; dialecti-
cal matcrialism recognises the mutffl.ljff detemiming relations
between knowing and being - knowing is aunutually determining
relation between subjeHt and object A central passage
in Reality must be fclted at morejW S ^ fc .

The question of which is first, mind or matter, is not ... a

question o f fvhich is first, subject or object. Every discenunent
of a quality (mind, trutli, colour, size) is the discenunent of a
two-tenn relation between a thing as subject and the rest of the
Universe. Mind is the general ame for a relation between the
human body as subject, and the rest of the Universe .... Going
back in the Universe along the dialectic of qualities we reach by
inference a State where no human or animal bodies existed and
thcrefore no minds. It is not strictly accurate to say that
therefore the object is prior to the subject any more than it is
correct to say the opposite. Object and subject, as exhibited by
the mind relation, come into being simultaneously. Human body,
mind, and human environment cannot exist separately, they are
all pars o f the one set. What is prior is the material unity from
which they arise as an inner antagonism.
We can say that relations seen by us between qualities in our
environment (the arrangement of the cosmos, energy, mass, all
the entities of physics) existed before the subject-object relation-
ship implied in mind. We prove this by the transfonnations
which take place independent of our desires. In this sense nature
is prior to mind and this is the vital sense for science. These
94 M AKING H ISTO RY

qualitics produccd, as cause and ground produce effect, the

synthesis, or particular subjcct-object relationship which we cali
knowing. Nature thcrcfore produced mind. But the nature which
produccd mind vvas not nature as seen by us, for this is
importing into it the late subject-object relationship called
mind. It is nature as known by us, that is, as having indirect
and not direct relations with us. It is nature in detemiining
relation with, but not part of, our contemporary universe. Yet,
by sublation, this nature that produced mind is contained in the
universe of which the mind relation is now a feature; and that is
why it is known to us.
Such a view of reality reconciles the endless dualism of
mentalism or objectivism. It is the Universe of dialectical
materialism. (FS 228-9), (my italics).

What is remarkable in Caudwell is the tenacity with which he

explored outwards from this central insight, into the materiality of
thought (Consciousnessy. Freud) and into the ideality of nature
(Reality, The Crisis in Physics). The crisis in physics had
arisen, in liis view, as a consequence o f the inadequacy o f the
catcgories of mechanical materialism: When the bourgeois consid
ere matter as the object o f cognition, he is unable to conceive of it
except under the categories of mechanism. (C in P 29). Mecha-
nism had stripped Nature, the object o f all qualitics which had in
them any tincture of the subjective.' (Ihid. 55) Thus nature ...
appears as the object in conlemplation, the object as it is in itself,
mcasurcd in terms of its own necessity, an object quantitative,
bare of quality. {Ihid. 45).

At first matter is only stripped of colour, sound, pushiness,

heat, which all prove to be modcs of motion. Motion, length,
mass and shapc are howcvcr believed to be absolutely objective
qualitics, independent of the observer. However they prove one
after the other to be relativo to the observer. Thus matter is left
finally with no real i.c. non-subjcctive qualitics, except those of
mimbcr. But number is ideal, and henee objective reality
Ynishes Nlatii has bcenme uiiknmvable {Ihiil 4(>)
 CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL 95

But, m a parallel movenient, bourgeois philosophy underweiit a

proccss m which man or mind, figuring as active, sensuous
subjectivity, was stripped of all thosc qualities wliich liad an
objective component in them. This stripping left mind as bare as
matter vvhen it was stripped of all subjcctive quality. Mattcr was
le with nothing but mathematics existing in the human head.
Subjectivity was left with nothing but the Idea But the Idea
existing apart from the brain is objective reality and therefore
enters the category of matter. Idealism has become materialism, just
as mcchanical materialism when it ended in mathematics, had
become idealism. (Ibid. 56-7)24
Positivism attempts to resolve this crisis but is dismissed by
Caudwell as a conised, amateurish and dishonest philosophy:

Consciousness (phenomena) is a relation between Man and

Nature, but positivism attempts to take the relation without the
temis.... It is impossible to have real activity without two temis,
without a contradiction, and a unity of opposites whose activity
springs from their interpenetration. Henee consciousness be-
comes a mere passive reflection of the world; its function
becomes merely to be a pal copy of existing practice. The
relation of knowing ceases to be an active and mutually
detennining relation, and becomes a godlike apprehension sep
rate from material reality. (Ibid. 65)

But reflection-theory must lead on to a regretful admission tliat it

is a misleading reflection, since all the known subjective
qualities (colour, scent, shape, mass, pushiness, beauty) are merely
symbolic ciphers for the tliing in itself. (Ibid. 65) Consciousness
has become a screen.
It is not my intention to attempt any judgement as to the
adcquacy o f Caudwells account o f bourgeois philosophy or of
bourgeois physics. I will say that I consider his account has
merits, and, in particular, his diagnosis of a phenomenon repeatedly
witnessed within bourgeois culture: that is, the repeated generation
of idealism and mechanical materialism, not as true antagonists but
as pseudo-antitheses, generated as twins in the same moment of
conccption, or, rather, as positive and negative aspeets of the same
 m a k i n g h i s t o r y
96

fractured niovcnient o f thought: It is not Berkeley who fights

mechanical matcrialism, but Berkeley who generates it. (FS 212)
But niy main intention is simply to present Caudwells epistemo-
logical preoccupations (wliich were consistent and which inform ali
his work) and to assert - contrary to a well-known stereotype -
tliat these cannot be rcduced to the dominant reflection-theory of
tliat time.
It is true that in lllusion and Reality, when discussing language,
Caudwell uses the tem reflection unselfconsciously:

By means of the word, niens association in economic produc-

tion continually generates changes in their perceptual prvate
vvorlds and the conmion vvorld [i.e. conmion perceptual world],
enriching both. A vast moving superstm cture rises above mans
busy hands which is the reflection o f all the changes he has
effected or discovered in ages o f life. Presently this conmion
world becomes as coniplex and remte froni concrete social life
as the market, of which its secret life and unknown Creative
forces are the counterpart.
This is the shadow world o f tliought, or ideology. It is the
reflection in niens heads o f the real world. It is alvvays and
neccssariiy only symbolical of the real world. It is always and
necessarily a reflection which has an active and significant
relation to the object, and it is this activity and significance, and
not the projective qualities of the reflection, which guarantee its
truth. (l&R 160-1)

This passage reveis, once again, somc strain between the apparent,
rational argunient and the metaphoric meaning. At the first level
Caudwell s attcntion is slack: 'tliought is bluntly equated to
ideology: reflection suggcsts shadow world. But at the second
level (a vast moving superstructura rises above mans busy hands)
he is intent upon conveying a complexity of relationsliip which
cannot be sustaincd by the image of reflection. For Caudwell,
evcn when writing about language, remains a student o f the
Sciences. And reflection rccalls to his mind the strict dcfmition o f
projcction in geometry. But how can a shadow or reflection'
when considerad in its projective qualities, have an active and
 CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL 97

significant rclation to the object? The question is lcft unresolved;

it is not cvcn clcarly posai
By tlie time that he wrotc the StuJies Caudwcll's cmpliasis
upon the active and significant rclation to the objcct (and his
implicit hostility to orthodox reflection thcory) has hardened:

Social consciousncss is not a mirror-image of social being; If it

wcre, it would be useless, a mere fantasy. It is material,
possessed of mass and inertia, composed of real things -
philosophies, language habits, churches, judiciaries, plice. If
social consciousness were but a mirror-image, it could change
like an image witliout the expenditure of energy when the object
which it mirrored changed. But it is more than tliat. It is a
functional superstructure which interaets with the foundations,
each altering tlie otlier. There is a coming-and-going between
them. (SDC 25)

This is an argument from the sociology of ideas, and, as I think, a

legitmate one. But Caudwell arges the point also in more strictly
epistemological terms. In The Crisis in Physics there is a signifi
cant passage:

When I say reflection I mean that the same general develop-

ment has taken place in the sphere of social relations as in
ideological categories, because the latter are rnerely subtiliza-
tions, qualitatively dififerent, of the fonner .... O f course it is not
suggested that physical tlieory is a mirror-reflex of social
relations. It gives information about non-social reality. But it
gives such information to society. The knowledge is conscious
knowledge. It has therefore to be cast into the categories of
society.

These categories are not like Kantian categories, ctcnial and given
in the nature o f the mind, a set of tools which work up into a
cognizable shape the unknowablc thing-in-itself. Man interpenctrates
actively with Nature .... This strugglc is not rnerely physical -
practica! - it is also theoretical, a relation of cognition. (C in P
27-9)
 98 M A K IN G H IS T O R Y

It is (we recall) Caudwells principal accusation against positiv-

ism that it reduces consciousness to a passive reflection of the
vvorld, a pal copy o f existing practice.
I fear that I am labouring a point. But perhaps it requires to
be laboured. For according to one widely-accepted stereotype,
British Marxisni - at any time before the annunciation in this
island o f Western M arxism in the Sixties - was subdued to a
vulgar epistemological positivism. It can be seen that this was
not true o f Caudwell, or o f his considerable influence upon the
Marxism o f the Forties. Sebastiano Timpanaro has directed a
polemic against thdL idealism o f W estern M arxism , which has
managed to shuffle off concern with material (physical, biologi-
cal) determinants as vulgar m aterialism or positivism. 25 If
Timpanaro is right (and I think tliat on many points he is) then
Caudwells astonishing attem pf at epistemological synthesis is in
necd o f attention. For we may have been witnessing within the
heart o f the M arxist tradition itself a reproduction o f that
phenomenon which Caudwell diagnosed within bourgeois culture:
the generation o f those pseudo-antagonists, mechanical materialism
and idealism. The same subject/object dualism, entering into
Marxism, has left us with the twins o f economic detenninism
and Althusserian idealism, each regenerating the other: the
material basis determines the superstructura, independent o f ideal-
ity, while the superstructura o f ideality retires into the autonomy
o f a self-determining theoretical practice.
It is true that the majority M arxist tradition liad been invaded
by positivism by the Thirties. It is also true that the forerunners
o f Western M arxism resisted this invasin, but at a very heavy
cost. This cost is now evident in what passes today as a
fashionable M arxist epistemology which has become locked into
an idealist theoretical practico which, in its tum , constitutes a
serious regression from the positions occupied by Caudwell.
Thcse positions might have been an elaboration o f M arxs second
thesis on Feuerbach.26 The relation between being and knowing,
Caudwell asserted, can only be understood in a dialectical
manner (SDC 13). But dialectics is not a formal logic, a
machine for extracting the natura o f reality from thought:
 It is a rccognition o f the mutually determining relations bctween
knowing and bcing .... Thought is knowing; the experience is
bcing, and at each stcp new experience negates od thought. Yet
their tensin causes an advance to a new hypothesis more
inclusive than the od. (FS 254)27

In this interactionist epistemology, there could nevcr be tolerated

that blcak theoretical closure (or confusin of empirical engagement
with em piricism) which has been imposed by Althusser:

T ruth always appears as a result o f rnans successful interaction

with his environment .... To attempt to fmd it in a mere
scrutiny o f the conscious field, by pur thought, results not in
truth but in mere consistency. The contents of the mind are
measured against themselves without the incursin of a distur-
bance from outside, which disturbances in fact, in the past
history o f the field, are what have created it. (FS 95)

Knowledge arises in a continual passage between conceptualisation

and empirical observation, hypothesis al^experim ent, just as, in its
origin, it arises from a similar interaction in the heart of the labour
process: The plough is as much a statement about the nature of
reality as the instructions how to use it. Each is useless without the
other; each makes possible the development o f the other. (FS 96)
At points Caudwell demands a test o f theory by the praxis of
experiment which has a Popperian ring:

No hypothesis, religious or scientific, can have any meaning

unless it can give rise to a crucial test, which will enable it to
be socially com pared with other hypotheses. (SDC 164-5)

These arguments are all resumed in his study o f Reality:

Our active contact with reality ensures a continual dialectical

change in thought and perception, and the constant ingression of
the new as a result o f our changing relations with it. Thought
thercforc only needs to go out in action to remain dialectical;
100
M AKING H ISTO RY

esis gocs out in the experinient, and, as a result, beconie

changcd, and returns upon thc hypothesis to alter it ...
Whcnever \ve see thought becoming non-dialcctical and
logical, tlicre must be a brcach between thought and action.
Instcad of preoccupying itself with the changing subject-object
relation, mind prcoccupies itself with the fomis o f that sym-
bolisni which, in the past, has contained od dialectical formu
la tions of realities .... Thought has beconie introverted. (FS
253-4)

Tlius Caudvvell vvas able to write the epitaph o f theoretical practice

before it liad even been imagined.

This interactionism was carried over, in a somewhat niodified form,

from epistemology to historical and cultural analysis. In his study
of religin, The Breath o f Discontent, he noted that religious
ideas are causally linked with material reality, and are not only
determined but also determine, in tlieir tum exerting a causal
influence on their matrix. (FS 18) And in Reality.

Thus thought is naturally dialectic in so far as it is part o f the

process of society. At each stage thought and material being are
flung apart and retum on each otlier, in mutual determinism,
generating the new qualities o f society. (FS 248).

But what meaning are we to give herc to determine and to

mutual determinism? A id is this a dialectic or mercly a barren
oscillation which, cscaping thc problcm o f determinism, simply
Icavcs us with an antithetieal model?
I do not think that Caudwell was consistcnt in this part o f his
thought. But what he offers is not a barren paradox but a fruitful
contradiction, a tensin which he lcaves unresolvcd. This contradic-
tion vvas grcatly superior to thc fat rcsolutions offered by most o f
his contcmporarics. or was it a naive contradiction. One should
rucnll rlint a a.reat part - from chapter VI to thc end - of T hf
 CHR1STOPHER CAUDWELL 101

Crisis in Physics is committcd to the discussion o f detcmiinism

and causality. Sonic part o f that argunicnt is rclcvant only to the
natural Sciences, and more tlian a part o f it is too spccialised for
me to follow with confidcnce. But we should note that Caudwell
distinguishcs between dcterminism and prcdctemiinism or absolute
determinism; and that by the former he indicatcs not pre-emptive
or predictive law but the given character and properties o f an
entity, occupying a given space, and henee setting limits upon the
space o f otlier entities and tlius detennining their properties also.
All properties in nature are, in this sense, mutually determining;
Caudwell reaches for the image o f the pool and the crevice, the
river and the river-bed;28 and this might be understood, in
contemporary terms, as a structuralist argument. Tliis corresponds
to one sense o f determination, as defined recently by Raymond
Williams: the setting o f limits.29
But if we transfer the tem to social and cultural analysis, wliat
are we left with? I f thought and material b e in g ^ a re B in mutual
determinism, tlien we may say that social being detemiines social
consciousness, but we m ust add that social consciousness deter
mines social being. Since (as Williams insists) in practice
determination is never only the setting o f limits: it is also the
exertion o f pressures, it would seeni that we are left with an
altemating current o f interaction. But a M arxism witliout some
concept o f determination is in effect worthless,30 and mutual
interaction is scarcely determination. W e are pulled back (I tliink)
by Caudwell from a merely interactionist historical tlieory in
scveral ways. First, in a certain epistemological priority aforded to
being. I live, therefore I think I am (FS 239): Vivo, ergo cogito
surt. There is no sense in which either sum or cogito can be prior
to each other, since both are part o f tlie same relation o f
being/cognition. B ut sum (when taken together with vivo) is always
in the process o f change, o f becoming; and it is becoming
(experience) which thinking is about (F S 240); consciousness is
therefore change, it is the ingression o f the new. (FS 92). Sccond,
tlic source o f this change, this becoming, is always situated by
Caudwell prim arily in the labour process: From the very start the
labour process, by the society it generates, acts as a mediating tem
in the generation o f tru th . (FS 9 6 -7 ) Thought flows from being,
102 M A K IN G H IST O R Y

and ... man changes his consciousness by changing his social

relations, which changc is the result o f the pressure o f real being
bclow thosc relations. (SD C 11) The argument is muddy here
(does consciousness change social relations or vice versa, and what
is the real being bclow both?), but clearly detennination, in the
sense o f the exertion o f pressures is moving from being to
consciousness. Third, when discussing class society, Caudwell
continually shows the exertion o f detemiining pressure in the fonn
o f idcological distortions o f consciousness, as expressed in the very
categories within which thought is ordered. To this point we will
return.
But Caudwell cannot be said to be consistent. In the polcmical
passages of Sndies in a D ying Culture he ascribed, with wit and
cven with sympathy, brutal class determinations to the producs of
the bourgcois intellcct. Loosely in Illusion and Reality and with
more precisin and sophistication in Further Studies he exalted the
role o f the artist and the scientist, who have in sonie way detached
thcmselvcs froni the bourgcois. And he introduced the concept of
inncr energy which, more tlian anytliing else, brought (some years
aftcr his death) the Caudwell Controversy about his hcad.
It was on this count that Comforth assailed Caudwell for his
idealista. He citcd these lines from Illusion and Realiiy.

Energy is always flowing out to the environment o f society, and

ncw pcrccption always flowing in from it; as we change
oursclves, we change the vvorld ....(J&R 296)31

And Comforth coninicnts:

Where Marx said that by acting on and changing the extemal

world we develop our powcrs and changc oursclves, Caudwell
puts it the other way round .... From him, evidently, this energy
flowing out lias not its source in the extemal material world,
but comes from somewhere within us .... This idealist not ion o f
inncr energy plays no small part in his writings.-12

And in his reply to the discussion, a ycar later, Comforth added:

 CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL 103

Tlic cnergy of man is itsclf a fomi of tlie motion of matter, just

os the consciousness of man is a rcflcction of niattcr. Any other
idea of energy or consciousness is idealism and mysticism.33

We have come a long way from thosc happy days of Marxist

certainty. Of course, tlie energy of man may be sccn as a fonn of
the motion of matter (Caudwell himself took more pains tlian
most writers to see it in tliis aspect), but tliis docs not settle,
finally, the question of tlie directions in which it moves. As
Williams remarked, in Culture and Society:

It is clear that rnany English writers on culture who are also,

politically, Marxists seem primarily concemed to rnake out a
case for its existence, to arge that it is important, against a
known reaction to Marxism which liad established the idea that
Marx, with liis theory o f structure and superstructura, had
diminished the valu hitherto accordcd to intellectual and
imaginative creation.34

Coriiforth reminds us that this known reaction was not only

outside the Marxist tradition (among Marxisms crtics) but also
deeply entrenched witliin it. Perhaps Williams mistook whom the
English Marxist critics o f the late Thirties and Forties were arguing
wilhl When Alick West (in defence o f Caudwell) noted that Marx
also referred to inner energy, Comforth replied that M arx must
have been thinking o f the mnimum o f food necessary if the
capitalists were to be able to exploit the workers: To imagine
sorne inner store o f human energy is to think o f man and o f his
energies and powers in a merely abstract, idealist w ay.
Tlie entire body o f Caudwells work may be read as a polemic
against mechanical materialism o f this kind, masquerading as
Marxism. Men can do nothing significant without consciousness
and passion: all that they do is passionate and conscious. In
Illusion and Reality he is making out a case for the part played
by the arts in the generation and organisation o f spiritual energies;
indeed, poetry, and the arts come to be shorthand for almost all o f
culture that is not-science. Tliis is one valid criticism o f his work:
in making a general case for culture, he lost sight o f the particular
104 MAK1NG H I S T O R Y

case o f art, and o f the particularity o f each a rt product. And I have

already indicated that I have such extensive criticisms o f this
apprenticework (lllusion a n d R eality) th at I consider it to be
beyond the repair o f cise criticism. B ut m y criticisms certainly do
not extend to the propriety o f the project itself: that is, the renewed
cmphasis, within a M arxist problem atic, upon hum an subjectivity
and (in consequence) upon the arts.
The difficulty o f Caudwells project w as greatly enhanccd by
tire positivism, indeed philistinism, o f the M arxist tradition within
which he worked. Com forth w as especially incensed at Caudwells
careful (and rational) definition o f poetry as irrational: So poetry
does not, as Marxists had hithcrto supposed, portray in poetic
images the reality o f the world and o f our own life in it. The
reactionary theory that poetry is irrational and is concemed, not
with the real world, but with some underw orld o f emotions is
one which Marxists should reject w ith indignation. It must have
been comforting, in tliose distant days, to have known with such
assurance what was the real w orld (a world somehow distinct
from tliat of the emotions?), and to have had such ready reserves
of indignation for all who strayed from the truth. But it must also
have been a difficult and discomforting time for Caudwell, and,
pcrhaps also, for Fox, for W est, for Rickword and Slater and
Swingler, and other pioneers o f socialist cultural theory and
practice.
What Caudwell has to say about effective culture is cogently
argucd and always suggestive, although tlie proposals in the studies
are gcncrally superior to those in lllusion and Realty. It is not my
business to rehearse these arguments again; they are familiar and
readily availablc, have been cxplorcd by Margolics and Mulhem,
and pcrhaps should now be rc-cxamincd by anthropologists as well
as by critics. What I wish to stress is that Caudwells insights
(howcvcr disordcrly) were bought at a cost which orthodox
Marxism was unwilling to pay. For Caudwell argued:

The valu of art to society is that by it an emocional adaptation is

possible. Mans instincts are pressed in art against the altered
mould of reality, and by a specific organisation of the emotions
thus generated. there is a ncw attitudc. an aaptatton (SDC 54)
 CHR1STOPHER CAUDWELL 105

AII art is produced by this tensin betwecn changing social

relations and outnioded consciousness. (Ibid. 54) Art modifies the
subjects general attitude towards life ... Viewcd from the societys
standpoint, art is the fashioning of the affective consciousness of its
members, the conditioning of thcir instincts. (Ibid. 50) So that we
are, once again, witliin an intcractionist ficld: art, opcrates upan
men and changos them affectivcly. Pseudo-art, tlie contmcrcialised
product, is siniply affective massage. It awakcns and satisfies the
instincts without expressing and synthesising a tensin between
instinct and environment. (FS 107)
The critica] problent, when situating Caudwell witliin the
Marxist tradition, lies in his recourse to the concept of the
genotype. Tliis is by no means a casual or carelessly-introduced
concept. Caudwells central notions of cultural adaptation and of
the function of the arts rests upou tlie concept of an unchanging
genotype in friction with changing social enviromnent. This is no
elisin o f thought: it is a delibrate and repeated proposition:

This contradiction between instinct and cultural environment is

absolutely primary to society ... (I&R 137)
[Great art is expressto of] the timelessness of the instincts,
the unchanging secret face of the g^tuype wliich persists
beneatli all tlie rich superstructura o f eivilisation, (Ibid. 228)
All art is emotional and therefore concemed with tlie
instincts whose adaptation to social life produces emotional
consciousness. Henee art cannot escape its cise relation with
the genotype whose secret desires link in one endless series all
human culture. (Ibid. 231)

Wliile Caudwells treatment of the instincts becomes refined in

the subsequent studies, he nowhere disclaims the concept of the
genotype.
Now it is necessary to identify, not only what tlie difficulty is,
in Caudwells use of genotype, but also what the difficulty is not.
For a common response, aniong historical materialists, is inunedi-
ately to identify the concept of genotype with that of human
nature, and to dismiss the argument unheard as reactionary.
There has been, and still is, for observable and honourable reasons,
106 M AKING H1STORY

a dccp hostility in the Marxist tradition to any such concept 0f

human nature, and Comforth's reaction is typical o f the common-
sense of the tradition:

The whole idea of the genotype and the instincts is a piece of

made-up idealist metaphysics. For it supposes that something
exists witliin the organisni - the genotype and the instincts -
which is not susceptible to change; which is not bom and
modified and developed in the course o f the life o f the organism,
but which precedes it and stamps its own pattern on it.
Applied to human affairs, this is a singulariy reactionary
theory. It teaches that human nature never changes .... Timeless
human nature, the instincts o f the savage, persist unchanged and
unchangeable beneath the developing social and cultural super-
structure; civilisation is but a thin veneer covering the volame
underworld of primitive instincts ...
Marxism does not explain society and its development in
terms o f etemal genotypical instincts. It rejects these reactionary
hypotheses of bourgeois biology and psychology.35

But, o f course, Caudwell does not explain society and its

development in terms of the genotype either. This is, exactly, what
he does not do, for if he could have explained social development
in this way, then no function would have been left for the arts.
or is it corred that the genotype is synonymous with human
nature. The genotype gives us, rather, brute nature - the nature
of man as a brute, prior to his or her acquisition, through
socialisation and culture, o f humanity, or human nature. The
constancy of man Caudwell sometmes illustratcd in a figure o f
the feral child.

By constancy we mean his constancy as bare individual. If a

Melancsan, an ancient Athenian and a modem English babc
were allowed to grow up in a wood ... nonc would share any o f
the charaderistics of its parents culture - either their language,
ther economic production, or their consciousncss Thcy would
grow up sub-buman This shows that man rcmains through the
 CHR1STOPHER CAUDWELL 107

in no way proportioncd to his chango as a niembcr of

contoniporary socicty. (/'.V 137-8; soc also l&li 151)

lt is not clcar to me that this is shown (for tho sub-human

gcnotypc camiot tlicn be dcscribcd as man), and tho experiment is
unlikely to bo made. Bul it is clcar that Caudwcll intends thc
conccpt (or hypothcsis) of thc gcnotypc to stand, not for human
naturc, but for prc-human naturc, a comnion biological and
instinctual ground, persisting rclativcly unchangcd through historical
time, prior to acculturation. So far from being a rcactionary
thesis, which seeks to reduce all chango to a timeless human
nature, it emphasises that everyhing that is human arises within
society and culture.
Indced, it is not so much a conccpt as a commonplace. Without
fiirther definition it offers little more than tlie hypothcsis that brute,
prc-human nature remains thc nature of brute homo and not that of
thc dog or thc ape. And what alternativo conccpts could be
proposed? One might be that cultural adaptations are genetically
transmitted, and that every babe is bom, in somc part, a
Melanesian, an ancient Athenian, a Cockney, or, perhaps, an Aryan
or a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Another might be that eveiy
babe is bom without any gcnetically-transmitted species-inlicritance:
that is, as a natural blank. Neither concept offers an improvement
on that of the genotype. The problems arise when we attempt to
define this genotype, with its attendant instinctual ground, and then
employ the concept in historical or cultural analysis.
The genotype is a concept which Caudwell took from biology,
and wc do not know what clarificaron is offered in his still-
unpublishcd further study on that theme. But clarification is to be
found in other studies. These suggcst tliat it is unfair to charactcr-
ise Caudwells theory as a psychologism, or to suggcst that his
conccpt o f thc instinets remains undcfmed.3(5 The innate re-
sponses o f an organism, the so-callcd instinets, as such are
unconscious, mcclianical, and unaffcctcd by experience. They are
tlie concern, not o f psychology, but of physiology (SDC 184):

Instinct is what we cali a simple repetition of hereditary habits,

the mechanical reappearance of the od. Such simple responsos
108 M A K IN G H IST O R Y

to extemal or intcmal stiniuli chaiige from age to age, but, in

rclation to the rapid tempo o f social Ufe, there is a consistency
about them which leads us to seprate them as hypothetical
entiies [my italics], the instincts. Situations which, while
evoking instinctual responses, do not pem iit their emergence
unchanged, but cause a suspensin or interruption o f the pattem,
produce affects or emotions. The result o f such a situation is the
transforming, or conditionmg (Pavlov), repression or subliniation
(Freud) o f tlie response. (F S 90)37

It is in the study o f Consciousness th at w e have Caudwells most

sustained critique o f instinct psychology, and, precisely, of
psychologism, in which the dram a o f the instincts ... becomes a
kind o f bourgeois novel, in which the heroes are the instincts; and
their experiences, mutual struggles and transform ations generate not
only all psychical but also all cultural phenom ena:

W hat in fact are these instincts? Tliey are innate pattem s of

behaviour automatically elicited by stiniuli. They are therefore
inevitable recurrences arnid the sea o f change, like tlie seasons.
They are detennined in fact (predetermined) by past events.

The bourgeois however sees them as freely striving for uncon-

scious goals, and psychology becomes the adventures o f the free
instincts in their struggles against the restraints o f the environment
(in Freud, o f society) which impede and cripple their freedom:

The niagnificcnt story o f human culture becomes ... simply the

tragcdy o f the crippling o f the free instincts by the social
restraints they have freely crcated .... Expcricnce, art and Science
are in tliis psychology the fcttcrs o f the instinctive energy; all
experiences are the scars o f the wounds to tliis freedoni
(inhibition and repression). M oreover the unconscious plays a
strange role. Sincc cxpericnce is in tliis inversin o f lifes story
the prison housc o f the free instincts, consciousness (the most
rcccnt and lcast innate producs o f the psyclie) acts the part o f
gaoler to the unconscious (the most archaic and least condi-
tioned psychic producs). Quite a littlc cocrcivc State rcigns in
 CHR1ST0PHER CAUDWELL 109

tlic psyclic, complete even to the Censor. Abominable things are

done to the instincts; screanis (dreains and obscssions) issue
from time to time from the dungeons where the noble bourgcois
rcvolutionarics are being tortured by tlie authoritics. lt is a
picturc in tire best anarchist stylc ....

But the instincts are not free springs of connation towards a goal.
They are, so far as thcy can be abstractly scparated, unconscious
necessities, as Kant real ised. They are unfree. Above all,

They are changed in human culture. As a result of this change,

these necessities becorne conscious, become emotion and
thought; they exist for themselves and are altered thereby. Tile
change is the emotion or thought, and now they are no longer
the instincts ... (FS 179-82)

Caudwell, tlien, is retaining the concept (or hypothesis) of the

instincts and of the genotype, while flatliP rejecting instinct
psychology. He is placed in a difficulty u f flrat the dominant
available psychological vocabularies offer conditioning (Pavlov)
and repression or sublimation (Freud), whereas the change he
wishes to express is tliat of transformation and exfoliation.
Socialisation, by transfomiing the instincts, by changing the
pre-social and pre-human genotype into the human, is a process
of realisation. Man, as society advances, lias a consciousness
composed less and less o f unmodified instinct, more and more of
socially-fashioned knowledge and emotion.'' (SDC 217) Emotion,
in all its vivid colouring, is the creation of ages of culture
acting on the blind unfeeling instincts. All art, all education, all
day-to-day social experence, draw it out of the heart o f the
human genotype and direct and shape its myriad phenomena.
Only society as a whole can really direct this forc in the
individual. (SDC 183) Henee psychology,

can only have for its material all tliose psychic contents tliat
result from the modification o f responses by experence. It is
this material tliat changes, that develops, that is distinctively
human, that is o f importance, and psychology should and in
lio MAKING HISTORY

practice does ignore the unchanging instinctual basis as a cause.

(SDC 184)

Well and good. The genotype stands for the genetic transmission of
pre-human nature, a ground of instincts or innate responses (a
predetennined progranuning) which remains relatively constant
tlirough historical time, but which, in the absence of repeated
Mowgli experiments, can only be inferred as a hypothesis. The
genotype signifies tlie genetic transmission of whatever is left when
we have subtracted all that is culturally or socially acquired. There
does not appear to be anytliing inherently reactionary, or idealist, or
anti-Marxist in such a concept. It is, however, a singularly weak
and indefinite concept; everything depends upon how it is put to
use, and how the innate instincts are defmed. Moreover, the term
entails once again that dislocation between a rational and a
metaphoric meaning which we have noted before in Caudwells
writing: but in this case the rational signification (when taken
together with his critique of instinct psychology) is greatly
preferable to the metaphoric drift. This drift arises, in large part,
from the use of a singular concept - the genotype - to describe a
ciurnp of genetically-transmitted physical properties and instinctual
propensities. By assimilation into this singular noun, tlie particular
components of the typical genetic complement become lost to view,
and with the least imprecisin or lapse of attention - as in the shift
from genotype to man - the metaphor drifts towards an
unchanging human nature. More than this, the metaphor, in its
singular sense, is then brought into conjunction with the collective
noun, society; and we have then drifted back towards the very
positon which Caudwell sought to reject - that of the unchanging
instinctual extra-social individual type facing a changing society.38
Caudwell is guilty, cspecially in Ilusin and Reality, of this
kind of inattcntion. There are times when he slides carelessly
between the notion of instinctual responses, inherent in the
genotype (man), and affeets or emotions, which are sccn as
bclonging to a conunon perceptual and affcctive world (adhering to
the affectve properties of language itself), the product of complcx
processcs of cultural formation. But what is criticaliy wrong is the
 CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL III

Thcrc is surcly a contradiction bctwccn Caudwell s arguiucnt that

'psychology should ... ignore tile unchanging instinctual basis as a
cause', and tJie central place which he invoked for thc gcnotype in
bis thcory o f art. For thc accuratc dcfinition of thc human gcnctic
inhcritancc (cven if only as cver-niorc-prccisc hypothcscs) might
appcar to be a valid concern of physiology, ncurology, and thcncc
by extensin of psychology or linguistics; but only thcncc by
further extensin, and tlirough these mediations, of aesthctics. Atid
in general, in historical and cultural analysis, thc extensin becomes
so remte tliat thc genotype or pre-human nature must remain an
unknowable and unobservable entity, and henee a concept not so
much false as without meaning. As I argued in these pages four
years ago:

The bare forked creature, naked biological man, is not a context

we can ever observe, because the very notion of man (as
opposed to his anthropoid ancestor) is coincident with culture ....
Thus to propose the investigation of man apart from his
culture (or his lived history) is to propose an unreal abstraction,
the investigation qf non-mati.39

Caudwell was seeking to hold in g R place a materialist theory of

art which took into serious account the evidence of physiology,
neurology, psychology, anthropology. tbe intention was valid, and
tlie enterprise should not be abandoned. But the concept of the
genotype obscured rather than clarified the linkages. If tliis
clumpish singular concept is broken apart, then the way is open to
the scrupulous examinaron of particular (biological, instinctual,
mental) links and detenninations. As these knowledges advance, so
they may be brought together again in a natural history of man
(or, as I would prefer, of natural detenninants within history) to
which even historiaos may give a hesitant recognition. But
Caudwell proposed an unmediated conflict bctwccn instinct and
social enviromnent, not as some original hypothesis (a primeval
cultural contract), but as an operation continuing throughout
history, in which the original instinets, freshly renewed with each
genetic transmission, must be socialised by art. Tlie difficulty is,
first, that Caudwell places far more upon art and poetry than
112 MAKI NG HI STORY

tliey can bear. And, second, that in his practice, he must often
attribute to the genotype or the instincts an active, assertive
presence (secret face, secret desires) which is at odds with his
more careful defnitions in the studies.
ln the following passage both difficultics are presented:

Man himsclf is composed like society o f current active being

and inherited conscious formulations. He is somatic and psychic,
instinctive and conscious^and thcse opposites interpenetrate. He
is fonned, half rigid, in the shape o f tlie culture he was bom in,
half fluid and new and insurgent, sucking reality through his
instinctive roots. Thus he feels, right in the heart o f him, this
tensin between being and thinking, between new being and od
thought, a tensin which will give rise by synthesis to new
thought. He feels as if the deepest instinctive part o f him and
tlie most valuable is being dragged away from his consciousness
by events. (SDC 26)

Once again, we have a conflict between a rational and metaphoric

meaning. But in its rational argument the passage does, after all,
merit the term, psychologism. The somatic and the instinctive
become being, theljroots tlirougli which reality is sucked into
consciousness. This not only contradicts all that Caudwell has to
say, in his more measured appraisals, as to the instincts as innate
behaviour pattems, prior to culture and to social being: it also
inverts the argument of Consciousness, for, with rigid ...
insurgent ... new being and od thought, it appears that the
instinctive life alone is active and that culture is resistant to
change and inherited. The passage exeniplifies the tendency of his
conccpt of the genotype to escape from his own Controls.
What have become lost in this passage are the concepts of
social being and of culture. Caudwell has forgotten that the
instincts are changed in human culture .... The change is the
emotion or thought.' And that social being is as remte from the
instincts as an agrarian system is from hunger. The genotype was
used by Caudwell (and here I am in agreement with Mulhcm) in
an essentialist and often reductionist manner. By identifying one
essential, basic function for the arts (mans instincts are pressed in
 CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL 113

art against the altered mould o f reality) Caudwcll is continually

reducing his analysis to a circulation within his original tcmis. But
if m ans instincts are presscd against the mould o f reality, this
finds expression not only in art but in every form o f acculturation
and socialisation; indecd, by the time the child venturos to lisp its
first nursery rhyme, it has acquircd, through language and socialisa
tion, a character in which the genotypc is already maskcd or
transformed beyond rccall. Language is already naming and cliang-
ing instincts into emotions; and the contradiction, or tensin, which
arises is less bctwccn the instincts and reality tlian between
inherited cultural rnodes and fresh experience. The conflict arises,
not between pre-culture and culture, but within culture itself.
In Caudwells hands tire concept o f the genotype becomes a
blunt instrumcnt which he wielded monotonously, like an unhoned
scythe with which he tried to hack a way through a dense
undergrowth o f other mediations to reach sorne ever-present
original source. B ut the source, unless as aboriginal hypothesis, was
never there. Caudwells failure to elabrate any concept o f valu or
o f value-system (for vales cannot be comprised in a vocabulary o f
instincts, emotions or affects) is the inadequacy in his conceptual
terms which has the m ost serious p radical consequences. His
tlieory offers instincts adapted into emotions or even attitudes, but
the ordering o f feeling can only be understood in terms o f valu.
And when we consider valu and poetry, concepts so large as
Mans Struggle with N ature (a dcbilitating and repetitious concept,
and yet a necessary correspondent concept to that o f the genotype
and culture), oblitrate where all the significad questions lie. For
valu wiil be found, most often, in particular historical contexts,
and in particular men and womens struggle with, or adjustment to,
or love for, other particular women and men. All this escapes from
Caudwells view, ju st as, in his essentialist paradigm, he often
loses all sight o f the real historical contradictions, in social being,
of social class.
This enforces a severe judgcmcnt upon that part o f Caudwells
enterprise. But reservations m ust be entered. M arxisms resistance
to the concept o f human nature, however deployed, may be
proper. But the resistance m ay also cover, as I think it did with
Coniforth, an ulterior flight from the subjective. Caudwell is not
114 M AKING HISTORY

to be pilloried because he found poetiy irrationaT, or because

of his emphasis on tlie operative, transforming role of the arts.
or is he to be dismissed as idealist because of his notion of
inner energy (even if his proper emphasis upon subjective
energy sometimes confuses instinctual drives and intemalised
cultural resources); or yet (in my view) because of his
arguments as to the mutually-determining interaction between
social being and social consciousness. This remains the most
critically-difficult area o f any general Marxist tlieory of history
and of culture, and if Caudwell did not resolve the problem he
is to be commended for not tidying it away, in the conventions
of his time, and for placing it upon the agenda of theory.
Indeed, his emphasis upon active subjectivity, and his fruitful
ambiguity as to being/consciousness, accounts in large part for
his liberating and heretical influence.
The temis of Caudvvells attempted revisin are often unsatisfac-
tory: the conceptual vocabulary which he inherited or vvhich he
invented from diverse disciplines sometimes broke apart in his
hands: but the Marxism of his time offered him no other. And I
am less confident than some others that Western, or any other,
Marxism has subsequently resolved these problems. I would prefer
to accept tlie judgement of Williams, the first half of whose
Marxism and Literature is the most substantial work of critical
reflection upon the terms of Marxist analysis to appear from any
English thinker since the time of Caudwell: all these problems still
rcmain on the agenda.
A further rcservation may be entered. I have been over-severe
when I suggested that Caudwell was trapped in his cultural theory
in an oscillatory passage between Man/Nature, genotype/social
environmcnt. Truc, he fell back into this far too often; but there are
middle terms in his more extended arguments; for the first, the
labour process; for the second, language. And on botli he liad
significant ideas to offer.
For the labour proccss, we will simply report his argument. It
is, once again, presented more cogently in the further study,
Bcauty, than in IIlusin and Reality:

The nature of ficlds and plants imposes on the organism specific

 CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL 115

typcs o f co-opcration in sowing and reaping and determines the

shape o f the plough. It imposes on them language, whereby they
signify to each other their dutics and urge cach otlier on in
carrying tliem out. Once establishcd the labour process, extend-
ing as remotely as tire obscrvation o f tlic stars, as widely as the
organisation o f all human rclations, and as abstractcdly as tlic
invention o f numbers, gathers and accumulates trutli. (FS 96-7)

Not only truth, but also the arts (or beauty) are generated in the
labour process:

In prmitive civilisation this intmate generation o f trutli and

beauty in the course o f the labour process and their mutual
effect on each other is so clear that it needs no elaboration. The
harvest is work, but it is also dance; it deais with reality, but it
is also pleasure. All social forms, gestures, and manners have to
primitives a purpose, and are both affective and cognitive. Law
is not merely tlie elucidation o f a truth in dispute, but the
satisfaction o f the gods, o f the imiate sense o f rightness in
mans desires. Myths express rnans primitive instincts and liis
view o f reality. The simplest garment or household utensil has a
settled beauty. Work is performed in time to singing, and has its
own fixed ceremony. All tasks have their lucky days. Trutli and
beauty, Science and art are primitive, but at least they are vitally
intemiingled, each giving life to the other.
It is tlie special achicvcmcnt o f later bourgeois civilisation to
llave robbed Science o f desirability and art o f reality. (FS 105-6)

The passage presents the usual essentialist difficulties ( 'bnate sense

of rightness? M ans primitive instincts?) but these are not so
severe as to disqualify the argument.
In Illusion and Reality Caudwell argued persuasively for a
derivation o f the arts witliin the heart o f the labour process, in
adapting and organising human attitudes in co-operatve ways, in
sunimoning up necessary psycliic energies in expectation of harvest
or in mimesis o f the hunt; and, by extensin, he derived myth
froni tlie labour process also:
116 M AKING H ISTO RY

The dead and tlie not-dead are the two great divisions of
primitive society which seem almost to stand to each other n
the relation of exploited to exploiting classes. The living owe
their productive level to the capital, the instruments o f produc-
tion, the instniction, the wisdom, and the transmitted culture of
the dead who therefore continu to live in the interstices of the
society they have departed from in body. This half-life of the
dead, constantly recalled to the living by their instructions, their
leavings and their social formulations, is the other-world sur-
vival o f the dead in all primitive societies .... This immortality
of the dead is a fantastic reality. The dead really live on
socially in the inherited culture o f society, but to the primitive
they live fantasticall>Bfelothed in the affective and concrete
images o f his dreams in another, ghostly world. (FS 32)

All these arguments - although some have been refrned since

Caudwells timeB- continu to conunand our sympathetic attention.
But while Man and Nature are mediated by the labour process, the
mediation is only provisional, and the two parties to the relation
are sometimes offered, inexplicably, as implacable antagonists:

Tlie war between man and nature is waged on more and more
fronts; and it is precisely this undying hostility, this furious
antagonism, which produces a greater humanisation o f the
environment by man and a greater environmentalisation o f man
by nature. (FS 27)

This is perhaps an example of a lapse in Caudwells style into the

dominant Soviet rhetoric of the mid-Thirties: tlie military vocabu-
lary of the opcning, the barren antithctical epigram o f the
conclusin, and the central proposition, thcn acclaimcd in Soviet
orthodoxy, that in socialist society the struggle between classes
would give way to the more basic struggle between men and
nature: masscd battalions of tractors, each flying a red flag, waging
furious war upon the virgin steppes.
Even when the middle tem, the labour proccss, is held to, it is
held in ternis of struggle or war (Men niiglit - a gardener or a
loi't liu 'i'ili'i jiu jJit urt'.uc nV"Q|H.'i~ate W i111 nnlnre) \ iv rta in k ii i i l
 CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL 117

of drama is insisted upon which colours Caudwells view of art.

And we are in danger of replacing one essentialist paradigm with
another, only slightly more refined. Caudwells inove from primi-
tive to mdem society is so swi tliat (despite passing references
to class) it allows for tlie interposition of only one new important
concept: tliat of the market, and of commodity-fetishism:

Labour now beconies, not labour to achieve a goal and to attain

the desirable, but labour for the market and for cash. Labour
becomes blind and unconscious. What is made, or why it is
made, is no longer understood, for the labour is merely for cash,
which now alone snpports life. Thus all affectiveRlements are
withdrawn ffom labour, and must therefore reappear elsewhere.
Tliey now reappear attached to tlie myfflffi commodity which
represents the miconscious market - cash. Cash is the rnusic of
labour in bourgeois society. Cash1' ajffigTOr objective beauty.
Labour in itself becontes increasingly distasteil and irksome
and cash increasingly beautiful and desirable. Money becorne tlie
god of society. Thus the completa*'disintegration of a culture on
the affective side is achieved, and has re^ftlted from tlie same
causes as its disintegration on the cognitive side. {FS 107-8)

The thought is pressed forward powerfiilly, tke" a logical irnpera-

tive; it is derivative from Marx and also, perhaps, from Morris;40
but it is, once again, essentialist - the rapid delineation of tkp deep
process o f a whole epoch - and it has no location within tlie
complcxity o f particular historical and cultural fonnations: what
happened (one wonders) in tlie interval between primitive and
later bourgeois civilisation? The complete disintegration of a
culture comes through as a kind of swearing at the bourgeois.
AVhat Caudwell says about language is less clear. His ap-
proach to linguistics was more amateurish than was his approach
to anthropology, physiology, psychology. None of his studies was
centrally concenied with language, and the treatment in 1Ilusin
and Reality is glancing and unsystematic and is diverted into
consideration of the polar antitheses of languages cognitive and
affective attributes (science/ art). What may be more significant
tlian anything which he says is the number of vulgarisations and
118 M A K IN G H ISTO RY

reductions which he avoided making. W illiams has noted that the

dominant Marxism from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth
ccntury tended to ncglect language theory, and to group practical
language activities under the categories o f ideology and the
superstracture . W hat was lost was the understanding of lan
guage as practical consciousness or as practical, constitutive
activity:

Language ... became a tool or an instrument or a mdium taken

up by individuis when they had something to conmiunicate, as
distinct from the faculty which made tliem, from the beginning,
not only able to relate and conmiunicate, but in real terms to be
practically conscious and so to possess the active practice of
language.41

There are times writes o f language as a simple

mdium of axdigBg^m he ejgptassion o f a transfer between one man
and another (I&R 160); tW kjjfe mdium is not supposed as an
exchange between already-formcd, pre-given individual conscious
ness. For it is through language that consciousness is generated. The
elabrate activities of primitive economic production -

Can only be co-ordinated by an elaboration of afFect and vvord

organisations which tlius contain within tlieir interstices a social
view of outer reality and a community of emotionally tinged ideas.
Thus any picture of the individual consciousness at the start
detaching itself as a simple ego from all reality, and acquiring its
own presentations and organising them, is false; for consciousness
emerges as the concomitant of economic production, as part and
parec of mans interpcnctration with outer reality. Tlie interpen- i
etration generales consciousness, which is therefore full o f the
impress of botli. Tlic fonnation of consciousness is an active
proccss, now and historically .... ( FS 23-4)

We can never prove consciousness in terms of the theory o f the

conimon pcrccptual world bccausc it is entircly that world.' (/</<
192) Language generates consciousness by creating a comnion
pcrccptual world and also a comnion affectivc ego: tlic conscious
 CHR1ST0PHER CAUDWELL 119

1 is always, through language, a social crcation. Caudwcll is

contcnt to describe this world as synibolic, and to enquire into its
operation very little further. Language is always more rigid (the
minds stiff and treelike qualities) than the changing reality which
it stands for:

The socially acceptcd pictures we niake in words of reality

cannot change as if they wcre reflections in a mirror. An object
is reflected in a mirror. If the object rnoves the rcflection
moves. But in language reality is symbolised in unchanging
words, which give a false stability and pennanence to the object
they represent. Thus they instantaneously photograph reality
rather than reflect it. This frigid character of language is
regrettable but ... it is probably the only way in which man with
his linear consciousness, can get a grip of fluid reality.
Language, as it develops, shows more and more of this false
pennanence .... This pennanence is part of the inescapable
nature of symbolism, which is expressed in the rules of logic. It
is one of the strange ffeaks of the affiPjk mind tliat it has
supposed that reality must obey the rules of logic, whereas the
correct view is that symbolism by its nature has certain
mies, expressed in the laws of logjeBand these are nothing to
do with the process of reality, but represent the nature of the
symbolic process itself. (SDC 50-1)

That is an odd passage. In nioving away frorn reflection,

Caudwell seems to be about to discuss the autonomy of language
and its mies. But he seizes, instead, upon' photograph, which
defeats his purpose.42 And tlien, by stressing the mies of logic
rather than granunar, he diverts attention from language to its
produets. But the confusin arises from an inadequate linguistic
theory, and not front an assimilation of language to ideology or to
superstmeture. Moreover, in evading attention to the symbolic
stmeture o f language Caudwell was also evading (perhaps deliber-
ately) Saussurian stmcturalism.
We cannot say that Caudwell liad even an incipient, unfonnu-
lated theory o f language. Rejecting the theories available to him, he
was concemed witli skirting around tlieir traps and with offering
120 M A K IN G H IST O R Y

ccrtain afFimiations. I f we accept W illiam ss analysis of the

problem, tlien Caudw ells notion o f language remained stubbomly
constitutive, a practical consciousness w hich is saturated by and
saturates all social activity.43 H e does not place the individual
here and a linguistic system there; his cum bersom e notions of a
common perceptual w orld and a com nion affective ego entail an
insistence that language is B th e m eans o f realisation o f any
individual life.44 Language is seen both as a mdium o f communi-
cation and as intemalised, the very stu ff o f consciousness. He
attends more carefully to the affective than to the cognitive
properties o f language. W riting o f the mim ic representation, not
o f language but o f art, he argued:

Tile emanation is in us, in our affective reaction with the

elements o f the representation. G iven in the representation are
not only the affects, but, sim ultancously, tlieir organisation in an
affective cittitude tow ards the piece o f reality symbolised in the
mimicry. Tliis affective attitude is bitten in by a general
heightening o f consciousness and increase in self-value, due to
the non-motor nature o f the innovations aroused, which seems
therefore all to pass into an affective irradiation o f conscious
ness. (SD C 49)

Caudwell commonly ascribed to a r t unctions and properties

which rnight more properly be ascribed to language, and thence to
culture. There is, more than once, the suggestion that the affective
are the fluid and dynamic properties o f language, as opposed to the
frigidity and false perm anence o f its cognitive symbolism. In
the fashioning o f consciousness the great instrument is language. It
is language which makes us consciously see the sun, the stars, the
rain and the sea - objeets which merely elicit responses from
animis. (l&R 192) Mcn inlierit through their language particular
modes o f consciousness:

The primitive does not see seas, but the river Oceanus: he does not
see mammals. but cdiblc beasts. He does not see, in the night sky,
blazing worlds in the limitless void, but a roof inlaid with patines
o f briglit gold Henee all natural tliings are artificial (l-'S 111)
 CHRI STOPHER C AUDWE L L 121

W thc same way:

a civiliscd mans view o f outer reality is almost entirely built

up o f the comnion pcrccptual world: he sccs the sun as a fiery
star, covvs as animis, iron as metal, and so on. The extraordi-
nary power and universality of languagc guarantees this, But it
is just as true that his wholc cmotional consciousness, his whole
feeling-attitude to the sun, iron, cows and so forth, is almost
entirely built up from the common ego which enablcs us to Uve
in cise relation as men. (I&R 167)

But whereas the cognitive system o f languages symbolism finds

expression in fixed (frigid) categories, which can only be broken
down and reconstructed in tlie course o f strenuous intellectual
conflict (tliis is one tlieme o f The Crisis in Physics), the concrete
properties o f poetry can reach deeply into tlie inlierited affective
rnodes transmitted by language, conveying directly an experience
which modifies the subjects general attitude towards life, thus
also modifying tlie conunon affective ego which is thence transmit
ted to tlie future. (SDC 49) It is this direct, concrete, operative
power o f poetry which contines to afford a challenge, the
possibility o f revolutionising inlierited modes of consciousness.
I do not offer all this as any kind of systematic theory. We
slide around too much between language, culture, art and poetry.
But I do not tliink it is all nonsense eitlier. At least, it leaves open
doors which, as Williams has shown, tlie Marxism of Caudwells
time was closing or whose existence it refused to acknowledge.
And Caudwell declined also to take another available exit (which
has currently become more fashionable) in which men are seen as
acting out the laws and codes o f an inaccessible linguistic
system.45 Caudwells was a way o f muddling tlirough, among
sliiing tenns. But wliat was saved, in the midst o f this muddle,
was not negligible; it was a sense o f the nobility and import of
poetry among the arts. The attack upon Caudwell in 1950-51
assumes some o f its significance from this, and must be seen
alongside Zhdanovs attack on Pasternak and tliat of Revai on
Lukcs. It is not just that Stalinism feared poets as heredes; tliere
was an ulterior fear o f consciousness itself, in its active and
122 MAKING HISTORY

Creative attributes, o f vvhich poetry is the sign. H enee poetry must

be allocated an inferior, reflective function - to portray in poetic
iniages the reality o f the w orld - a reality tliat w as objective and
given independent o f consciousness. In defending poetry from this
relcgation Caudwell was also defending a view o f hum an creativity.
But with creativity must also go uncertainty: failures in prediction,
failures to conform to objective law, tlireats to a positivist science
of society. Such tlireats were intolerable. The Party, guided by
Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism, should be able to decide what was
reality, and then poets could set reality to rhyme. It w as for these
reasons - and not because Caudwell had failed in some parts o f his
enterprise - that his whole work carne under official attack. Yet tlie
attack was not (as we have seen) witliout some legitmate basis
and Caudwells own confusions, in Illtision a n d Reality, inhibited
tire defcnce.46 By the time the dust had settled, his work had fallen
into general disrepute.
VI

And should it now be rehabilitated once again? That is not the

intention of this essay. I hope to have shown that Caudwells work
was more interesting, more complex, and more heretical than has
been supposed. But nothing that he wrote is o f a maturity or
consistency to merit election as a Marxist or any other kind o f
elassie.
Yet if we replace the Sudies w here tliey should alw ays have
been - at the centre o f CaudwelFs w ork - then we are entitled to
make a favourable revisin o f the accepted judgem ent. In the
transition from Illusion and Reality to the Studies more had
changcd in Caudwell than could be expected in the passage o f one
year. Aftcr coniplcting that book in Comwall, he had moved to
Poplar, where he soon bccamc a member o f the local branch o f the
Conununist Party, sharing rooms with scveral o f his new conirades.
Until this time he sccms to have been withdrawn and introverted,
within the protection o f his kindly older brother Theodorc, and
with fcw friends apart from Paul Bcard, a school-fcllow and critic,
and his wife, Elizabcth, a writer. Now, developing late, he
discovered. in himself new rcsources o f sociability. He had almost
notlung to do with the intellectuals o f the Party (lie attended some
 CHR1ST0PHER CAUDWELL 123

lectores on Marxism and Litcraturc by Alick West and Douglas

G arman), but in a year of activity which included battlcs with tlie
Blackshirts he won tbc coinradeship of bis fcllow Poplar Coniniu-
nists.47 lt is evident, in the Sludies, that he had found a new style
and a new sense of audicncc; there is a new flueney of polemieal
attack and a new self-confidence. He also focussed his rnind in a
new way upon one central problcnv. that of idcology.
Even here Caudwell's work docs not allow for a simple
judgement. We may set asido the sectarian strideney, wliich
belonged to a strident (and critical) historical moment. But we
mect, once again, the od problem of Caudwes essentialist tricks
of mind, his tendeney to intellectualise the social process. Every
critic, from Comforth to Mulhem, has noted that in his work any
real sense of history is missing. In Williamss view, To describe
English life, thought, and imagination in the last three hundred
years simply as bourgeois , to describe English culture now as
dying , is to surrender reality to a formula.48 There is nothing in
Caudwes writing which speaks to the actual texture and media-
tions of social and cultural process; if he explored the conse-
quences of Marxs first two theses on Feuerbach, he failed to take
the point of the sixth.49 His study on history (Me and Nature) is
quite the worst in Furher Studies, and his interesting study of
religin (The Breath o f Discontent) is suddenly made ridiculous
by a jejeune sectarian political parable on the life of Christ (Jess
was a premature social-democrat, and by his treatment of the vital
question of workers power, Jess had from the start ensured the
defeat of his conununist programme). Tlie study is in fact very
much more interesting in its comments on magic than in any part
of its treatment of religin, (see F S 30)
While Caudwell encounters and despatches various kinds of
philosophical idealism, idealism re-enters into his history: first, as a
transcultural idea of progress - Man/Nature/Progress - which, while
showing men as being irredeentably stunted and thwarted by class
divisin and ideological illusion, nevertlieless always hypostasises a
Man who is progressively enriched and ftilfilled. Second, idealism
retums as the epochal idea o f the bourgeois, who maintains across
centures an archetypal ideal character, imposing its ideal logic
uPon the historical evolution o f the epoch:
124 MAKING HI STORY

The absolutist Tudors are only a phase o f the bourgeois

revolution .... The full bourgeois State comes later into being as
a democratic constitutional State. Tlie bourgeois has then
achieved his desire, which is that there should be no overt
dominating relations over himself. There are only to be dominat-
ing rights over property .... (R&R 42)

Thus the democratic State is seen as the fulfihnent o f some primal

and constant bourgeois idea. This idea is seen to are across time,
from those unlikely bourgeois, the Tudors, to the Thirties, disclos-
ing its consecutive logic, from a rich individualist protest at its
origin to its final loss o f identity within the compulsive and unfree
anarchy of uncontrolled market relations, o f Fascism and of war.
But this epochal idealism, I vvould arge, is a vice attendant upon
significant virtues. I suggested earlier that Caudwell should be seen as
an anatomist of ideology. He was preoccupied centrally in all his
work with ideology, and above all with its own authentic logic. If he
was vvrong to afford to this logic autonomy - an idea imposing itself
on history - he was not wrong to identify this logic as an authentic
element within the social process. He was concemed with the
characteristic illusion of the epoch; the deep structure o f myth; the
generation of modes of intellectual self-mystification.
In this preoccupation Caudwell anticipated some part o f West
ern Marxist thought. He gave a similar primacy to the ways in
which the mind becomes estranged from reality through its
sclf-imprisonment in its own categories. The categories of the
critic, he rcmarks in Romance and Realism, are generated below
the surfacc by one devcloping thing, bourgeois social relations. As
all the critics other categories are bourgeois, he could never see
this; it is likc trying to look through himself .... (R&R 33) He
carried this central concern into every arca of his studies: literature,
psychology, physics. He noted, in a criticism of unctional anthro-
pology which anticipates rnuch subsequent debate:

Tlie view o f human society taken by this school is not really

functional, for it docs not inelude, as functions o f society, the
civiliscd equipment the observers themselves bring to the
survey of primitivo society. (I'S 17)
 CHRISTOPHER CAUDWE L L 125

Or, in The Crisis in l hysics, thc social rclations are reflected in

all thc produets of society (including the idcology of physics) as
categories (C in P 29):

The genius docs not escape front thc categories of his age, any
more tiran man escapes from time and spacc, but the measure of
his genius consists in thc dcgrec to which lie filis these
categories with contcnt - a degree which may even result in
their explosin. This explosin is, however, in turn dependent
on a certain ripeness in the categories. (Ibid. 25)

In suggestive comments on the limitations of bourgeois feminism

he remarked: The woman revolts wilhin the categories of bour
geois culture. She finds herself an alien in mans world, for this
world is a vast cognitive expression of mans notion of reality.
But if her revolt does not transcend tliese categories, then it is
bound to fail, because it asserts womans right to be man, in other
words to enslave herself to masculine vales. (R&R 72, 113)
Tlie Studies then are each in different ways explorations of tlie
Ilusin o f tlie bourgeois epoch, and of the deforming or limiting
character o f bourgeois categories. The method is assertive; the
judgements hard and sometimes ungenerous; the temptation to
marshall evidence in binary oppositions is too often taken; and tlie
tone is at some points pharasaical. vThe bourgeois, in Caudwell's
essays, is always tripping up on his own categories and falling fiill
length in tlie epistemological mud, but somehow, despite these
repeated exposures to ridicule, someone called Man is advancing in
knowledge and producing great art. But these polemical vices were
perhaps the inevitable concomitants of a venture which was, in
Caudwells time, original and arduous. He was attempting to offer,
not an altemative view in one special area (economics or politics),
but to effect a rupture with a wholc receivcd view of thc world,
with its vocabulary and its tenns of argument:

When categories are first imposed, they seem arbitrary, violent, tlie
expression of individual personalities .... When one is bom into
these categories, so that from childliood ones mind is moulded by
them, tliey seem reasonable, pcaccful and impersonal. (R&R 42)
126 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

Caudwells acrid style expresses the violence and novelty 0f

exactly such an encountcr.
The method of the Sudies seemed to me, when I first read
them, and still seems to me today, to have been productive.
Caudvvell undcrstood the nature of ideology better than it is
generally understood today, and his work developed this under-
standing in new directions. This follows in some part upon his
heretical rejection of reflection-theory. Ideas, art, intellectual
artcfacts do not appear to Caudwell (as they did to some of his
contemporaries) as sociological symptoms expressed (inconven-
iently) in other tenns, or as simple reflections of class interests.
or did he (as is often still done) use ideology as an
indiscriminate and replaceable term for any system of beliefs.
Ideology gives the characteristic shape to a societys intellectual
culture; it is a basic world-vievv, with attendant categories, which:

Is only revealed on analysis as an miseen forc, not explicit in

the fonnulations of that culture, but acting like a pressure from
without. It gives to that culture a characteristic distortion which
is not visible to those who still live within the framework of
that economy. (FS 116)

Tlie carapacious touglmess of the conscious part of society

consists in the fixity of the categories into which knowledge is
sorted, and these categoriesHalways reflect in a class society the
particular conditions of functioning of the ruling class as felt by
them (C in P 89) But these categories, while resistant to change,
are not incrt; tlicy also excrt a pressure, they direct intellectual
interests in ccrtain directions (C in P 53). They determine a certain
drift of the mind which is, ultimatcly, itsclf determined in class
ways. Wc can observe this pressure, this drift, by observing the
way in which in different historical periods, similar illusions
reappear within quite distinct ficlds of thought. Henee we may
lcgitimatcly analyse ideology not only as product but also as
proccss; it has its own logic which is, in part, sclf-dctcrmincd, in
that given categories tend to reproduce thcmselves in consccutivc
ways. While we cannot substituto the ideological logic for the real
lustory - capitalist evolution is not the acting out of a basic
 C H R I S T O P H E R C A U D W E L L 127

bourgcois idea nevcrtheless this logic is an authcntic componen!

o f that history, a history inconceivable and indescribable independ-
ent o f tlie idea.
T he bourgcois illusion o f freedom is tlic central character o f all
thc studies. T he dccpcst and niost ineradicable bourgcois illusion,
upon w hich all othcrs are built, is that man is frce not through but
in spite o f social relations (S D C 69). T his dcmand o f bourgeois
culture w as in fact unrealisable, since m an camiot strip him self o f
his social relations and reniain m an . Freedom is secreted in tlie
relation o f m an to m an (SD C xxi). B ut repeatedly the logic o f
bourgeois ideology enforces a refusal to acknowledge social
detenninations. Tlie bourgeois by his position is committed to tlie
belief that a dom inating relation to a thing (prvate property) is not
a dom inating relation at all? the relation between a man and his
property is a relation between m an and a thing, and is therefore no
restraint on the liberty o f other m en (F S 167; SD C 100).
T hroughout tlie studies the bourgeois is seen as a m an standing in
his own liglit:

As a bourgeois he liad been unconscious o f any necessity

detennining his action, for the bourgeois law o f social action is
*Do as you w ill. It forgets to State whetlier (a) you can do as
you will; (b) you can w ill w hat you will. (F S 168)

As tlie grow ing coniplexity o f economic organisation, tlie rise o f

the State, and the threat o f the w orking-class movement make older
bourgeois notions o f social liberty come to appear increasingly
unpracticable, nevcrtheless the bourgeois illusion continued to
reproduce itself in tlie arts and tlie intellectual disciplines. It
reappears, witli astonisliing vigour, in m dem psycho-analysis (see
Freud, Love, Consciousness); it supports tlie ineffectual paci-
fism o f the Thirties; it diverts D .H . Lawrence from the sources o f
his ow n genius; above all, it is stubbonily defended in the
bourgeois self-image:

Tlie bourgeois camiot adm it him self to be a detemiined

individual - to do so would be to uncover the detennining
relations w hich are all social relations .... Thus the bourgeois
128 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

reserves for himself an area o f spontaneity or non-causality in

all vales in which the human mind is concemed, and since
there is no detemiinism there, they are all arbitrary and might
be anything (FS 12).

Idcology, as seen by Caudwell, is not a cunning and wilful class

imposition, as mask to disguise social realities and to mystify the
oppressed. It is, in its most essential effects, a form o f self-mystifica-
tion, a drift of the mind and of the sensibility. But it does also
mystify the oppressed, impose an approved view o f social reality,
and, henee, enforce the hegemony o f the rulers. About this - and the
institutional consolidation and reproduction o f ideology in its domi-
native aspeets - Caudwell has less to say. But he does, repeatedly, jab
at the central legitimating notion of the ffeedom o f market relations,
a notion astonishingly regenrate in the capitalist vvorld today:

Man is completely free except for the payment o f money. That

is the overt character of bourgeois relations. Secretly it is
different, for society can only be a relation between men, not
between man and a thing, not even between man and cash.
(SDC 151)

This way of seeing ideology is of course derived from Marx, but

Caudwell has thought it through once again, and has made it his
own. 1 find it congenial, and also contagious. It has influenced
by own historical thinking, althougli the imbrication of ideology,
with its own authentic logic, within particular social contexts
whose logic need not be congruent, presents problems both of
reciprocal determination and of contradiction of a complexity
which Caudwclls epochal analysis glosses over. And I must also
confess to another arca in which Caudwell influenced me, an
area in which his thought is unelear, ambiguous and perhaps
heretical. This concems the relations between basis and super
structura, between needs and nonns, between economy and
valuc-system or morality.
Caudwell does not often ernploy the basis/supcrstructurc analogy,
and if he does so it is clcarly as a figure-of-spccch. He is more
concemed to cise than to forc open the gap between socialbeinn
 CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL 129

and social consciousncss; one is not sccn as prim ary, tlie otlicr as
dcrivative. Y ct a t thc sanie tim e he is given to statcments tliat
intellectual artefaets are econom ic p roduets. Religin, he notes at
one point, is like the consciousness o f which it is a part, an
econom ic p ro d u ct. (FS 18) And again, m ans imier frccdom, thc
conscious w ill, acting tow ards conscious ends, is a product o f socicty;
it is an econom ic p ro d u ct (SDC 216). If religin and free-will are
econom ic producs, w h at then is the cconomy? Caudwell has an
an sw cr to th is too:

B y econom ic production \ve m ean an active interpenetration o f

o rg an ism w ith n atu re th a t is not innate, is not genetically
inherited, b u t is transm itted by extem al m eans, and yet is not
environm ental in tlie biological sense. It is cultural. (FS 27)

So w e a re in a circle. R eligin and free-w ill are economic produets.

W h at is econom ic production? It is cultural. B ut this is not the
w ord-spinning o f an ideologue. C audw ell is not shuffling his papers
at random , an d g rab b in g a t w hatever te m com es to hand. It is true
iat he m ay be try in g to shock u s o u t o f certain received bourgeois
(or M arx ist?) categories, in w hich the p u rity o f culture can never be
sullied b y v u lg a r econom ics o r in w liich econom ic production is
substantial m aterial rea lity an d culture an insubstantial accessory.
T liat th e assim ilation is m editated an d delibrate, and is o f a piece
with his interactio n ist epistem ology, is m ade clear in his study o f
L o v e \ L ove is m a n s liante fo r the em otional element in social
relations:

I f o u r defm ition o f love is correct, it is tru e that love makes the

w orld g o round. B u t it w ould be ratlier tru er to say that the society
going ro u n d a s it does, m akes love w hat it is. This is one o f tliose
relations like th a t o f know ing and being, which can only be
understood in a dialectical m am ier. T hought guides action, yet it is
action w hich gives b irth to consciousness, and so the two seprate,
struggle, an d re tu m on each other, and therefore perpetually
develop. Ju st a s hum an life is being mingled with knowing,
xociety is economic production mingled wilh love. (SDC 130-1)
(My italics).
130 MAKING HISTORY

Thus Caudwell is refusing to allow us to place economics in a

conceptual basis, and consciousness and affective culture in a
conceptual superstructura. Needs and norm s m ust be taken together,
and knowledge m ust be taken w ith thern, as part o f a unitary
proccss in which men in particular fom is o f association (mode of
production) produce botli goods and culture. This may be seen
clcarly in primitive society: as the researches o f anthropologists
show, economic production is inextricably interwoven witli social
affcction. (SDC 150) T he dichotomy between economy and
love has no transcultural heuristic valu: it is historically-specific
to capitalist society.

Tlie bourgeois w as detennined to believe that the m arket was

the only social relation between m an and man. T his m eant that
he must refiise to believe th a t love w as an integral part o f a
social relation. H e repressed this tendem ess from his social
consciousness. (SDC 152)

In all distinctive bourgeois relations it is characteristic that

tendemess is com pletely expelled, because tendem ess can only exist
between men, and in capitalism all relations appear to be between a
man and a com m odity (Ibid. 151), Econom ics, in short, is a
category invented by the bourgeois, in his utilitarian stage; and the
same category imposes a particular, lim ited and instrumental view
o f human motivations and satisfactions w hich exeludes all needs
and faculties w hich are not responsive to the stimuli o f the market,
or subjcct to its operations:

T o our generation the association o f economic relations with

sexual love scems arbitrary, not because our idea o f love is too
rich but because our notion o f economic relations is too
bourgeois. Bourgeois civilisation has rcduccd social relations to
the cash nexus. T hcy have bccome em ptied o f affection. (Ibid.
148)

But econom ic is not a category which Caudwell rejeets. He holds

onto it, as a very general tem for men and women in association
producing the m eans o f life, and at the same time producing
 CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL 131

themsclvcs and their own culture, and he tries to stuff back into it
tiloso qualitics which the bourgeois category lias excludcd:

Tlie misery o f the world is ccononiic, but that does not mean
that it is cash. That is a bourgeois error. Just because they are
ccononiic, they involvc the tenderest and most valued feclings
o f social man. (Ibid. 156).

(They, I take it, refers not to misery but to a missing term,

social relations). Tliis thought carries him on to his apocalyptic
conclusin:

Today it is as if love and economic relations have gathered at two

opposite poles. All the unused tendemess o f mans instincts gatlier
at one pole and at the other are economic relations, reduced to
bare coercive rights to commodities. Tliis polar segregation is the
source o f a terrific tensin, and will give rise to a vast transfomia-
tion o f bourgeois society. Tliey must, in a revolutionary destruc-
tion and construction, retum in on each other and fiise in a new
synthesis. This is communism. (Ibid. 157)

This is powerfid as a parable, but the parable is too neat. Metaphor

and logic are slipping in different directions, rhetoric is dominant,
the idea is imposing itself on the social process, od errors (mans
a-historical instincts) reappear. Moreover, on the previous page
Caudvvell had sketched an altemative scenario: displaced societal
feelings might equally reappear in the form of social neuroses -
late, patriotism, fascism, anti-semitism, absurd and yet pathetic
Royal Jubilee enthusiasnis, or mad impossible loyalties to Hitlers
and Aryan grandniothers.50 All tliis is forgotten or brushed
impatiently aside. Emotion (afFirmative) will burst ffom the
ground in which it has been repressed with all the forc o f an
explosin .... This is a revolution.
The conclusin, then, will not do, although I confess that I was
long attracted by its nietaphoric vitality. It is not altogether
spurious, for it serves to remind us, forcibly, that the injury which
capitalist process inflicts on us is not only that o f economic
exploitation. It is also that o f defining us, in tliis abbreviated way,
132 MAKING HISTORY

as economic creatures at all. And men and women do, continuall

fmd ways o f resisting tliese defnitions. And this resistance has
often proved to be more diicult for capitalism to accommodate
than the direct resistance o f exploited economic men, which can
often be bought off in economic ways. So that tlie tensin upon
which Caudwell builds his parable is not o f his invention.
But the conclusin is less signicant than the train of argument
which led up to it. This is not without difficulty, of several kinds.
It is possible to ask, for example, why love should be the
distinctive emotional elcment in social relations, and not late,
greed, envy, aggression, &c. To this Caudwell has, implicitly, his
own answer; if society is dependent upon men and women
associating co-operatively in economic production, then only the
adliesive affective qualities are functional, and these we decide to
cali love; greed, aggression, &c., are dysfunctional. This answer
scarcely suffices. But the ulterior methodological problems are, to
tlie dominant Marxist tradition even greater. The assimilation of
economics and culture, and o f social affection to the productive
base, are plainly heretical. And if the notion that die misery of the
world is economic, in the sense o f cash, is a bourgeois error, it is
also an error which has penetrated very deeply into the interstices
of the Marxist tradition. And where in all this dialectical
interaction (society is economic production mingled witli love) are
we to insert - as Caudwell elsewhere does insert, sometimes
brutally - the detemiining pressure o f social being? Have we not
lost sight of tlie critical concept o f society organised according to a
specific and structured mode o f production?51
Caudwell does not resolve these questions. I have already said
that his tliought in tliis area was unclcar and ambiguous. There
was a time, a very recent time, wlien to ask such questions and
to receive an irresolute answer would have been to have courted
dismissal. Marxism - or the people who spoke most loudly and
authoritatively in Marxisms ame - already knew the ansv/ers. I
am glad that this intellectual iron age is now passing; one has
waited for a long time for it to go by. Caudwell, in my view,
was asking questions wliich liad to be asked, and his anibiguity
was a fruitful ambiguity. In refusing tlie ortliodox closures
offered by reflection tlieory, by the basis/superstructure model,
 CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL 133

and by tlie allocation o f economics to the base and nomis, or

affcctive culture, to the superstructure, he was holding open a
door to a more Creative tradition.

VII

Some o f us strayed through that door, hesitantly and with many

backward looks. That is, I suppose, one reason for my writing this
essay. Caudwes insights and Caudwells confusions were im-
printed upon many o f my generation. I hope that I may have
shown - and Caudwell, if Promethean, was by no means an
isolated figure - that the Marxism available in England as we
entered the Forties was more complex than is often supposed. But I
may only have confmned, in the eyes o f mdem critics, the
poverty and confusin o f our resources. Even so, one should not
swing from one fashion to tlie next without making some
settlement o f intellectual accounts.
In these accounts I still feel myself to be in CaudwelPs debt.
The examination has proved to be more difficult than I
anticipated. I now find that very much o f Caudwells work,
perhaps ninety per cent, must be set as'ide. It no longer affords
any point o f entry. But there is a residue, a ten per cent, which
still holds an extraordinary, searching vitality. Above all, Caud
well was walking abroad in the intellectual world o f his time,
encountering the largest ideas and issues o f his contemporary
culture. He was not, as sometimes happens today, retreating into
the introverted security where Marxists speak only to Marxists in
a universe o f self-validating texts. His enterprise - to work over
in his consciousness the whole inheritance o f human knowledge
- was impossible ambitious, but it is not for that reason
discredited. Studies in a Dying Culture remains, with Hazlitts
The Spirit o f the Age (with which it bears, at some points,
comparison), an outstanding diagnosis o f a particular moment of
intellectual history.
This moment was not just the Thirties. It was a particular
point within the Thirties. One o f his editors, recalling the year
(1935-36) when the studies were written, has summarised it thus:
134 MAKING HISTORY

It w as a good tim e to be a left-w ing idealist: during that year

H itler occupied the Rhineland, A b y ssin ia fell to the ltalians, and
the Spanish Civil W a r began. In London, troops o f Sir Oswald
M oseleys B ritish Union o f F ascists m ade their m ost serious effort
to invade the E ast End, and w ere repulsed by the workers, and the
H unger M archers from Jarrow arrived in W estm inster ,...52

It w as, moreover, a tim e o f sustained an d exalted illusion about

Soviet reality. T he m ajor purges and tri is had yet to come. At
the first Soviet W riters C ongress (1934), w hose proceedings were
translated when Caudw ell w as com pleting Illusion an d Reality,
Bukharin, in one o f his last public appearances (but who could
know that?), had appeared to offer a charter to the poets
endorsing tlieir Creative autonom y.53 W hether or not it was a
good tim e to be a left-wing idealist, it w as a time in which
one might easily take one culture to be dying and another to be
coming o f age.
Caudw ells utopian visin o f Soviet Com munism leaves a
dusty taste in our mouths today, and inevitably this must date
some p art o f his writing. B ut the potes and oppositions between
which he made culture and history swing were not by any
means factitious. He lived at a tim e w hen bourgeois individual-
ism did, in extremity, effect alliances w ith Fascism; when
peaceful laissez-faire did undergo a transfonnation into armed
imperialism; when the commercial degradation o f art did appear
to gather at one pole and self-contemplating aestheticism at the
other; when eminent scientists were proclaiming the rediscovery
o f God and o f free will in the indctemiinacy o f physical laws;
when ascendant psycho-analysis w as prcsenting society as tlie
prison-housc and culture as the warden constraining the nobility
o f the free cxpressivc instincts. T hat crisis was not imaginary. It
iniposcd itsclf Mike a pressure from without upon his acrid style
and within the antinomies o f his thought. At lengtli it iniposcd
itsclf upon his Ufe, and took him to his dcath in Spain. His
body was ncvcr recovcrcd. Tlic unfinishcd manuscripts which
wcrc recovcrcd 54 represcnt the most hcroic effort o f any British
M a r t n to t!nnk his n u il intcllccliial lime
 CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL 135

1 seo a man
Last hcard of alive on a hill-crest
In Spain, expecting to die at bis gun.
Alone, his youtli and work all over,
His stars and plancts
Reduced to yards of ground,
Hoping otliers will harvest his crop.55

From lile Soclalisl Reglster, 1977

Notes

I am grateful to tliose vvlio llave read or heard different versions of

this essay for their criticai conunents: these inelude Philip Corrigan,
Alan Dawley, Martin Eve, Dorothy Thompson, Raymond Williams,
the editors of the Socialist Register, and members of tlie Birming-
ham University Caudwell Sociejy.

1. The Crisis in Physics (1939); Illusion and Reality (1937); Romance

and Realism: a Study in English Bourgeois Literature (Princeton,
1970); Studies in a Dying ^ 9 r r e 1 9 3 Further Studies in a
Dying Culture^f1949). Mv reRgnces M a l te s r are to these
editions, abbreviated as C in P, I&R, R&R,SDC, FS. In 1965
Lawrence and Wishart issued a selection from Caudwells writings
as The Concept o f Freedom. There is a Monthly Review paperback
edition (1972), of SDC and FS within a single cover.
2. Biograpliical evidence is patchy and sometimes contradictor^': see
tlie biographical note in Christoplier Caudwell, Poenis (1939); and
material in Stanley E. Hyman, The A rm fd Vision (New York, 1948)
and David N. Margolies, The Function o f Literature: a Study o f
Caudwells Aesthetics (1969). The most informative account is
undoubtedly in Samuel Hyness introduction to R&R. Since writing
tliis essay, I llave liad a sight of an unpublished biography by
George Moburg, Christoplier Caudwell: The Making of a Revolu-
tionary, wliich is based on letters and manuscripts in the possession
of Caudwells brolher, Mr Theodore Sprigg. Mr Moburgs study
fully conrms the account given by Samuel Hynes.
3. Francis Muiheru, The Marxist Aesthetics of Christoplier Caudwell,
New Left Review, 85, May/June 1974, pp. 37-58. While I disagree
witli Mulhern on many points I welcome his careful and tlioughtful
study.
136 MAKING HISTORY

4. Sce Terry Eagleton, Raymond Williams: an Appraisal, New Lejl

Review, 95, January/Febniaiy 1976, p. 7: Who is the najor English
Marxist crilic? Christopher Caudwell, lilas. lt is in such pat
question and answer lliat Ihe problem of a Marxist criticism in
contcmporary Brilain is most deftly posed. For tliough Caudwell is
the major forcbear - major, at least, in the sheer undaunted
ambiliousness of his project - it is equally true that there is little,
except negalively, to be learnt from him .
5. Raymond Williams, Culture and Society (Penguin edition, 1961), p.
272, 269.
6. It should, however, be nolcd that the late essay, planned as one of the
Sludies, and published only in 1970 as Romance and Realism, reveis a
quite new specificily of judgement, a more watchful eye and a inore
altenlive ear, nolably in its treatment of Meredith, Hardy, Kipling,
Moore and Virginia W oolffThis suggests reserves of critical power
only casually drawn upon in Caudwells earlier writings.
7. Loe. cit., p. 58
8. Loe, cit., p. 7
9 A rough-and-ready breakdown into categories gives us: Linguistics,
14; Mathemalics, 14; Philosophy, 33; General Science (including
genelics, physics), fcSjT Ancient civilizations (Egypt, Greece, Rome),
39; Marxism, 39; Hislory, economics, general politics, 64; Literary
criticism and the arts, 75; Psychology and neurology, 78; Anthropol-
ogy and archacology, 122. A few tilles evade even these classifca-
lions. And there are two or lince volumes of poetry.
10. Caudwell at first intended til cali the book F to jr and Mathematics
a Sludy o f the Foundation o f Poetry: see R&R, p. 10. Caudwell in
fact disavowed any claim to llave studied aestlielics: 'to deal fully
and apprecialively with [acsthetic] vales in one author alone would
perhaps occupy several books. His concern was, rather, with the
social gcncration of art, and at a time when a culture disinlegrates
lilis mus be a prior concern: R&R, 139-40.
11. Bcrnals criticism (Modero Quarterly, Vol. 6, no. 4, Autumn 1951, pp.
346-50) docs not in fac idenlify spccific errors in Caudwells scien-
lc writing, allhougli lie indcales one passage (FS 243) as vvord-
spimiiug': i.c. an ovcrslraincd analogy rather (lian an error of fac.
12. The discussion was elosed with Cornforths rcply (loe. cit., Autumn
1951), with the rcmark that it would have to be coiuiimcd clsevvhcrc'.
But there was, in the conditions of that time, in the Parlys control of
its own press and in the virtual abscncc of any independen! jouruals
interested in Marxist discussion, nowhcrc clsc for its couliuuniicc. The
uumber of conlribiitions to that discussion (Sumiller and Aulimui
 CHRISTOPHER CAUDWELL 137

1951), o fien heavily edilcd and cut (as well as other contribulions
which never appeared?), indcales Ihc very general inlcrest llial liad
bcen aroused. In my view Ihc controversy* was cdilorially conlrollcd
tliroughoul and dircclcd lo a foregone conclusin.
13. A ncurologisl, B.H. Kcrnian, addcd soinc hclpful foolnolcs lo tlie
sludy o f Consciousness in Further Sludies, whicli offered corrcc-
lions lo Caudwell in the 1igil of subscquenl researcli: bul il is also
made clear dial diese correclions did nol undcrniinc his basic
argunienl, and, indeed, his argumenl brillianlly anticpales a whole
Irend which is now discernible in niodern ncuroanatomy: FS 11.
14. See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, pp. 269, 271; Marxism
and Literature (Oxford, 1977), p. 30.
15. Maurice Cornforth, Caudwell and M arxism, Modern Quarterly, Vol.
6, no. 1, W inler 1950-51. In describing tliis orthodoxy as Stalinist
I o f course employ liindsight, but not complacent hindsight. There
were a good many frustrated proto-revisionists in die Conununist
Party in tliose days; in my own circles vve designaled die enemy as
K ing Street and as Jungle M arxism, of which we increasingly
carne to see Modern Quarterly as the leading inlellectual organ. For
a superb example of Jungle Marxism, see (in the same number as
Cornforth on Caudwell), Dr. John Lewis (the reviews editor) on
The M oral Complexin of our People, from which we learn, nter
alia, dial the m ilitant worker exemplifies kindness, courage, com-
radeship, merey, integrity and truth to a degree not knovvn before.
The spectacle o f Allhusser going hanuner-and-tongs at Lewis (King
Streets leading lay preacher o f the most vulgar orthodoxy) as an
idealist and revisionist herede dees ones sense of the ridiculous.
16. Caudwells leading defender was George Thomson (In Defence of
Poetry, Modern Quarterly, Vol. 6, no. 2, Spring 1951). I llave been
told by Professor Thomson iat he was given an exceedingly short
time - only a few days - to prepare liis reply to Cornforth; perhaps
tliis explains why he was driven to defend Caudwell mainly by
trading quotalions from Marx. It seems tliat it liad been the intention
tliat CornfortlTs a n id e should go uncontested, as an ex cathedra
statemenl of the co rre d view on Caudwells work. Only an oulcry
among Party niembers, and the high standing of several of them -
including George Thomson (who liad been on the Partys Executive
Conunittee) - forced the discussion to be opened.
17. N. Bukharin, Poetry, Poetics and the Problems of Poetiy in the
U.S.S.R., in Problems o f Soviet Literature: Reports and Speeches at
the First Soviet Writers Congresst 1934, ed. A. Zhdanov, N.
Bukharin, K. Radek, &c (1935). Margolies, op. cif, pp. 86-91,
138 MAK1NG HISTORY

discusses the influence o f B ukharins ideas on Caudvvell. But he

fails to convey the intelligence, flexibility and soaring confidence of
lilis report.
18. See Hynes, Inlroduction, R& R E arlier editors and critics liad
supposed tliat Studies in a D ying Culture preceded lllusion and
Reality.
19. Hynes, op. cit., pp. 13-14.
20. See belovv, note 54. Several o f Caudw ells works are m arred by
evident misreadings or m is-transcriptions o f the m anuscripts, notably
The Crisis in Physics, w ith defendant for dependent (p. 11),
conscience for conscious (p. 20), etliers for ethics (p. 74),
denoniinaled for denoininator (p. 81), w ith for without (p. 150),
sun for sum (p. 220) , and so on. Sucli errors reduce whole
sentences to nonsense.
21. Poems, p. 41.
22. Modern Quarterly, Vol. 6, no. 4, A utumn, 1951.
23. The 1886 edilion of Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, is cited in the
bibliography to I.&R.
24. A related argunient appears in I&R, pp. 164-5 and in Beauty, FS,
p. 93.
25. Sebastiano Timpanaro, Considerations on M alerialism , New Lefi
Review, 85, May/June 1974; On M aterialista (New L et Books,
1975).
26. The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human
thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question. In
practice man must prove the truth, i.e. the reality and power, the
this-sidedness of his thinking. The dispute over the reality or
non-reality of thinking which is isolated from practice is a purely
scholastic question.
27. Compare C in P, p. 58: Dialectics can only be lilled w ith content
by activity upon the object - that is, by practice and experiment.
slice the objcct did not exisl for Hcgcl, his dialcctic could never be
fillcd with rcalistic content, and reinaincd a beautiful and intricate
mili grinding llic air of theory and producing notliing but his
prejudices and aspiralions.
28. See e.g. C in P, pp. 126-7, FS, p. 247.
29. Marxism and Lilerature, p. 85.
30. lbid., pp. 83, 87.
31. The passage contines: as we chango the world we lcarn inore
about it; as we lcarn more aboul it, we chango oursclvcs ....
32. Loe. cit., p. 18.
33. Loe. cit., p. 356.
34. Loe. cit., p. 266.
35. Loe. cit.. pp. 22-3.
36. As Mulhcrn suggcsl, op. eit., p. 54.
37. Cf. SDC, pp. 135-7: Alt instincl is a ccrtain huate behaviour-patter or
chal! of rcflcxcs, coiulilioncd or modified by cxpcricncc; wc mus rid
our miud of mylhological cutilics of diese seprale inslincts, likc
distinet souls, plantcd iu llic animal or human breas! ....'
38. Scc Raymond Williams, Murxixm and Literatura, p. 87. ln a prvate
comnumication lo me, Williams suggcslcd (lie way in whicli llic
metaphor drifts.
39. Open Lctlcr lo Lcs/.ck Kolakowski, Sacialist Reyister, 1973, p. 67.
40. M orriss lapes and Fears jar Art is ineluded in (lie bibliography of
I. & R.
41. Marxism and Literatura, p. 30.
42. The image of pholograph appears in a more complcx form in l&R,
p. 161: Words are lied lo pcrccpls which are photographic
memory-images of bits of rcalily. These pcrccpls are fused inlo
concepts, are organised and ordered in the broadest and inost
abslracl way. Or, more accuralcly, out of the broad humming chaos
of cxislcncc - Ihe simplcsl perccpt, otlver concepts and percepts
arisc by differentiation and inlcgration.
43. Williams, op. cil., p. 37.
44. Ibid., pp. 41-2. See Caudwclls comment on Russell, SDC, p. 214:
Language fillcd his hcad with ideas, showed him what lo observe,
taughl him logic, pul all other m cns wisdom al his disposal, and
awokc in him affcclivcly ihe elemenlary decencies of society.
45. Marxism and Literatura, p. 36.
46. The most hclpful contribulions lo the controvcrsy (Madera Quar-
terlv, Vol. 6. no. 3, Summer 1951) wcre from Montagu Slalcr and
GcolTrcy Mallhcws, bolh of whom accepted extensivo criticisni of
Caudwell. Matlhcws wrote (p. 272): Caudvvclls great vveakncss as a
Marxisl literary cride is surcly not that he invenlcd the bourgeois
illusion within which all the mdem English poets have writtcn, but
that he docs not study these poets from any other anglc than that of
the illusion.
47. Moburg, cit. supra., note 2.
48. Culture and Society, p. 273.
49. The human csscncc is no abslraction inherent in cach single
individual, m its rcalily it is the ensamble of the social rclations.
50. In tliis nolion of displaced love as social neurosis, Caudwell may
have been influcnccd (likc Auden) by Gcstalt psychology.
51. The diTicully appears in a passage in Love (SDC, p. 132): What
140 MAKING HISTORY

does nialter lo m en is Ihe em otional ciernent in social relations ...

whicli makes m an in eacli gen eratio n w h a t he is. This emotion is not
seprate from but springs out o f the economic basis o f ltese
relations, w hich thus determ ine religin. M a n s quality in eacli age
is delerm ined by his em otional an d technological relations, and these
are not seprate but par o f the one social process.' I strongly
assent to the im plications o f th e w ords w h ich I have italicised. But
w hat springs out o r a basis m ust be in h e re n t in th is basis and these
relations, and henee th e analogy o f basis/su p erstru ctu re has only a
lim ited (and oflen m isleading) analytic use. W h at th e n is econom ic
about tliis basis? Is econom ic th e sam e as technological? W hat
Caudwell has failed to elabrate is th e concept o f a mode o f
production, w hich entails bull eco n o m ic a n d norm ative correspond-
ent attribules: the priority afforded to econom y is liistorically-
specific to capitalist m arket relations. T liere is n o th in g about a mode
o f production w hich dem ands o u r a ttrib u tin g p riority to th e (bour-
geois) category o f econom ics as opposed to the norm s, affective
qualities, and social relations (o f pow er, d o m in atio n a n d subordina-
tion) witlioul w hich tliat m ode o f production w ould be inoperative
and inconceivable. A ll are p art o f th e one set. O n these points I find
helpful M aurice G odelier, Perspectives in M arxist Anthropologv
(Cam bridge, 1977), esp. cliapters one an d two. G odelier still
m aintains a concept o f infrastructure/superstructure, w hich is, how-
ever, alm ost dissolved in his rich an d scrupulous analysis. I
understand that his thought is still developing in tliis area, an d we
must aw ait his conclusions w itli interest.
52. Samuel Hynes, in R&R, p. 12.
53. B ukharins eloquent and aTinnative report (cit. supra., note 17)
carne to a clim ax witli the slogan: C ulture, culture and yet again
culture! (p. 257). It w as received by the delegates w itli ecstatic
cxcilcm cnl, as the signal o f rcconciiiation belw een the Soviet regim e
and the intclligcntsia: for the circum stanccs, see Stephen F. Cohn,
Bukharin and the Iiolshevik Revolution (1974), pp. 3556.
54. In a letter to Elizabclli and Paul B card (ciled by M oburg, above,
note 2), w hich constilulcs his literary tcstam ent on leaving for Spain,
he referred lo Studies as im perfect hasty sketches, and only
drafts. Tlicy would all have lo be rew ritten and refned ... it needs
refining, balancing, getting in it the m ovem ent o f time, ripening and
lium anising.
55. R.F. W illcts, Homage to Christoplicr C audw ell, Envoi, no. 15,
1962.
 n Defence o f the Jury

It was nice to be awoken on 12 Novcmbcr by the BBC informing

us tliat tlie Qucens Spccch would anuounce measures to
strengtlien tile jury system. It is, aftcr all, a very ancient English
institution for which we feel a ritualistic affection. And it is good
to know that our betters are taking carc of it.
There have been a lot of measures to strengthen the jury
system in recent years. In 1967 the Criminal Justice Act abolished
the unanimity rule and introduced a majority verdict (at ten to
tvvo). This was presumably to bring the jury in line with the metric
system and the decimalisation of money. Then measures were taken
to rationalise the archaic system of defence challenges and to
reduce their efectiveness. The number of peremptory challenges
allowed to the defence liad already, in 1948, been reduced from 20
to seven. In the Criminal Law Act of 1977 they were further
reduced to three. Meanwhile, n 1973, the Lord Chancellor, Lord
Hailsham, by an Order in tlie law vacaticm, liad struck out the
ancient practice o f listing the occupations of jurors summoned onto
tlie panel.
Two further measures were taken in the compendious 1977
Criminal Law Act. In an unobtrusive clause (which eluded
Parliamentary notice) the most ancient fonn of jury in English
history - the jury o f inquest - was shom of effective powers. And
in a sweeping series o f clauses, the option of trial by jury - or, in
the od language, putting oneself on ones country - was removed
in many categories o f case where the option liad previously been
open. Such cases, which inelude many offences against public
order, in which, o f course, the evidence of the Plice is usually
decisive, are now tried summarily before tlie stipendiary magis-
tratcs.
Few cases have been more important in the history of jury
rights tlian what is known as Bushels Case (1670). This is the
 142 MAKING HISTORY

case o f tlie Quakers, Penn aiid Mead, indicted at the Od Bailey in

tliat they did preach and speak to persons in the Street assembled,
by reason whereof a great concourse and turnult o f people a long
time did remain and continu, in contem pt o f the King and his
law, and to the great terror and disturbance o f his liege subjects.
Bushcl was tire intransigent juror who reised to allow his fellow
jurymen to be intimidated into bringing in a verdict o f guilty in
tiose tenns, but would bring in a verdict o f guilty o f preaching
only. Mr Bushel was directly bullied by the whole bench:

Alderman Sir J. Robinson: I tell you, you deserve to be indicted

more than any man that hath been brought to the b ar this day ...
Mr Justice May: Sirrah, you are an impudent fellow ...
The Recorder: You are a factious fellow: I will set a m ark on
you ...
The Major: I will cut his nose ...

This did not sufficiently strengthen the jury, so they w ere hauled
off to prison for the failure to convict. On appeal, the ju ry was
vindicated, and the precedent was established o f the ju ry s pow er to
detennine its own verdict, free from the tlireat o f punishment. But
if William Pemi were to preach at G racechurch Street today, M r
Bushel and his fellows would be unable to afford him the
protection o f their special verdict, since the case - as a public
order offence - would not come before a ju ry at all.
The ink of the Criminal Law Act, 1977, liad scarcely dried
before an even more remarkable resource o f jury-strengthening w as
discloscd to a startlcd British public. I m ust suppose that tlie ABC
Case, undcr the Official Secrets Acts, s sufficiently fresh in
memory for me to be able to dispense with rehearsing the details.
Therc was never any qucstion o f tlie tliree defendants (the
joumalists, Crispin Aubrey and Duncan Campbell, and the fonner
signis corporal, John Berry) meditating passing any infom iation to
the encmy - except (an important qualification) insofar as the
British Sccurity Services have always regarded the British public as
the encmy. The ABC Trial was intended to be a sensational public
show trial, and a condign waming against the whistle-blowers. In
the event, it was (for the prosccution) a sensational anti-climax.
 IN D E F E N C E OF T H E J URY 143

One reason for tliis was the scandal occasioned by the revelation of
jury-vetting.
What occasions surprise is not the fact that vetting liad taken
place, but the shamefaced way in which the fact carne out. On the
opening o f the trial, the distinguished counsel for the defence,
Jeremy Hutchinson QC, visited the court to obtain a sight of the
panel. In a casual conversation witli a court officer Lord Hutchin
son leamed tliat - more than two montlis before - the prosecution
had applied privately to a judge in chambers for the panel list, in
order to scrutinise the ntembers. In the face of pressure from the
legal profession the Attomey-General suddenly released to the
Times guidelines authorising jury-vetting, Which he liad secretly
issued four years before to snior plice and the Director of Public
Prosecutions - without tlie knowledge of Parliament or the Bar.
These guidelines instructed the Plice that diere were certain
exceptional types of case of public importance in wliich, in order
to ensure tlie proper administration of jSsticeV jury-vetting might
take place. Such cases were gestured at as tliose involving
terrorists, criminal gangs, or serious offences where strong political
motives were involved. In these cases it was held proper to
identify and rernove front the MCg fiersons of extreme political
beliefs. Checks to identify such persons should involve ie use of
the data banks of the central crBnal records Computer at Hendon
(which has a capacity for storing records on a mere forty million
people); a check on Special Branch records; and further checks on
jurors by the local CID.
What vetting signifies became a little clearer in the autumn of
1979 at the opening o f the trial o f four anarchists. The trial judge
authorised jury-vetting by the prosecution, and allowed the defence
to engage prvate detectives (out o f legal aid funds) to undertake its
own investigation o f tlie panel. When this unsavoury business
became too expensive, he ordered instead that an edited versin of
the prosecutions information gained from plice records (but not
from Security records) should be passed on to the defence. The
gleanings of the plice Computer were duly leaked by sorne
responsible person to the press, and the public had a brief glimpse
of the extraordinary miscellany o f fact, trivia and malicious gossip
stored at the taxpayers expense. O f a panel of 93, more than
144 MAKING HISTORY

one-fifth liad entries on central plice files. Some were for trivial
and long-expired offcnces which could never have constituted
disqualification for jury Service - for example, a 14-year-old fine of
5 for a minor theft at work. Others were dignified in the records
bccause thcir children or kin were reputed to have liad associations
witli criminis. Another was Usted as liaving resided at an address
rcputcd to be a squat. Yet others were listed because they liad been
the victims o f a crinie, or liad niade complaints against the Plice.
It was left to the incoming Conservative Attomey-General to
regularise the procedures o f jury-vetting by a Practice Direction, to
introduce a few emollient fomialities, and to lower the profile of
the issue so that it is now accepted as normality. It can be seen
tliat this is not a party-political question. N o one can be accused of
partisan zeal. Ensuring the proper administration o f justice is a
consensual duty in which Lord Hailsham and Labours Attomey-
General Sam Silkin laboured alongside each other, while tlie
pupating leadership of the SDP (then in Mr Callaghans Cabinet)
averted their faces - or perhaps did not. All have shared in the
work of strengthening the jury system by diluting tlie unaninious
verdict, renioving offences to summary jurisdiction, limiting the
challenges of the defence, and extending the scrutiny o f the panel
by the prosecution (with the aid o f plice infomiation-storage of a
miscellancous and uncontrolled kind).
Tlie new measures in the Criminal Justice Bill, publishcd on 13
Novcmber, are therefore strictly on course. They will strip froni
jury trial more categories of offence, including criminal damage
and common assault and battery (Clauses 24 and 25). Clause 83,
the right to challenge jurors without cause (when selccting the jury
from the panel), is now to be abolished. The legally illiterate - that
is, most of us - will suppose this to be even-handed. In fact, this
is a unilateral pre-cniptivc strike against the dcfences 800-ycar-old
right to peremptory challenge. For (as we shall see) the Crown
does not have a right to peremptory challenge, but, instead, an
cqually effective right of stand-by, which is to rcmain unlimitcd
and uncontrolled.
Thcsc measures are introduccd with the awesome authority o f
the Roskill Committcc. Wc can be assured that cvcrything has been
lookcd into, all evidence taken. and that the jury system will be
 strcngthencd accordingly. Yet one must note tliat here a little
transplant operation has bcen done. For tile Roskill Comniittee was,
in foct, tile Fraud Triis Comniittee, and its brief was to
recomniend just, expcditious and economical disposal' of criminal
proceedings in England and Walcs arising from fraud.
Fraud is a complex arca, and in these days of City and
Computer crime becomes every ycar more complex. 1 am
unqualifed to comment on tlie Roskill Committees cxcrtions in
this area. But tlie extensivo attention given to the jurys role
(two chapters out of eiglit in the Report, as weil as a
supplemcntary volume of confected studies) takes it far beyond
its brief - perhaps on the pronipting of tlie Lord Chancellor?
Tlie Comniittee does not, in fact, ofFer cmy evidence to show
that juries in complex fraud cases have retumed inconipetent or
perverse verdiets. Instead, it marshals hypotheses from simulated
situations to present a plausible case that a random jury might
not have the powers of comprehension or skills in numeracy to
sustain its functions. These arguments, which led towards the
need for expert assessors and the recommendation of a special
Fraud Triis Tribunal, are relevant to the issue of fraud and to
fraud alone. I will leave this isgtt^ aside, noting only that the
Law Society and otlier expert bodies emphatically dissent from
any measure which would abolish jury trial in fraud cases. Their
arguments, summarised in the Report by Mr Walter Merricks in
a Note of Dissent, seem to me to be sound. The point which
concems me is that, even if a case might be made for the
replacement of jury trial by assessors in certain categories of
fraud case - proposals which do not find a place in the
Criminal Justice Bill - the arguments for this have no bearing
whatsoever upon the jury in its other roles and functions.
The transplant operation was done in the White Paper
Criminal Justice, Command Paper 9658. This commended the
powerful analysis of the Roskill Comniittee, and extended its
recommendation that the defences riglit of peremptory challenge
should be abolished in fraud triis to all jury triis. Not a
scintilla o f evidence in support of this extensin of the particular
into tlie general has been offered. The Government, Command
Paper 9658 intoned benevolently, has no desire to interfere
146 MAKI NG HI S T ORY

unnecessarily with a long-established right, and then proceed to

recommend measures for exactly such unnecessary interference.
Tlie justification for diese measures, if any, must be looked for
I tiie special findings of tile Roskill Committee. Seven members
sat with Lord Roskill: an eniinent chartered accountant, an
infonnation-tecliiiology expert, a fomier Chief Inspector of Con-
stabulary, a circuit judge, a former chairman o f Courtaulds, and
tile vice-chainnan of Shropshire County Council. Tlie seventh was
Mr Walter Merricks, secretary o f tile Professional and Public
Relations Committee of the Law Society, whose most cogent Note
o f Dissent on all tile Committees findings regarding the jury has
already been mentioned: I will graciously allow him to stand by
for the rest o f tiiese proceedings.
Without doubt Lord Roskills Committee was eminently quali-
fied to consider complex fraud. The members knew much about
offences against the rights of money. Tlieir qualifications to survey
and make recommendations on the long-established rights, practices
and traditions of the English and Welsh peoples are less evident.
Not one of them appears to be qualifed as a historian, and I do
not notice any liistorians who were called to give evidence. (An
exception should be made for Lord Devlin, whose contributions to
legal history have been distinguished, and whose evidence - which
has not been published - appears to have run directly contrary to
the Committees recommendations.) O f course, the historical profes-
sion may be faulted for not volunteering to come forward. But then
we supposed tliat the Committee was concemed with its purported
brief - contemporary complex fraud - and did not know that a
transplant operation was in progress, by which its findings would
be fraudulcntly employed against our liberties. The rest of what I
have to say must thcreforc be a belatcd submission to a defunct
committee.
Tlie Roskill Committee found historical mattcrs to be tedious,
and mcriting less than a page in tlieir Rcport. Tliey also found
thcm to be a sourcc of irrelevant passions: Our task has been to
look at this emotive topic dispassionately in the light o f tlie
evidence presented to us. Since history might be emotive, it
could be excluded from evidence. Tlic level of historical rcference
may be cxcmplified by a footnote (p. 125) where the Report is
 IN D E F E N C E OF THE J URY 147

discussmg the dcfendants nght of pcremptory challenge. Thts

rcads: At common law each defcndant chargcd with a fclony could
make up to 35 challenges; over the years it declincd from 20 n
1509, to seven in 1948 when the right of challenge was extended
to misdemeanours. Tlie casual cye rcceivcs the notion of a steady
decline. In fact, the level of dcfence challenges without cause
remained stable at 20 - not. 1 think, from 1509 but from 22 H 8c.
14 (1541-2) - for over four hundred years. During which long and
often tempestuous period the admimstration of justice did not fall
apart. The erosin of jury' rights and the intrusin upon its practices
belong to the past four decades, and especially to the last fifleen
years. Our betters prefer to take very brief views of history.
The jury is a very ancient creature, almost as od as the
Nlonarchy and as od as Parliament. It is also a very odd beast. No
one would even dream of inventing such an institution today, least
of all a Roskill Committee. There is no single, A to Z, exhaustive
and scholarly history of the jury, partly because it is a chameleon-
like creature, which has altered its colour and shape in differing
contexts. Excellent local studies are novv being done, in the
burgeoning history of crime and legal practice. Perhaps the most
ambitious attempt to present jury' history as a whole is Thomas
Andrew Greens Verdict ciccordirtg to Conscience.
The book is subtitled Perspectives on the English Criminal
Trial Jury, 1200-1800. It sets out briskly and well in difficult
Medieval terrain, begins to falter in the 17th century, and collapses
in a heap with exhaustion - an exhaustion which the reader shares
- in the 18th century. This is partly because Professor Greens
perspectjves keep shiftng their bearings. In Medieval England he
is concerned to examine both theory and practice; he interrogates
the existing scholarship with respect, and adds his own interesting
samplings of the records. He reveis an institution with surprising
vigour, which the Crown (with its slender adminstrame resources)
was forced to come to tenns with, and which played a remarkable
role ui soening the inclastic laws of homicidc. Thereaer his
point of view becomes more theoretical and idcological. There are
somc valuable sections (for example, on the Quaker cases after the
Rcstoration). but he is incrcasingly inattentive to the actual
composition of juries, their modcs of summoning, their practiccs.
148 MAKI NG H I S T OR Y

and prefers to rehearse the argunients in Whig and Tory tracts. His
treatment of the critically important libel and sedition cases o f the
late 18th century is an anti-climax - he appears to be at a loss in
the political and social context, and even to lose condence in his
own theme. As for the practice o f 17th and 18th-century junes, we
vvill do better to go directly to the scholars whose work he has
borrovved from - Cockbum, Langbein, Douglas Hay, and especially
J.M. Beatties Crime and the Conrts in England, 1660-1800.
Never mind. Verdict according to Conscience gathers a great
deal together in one place, has many shrewd pages and much
patient exposition. It will be a resource for many historians, and
Professor Green deserves our thanks. His recurrent theme - that of
jury nullification of the rigours o f the law (a practice sometimes
tolerated or even connived at by the Bench) - is profoundly
relevant to the current debate. But, strangely, he omits to follow
his own insights through into any explicit cngagcment with Patrick
Devlins brilliant Blackstone Lecture. The Power without the
Right, published in The Judge (1979), which ought to be tlie
bench-mark from which any^discussion o f the jurys role must
start.
We have got our noses pressed too cise against the window-
pane, as historians often do. Let us stand back and take the scene
in. Tlie jury system isi to a social historian, a very remarkable
institution. Beginning as a group o f knowledgeable persons (or
inquest), who could report their findings to tlie officers o f the
Crown, it has survived immcnsc changes in political life and
adniinistration - not as a fictive or vestigial sign but as an active
element in the judicial process.
During its 800-ycar life it has shed some functions and acquired
others, evincing a quite unusual flcxibility - from ancient juries of
prescntmcnt, the homagcs of courts lcet and barn, and the
Regarders and honiage of forcst courts, to the fonualities o f the
jury box today. Evenmore remarkable, it is an institution, or
prcsencc, or tradition - which is it? - which is in some part secret
and impervious to research. The actual deliberations of the jury
may not be discloscd, and sustaincd accounts of theni are few and
impcrfcct
What. iniieed. is the jury? A legal cxpert may tell us how it is
 IN D E F E N C E OF T H E J URY 149

sunuuoncd, and, lcss exactly, w hat are its powcrs. But a social
historian cannot be so ccrtain. T o be a ju ro r is to have thrust upon
onc a tcniporary office, to w hich is attachcd an inhcritcd w cight o f
rules, practices and expectations; and this wciglit transform s an
office into an imposcd (and often intcm alised) role. T his role is
exercised for a day, or a wcek, or for threc m onths, and thcn as
suddcnly as it w as adoptcd, it falls aw ay once more. Scen iit this
w ay, the ju ry is less an institution tlian a practico, or a place
am idst adjacent judicial practices: a place through w hich generation
after generation flow s, inheriting the practices o f their forerunners,
yet inheriting tliese w itli little form al instruction, and practising the
role in the light o f expectations brought witli them into the ju ry
box and shared by the public outside.
W hen considered in this aspect, the ju ry m ay be viewed in tw o
w ays, as th eatre and as expectations as to role. T he em phasis, in
theatre, is upon tire practice, and in expectations it is upon the
inherited political culture. By th e atre I dont only m ean the
evident theatre o f the courtroom process - and the space allocated
to the several parties (judge, prisoners, counsel and jury). Despite
the theatricality o f som e 17tli an d 18tli-century triis, the ju ry s
space could be surprisingly inform al in j|ns. E arly 18th-century
forrn prescribed only th at these T w elve M en standing near may
hear all th a t is said and produced on eitlier P art, and m ay ask w hat
Q uestions they please o f the W itnesses. O r, in an account o f 1767:
as tlie custom is now , they sit am ong the crow d, undistinguished,
and it is not easy to know them from the rest o f the spectators.
This prom iscuous arrangem ent occasioned inconvenience when
tliey consult on giving tlieir verdict w ithout going out o f court.
Y et this very inconvenience em phasised th a t p art o f tlieir role in
the theatre w hich liad to do witli th eir being members o f the
general audience o f die public, albeit m em bers especially qualified
witli voices.
The place in the theatre has been th at o f a lay presence
conferring legitim acy upon the process, but sometimes at a cost
which authority has found it h ard to bear. For by their very
presence (and the pow er o f their verdict), they have profoundly
niodified the entire play. Judge, prosecution, defence, have ad-
dressed their w ords to them , souglit to overaw e or confuse them, or
 150 MAKING HISTORY

to move them to mercy: and this h a s sh aped the form o f the drama
and dictated its lines. B ecause o f th e ju r y s presence, the mysteries
o f die lavv m ust be broken dow n into la y language - law must be
made to appear rational and even, on occasion, humane. This is so
deeply assunied th at its iniportance m a y easily be neglected. Take
tile ju ry avvay in 1686 or 1796 o r 1986 and the entire judicial
process would have been - o r w ould still be - altogether re-cast.
John Lilbum e, the leader o f the L evellers in London, liad a
superb sense o f the th eatres possibilities. O n his third trial for his
life, in 1653, he called tliem his h o n ourable Jury, and said they
were the keepers o f the L iberties o f E ngland; and will make it
appear that the Jury are the Judges o f th e L aw as well as o f the
F act. In his previous trial, in 1649, he h ad played the ju ry against
the judges in a dram a w hich explicitly solicited the applause o f the
audience in the theatre. W hen L ilb u m e claim ed th a t the ju ry were
judges o f law as well as fact, the presiding ju d g e interposed a
denial. Swinging upon the bench, C olonel L ilbum e replied: You
that cali yourselves judges o f the law a re no m ore but Norman
intruders. And when he closed his defence, he retum ed to the
point: You judges sit there, being no m ore, i f the ju r y please, but
ciphers to pronounce the sentence, o r th eir clerks to say Amen.
The audience in the court w ith a loud voice cried A m en, A lie n
and gave an extraordinary great hum , w hich m ade the ju d g es look
something untow ardly about them , and caused M ajor-G eneral
Skippon to send for three fresh com panies o f foot so ld iers.
It is inadvisable, if you are on trial fo r y o u r life, to trea t judges
in this way. G rand dram a in this style w as possible only in a
period o f revolutionary fennent, w hen the legitim acy o f Parliam ent,
law and judges w ere all in question. A id perhaps honest Jolm
Lilbum e was a littlc fortificd, in 1653, by the know ledge that
outsidc the courtroom there w ere said to be six thousand London
citizcns, many o f them fom ier soldiers o f the N ew M odcl A rniy,
who had thoughtfully provided them selves w ith bludgeons and
cutlasses to use upon judges and ju ry i f the verdiet sliould
displease them. N ot even S ecuricor could be hired for such a
Service today.
L ilb u m c s acq u ittals rcniind us th a t a tria l o f se n sitiv e p o litic a l
m om ent attractcd an audience, n o t o n ly in th e c o u rtro o m , b u t in
 1N D E F E N C E OF THE JURY 151

thc nation outsidc. Whcn thc ju ry forcm an pronounccd thc vcrdict

o f not guiltv in 1649. tire wholc m ultitudc o f pcoplc in tlic H all,
for jo v o f tlic Prisoncr's acquittal. gave such a loud and unanim ous
shout. as is believed w as never hcard in G uildhall. w hich lasted for
about h a lf an hour w ithout interm ission: w hich m ade thc Judges fo r
fcar tu m palc. and hang dovvn their hcads; bu t thc Prisoncr stood
silent a t tlic bar. ratlicr m ore sad in his countcnancc than he w as
bcforc. Tlic acclam ations sprcad to thc streets, and bonfires w crc
lit tliroughout tlic city. Sim ilar sccncs w crc w itncsscd on thc
acquittal o f thc Seven B ishops (1688), th c acquittal o f printers and
publishcrs o f Ju n iu s's L etters (1770), an d th c acq u ittal o f T hom as
H ardv and his fcllow reform ers in 1794. Ju ro rs in su ch cases could
be draw n in trium ph through th c streets, feasted an d toasted , o r be
com m em orated on m edals an d token coinage.
Enough o f theatre. By expectations I mean the notions o f the
jury's role and responsibilities handed on over successive genera-
tions which flow tlirough tliis place or theatre. This belongs,
clcarlv, to political culture. It is a culture in which people are
socialised in a hundred fonnal - but mainly informal - ways: by
parents, teachers, discussions in alehouses or coffee-bars, in trade
unions or political parties, by reading trial reports or watching
Perry M asn or The R ockford F iles on T V - perhaps even
historians pass on a little. B ut this is not the same as the casual
response which miglit be m ade by the m an or woman in the Street
to questionnaire on ju ry rights. M ost people would like to wriggle
out o f the duty. B ut selection for actual ju ry Service can
concntrate the mind amazingly; presence in th at theatre can be
fiercely educative; and people discover w ithin tliemselves capacities
to ulfil a role which they liad never anticipated.
This political culture is, o f coursc, alw ays changing. Memories
of rights are lost and are tlien rediscovered. A nd I m ay have
entered this discussion frorn an over-optim istic perspectivc. The
record o f the hum anising role o f the ju ry over centuries is
incontestable; ju ry nullification or tlie m itigation o f tlic offence by
pious perjury' in crim inal triis - finding a verdict o f guilty but o f
a lcsscr offence than w ould have been capital - m ust have saved
tens o f thousands frora the gallow s. M oreover, the uncertainty as to
a jurys verdict m ust have prevented m ore thousands o f oppressive
 r
thc partiality o f British juries.
This is bccause real juries (as distinct from ju ry theory) have
operatcd in a real context o f class perceptions and conflict. It
would be absurd to say that the ju ry w as invented by bourgeois
liberalism to suit the convenience o f the bourgeoisie, for it was
invented at a time when the bourgeoisie w as not yet a glint in
fcudalisnvs eye. But the assum ption by the ju ry o f a new and
critical role - that o f inhibitor o f oppressive process and defender
o f the subject against the Crown or the organs o f the State - was
the expression o f a particular moment (which stretches from the
17th to the early 19th century) when tlie middling sort o f people
(from whom juries, and especially London juries, w ere drawn)
found themselves to be repeatedly at issue w ith the aristocracy and
Court.
Tlie stubbom jury- which acquitted Lilbum e in 1653 - and then
defended its verdict before the Council o f State - w as made up of
two haberdashers, two woollen-drapers, a leather-seller, salter,
bookbinder, grocer, brewer, tallow-chandler and two undescribcd.
For some hundred and fifty years London juries in politicallv
sensitive cases continued to have a profile like this: they were
empanellcd from lcsser gentry, shopkeepcrs, m aster tradesmen,
merchants and dcalcrs - a social stratum which included many with
some indepcndence from the lines o f interest and patronage. The
jury which acquitted of treason onc o f the London Corresponding
Socicty lcaders, Dr Robcrt Crossfield, in 1796 w as made up o f two
merchants, two masons, a com factor, sugar baker, wine merchant,
coaclunakcr, carpcnter, bookscllcr, distiller and tailor. W hilc the
members of working trades represented on such panels were not
journeymen or labourers (who were debarred by propertv qualifica-
tions), some mav have becn small masters or contractors. The
London jury reached down to thc petty bourgeoisie, among whom
- contrary to stereo-types - Radical and Painite ideas moved
 1N D E F E N C E OF THE J URY 153

Alrcady a sour note of dissent can be hcard, howcver. The

post-Waterloo Radical movement was bringing into action a class
o f persons who had no more chance of being callcd for jury
Service than had tlie blacks in Mississippi. When Brandrei and his
follows awaited trial at Derby for their part in tire Pentridge Rising
o f 1817 - all of thcm stockingers and disfranchiscd working inen -
the political theorist among tlicm was Tilomas Bacon, an od
Jacobin o f the 1790s. A corrcspondent wrote in alami to the
Home Secretan': 'Od Bacon has been telling the prisoners tlicy are
not tried by their Peers, but by men of property. I ame tliis to
show you what drcadful principies these men have taught their
unfortunate children.
Tlie unfortunate children of the poor taught their own children
the same dreadful principies, and so altemative expectations about
jurics - as promoters o f class injustice - were formed within the
political culture o f the working class. Twenty years on, and the
situation was rank witli class antagonism. Chartists expected (and
sometimes received) more fair play and merey from judges tlian
from juries, made up - in the country - from farmers and
publicans, and in the towns from the shopocracy. When John
Frost and his fellows were convicted, in 1840, for their part in the
rising o f Chartist miners at Newport, diere was of course no miner
on the jury - or was it likely that a miner would serve as a juror
for the next hundred years. The jury which convicted Frost was
made up o f five farmers, and a haberdasher, buteher, ironmonger,
baker, miller, grocer and coacliniaker.
Freetiinkers in Victorian times equated trial by jury' with trial
by bigotry. It should tierefore occasion no surprise that Chartist,
ffee-thought, trade-union or early Labour publications are not filled
with pancgyrics o f the systein: or should we expect them from
suffragettes who always faced all-male juries. What is perhaps
suiprising is tiat tie principie o f jury trial - as trial by one s peers
or equals - was still gencrally uphcld by tie disenfranchiscd. The
Chartists of North-East England in 1839 declarcd: Wc have made
UP our minds ... to stand by tic trial by jury as constituted by
Alfred die Great. When William CufFey, a black tailor (tie son of
a slave) and respected London Chartist leader, was tried for treason
ln ^ 8 , he objected diat tie jurors were not his equals, as he was
154 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

a joumey-man mechanic. After conviction, and while awaiting his

sentence of transportation, he addressed the court witli the greatest
composure: This has not been a fair trial, and my request was not
complied witli to have a jury o f my equals. But the jury as it is I
have no fault to fmd witi; I dar say tliey have acted conscien-
tiously.* Throughout his trial he appealed to the rights o f the
working classes to enter into fiill citizenship. It did not occur to
him to notice the matter of his colour.
Thus in tile years after 1832 the political culture o f Britain
acquired a new working-class dimensin, but the social profile of
tlie jury remained unchanged. A jury of the middling sort of
people, which in 1649 or 1794 still watchfully confronted the
Crown, now tumed itsef about and confronted the challenge of
democracy from their social inferiors. Perhaps this may explain
why the jury upvv^Hnto the 0 th century almost immune from
tlie rationalisations imposed by Utilitarians in other areas. The
jurys ancient legitimacy proved to be a useful resource in tile
control of workini>-ckss nbvemsuts.
And so it remained, for most purposes, until 14 years ago. Until
1972 qualification for jury Service carne witli the payment of rates
(30p.a. in London, 20 elsewhere). This tied jury Service to
householder-ratepayers, excluding wives, lodgers, co-habiting adults
including adult children, and many categories of non-rate-paying
tenant. The English and Welsh jury until 1972 excluded the
majority of the adult population and was, in Lord Devlins
admirable account in 1956 (Trial by Jury), predominantly male,
middle-aged, middle-niinded and middle-class. (Before the admis-
sion of women householders in 1919 it liad of course been
cxclusivcly male.) In 1972, some spccial categories apart, adniission
to jury Service bccamc in effcct co-tcnninous witli adniission to the
electoral roli.
A grcat dual can be cxplaincd by this. Many snior plice and
some judges and politicians faced this inmsh of vulgar democracy
into the courts witli ashen faces and palpitating hearts. We vvere
told, by Sir Robert Mark, by the Association of Chief Plice
Officers (ACPO) and others, that the ratc of acquittals was rising
steeply, that jurors were being suborned by Mafia-like gangs, and
that professional criminis were becoming imnuine from effective
 IN D E F E N C E OF T H E J U R Y 155

prosccution. Subscquent inquiry lias shown much of lilis cvidcncc

to llave becn flawed (or even faked). Tlierc is no dramatic disparity
betwecn the record of jury performance before and afler 1972. Of
course, like cvery human institution cvcr studied by historiaos, the
jury is not immune from frailtics and improper pressures (whether
from criminal gangs or from the Crown). But the anti-jury lobby
has fiinctioned inccssantly sincc 1972, and has scorcd repeatedly
with those measures to strengthen the jury which 1 have already
reported. The Roskill Committecs fraudulent transplant operation
and the current Criminal Justice Bill are the latest producs of this
exercise. After eight hundred years our betters have decided to
bring the jury under their condign control.

* * *

In the previous article we discussed the unusual concern of the past

14 years to strengthen (or subdue) jury practices, some of which
date back hundreds of years. Tfiere has always been another
resource o f jury-strengthening, which is jury-packing. A disquisi-
tion on tliis ancient British practice would require a further essay,
much longer than the present one. Jury-vetting is not the same
thing as juiy-packing, although the first may prepare for the
second. Whether packing does or could take place in conteniporary
English practice is a matter renmrkably obscure. The Plice may
properly inspect the panel against their records, in order to remove
disqualified persons, and in the course of this scrutiny much other
infonnation vvill come to light, which may or may not be passed
on privily to the clerk o f the court or to the prosecution. Of one
thing we may be certain: the current monitoring of practice by the
Director o f Public Prosecutions (reported in Command Paper 9658)
will tell us nothing that the Plice (or ACPO) does not wish the
public to know.
Wliat panel scrutiny - or, in sensitive cases, the more elabrate
investigations o f vetting - allows is the exercise of die Crowns
right o f peremptoiy challenge or stand-by, to remove obnoxious
jurors from the panel. The Report o f the Roskill Committee is
anodyne and confiising on the matter o f challenge, largely because
156 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

of the failure to present it in any historical perspective. It is my

duty therefore to attempt a brief correction.
In looking into this matter I was intrigued to find that every
one of the critical cases still cited today as precedents goveming
the contcmporary practice of challenge and stand-by arse in the
course of highly-charged political cases in the period 1790-1848. I
refer in particular to Rex v. O Coigly (1798), Rex v. Edmonds and
ensuing appeal (1820, 1821), and to several Chartist cases in 1848.
Father James OCoigly, a Catholic priest, was a United Irishnian
who, somctimes disguised as Captain Jones, was travelling in
England in the year of the Irish rebellion, as courier to the
Jacobin underground. With Arthur O Connor and others, he was
arrested when about to board ship for France, and a sensationally
seditious address was found in his pocket, welcoming a French
invasin in support of British liberty. It led to a draniatic state
trial, and there was much sparring by both sides in selecting the
jury. Tlie defence made several challenges for cause of potential
jurors. One of these, Mr Raikes, was proved to have gone up to
the prisoners before the trial, looked them all steadfastly in the
face ... clenched his fist, and exclaimed damned rascis! That
is no cause of challenge, exclaimed the Attomey-General (who led
the prosecution). We are getting here into prodigious irregularity,
and I feel it my duty to protect the Gentlemen of the Jury against
this sort of attack. In the end, Mr Raikes did not serve on the
jury, but there was clearly a strong opinin among judges and
counsel for the prosecution that to shake ones fist in the face of
the prisoners before a trial did not constitute cause of challenge on
grounds of unindiffereney. Any loyal gcntleman, confronted with
imputed Jacobins, should be cxpected to do much the same: but
any gentlcman must also be presumed to have that liberality of
mind which vvould allow him to be persuaded in the course of the
trial that the imputation of Jacobinism had bcen brought on these
particular prisoners in error.
Tlie course of this challenge was confused and did not establish
a ruling prcccdent. Rex v. 'Coigly is remembered by lawyers now
for its ruling on the adjaccnt issue of the Crowns right of
challenge or stand-by, which was here argued at lengtli and
determined in a way which govems practice to this day. The
 IN D E F E N C E OF T H E J URY 157

Crown was disallowcd any right of pereniptory challenge, but must

ahvays show cause: however, by a sweet legal fiction, it may
postpone showing cause by calling on the juror to stand by to the
end o f the panel, and then challcnging for cause only if the rcst of
the panel is exhaustcd - which scidom, if cvcr, takcs place. In the
rcsult, the Crown was effcctively awardcd an unlimitcd number of
peremptory challengcs. As for Fathcr O Coigly, he was convicted
and hanged.
As regards the defence, in the first half o f the 19th ccntury the
position was this: it liad, in its quiver, the right of 20 peremptory
challenges. Thereafter it might only challenge for cause. And by a
series o f decisions it became established (in lay language) tliat such
challenge - if in the matter o f prejudice, bias, unindifferency -
may only be for particular bias against particular defendants.
Prejudice o f a more general nature might not be allowed as cause.
Moreover, challenge for cause might only be allowed to proceed
through the means of questioning a potential juror in court (an
interrogation known as voir dir) if good reason for cause to
question was first shown to the court, which, at its discretion,
might then permit questioning. And, further, the proof of a jurors
bias should be founded upon extrinsic evidence and not on
interrogation alone.
It is notorious tliat English and United States court practice has
handled this matter in different ways. I f we take the procedural
question out o f its context, there is much to be said for the logic
of tlie English resolution. Let us suppose the prisoner to be charged
witli arson. Now we camiot expect it to be likely tliat we will fmd
a jury which has no opinin as to the rights and wrongs of arson.
Therefore we should not permit a juror to be interrogated as to his
opinin o f this offence, under tlie implication that an adverse view
o f arson - or even o f the particular episode of arson coming under
trial - is evidence of bias against the prisoner. Unless the juror can
be proved to have said that he or she believes the defendant to be
a foul arsonist, a disgust for arson carries no imputation of bias.
In politically sensitive contexts this logic does not wear so well,
however. Examine the case o f Rex v. Edmonds and Others (1820).
This was a trial for conspiracy, before a special jury, at Warwick-
sliire Assizes. The defendants included the venerable Major John
158 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

Cartwright, the Father of English Reformers; the editor of the

Radical Black Dwarf, T.J. Wooler; and Edmonds, the secretary of
the Binningham reformers. Their offences arse out o f the same
context as the Peterloo meeting in support o f manhood suffrage:
seditious agitation, disorderly demonstrations, the election of a
popular reprcsentative for the unenfranchised city of Birmingham.
Tlie defendants were convicted, and either imprisoned or fined.
There was an appeal to Kings Bench in 1821. One ground of
appeal concemed the defences challenge for cause. At his trial
Wooler liad sought to examine jurors on voir dire as to whether
they liad expressed any opinin in the case. The court, presided
over by the Lord Chief Barn, liad refiised to allow the questions.
In judgement, Abbot, Lord Chief Justice, upheld tlie Lord Chief
Barn. An opinin as to the general guilt o f radical agitators, and
as to the need to bring tliem to punishment, could in no way be
shown to be a cause of disqualication. Only a preconceived
opinin of their personal guilt, or a detemiination to fmd them
guilty, could be shown as cause: and this must be proved by
extrinsic evidence, not by voir dire interrogation.
I am not arguing the evident fact tliat arson and sedition are
different orders of offence. I am pointing to a narrovver fact, which
is that bias expressed by jurors against Radicalism may be
inseparable from a bias against particular defendants, in a way in
which bias against arson may not. Arsonists, rapists, murderers and
highwaymen rarely advertise, publish and demnstrate on behalf of
their intentions before committing their offences, whereas Radicis,
Freethinkers, Chartists, advocates o f birth control, suffragettes, and
so on, commonly did (or do): and it was oftcn this advocacy,
rather tlian any othcr ovcrt act, which constitutcd, in the eyes of
the law, the offence. There was no way in which Warwickshire
jurors in 1820 could cxpress hostility towards Racialism without
also cxprcssing a particular hostility against thcsc notorious lcadcrs
of the cause of Rcform.
Tlie decisin in llex v. Edmonds, howcvcr, established the ruling
prccedent which is still citcd in disputed cases to this day. It was
cnforccd and furthcr dcfined in two cases arising from the Chartist
agitation of 1K4K, Regina v. Cuffey and Regina v. awiittg. In the
vcar of revolutions, Chartisni rcached its last pcak of agitational
 IN D E F E N C E OF T H E J URY 159

presence. In London a monster mecting was convened for 10 April,

witli tlie intcntion of presenting yet onc more mass petition for
universal male suffrage. Tlic Govcmment profcsscd to bclicve tliat
an insurrection was thrcatcned and prepared for it in full military
style. This included the raising of a prodigious number - perhaps a
hundred and seventy tliousand - spccial constables. This was a
leve en niasse of Londons bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie,
placed in amis and under orders against Londons working class.
The prisoners at tlie triis which carne up at the Central
Criminal Court the following September were Chartists and Irisli
Confederates accused of insurrectionary preparations in the con-
fiised aftemiath of 10 April. The clearest decisin in the matter of
voir dire arse in the case of Dowling, a young Irish portrait-
painter. Kenealy, his counsel, declared that he wished to examine
every one of tile jurors on tlie voir dire to fmd out whetiier tiiey
had served as special constables:

Mr Justice Erle: Have you any cause?

Kenealy: That he does not stand indifferent.
Attomey-General: That is no cause. You must State a particular
cause.
Kenealy: I have reason to believe that he is a special constable
and has prejudged this case. It is perfectly notorious that the
great majority of tire inhabitants about here were swom as
special constables. I have no special instructions witlv regard to
this gentlenian ... and cannot dierefore prove tile fact ali linde.
Mr Justice Erle: Then I must refiise the application.
Kenealy: Am I to understand your lordship to say that I am not
to be allowed to examine upon the voir dire? Am 1 to
understand that die right is to be taken away from the people of
England?

He was, indeed, so to understand. And this ruling was upheld on

appeal. Dowling was duly convicted by a jury of special consta
bles, and sentenced to 20 years transportation.
Tlie cases - O Coigly through Edmonds to Dowling - are tiiose
cited in Halsbury and in all compendiums of contemporary law, as
1(1 MAKING HISTORY

establishing the rule as it lies today. Each o f these decisions carne

out o f a context o f political conflict, in which the authorities
sought to strengthen the operation o f the jury system in the
intercsts o f the bettcr administration o f justice. W hen we are told
- as the Roskill Committee tclls us, and as without doubt
Conscrvative Lavv OfFicers will arge in coming debates on the
Criminal Justice Bill - that the defence is losing little in losing its
ancient rights o f peremptory challenge (to be reduced now from
tlirce to nil), since the right o f challenge for cause remains
unimpaired, it is essential to remember, first, that the law s
dcfinition o f cause exeludes all general prejudice (political, racial,
gender, religious etc), and, second, that since the defence is barred
from questioning the juror on voir dire (unless with prior cause
shown), it is unlikely that cause can ever come to light.
American practice is vastly different. O ur jury Systems are lilce a
tree with a strong common trunk, but on one side a bough has
been lopped off, so that today only a vestigial challenge for cause
is allowed to the English defence, while on the other side is a
flourishing American branch, heavily-laden with challenges on voir
dire examinations. Thus ju ry selection in England became a formal
and expeditious matter, rarely occupying as much as an hour, in
which voir dire is rare, whereas on the other side o f the Atlantic
there was, by the late 19th century, a heavy branch o f practice
indecd. In the Haymarket case (the Chicago A narchists) selection
o f a jury involved examination, mainly on voir dire, o f 981
panellists, over a period o f 21 days; and in the trial o f Jacob
Sharp, in the N ew York Aldermanic corruption cases o f 1886-7,
2,100 panellists were summoned, 1,196 were examined, and 22
days were spent in jury selection. These proccdures, only a little
abbreviated, continu in many States today.
This has altered the jury system, when considercd within the
expectations o f our political future. And altered it irrevocably. We
cannot go back. We could not now import protractcd voir dire
procedures into English courts, because they would run athwart
inherited expectations. The jurors, every woman and every man,
would have their backs put up by such interrogation. Thcy would
feel it as an insult to their integrity, as well as a breach o f British
reticencc as to the privacy o f opinin. Any attcmpt in this direction
 I N D E F E N C E OF T H E J U R Y 161

can be counter-productive for the dcfence. When Lilbume was on

trial in 1649 and was presented with a juror whom he did not
know by person or report, he scanned him closely and then said:
He is an honest man, and looks with an honest face: let him go.
Tlie juror, so flattered, was the more ready to acquit. It is a trick
which counsel still understand today. Thcre is, moreover, some
suggestion that clumsy exercises in vetting can also be counter-
productive. Vetted juries retumed acquittals in the Anarchists
(1979), Cyprus signalmen and Clive Ponting cases. Perhaps they
were put on their mettle to show that they were not cats-paws o f
the Crown?
W e may take the point o f expectations further than that.
Because ju ry selection in England has been procedurally abbrevi-
ated, the dominant expectation in our political culture has become
this: the ju ry is, or ought to be, a random selection o f our peers.
That is what a fair trial is now thought to be. Now an exact
historian might arge that American practice is closer to ancient
precedent: the selected 12 m ust be good men and true, o f good
repute, men o f a clear reputation. Moreover, it was 12 men firom
whom, by an elabrate system o f challenge, it was possible to
remove persons o f known bias against or affiance to either party.
The history is not, then, if we are exact, one of merely random
selection. T hat is why the poor od Roskill Committee got itself so
confused. For the record is this. Trial by jury, drawing upon a
limited pool o f male householders in the much smaller communi-
ties o f the past, allowed both sides to find out a great deal about
tlie panel; and it was upon this investigation that instructions to
challenge could be made. When Lilbum es jury was in selection in
1649 he asked the court: I do not know the faces of two o f the
men that were read to me ... Will you let me llave some friends by
me that are citizens o f London, that know them, to give me
infomiation o f their qualities and conditions? For witliout this,
truly, you may as well hang me witliout a trial. Move on a
hundred and fifty or two hundred years. In politically sensitive trial
after trial, it can be observed, from the Treasury Solicitors papers
or from the trial record, that both sides were busily eniployed in
investigating the panel. The Crowns resources were of course
greater, and their inquiries more thorough. But even in John Frosts
162 MAKING HISTORY

trial in 1840 defence counsel had inquired into all but five o f the
panel o f 318, and had notcd objections to 160. This amounted to
an cxhaustive survey or canvass, and there w as no suggestion that
this involved any impropricty.
The scrutiny o f the panel is, then, ancient and venerable
practice. So vvhat is all this present pother about? It is this. The
opportunity for the defence to scrutinise or influence the selection
o f the jury is being closed, while tire prosecutions scrutiny and
means o f influence are enlarged. In England the number of
peremptory challenges open to the defence has been reduced from
20 to seven, to three and now nil. But challenge for cause (which
we are grandly told remains untampered with) was lopped o ff and
sealed by 1848, vvhen voir dire interrogation w as liniited to a
vestigial survival, and the defmition o f cause excluded matters o f
general bias. Meanwhile the constituency from which panels are
drawn has changed out o f recognition. Gone are the cise
communities in which a householders reputation might be quickly
leamed. Panels today are drawn from vast and anonymous catch-
ment areas: the defence is presented with faceless ames drawn
from an electoral list, a meaningless swathe o f ames and
addresses, from which the one point o f purchase - the additions
or occupations - was struck out in 1973 by Lord H ailshams pen.
Tlie defence today is blindfold, unless it should resort to hiring
expensive private eyes to lurk around the streets and ask
questions of neighbours - a practice prohibitive in cost and
offensive to our privacy. For this reason, in recent years, the
peremptory challenge has been used rather rarely by experienced
counsel, and - if used at all - most often in an effort to adjust the
number of women or perhaps o f blacks or o f young or od people
on a jury.
For the prosccution it is a different question altogetlier. ACPO,
the DPP and succcssivc Attomey-Gcncrals have come up with
jury-vetting, with scarcely a reproof from the judiciary. As the
rcsourccs of Plice and Security cnlargc, more and more sophisti-
catcd methods of machinc-storagc and rctrieval o f records are
available to the prosccution. At the press o f a few keys, the Plice
can routinely open a huge and crazily-distorted screen to view the
panel a squatter, an associate of Trotskyists, the mother o f a girl
 IN D E F E N C E O F T H E J U R Y 161

supposcd to associatc with criminis, or a Citizen who tas

conmiittcd thc aggravatcd offcnce of actuaily coniplaining about thc
Plice. This infomiation may routincly be passed on, with a nod
and a wink, to thc prosccution or thc ofliccrs of thc court. In
politically sensitivo cases, where thc Attomcy-Gcncral's and
ACPOs Practico Dircctions authorisc vetting, there may be addcd
tlie impertinent and often crroncous records of thc Spccial Branch,
CID and perhaps Sccurity Services, which may be fed to the
prosccution, enrichcd by the producs of Britains growtli industries:
spying, mail-interccption and telephone-tapping.
Mcanwhilc. thc Crowns right of peremptory challenge (dis-
guised as stand-by) remains unlimitcd: tliat is, its ability, upon
secret and prejudicial information, to water the jury. Even the
Roskill Comniittee, for all its gross conisions, must be acquitted
of such partiality. It suggested that if the defences right of
peremptory challenge were to be abolished, then the occupations of
jurors should go back on the lists, and the prosecutions right of
stand-by (without cause) should also be abolished: Unquestionably,
in our view, it would be necessary for both sides to be treated in
tlie sanie way. But our betters these days have no patience with
even the fictions of fair play. Neither recommendation will be
found in the Criminal Justice Bill. In truth, tliey are frightened by
a deniocratic jury. Tliey are afraid that it might shy at oppressive
prosecutions, and tlirow the DPP into the ditch. It did so, after all,
in the Cyprus signis trial and the Clive Ponting case. This is the
real occasion for these measures in the Bill.
Well, that is it. The fraudulent operation of the Roskill
Committee is over. On the prompting of a conimittce of judges,
snior plice and accountants, another portion of our liberties is to
be chipped away. As Mr Walter Merricks said, in his admirable
Note of Dissent in the Roskill Report, niy colleagues seem to fmd
trial by jury an anonialy. In fact, the Report of the Roskill
Committee is more explicit: Society appears to have an attachment
to jury trial which is emotional or sentimental rather tlian lgica!.
The Conmiittee itself shows a marked preference for summary
jurisdiction and trial by tribunals, and for verdiets dclivered by
persons qualified by training. We are to be govemed by experts
for our own good.
164 MA K I N G H I S T O R Y

One must grope back in our history - perhaps for several

hundred years - to come upon a time which had less true respect
for tlie vales of democracy than we - or our experts - have
now. Tlie defences peremptory challenge, Mr Merricks notes, may
be difficult to defend in strict logic: it is but one feature of a
complex and not wholly logical system in which the checks and
balances have evolved over a long period. What enrages our
betters is tliat some of these checks inhibit them.
They do not like od tliings. They are the projectors and
adventurers, the alchymists and empirics, of modera times. They
are concemed with the proper administration of justice a thing to
be administered by tliem to us. They are the Gradgrinds of
govemment offices and tlie Militants of the MoD or MI5,
commuting from Richmond and from Sussex villages to their
dcpartments, mcditating benignly on more expert measures of social
control. Tliey are tlie Fordists of bureaucracy, who wish to engrave
over the portis of our law courts: History is bunk.
They are the culturally-deprived of our time, and it would be
unfair to mock them for their disabilities. Two basic propositions
of democracy are so bizarre to their atrophied faculties that they
really carniot comprehend them. The first is that there could be
occasions when laws are judged by the public to be oppressive, or
when the subject requires a defence against the Crown (or organs
of the State), hi our history it is at precisely such moments that the
jury has interposed the power of its verdict. Clive Pontings case
lias shown this function to be not wholly obsolete.
The defence of the subject against the over-mighty State was
once regarded - by such men as Sir William Blackstone and
Thomas Jefferson - as a crucial function of the jury, elevating it to
a high place among the defining institutions of a political
democracy. For Alexis de Tocqueville the American jury was an
eminently republican element in govemment* which places the
real direction of Society in the hands of the govemed. I kr.ovv of
only one od judge, long retired from practice, who even under-
stands this language today. And he - Lord Devlin - now writes in
elegiac tone. Thirty years ago he could still say that the jury is
the lamp that shows that freedom lives. In 1978, he wamed of the
gathering signs that the jury has another half-century or so of Ufe
 1N D E F E N C E OF T H E J U R Y 163

to be spent in the sort of comfortable reservation which conquerors,

bringing with tliem a new civilisation, assign to the natives whom
tliey are displacing.
Tlie second proposition is beyond tlie coniprehension not only
of our betters but of alniost any of us in diese latter days. It is the
quaint archaic notion tliat anyonc - randomly selected - niight be
able to perfonn a hunian-sized office or role. We have less sense
of ourselves than villagers in Medieval times, who rotated parish
offices, or 18tli-century tradesmen who could fmd it in themselves
to defy the Attomey-General and tlie Bench. The jury is perhaps
the last place in our social organisation where any person, any
Citizen, may be called upon to perfonn a fiilly adult role. It lias not
been shown that our fellow citizens have failed, when placed in the
jury box. They appear, when tliey find themselves there, to undergo
some inexplicable reversin to pre-modem modes, and to find in
themselves resources to fulfil the responsibility. But the very idea
of it is illogicaP and absurd. Only a crank could possibly suggest
such a direct exercise of democracy today. Indeed, although as a
historian I have to confess that the thingt Jjsis worked, I can
scarcely comprehend it myself.
As for tlie matter of challengesf'no doubt our betters will have
their way. For decades only a handfi.il of MPs jve shown any zeal
for our rights or liberties. All major parties have shared in tlie
complicity. or could we try to figlit our way back by importing
vair dir across the Atlantic. The defence could never compete
witli tile Hendon Plice Computer and the data banks of Security.
Our only way now is to opt for the random jury,, jvith defined
riglits of peremptory challenge equal to botli sides (and the
abolition of the fiction of stand-by). The panel should be selected
by statistical criteria of randomness. There should be impartial
scrutiny of court practices, and penalties imposed for collusion
between the Plice and the prosecution (or court officers) in
manipulating the panel. How this could be best effected I must
leave to qualified persons, who would not inelude ACPO or the
DPP. In politically or racially sensitive cases we niight experiment
with some voir dire interrogation for a trial period.
But I ani no projector or adventureraj I would trust a little in
the devices inherted ffom our ancestors. I will be satisfied with the
166 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

abolition of vetting, the closing-down o f their infernal data banks,

the dismantling of their invasive devices for the interception of our
privacy, the restoration of tlie powers o f the jury o f inquest, the
retum of certain excluded categories to the option o f trial by jury,
and the regeneration of some sense of independence (or at least
some sense of shanie) amongst the judiciary. Tliis might best be
effected by a Conunission to Inquire into Serious Fraud upon the
Peoples Rights and Liberties, from vvhich politicians, plice and
judges would be disqualified.
Tliis is not to say that the od system was beyond all possibility
of refomi. Thcre could be more preparation for our rights and our
duties as jurors in our schools. It may be argued that 18 is too
young to fulfil tlie role, that literacy qualifications might be more
scrupulous, or even that, for some modem types of case, qualifica
tions might be required in numcracy. And education might go
further still. Aspirant judges might be transported for a probation-
ary period to New Soutn Wales, to sit at the feet of Mr Justice
Powell, and study notions of truth and of impartiality now
obsolescent in our island courts. I would be willing, for a modest
fee, if tlie Lord Chancellor so wishes, to prepare an animal
examination for all the judiciary in tile peoples rights and
precedents, although I fear tiiat a great many vacancies would
ensue upon the Bench. And the Attomey-General has my permis-
sion to circuate, gratis, a copy of this article to all electors, not
forgetting the Plice. But these notions savour a Iittle of the zealot.
For the moment, randomness - and confidence in our fellow
citizens - is enough.

Publishcd as lwo articles in the LonJon Review o f Books, 4th and

18th Dccenibcr 1986.
 Peterloo

Peterloo, 1819. A Portfolio of Contemporary Documente. Man-

chester Public Libraries.
Joyce Marlow: The Peterloo Massacre. Rapp and Whiting.
Robert Walmsley: Peterloo: The Case Reopened. Manchester
University Press.

The 150th amiiversary of the massacre at St. Peters Fields,

1819, saw the appearance of three new publications, t\vo of
wliich may be described as occasional. The first is a well-
presented folder of plans, prints, and broad-sides, prepared by the
Manchester Public Libraries. The second is a popular account
(the first book for the general reader, as the blurb has it) by
Miss Joyce Marlow. The bias o f her book appears to be, like
her maternal descent, of Radical, Unitarian, small mill-owning
stock: and tlie general reader may sometimes find that her
folksy narrative - Bamfords wife, Mima, a sterling character,
made detennined efforts to ascertain what had happened to our
Sani ... - tends to cloy. Miss Marlow offers some general
background to explain what led up to Peterloo: this is second-
hand and generally over-simplified: but her narrative of the
events o f the day itself is closely observed; well-written, and
deftly employs a little original material. On this account her
book deserves to find some readers: although the first book for
tlie general reader must remain, as it has always been, Samuel
Bamfords Passages irt the Life o f a Radical.
Bamfords evidence is not, of course, privileged and beyond
reach o f examination. He was one of the crowd ridden down by
Yeomanry and Hussars - a tiing likely to induce bias in the
victims. And he was later found guilty before a special jury at
York Assizes for assembling with unlawful banners, at an
unlawful meeting, for the purpose o f inciting the subjects of our
 168 MAKI NG HI S T ORY

Lord tlie king, to contenipt and hatred of the govemment, and

sentenced to one years imprisonment. This clear decisin in an
inipartial court of justice suggests hirn not only as a biased but
also as a comproniised witness. No matter such as this escapes the
watchful eye of Mr Robert Walnisley.
Mr Walmsleys Peterloo: The Case Re-opened is not so much
occasioned by the anniversary: it is, in itself, an occasion, and is - the
blurb tells us - the fruit of half a lifetimes research. The 585 pages
of this fruit swing from the impeccable bough of the Manchester
University Press. Mr Walnisley, a Manchester antiquarian bookseller,
first liad his hiterest in Peterloo aroused sonie thirty years ago during
the course of research into the aniily history of the Hultons of
Hulton. William Hulton (1787-1864) was chainnan of the magistrates
who overlooked the field of Peterloo and gave to the Yeomanry the
fatal order to advance. In the course o f Jiis researches Mr Walnisley
became convinced, not only tliat William Hulton liad been unfairly
treated by historians, but that he and his fellow magistrates were the
victims of notliing less than a Radical conspiracy to falsify tlie events
o f that day - a conspiracy fostered by Hunt, Bamford, and Richard
Carlile, urthered by Archibald Prentice (autlior of Historical Sketches
o f Manchester) and John Edward Taylor (before he sobered down and
founded the Manchester Guardian), and in which John Tyas (the
correspondent of The Tintes who witnessed events from the hustings),
the Rev Edward Stanley, and dozens o f others were witting or
unwitting accessories - a conspiracy so compelling that even Donald
Read, in his sober and by no means radical study of Peterloo (1957),
failed to detect it.
It is neccssary to make clear what Mr Wahnsleys book is not,
as well as what it is. It is not a general interpretative account of
Peterloo within its political or local background. Notliing is said of
radicalism or rcaction before January, 1819; very little is said about
tlie govemment of Manchester in 1819, or to explain the character,
role, or reputation of such important actors as Joseph NaJin or
Henry Hunt before they emerge on the 1819 stage. This is not a
book for the general reader, unless he has taken the precaution of
rcading (at least) Bamford - or Prentice - and Dr Read beforchand.
or is it, altogcther, a book for the scholar, although it has
conipctent scholarly apparatus, adequate footnotcs and bibliography,
 PETERLOO 169

and a very good ndex. It is not based on cxtensive newly

discovered evidence, although Mr Walmsley introduces interesting
new material from the Rcv W.R. Hay (the proniincnt clerical
magistrate) and from William Huiln himsclf. In particular there
has been no new search of Home Office, legal, or military papcrs
in the Public Record Office.
Such new material as there is relates largely to the Hultons of
Hulton. We leam not only that there was a Ranulph Hulton who
was sub-deacon at Manchester Collegiate Church in 1465 but (more
interestingly) tiat Williams mothers horse Church and King won
tlie Kersal Moor races in 1749; and we are given a rnost revealing
view of William liimself, addressing the anniversary dinner of the
Manchester Pitt Club two years before Peterloo, proposing the
toast. Tlie Pride of Britain and the Admiration of the World - Our
Glorious Constitution, and rolling around the room the unabashed
and unalloyed clichs of tlie British^Bifciefi T$ime: Under this vast
aegis repose our liberties' encircled witli wisely-ordained laws, and
blessed with the sanction of pur religin .... Shall we then, sell
tlie black-letter volunies of our charters for any spurious
editions printed witli type of the National Convention, for Co-
clirane, Burdett and Company?
If Mr Walmsley liad confined Tiifhself to writing a brief
biography of William Hulton he would llave served historians well.
It would have seenied somewhat quaint and provinciflsjrtilling of
fine vellum and reverence; and in such a work an exculpatory
chapter on Peterloo would have passed without remark. But this
chapter has expanded to become Sonie po pages of Mr Walnis- i
leys text, and it cannot pass without remark. or has it. One of
tlie books more ecstatic reviewers (in the Daily Telegraph) has
declared that Mr Walmsleys massive research challenges the
accepted versin, his book leaves no fact unchallenged and
uncorroborated, no document unread in jiill, no source unchecked,
and tliat it utterly discredits the accounts in Prentice and
Bamford. Not very many readers, perhaps, will struggle their whole
way through the book; and of those who do even fewer will
follow, point by point, its exceedingly repetitious, but at tlie some
time involuted apologetics. But all - or nearly all - will come
from it with a bemused impression that, in all this tuming and
170 MAKING HISTORY

vvhceling around a few points, something must have been proved,

somebody must have been exposed. And as such the book will
enter the folklore of history.
Mr Walmsley is interested, cliiefly, in the events o f the day o f
Pcterloo and even more closely in the events o f one half-hour of
that day - between 1.15 and 1.45 p.m. - from the time when
Henry Hunt arrived on the hustings to the time when the field was
empty o f all but shawls, bomiets, sticks, and cavalry adjusting their
saddle-girths. Obsessively he rides up and down that field and its
environs, obsessively he rides up and down the five or ten minutes
between the arrival o f the Yeomanry at the edge o f the field and
the dispersal o f the crowd, summoning witnesses in the newspaper
press o f the weeks following, dragging them back by their collars,
making them pace over the yards before and behind the hustings,
cross-examining reminiscences and confronting them with conflict-
ing depositions, galloping off into the suburbs o f the twentieth
century to interrgate suspicious stragglers, like F.A. Bruton, the
author o f the careful T h e ^ m y o f Peterloo (1919).
At the centre o f his obsession is this: w hat happened on that
day was unintentional, and the crowd (or part o f it) was the first
aggressor. The magistrates in their house overlooking the hustings
were justly alarmed by the proceedings, both by tumults which had
preceded August 16 and by the radical rhetoric and military array
o f the crowd on the day. W ith a nice sense o f legalistic propriety
they waited until Hunt and his fellow speakers were on the
hustings and then ordered the constables to arrest them; this Joseph
Nadin, the dcputy-constable, refused to do without military aid; the
magistrates scnt for Yeomanry and Hussars, and the Yeomanry
arrived first, fortuitously; the Yeomanry were ordered to support
the constables in the execution o f the warrant, and they advanced
in rcasonablc ordcr and without aggrcssivc intcntion or action into
the crowd; but the crowd then closcd in upon them in a menacing
manncr and the Yeomanry were assailed, at some point cise to the
hustings, by brickbats and sticks hurlcd by a portion o f the crowd;
most o f the Yeomanry kept their hcads until Hunt and his fcllows
had been arrested, and then, incrcasingly assailed by brickbats and
hemmed in on all sides by a thrcatcning crowd, were forccd to
beat off their attackers (with the Jlats o f their sabres) in self-
 PETERLOO 171

defence. The magistrales, observing their predicament in the midst

of a thrcatening multitude, were forced to ordcr the Hussars to
come to their rescue and to clear the field. All follovvcd on. And
the radicis have made party-political propaganda out of their own
aggression ever since.
One needs a book like this, evcry now and then, to recall that
the patrn saint of historians is St, Sisyphus. Bcfore we enquire
wliat facts he has actual^ adduced, Mr Walmslcy must be
acquitted of one charge. He is certainly not guilty of wilful
suppression or distortion, although jthere are niany" inconvenient
facts umncntioned and fithers wfich bludgeoned into unrecog-
nizable pulp. Pife could not fiave twitten book unless he
believed in its trutn, obseSivdy. one but a true Church-
and-King bcliever, an aulfaflwic deSsydSttt and vindicator of the
shopkeepers cB horseback who made .Manchestet Yeomamy,
could hjkve cantcred, brandishing his sword of polcmic, into so
many blind alleys of argument as he ^yJ^The printed - and, to
historians, long known and readily -available - docunients which he
quotes, he quotes repetitiously and in fiill.
. Yet the fact is that Mr to adduce
about this half-hour. His book is a JflfettB M B essaft1- in special
pleading about minutiae, in which he is very much disposed to
believe that A did happen and very much disposed to believe that
B did not happen. Such a conviction, Sdstained over 500 pages, is
bound - whatever tlie press of defenceless facts agaiist it - to
reach the hustings in tlte end and to cut down the radical flags.
Nevertheless, let tre follow Mr Walmsey on tff his chosen part of
tlie feld.
Did the Yeomanry ride quietly up to the hustings to effect the
arrests, or did tliey (as radicis' mytliologise) begin to strike out
with their sabres frorn tlieir first entry into the crowd? Were they
attacked, before tliey reached the hustings, by sticks and brickbats?
Tlie overwhelming majority of witnesses to these events may be
suspected o f prejudice, as parties to the event, since the greater
part belonged to the crowd who were ridden into, and the
remainder belonged to the magistracy, special constables, and the
Yeomanry who did the riding. Their evidence is not therefore
worthless, since they were subject to cross-examination in tlie
172 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

courts, and betrayed the custoniary signs o f veracity or inconsist-

ency. However, historians, from 1819 until 1969, have attempted to
simplify tlie extreme difficulties of sifting tliis evidence (and the
reports of partisan newspapers, on either side) by looking for
witnesses who cannot be accused o f belonging, in any obvious
sense, to either contesting party. Tliere are a few such observers:
uncommittcd and merely curious spectators on the fringes o f the
crovvd: householders whose Windows overlooked tlie field: and
(notably) several press reporters who were afforded places on the
hustings - John Tyas of The Times, John Smith o f the Liverpool
Mercury, Edward Baines of the Leeds M ercury - and the Rev.
Edward Stanley, a clergyman who had prvate business on that day
with Mr Buxton, who owned the house which the magistrates
chose as their headquarters, and who stayed on to observe the
whole affair from a window directly above tlie magistrates.
Mr Stanley, in a careful account written witliin a few montlis
of the affair, was unequivocal. On the brickbats, for example: I
indeed saw no missile weapons used tliroughout the whole
transaction, but ... the dust at the hustings soon partially
obscured everything that took place near that particular spot. Mr
Wahnsley seizes upon this honest statement as merely negative:
Stanley could not see the brickbats because of the dust. (He does
not notice that, if he accepts Stanleys testimony here, he must
for the same reason question Hultons testimony at the trial of
Hunt: When the Yeomanry advanced to the hustings I saw
bricks and stones flying - since Hultons viewpoint was almost
idcntical to that of Stanley, and magistrates must peer through
the same dust as clergymen). Uncommitted witnesses, however,
can be found on the hustings, beyond the rising dust. Thus Tyas,
who was rcporting from the hustings, on the Yeomanrys
approach to the hustings: Not a brickbat was tlirown at them ...
during this period. Mr Wahnsley gcts around this by quoting
Captain Birlcy, the scarcely impartial witness who commanded
the Yeomanry on the field, to the effect that the first attack was
made upon his men at the rear of the hustings, which Tyas
could not observe. Mr Walmsley does not report the evidence of
Smith (at Hunts trial) who was over six feet high and had a
good viewpoint to the left of the hustings:
 PETERLOO 173

1 saw no stone or brick-bat thrown at them; in my judgement, if

any stoncs or brick-bats had been thrown I was in a situaition
likely to have scen it, my eyes and countenance were in a
direction towards the military up to the moment of tlieir
reaching the hustings.

The question o f the manner in which the Yeomanry approached

the hustings is much the same. Smith declared in a lctter to the
Earl o f Derby written two days after Peterloo that they rushed
upon the people, cutting right and |e f t , and repeated the same
general testimony in Redford v. Birley three years later. He did
not attest to the fact during the intervening trial o f Hunt,
presumably because, as he was led by counsel through his
evidence, he was not asked this question; but Mr Walmsley finds
the omission so significant as to be sinister and to discredit his
whole evidence J he thought fit to modify his first impres-
sions when under oath.
Tlie Rev. Edward Stanley receives very much the same treat-
ment. His testimony (which influenced the accounts o f those two
radical writers, F.A. Bruton and D r Read) was plain:

It has often been asked when and where the cavalry struck the
people. I can only say that from tlie moment they began to
forc their w ay through the crowd towards the husting swords
were up and swords were down, bu t whether they fell witli the
sharp or fat side, o f course I cannot pretend to give an opinin.

Mr W almsley demolishes this by showing that, three years later, in

the action o f Redford v. Birley, Stanleys testimony under oath
was not the testim ony given in his narrative:

Did you w atch the advance o f the cavalry from their place up to
tlie hustings?
I did.
Did you see eithcr sticks, o r stones or anything o f the kind used
against the cavalry in their advance up to the hustings?
Certainly not.
174 MAKING HISTORY

D id you scc any resistaiice w h a te v e r to th e ca v alry , except the

thickncss o f the nieeting?
None.
D o I understand y ou to sa y you sa w th e m su rro u n d the
hustings, o r not?
S urround I could not sa y , fo r th e o th e r sid e o f th e hustings, of
course, w as p artially eclip sed b y th e p eo p le u p o n it.
B u t you saw them en circle p a rt?
E ncircle part.
D id you see w h a t w as done w h en th e y g o t tliere? ...
I saw th e sw ords up a n d dow n, th e o ra to rs tu n ib led o r throw n
over, and th e m ob dispersed.

M r W alm sley an d it m u st b e in siste d th a t th is is a fa ir exaniple

o f his m ethod is seized w ith th e m isap p reh e n sio n th a t the
ju x tap o sitio n o f trese tw o p a s sa g e s o f S ta n le y s am o u n t to an
astounding d isc re p an c y ( B ru to n a p p e a re d q u ite oblivious th a t these
discrepancies ex iste d ), a n d h e c a n te rs a b o u t th e p ag es w ith it like
a ca p tu red C a p o f L iberty:

In Iris p rin ted n a rra tiv e tire sw o rd s w ere up an d tire sw ords

w ere d o w n on tlreir w a y u p to tire hu stin g s. O n oath, Stanley
testified he sa w sw o rd s u p an d d o w n w h en th e y g o t to the
hustings.

B u t - oh, S t. S isyphus! tlrcre is no discrep an cy h ere a t all.

S tanley, b eing led by counscl, h ad to reply as ex actly as he could
to th e ex a c t q u estion askcd, w hich is, in th is case, w h at he saw
done a t the h u stin g s. A nd he uses th e identieal p h rase w hich he
h ad u sed in his ea rlier n arrativ e becau se, being an ac cu rate nran (he
w as later a presiden! o f th e M a n ch e ster S tatistical Society), he w as
d cscrib in g w h a t h e co u ld ac tu a lly se e th ro u g h rising d u st a t a
d istan c e o f sonre h undred yard s th e sw ords rising and falling.
M r W alm sley allow s th a t tlrere w ere one o r tw o oth er w itnesses
w ho sh a re d S tan le y s illusions, b u t he inrplies th a t the evidence is
slcndcr an d unsupported. S uch a conclusin is nrade p ossible only
b y the cav alicr w ay in w hich M r W alm sley passes by the evidence
 PETERLO O 175

adduccd in tlic inqucst on Jolin Lees o f Oldhani, at which at least

ninc wituesscs testificd to sccing the Yeomanry cut at the pcoplc
on tlieir vvay to the hustings:

Coroner: At what pace did tliey come?

Jonali Andrew (cotton spiuncr): 1 think it was a trot. It was as
fast as tliey could get, and tlie constables were making way for
them.
Q. Did you see them striking any one?
A. Yes; I saw them striking as they come along, and they struck
one person whcn tliey were about twenty yards from me ... they
squandered to the right and left before they carne to me ....
Q. Well: W hat tlien?
A. W hy tliey began to cut and hack at the people like butchers.

William Norris Buckley (merchant, and nephew to one o f the

active-magistrates): There w as a complete convulsin when the
soldiers rod their horses among tlie multitude, and they seemed
to be laying about them w ith tlieir swords, in their way to the
hustings; and when they arrived there, they cut down the people
that held the flags.
*

Coroner: Do you know anything o f the death o f John Lees?

Elizabeth Farren: N o, I do not.
Q. Then why do you come here?
A. Because I w as cut.
Q. Where were you cut?
A. On the forehead (Here the witness raised her bomiet and cap,
as also the bandage over her forehead, and exhibited a large
wound not quite healed).
The Coroner: I dont m ean that, wom an. W here were you at the
time you were cut?
A. About tliirty yards from the house w here the Justices were,
amongst the special constables ....
176 M A K IN G H IS T O R Y

Q. W ere you cu t as the C avalry w ent to the hustings, or on

their retum ?
A. I w as cut as they w ere going tow ards the hustings. I had
w ith me this child (shewing tire child she held in her amis). I
w as frightened for its safety, and to protect it, held it cise to
my side w ith the head dow nw ard, to avoid the blow. I desired
them to spare my child, and I w as directly cut on my forehead.
Q. W hat passed then?
A. I becam e insensible ....

None o f this, or sim ilar, evidence at the inquest on John Lees is

cited by M r W ahnsley. T he w itnesses, and in particular the last
one, were clearly highly prejudiced. The counsel for the family of
tlie deceased offered to bring any num ber o f further witnesses to
prove the same facts, but w ere prevented by the coroner; the
counsel for the M anchester constables brought forward several
witnesses (including Joseph N adin) who contradicted this evidence
(and who saw the controversiajW brickbats) and could no doubt have
brought forw ard others. All that can be said is that the witnesses
for the fonner appear to be more various in their occupations and
commitments and to offer more authentic testimony.
Tliis is relevant to M r W alm sleys large claim to have dispersed
from the field all previous historians, since his neglect o f tlie
evidence presented at this inquest is in striking contrast to the
exceptional weight which he places upon the evidence presented for
the defence in Redford v. Birley. The Oldham inquest, upon a
victim who died, most probably o f injuries sustained at Peterloo,
was a turbulent and ill-conducted affair, at which the refonners
sought to bring forward evidence leading to a verdict o f wilfiil
murdcr against the Yeomanry. But it was held witliin weeks o f the
event, whcn neithcr the authorised or the unauthorised versions
had congealcd; the testimonies have authenticity and freshness, and
the very breadles in legal fomiality lead to scores o f revealing
polcmical encounters. Redford v. Birley, on the other hand, was
held three years after Peterloo; it was a civil action for damages by
onc o f the injured against the comniandcr and several members of
the Yeomanry. In the interval there had been the trial o f Hunt,
press outcry, parliamentary debates, demands for enqniry; memories
 PETERLOO 177

had dinuiicd and the evidcnce liad bcen many times rcliearsed; and
tlic Manchester authorities offcrcd for the first time a unified and
weil-drilled defence of their actions. Mr Walmsley lias a touching
faith in the absoluto histrica! vcrity of legal dccisions (when they
connn his ovvn conclusions), and the fact that the jury found
against Redford appcars to him to substantiate at evcry point this
tardily niounted official versin and, moreover, to brand Prenticc
and Bamford - who continued to pass on their own versin - as
wilful deceivers of posterity.
This is central to his argument. The 580 pages of the Oldliam
inquest are interminable proceedings; which may be largely
discounted; but the 632 pages of three-year-chewed cud in Redford
v. Birley are commended as providing a cloud of witnesses to
prove that it was not the Yeonianry at all but the crowd which
attacked. But it is characteristic of Mr Walmsleys polemical
method tliat he never does settle down, in any systematic way, to
examine what Redford y. Birley difl or did not, prove^ B
In fact, an analysis of the trial gives these results: on the first
of Mr Walnisleys disputed points, twenty nine of Redfords
witnesses swore tliat tliey did not see brickbats, stones, or any form
of resistancc by the crowd befare they reached
the hustings, whereas seventeen of Captain Birleys witnesses swore
that tliey did. Among Redford s j^fflH -ninc HHjsses were seven
weavers, one fustian-cutter, one carver and gilder, two cotton
manufacturera, one pattem-drawer, one Church of England clergy-
man (Stanley), one dissenting minister, one Quaker surgeon, three
gentlemen, one salesman, four joumalists (including Tyas, Baines
and Smith), one chemist, two householders overlooking the field,
and one rnember of tlie Manchester Yeomanry. Among Birleys
seventeen were the Deputy-Constable (Nadin), two of the commit-
tee o f magistrates (Hulton and Hay), one merchants agent, one
calico-printer, one policeman, two lawyera, one gentleman, one
farm steward, and at least six special constables. Tlie former would
appear to be the more representative group, witli the greatest
number o f independently placed witnesses.
On Mr Walmsleys second disputed point - whether tlie
Yeomanry struck out with tlieir sabres on the way to the hustings
- the honours are more even: rather more - and more various -
 178 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

witiiesses said they did than said they did not. The fact that the
jury (which was a special jury) found for Birley does not, in any
case, indcate anything about their judgnient on these parts of the
evidence, since they were directed by the judge that if the
defendants were acting in the legal discharge o f their duty, being
called upon by the niagistracy to act, the verdict ouglit to be for
the defendants. Since the fact that the magistracy ordered the
Yeomanry into the crowd is one o f the few facts about Peterloo
which was never disputed, the jury had no altemative; but a verdict
reached on such a basis can have no binding power on the
judgment o f posterity.
In contrast to his faith in the cloud o f witnesses in Redford v.
Birley, Mr Walmsley evidently found the more authentic evidence
given at the Oldliam inquest too painful to read with precisin. His
few, selective references to it are generally inaccurate. Here is an
example. He writes that one witness

testified that he heard one o f the Yeomanry say there is that

villain Saxton: run him through, which in tlie printed report of
the proceedings is italicized, apparently to make it clear that it
corroborated John T yass report in The Times. It did. The words
were almost identical. Tyas had written: There is tliat villain
Saxton: do you run him through tire body. This passage has
been cited in modem times [footnote citing E.P. Thompson] as
convincing testimony, without addig the information that this
witness, muttering to him self, was dismissed from the court-
room as an incredible one.

The passage deserves detailed criticism, as exemplifying Mr

Walmslcys pursuit o f imaginary molehills and his ignorance o f
tangible mountains. The suggcstion that the words quoted were
italicized to indicatc that they corroborated T yass report is pur
attribution; it is very much more probable that they were italicized
to distinguish quoted matter from the witnesses' own words. If Mr
Walmsley had been discussing evidence supporting the Yeomanry
he would probably have found that two witnesses corroborating
cach other ofcrcd final proof; in this case he suggcsts that
corroboration suggcsts collusion. Tire witness, it is true, is reported
 PETERLOO 179

as witlidrawing, muttering, but there is nothing in the report to

suggest tliat he was dismissed as incredible; he was dismissed
because the coroner was out of patience, was secking to abbreviate
the proceedings, and was refusing to take evidence which did not
bear dircctly upon the wounding of John Lees by the hustings; and
tlie witness was nuttering because he was not pemiitted to relate
all the facts about the Yeomanry which he knew:

Coroner: Do you mean to State, that you saw these two people,
Harrison and Sheknerdine, wound any body?
James Walker: I dont know that I saw Harrison wound any
body, but I saw him attempt to wound both me and Mr Saxton;
and if I liad not jumped back, I am sure he would have cut me.
I saw Shelmerdine inflict a wound lipn a person afterwards.
Q. Near tlie hustings?
A. No.
Q. Then tliis is the conclusin of your evidence, that you
neitlier saw Shelmerdine or Harrison wound any person at the
hustings? Which was it that attempted to strike you?
A. Harrison.
The Coroner: That is all I ask you.
The Witness: But I have not stated all I know. I saw different
men wounded aer that.
The Coroner: You are told, tliat is not evidence. Go about your
business.
(The Witness withdrew, muttering.)

Tlie witness was not, in any case, the witness cited by E.P.
Thompson, unless Mr Walmsley has access to an edition of The
Making o f the English Working Class which is unknown to us. Mr
Thompson cites Natlian Broadhurst, who appears some 300-odd
pages earlier in the inquest, and who also testified (collusively?) to
tlie attack on Saxton, using the words: Theres Saxton, danui him,
run him tlirough. Tliis witness was not dismissed, or accused of
incredibility, or did he mutter.
This, then, is Mr Walmsleys method. He batters away so
ISO MAKING HISTORY

remorselessly at every piece o f evidence accusatory o f the Yeo-

manry tliat the reader, out of sheer tedium, is inclined to submit.
The crowd attacked the peaceable Yeomanry (behind tlie hustings,
where no one but Captain Birley could see it) and all followed on:

All tlie actors in tliat tragedy were victims. The radicis on the
platfonn, die niilitants in the crowd, the peaceable in the crowd,
the Yeomanry, the constables, the magistrates in their room, the
captives in tlie New Bayley, were each and severally as much
tlie victinis o f the tragic cliain o f circunistances as the dead
special constable lying in the Bulls Head, the wounded in the
infinnary, and Mrs Partington, crushed to death, lying at the
bottom o f the cellar steps.

If a case is constructed largely out o f negations, it is logical that at

the centre o f it there will be, not a fact, but a hole. M r Walmsley
is well aware o f tliis hola1- who did, then, attack the Yeomanry? -
and he would have been wisest to have left it empty; but he could
not resist the urge to fill it, and it is here, at the heart o f liis
thesis, that his special pleading beconies excessive.
There was a row, in February, 1819, at Sandy Brow in
Stockport, where sonie cavalry attenipted to seize a Cap o f Liberty,
and where the Radicis beat them off and crowed about it for
months afterwards. Therefore it follows, as the night the day, that
the hole can be filled by the Stockport contingent. The evidence?
They were behind the hustings. That is all: a mountain of
speculation labours to produce this poor, nioulting niouse of
uncertain evidence. No one, at the time or later, noticed what Mr
Walmsley, now that 150 years o f dust has settled, can now see; not
even Captain Birley.
Moreover, the mouse is dressed up as a lion. First Tyas o f The
Times is pressed into Service. He nientioned at Hunts trial that,
while the crowd were chcering the Yeomanry on their first arrival
at the edge o f the ficld, Mr Hunt desired that some persons on the
waggon [hustings] might be removed, as they were neither speakers
or writers, and were creating a disturbance. To Mr Walmsley, this
incidcnt suggcsts a disruptive element in the crowd actively
opposing the Huntcan modo o f procecding - that o f passive
 PETERLOO 181

resistance. Wcll, does it? It seents to suggest an overcrowded stage

and people jostling for place. But then, contines Mr Walmsley,
how to account for the sinister evidence of Gcorge Swift, himsclf a
radical speaker:

Hunt ordered tlie people to stand fast. If tliey want me, said
Mr Hunt, let me go - dont resist, dont rush, - pointing to a
place near him. If them fellows wont be quiet put them down
and keep them down ...

More evidence of a disruptive element. And then ttere is tiie

rentarkable fact tliat JfndS Moorhouse, the Stockport leader who
accompanied Hunt to the h u s tin g lj|K nevertheless not on the
hustings during the action. What was he doing? And why did Hunt
huff and pim so muclf abouf'all jfltfejat his In fact the
reasons for this are ludicrously simple: first - Miss Marlow points
out this o n eB Moorhouse had injured his hand in tite door of the
barouche and retired lw m e d i c P ^ ^ f f l M ^ ^ t r o w n witnesses
swore to ltis presence on the hustings when it was simple to prove
that he had been absent, and in all the contentious evidence this
was one point at wltich ttey could learly be faulted and even
accused o f perjury.
But we are allowing ourselves headlong, into tite trap
which Mr Walmsley has spent half a lifetime in baiting. For of
course titese disputed matters do not affect, centrally, an under-
standing o f Peterloo, even if Mr Walmsleys liberal criticisms of
Prentice, Bantford, Bruton and Read, do invite a little of his own
kind o f correction in reply. Marshalling his ttin case in support of
the brickbats, Mr Walmsley avers:

That attack on the Yeomanry, if ntade, is to be considered as

tite flashpoint front wltich stemmed tte inevitable explosin.
Anything could happen after that; and in fact did.

This is the heart of tite matter, because the success or failure of

the radical versin o f Peterloo pivoted on whether this fact of
striking the first blow could be pinned on tte Yeontanry or not.
But this is not the case. If a meeting of sonte 60,000 people is
 182 MAKING HISTORY

surroundcd by cavalry and foot-soldiers and penetrated by hostile

special constables, if Yeomanry are then sent into its midst to
arrest its most charismatic orator, and if a member o f tlie crowd
then throvvs a brick at a yeonian (which is not proven), are the
crowd then guilty o f being ridden and sabred o ff the field?

Even by the infinitely nice legalisms o f M r W almsleys own ganie,

the military do not resort to instant and massive retaliation at the
moment when one o f their members is assaulted. What Mr
Walmsley has almost succeeded in niaking us do is to distract our
attention ffom the actual attack on the crowd, and the nature of
that attack. Give or take some emphasis this way or that, the
events that preceded this attack are as follows.
A peaceable and fairly good-humoured crowd was assenibled,
and Hunt began to address it. Inmiediately the magistrates sent for
the Yeomanry to assist the civil power to arrest the speakers in the
midst o f the assem blw T he Yeomanry - local shopkeepers, dealers,
dancing-masters and the rest (several o f whom were probably
drunk) - rod fast towards the hustings, fanning out in disorder
among the crowd as tliey carne into it. As they reached the thickest
part o f the crowd the more disciplined or more humane probably
only brandished their swords to make the crowd give way, but
others struck out, and not only with the fats. The evidence o f any
brickbats, &c., being thrown at them until at least several minutes
after they liad reached and surrounded tlie hustings is excessively
thin. Hunt - who until that moment liad exerted himself for order
and to prevcnt panic - was then arrested. Up to that moment the
situation liad still not passed bcyond control, but simultaneously
with that niomcnt (Hunt disappeared as if he liad been shot, said
one witness) the cry wcnt up from the Yeomanry - Have at their
flags! - and the Petcrloo Massacre really began. Some feeble
attcmpts were made by the crowd to defend the costly embroidered
banners and Caps of Liberty which the female reformers liad
worked over so carefully, and which the reformers liad carried so
many miles to the mecting. The Yeomanry struck out riglit and left
and the special constables, not to be deprived of tlieir share o f
 PETERLOO 183

trophies o f the field, joincd in. The magistrates, seeing the

Yeomanry in difficulties, ordered the Hussars to clear the field.
On tlie edge o f the field, some of the people, finding themselves
still pursued, niade a brief stand.
Mr Walmsley, who has so much to say about unidentified Stock-
port militants, has almost no conimcnt to offer on this - a momcnt of
unrestraincd aggression which cannot by any spccial pleading be
offered as self-defcnce. or is tliere much confiict of evidence, about
tliis, tlie real fiashpoint. Scarlett, who led the prosecution against
Hunt, remained unconvinced about any attack upon the Yeomanry
until tliis momcnt, and declared in a subsequent parliamentary debate:
Had tiiey [tlie Yeomanry] stopped then no real damage would have
been done, but tiiey then began to attack. Tyas reported:

As soon as Hunt and Johnson had jumped from the waggon a

cry was made by tlie cavalry, Have at their flags. In
consequence, tiiey immediately dashed not only at the flags
which were in tile waggon, but tliose which were posted among
tlie crowd, cutting most indiscriminately to the right and to tiie
left in order to get at them. This set tlie people running in all
directions, and it was not until tliis act had been coinmitted tliat
any brickbats were hurled at tile military. From tiiat moment the
Manchester Yeomanry Cavalry lost all conunand of temper.

Not even Captain Birley disputed the fact of this attack on the
flags. His account (tiirough the mdium o f Lord Stanley) declared
that, when the magistrates warrant liad been executed.

considerable tumult prevailed, and a struggle ensued between the

constables and tiiose persons in tiie cart, who wished to save the
caps o f liberty, banners, &c. Some of those who resisted were
taken into custody, and tile soldiers cut witii their sabres. In
doing tliis, it was possible that some persons had been hurt, but
not intentionally.

It would perhaps be legalistic to point out that the magistrates

warrant was for the arrest o f Hunt and not of a Cap of Liberty. We
are bereft o f independent witnesses to describe tlie sensation of
184 MA K I N G H I S T O R Y

being hur, but not intentionally, since neither Tyas (who hiniself
had been arrested, in error) or the Rev. Edward Stanley was
fleeing on the field. We rnust, perforce, supply the hiatus in Mr
Walmsleys account, by drawing upon the evidence o f some of
these biased victims to describe the temper of these moments:

William Harrison (cotton spinner): ... We were all merry in

hopes of better times.
Coroner: Were you not desired to disperse?
Harrison: Onlyfe'ith the swords - nobody asked us to disperse -
only trying to cut our heads off with their swords.
The soldiers began cutting and slayingwent on Harrison, and
tlie constables began to seize the colours, and the tune was
struck up; tliey all knew of the combination. Amidst such
music, few paused tc^listinguish between fats and sharps:
Coroner: Did they cut at you near the hustings?
Hamson: No: as I was running away three soldiers carne down
upon me one aer another: there was whiz tliis way and whiz
that way, backwards and forwards ... and I, as they were going
to strike, tlirew myself on my face, so tliat, if they cut, it should
be on my bottom.
The Coroner: You act as well as speak?
Harrison: Yes, Im real Lancashire blunt. Sir: I speak the truth:
whenever any cried out mercy, they said Damn you, what
brought you here,

Another witncss related how a special constable jumped on tlie

hustings, took up the Presidents chair, and bcat it about those
who remained. Some of the crowd, henuned in on all sides by
Ycomanry, crawlcd under the carts vvliich formed the platfomi
for the hustings. According to one witncss, John Lees (who later
dicd) was one of these:

Jonah Andrcw (cotton spinner): I saw several constables round

him, and beating him with trunchcons severely. One o f thcni
pickcd up a staff of a banner that had been cut with a sword,
and said, Damn your bloody eyes, Ill break your back'.
 PETERLOO 1X5

T liis self-defencc w as pursucd by Y com anry and spccials to thc

cdgcs, an d bcyond thc cdgcs, o f tlie field H unt, as he w as takcn to
tlic m a g istrales liousc, ran thc gau n tlct o f spccial co n stab les
batons. Evcn in thc side-streets aro u n d thc field thc cav alry pursucd
thc pcoplc, cutting a t thcm and saying, D anui you, Ill reform you:
- Y o u ll com e again, vvill y o u ? . O utsidc one liousc in W indniill
Street, spccial constables carne up in g rca t triuniph, before my
door, calling out, T his is W cilerloo f o r y o u ! This is W a te rlo o ''
M r W ah n sle y is o f cou rse w rong to su p p o sc th at thc sober
acco u n ts o f P eterloo by B ruton a n d R ead represent, cvcn if unw it-
tingly, a p erpetu atio n o f th e ra d ic a l m yth. A radical intcrprctation o f
the day, derived in p a rt froni vvitncsscs such a s those ju s t quoted,
w ould be fa r m ore sa v ag e th a n anything p ublished since B am ford o r
Prentice. It w ould see it as a clea r m om ent o f class w ar. o r w ere the
w arrio rs only on the side o f th e m ag istracy . I f M r W alm sley h ad
exam ined the H om e O ffice p ap e rs h e w ould have found evidence tliat
botli before th e d ay (am ong tho se drilling on the m oors) and
afterw ard s (am ong th o se threaten in g vengeance) there w ere indeed
m ost u n p acific m ilita n ts am ong th e refo n n ers. B am ford w as - at
least afte r P eterloo - v ery p ro b a b ly am ong them , although he gives
him self a m ore so b e r c h a ra c te r in his rem iniscences. I f the report o f a
spy is to be credited, h e w as still, th ree m onths later, venting his
feelings in revo lu tio n ary rodom ontade, an d giving in a tav cm the
toast: M a y thc T re e o f L ib erty b e plan ted in H ell, and m ay the
bloody B utchers o f M an ch e ster b e th e F ru it o f it! A s late as A pril,
1820, th ere w as a fierce ta v e m braw l in O ldham betw een soldiers and
tow nsm en, w hen one o f th e la tte r prop o sed the toast: M ay the skin
o f every loyal m a n b e ta k cn o f f his b ac k an d m ade into parchm cnt to
beat th c R e fo n n e rs to a n n s !
U ndoubtedly am ong th e huge cro w d w hich assem bled on th at
day there w ere som e w ho felt o bscurely th a t som ething large might
com e o f it, an d com e suddenly to tlie raising o f thc poor and the
throw ing dow n o f tlie rich. A s one o f tlie contingents m archcd in
th at m o m ing they p assed R o b ert E ntw isle, an attom ey and clerk to
the race-course, an d later a w itness again st H unt: T hou h ast got a
good co a t to th y b a c k , one o f the m archers shouted, but I shall
have as g oo d a one a s thee before to-night is o v er.
* * *
186 MAKING HISTORY

All this was around, bcfore and after Peterloo. B ut on the day itself
the vast crovvd w as, definitively, under H u n ts control and subjected
to his egotistical but em phatically constitutionalist strategy. H e liad
spcnt the previous wcek in M anchester, seeing sonie o f the leaders of
contingents, and ensuring that his orders fo r peace and discipline were
understood and would be obeyed. T hey w ere obeyed, and women and
childrcn carne with the men upon the field. H enee P eterloo w as not
only a massacre, but a peculiarly cow ardly one. M iss M arlow has
discovered letters o f M ajor Dyneley, w ho conm ianded the tw o field-
pieces which w ere held in readiness in the w ings on the day: Tlie
first action o f the Battle o f M anchester is o v er, he w rote, and I am
happy to say has ended in the com plete discom fture o f th e Enem y.
He liad been very m uch assured to see the w ay in w hich the
Volunteer Cavalry knocked the people ab o u t the during the whole
tne we remained on the groundtfthe instant tliey saw ten o r a dozen
Mobbites together, they rod a t them an d le a th ered them properly.
A radical interpretation, how ever, w ould re-exam ine w ith the
greatest scrupulousness those p arts o f the received account which
exonrate from blame in tlrefffl events, not only the govem m ent, but
also the magistracy: or w hich assum e th a t the m agistracy w ere guilty
only o f panic or ill-judgment, an d th a t once they liad sent the
Ycomanry upon the field, all happcned fortuitously. Both Prentice
and J E. Taylor offered powerfiil argum ents against this at the time.
Tlie official P apers Iielative to the Sta te o f the C ountry, published by
govermuent in Novem ber, 1819, and offering a selection o f the letters
o f magistrates to tlie H om e O ffice, depositions, & c., should be
regarded as being ju s t as mucli a p arty statem ent and should be
exaniincd as scrupulously - as any radical account. H istorians have
not, gcnerally, done this: although the P apers w ere selected and
published in order to prevent any parliam entary enquiry: the infonna-
tion (Lord Liverpool adm itted privately) m ay be laid safely, and
much more advantageously, by G ovem m ent directly rather than
through the mdium o f any com m ittec. M any o f the questions askcd
by John Edward T aylor in his brilliant and scathing N o tes a n d
O bservadnos, C ritica1 a n d E xplanatory on the P apers R e la ti ve to the
Internal State o f the C ountry (1820) have never found a satisfactory
answer.
* *
 PETERLOO 187

These qucstions are of tire order most difficult to resolve: questions

of intcntion - did tire nragistrates intend beforehand that an arnred
dispersal should take place? - and of complicity - did Sidmoath
assent to, or know of, any such intention? Mr Walmsley himself
quotes inrportant passages fronr a prvate, justificatory account
which the Rev W.R. Hay drew up for Sidmouth on October 7,
1819, and which was hitherto unpublished. hi tlris he described the
actions o f tlie select conmrittee of nragistrates which was in alnrost
continuous session in tire days leading up to August 16:

Tire Conmrittee continucd to nreet, and did so on Saturday,

[August] tire 14th, Sunday, and Monday. Prior to the Saturday,
different poiirts had been discussed as to the propriety of
stopping the Meeting and the nranner of doing so. Tlrey were of
opinin that Multitudes conring in colunms witlr Flags and
Marching in nrilitary array were even in the approach to the
Meeting a tunrultuous assenrbly; and it was for a little tinre
under considcration whether each Colunm should not be stopped
at tlreir respective entrances into tire Town, but tlris was given
up - it was considered that the Military nright tiren be distracted
and it was wished that the Town should see what the Meeting
was, when assenrbled, and also that those who cante should be
satisfed tlrey were assenrbled in an unlawful nranner.

Being satisfed, tire account contines, that in poiirt of Law [the

Meeting] if assembled as it was expected, would be an illegal
Meeting, we gave notice to Lieut-Col LEstrange ... of our wish to
have the assistance o f tire Military on the 16th.
Tlris is a clear enough statenrent of the magistrates intention,
although it does not anrount to proof. It is abundantly evident that
nragistrates and nrilitary had a contingency plan for dispersing the
nreeting; and, at tire very least, it would appear that Sidmouth was
infomred o f this plair, fronr a letter in tire Home Office papers
dated August 18, in which Sidmouth conveyed to General Sir Jolm
Byng his satisfaction in the judgnient of Colonel LEstrange, the
nrilitary conrmander on that day: His Judgement has in Lord S.s
rnind been evinced by his eniploying the Yeomanry in tlie Van
agreeably to the Plan on which I know you intended to act. A
188 MAKING HI S TORY

contingency plan, it is trae, does not amount to a fiilly-proven

intention, even when the first part o f it - the assembling o f the
nlitary forces - is put into effect. But there is altogether too rnuch
circumstantial evidence, as well as ramour, circulating on the
Sunday and the Monday niorning, to allow one to discount the
possibility of such a flly-formed intention: the clearing o f the ficld
by the authorities, early on Monday moraing, o f all stones: the
industrious preparation by the magistrates o f depositions from
pronhnent citizens tliat tliey vvere alarmed by tlie banners and
nlitary array of the crowd: the ramours such as those which
reached tlie ears of J.E. Taylor:

... early in the forenoon on August 16th persons supposed to be

acquainted vvitii tlie intentions o f the magistrates distinctly
asserted tliat M r Hunt yvould be arrested on the hustings, and
tlie meeting dispersed. I myself was more than once told so, but
could not conceive it possible ....

Tlie intention was expressed, the contingency plan was prepared,

the nlitary forces were assembled, the ramours and more-
than-ramours were circulating: and yet we are still invited to
believe that the dispersal o f the crowd was fortuitous, and that the
magistrates detennined to send cavalry into the midst o f it to arrest
the speakers because one Richard Owen, a pawnbroker, swore an
afTidavit that Hunt liad arrived and that an mmense mob is
collectcd and he considers the town in danger.
(Tlie affrighted Richard Owen, in his altemating role as a
spccial constable, is supposed to have signally distinguished
himsclf on the fred by capturing the black flag of the Saddleworth
contingcnt - Equal Rcprcscntation or Dcath - the mere sight o f
which so many official witnesscs at subsequent proccedings testi-
ficd as having tlirown tlicm into constcniation and alanu.)
There is a simplcr cxplanation than M r Walmsleys for Peterloo.
There was a plan. It was put into operation. The magistrates knew,
for some hours, and perhaps days, before Hunt arrived on the
hustings, what they intended to do; the special constables were
expccting the arrival of the Yeomanry; the Yeomanry did, on the
field, very rnuch what was expectcd of thcm, although neither as
 PETERLOO 189

efficiontly or as dccorously as the authoritics might have wished:

and the regulars perfomied a part in which their oficers (like
Major Dyneley) were wel! versed.
Tliis case has not been establishcd, but it seems, at the least,
open to enquiry. If establishcd, it would not nccessarily exelude the
authorities froni any larger historical defence. Tlie niagistrates were
faced witli a nevv phenomenon o f which they had no understanding.
The crowd was not attending a Whitsun walk or even a miners
gala. Its size, it discipline, its high inrale, were ominous to the
od order. Neither in the niagistrates roorn or in the crowd did
men look forward complacently to 1832 and all that; it was more
natural, in 1819, when two incompatible social forces confronted
each other, to remember 1789.
Some such historical defence might be offered. M r Walmsley,
however, would not wish to offer it. His zealous partisanship is, in a
serious sense, wortliy o f the Peterloo tradition; and his book, which
has tumed over the ground freshly, will certainly join the enduring
literature o f the event. But he cannot allow a line o f investigation, or
even o f defence, which must also show that Hulton o f Hulton (who
denied that the niagistrates hadjhny prior intention o f dispersing the
crowd) was a liar. But M r W almsley, in his zeal, has provided
evidence for this as well. W illiam Hulton had some sort o f stiffening
about him which some o f his fellow-magistrates lacked - an absence
o f humanitarian cant and a contempt for general opinin. He offered
no maudlin apologies for Peterloo: indeed, he later recalled it as the
proudest d ay o f his life, and m any years afterwards he kept a Cap o f
Liberty, captured upon the field, in his study. A gentleman o f
Hultons breed and station does not lie; he nierely has so great a
hauteur, so great a distance between him self and the seditious plcbs,
that it is a m atter o f utter indifference to him whether this or that is
true o f them or not.
* * *

Twelve years after Peterloo, and after fact upon fact had been
disputed for as long, Hulton could throw o ff a public letter
containing a nianifest frrago o f mis-statcments about the day -
two people w ere killed in St P eters Field - one, a woman, who
having personated the Goddess o f Reason, w as tram pled to dcath in
 190 making h i s t o r y

tlie crowd .... On tlie succeeding day, an od pensioner was beaten

to death with portions of his own loom, because he had expressed
a loyal attachnient to the King. He was as inflexibly convinced, in
1831 as he had been in 1817, tliat the defence o f this vast aegis
of our liberties required the hunting o f Jacobins and the sharpening
of svvords. Tlie defeat of the Tories in South Lancashire in the
Refomi election of 1832 led only to an adjustment o f tactics. A
few despondent individuis, Hulton o f Hulton later recalled, then
met in a conimon pot-house in Newton-le-Willows: It occurred to
tliem that it was tlieir duty to cali up every friend to the monarchy
and the Church to counteract the machinations o f the enemies to
both. As a result of that meeting the foundations o f the South
Lancashire Conservative Association were laid ... and from that
stem at Newton. Conservative associations had branched out all
over Her Majestys dominions. It is well to remember that British
conservatism has not only been niade by the great, the well-
endowed, the fluent. It has also had its stubbom provincial
grass-roots.

From The Times Lilerary Supplement llth December 1969

 Sold Like a Sheep for 1

James Hammctt was the only one of the six transportad Dorchcster
labourers to livc out bis lifc, on his rcturn, in bis borne village of
Tolpuddlc. He worked as a builders labourer (pcrhaps a frcer lifc
tban workmg for rescntil farniers) and, tacitum even in bis youtb,
he matured into a bcery od boy, a rum ol card.
Taciturnity in fact liad taken bim as far as New South Wales, since
it liad bcen his brothcr, John, and not himsclf, wbo liad been prcscnt
wlien tlie fatcful unin oatli was taken - a fact wliich James kept to
liimself for a good niany yeafS. After all, at the time of the arrests
Johns wife was expecting, and, in these circumstances, it seemcd to
be the right thing to do to stand in for his brother.
Taciturnity was briefly broken in 1875 when tlie new Agricul-
tural Labourers Union held a demonstration and presentation to the
surviving martyr. After long and elevated speeches, a purse and a
gold watch were presented to Mr Hammett, who looked tliese over
witli care, and rcmarked: It appears a great deal better than
what I got 41 years ago. Then he unthawed sufficiently to make
his one recorded political statement: *We onhfltried to do good to
one another, the same as youre deing now. His otlier comment is
more famous. When friends and relatives asked Grandfather Ham
mett why he kept so quiet about his time in New South Wales he
answered (referring to his assigmnent as convict-labour to a settler):
If youd been sold like a sheep for 1 would you want to talk
about it?
Mr Hammctts precisions (which I glean from Joyce Marlow,
not from the book under review) seem to me to settle most of the
thcoretical problems raised by Professor Rud. Most of his
protesters were innured to being clouted across the ear-hole by
Fate (or the British ruling class) for trying to do good to one
another; but thcy bitterly resentcd it nonetheless. To be sold like
a sheep for 1 was a humiliation to manhood too shaming to
remember. Many of tlieni were not especially articlate practioners
 192 MAK1NG H I S T OR Y

o f political thcory, although many o f them were. Along these lines

o f enquiiy neither statistical chai or sociological lucubrations are
likely get us much further.
James Hammctt would have disapproved o f George Ruds
book, cven thougli both had been fellow visitants to the antipodes.
For, in an episode in the unwrittcn history o f British McCarthyism,
Rudo vvas stripped o f all academic eniployment, and as a conse-
quencc had to transport him self to the more liberal soil of
Australia. The episode is discreditable, although certainly not to
Rud. At that time he had laid down the foundations o f the very
substantial work in the history o f the crowd in eighteenth-century
France and England - the Bastille crowd, laxation populaire,
Gordon rioters - and he was already on his vvay to Wilkes. Even
though he had opened up a new continent to historical explanation,
no British university wanted to knovv. Since that time many lesser
and rcputably-placcd younger scholars have been paddling up the
crecks vvhich his early charts frst disclosed.
No doubt the Australian emigration brought many advantages
both to Professor Rud and to his hosts. But it put liim at a grcat
distance from his sources. And his more recent, voluntaiy expatria-
tion to Caada has done the same. So ... w hat was he to do?
Helpfiil general textbooks were one answer. The other answer
secmed to lie in the project now before us. Generations of
p ro te ste rsfl- Irish rebels o f several kinds, Luddites, Pentridgc
insurgents and Chartists, Swing rioters, arsonists, and even Cana-
dian rebels o f 1837 and 1838, had preceded him on the long
journey to N.S.Wales or Van Diemens Land. It must have seemed
inevitable to Rud that he was to be tlieir chosen chronicler,
employing his fine archival craftsmanship in the records o f
England, Caada, Ireland and Australia, to weave a richly-figured
pattem in that stark warp o f transportation.
Yet the book disappoints. It is even quite bad. Rud has never
been at lime in the ninctecnth century, the Swing riots o f 1830
apart (and herc he had Eric Hobsbawm as collaborator). The book,
commenccs with some ninety pages o f insecure statistical passes
and gestures at criminological gcncralisation: the only adequate
critic for tlicse pages would be a pair o f scissors. Tliere follow
sixty pages on the protcsters and their offcnccs. Tlicse sununary
 SOLD LIKE A SH EEP FOR 1 I J 3

accounts are uscful only when Rud, by good fortune rather tlian
judgcment. chances upon a uscful secondary account.
At last, in part Four, vve llave tlie Australian end o f the story,
and here we may set the scissors aside. Rud has accumulated,
with the fine archival craing vvhich is his trademark, an inimcnsc
amount o f dctail about tlie fatcs o f the convicts: how often they
vvere disciplined: when they got their tickets-of-lcave: how they
fared when they got their freedoni. Ttere are sonte rcntarkable
cxamplcs o f success and upw ard mobility - for exantple, antong
the Irish rebels o f 1798. B jQ contrast rnany Luddites, Pentridge
rebels and Swing rioters rentained ntuch at a level, in artisan or
labouring trades. Tltis is all lidpful stuff, it is sometimes lively,
and on occasion it is vintage Rud.
But it is not good enough. W hat strikes one is the erratic and
one-sidcd naturc o f the research. Rud has absolute faith in the
original and prior virtue o f scraps o f T asntanian prison archives
ovcr all other sources. Extensive legal records, published triis,
the British Radical, local, and C hartist press (which reported
copiously on many o f his protesters and followed their subse-
quent history), and local historians (who subsequently ntadc
transported liten into folk heroes) - all those rentain unconsulted.
Rud prefers to fall back, for biographies, upon the A nnual
liegisler o r the A ustralian D .N.B.
Far more is known about the transported Jacobins o f the 1790s
than is hinted a t in these pages. Some unexplained Yorkshire
radical w eavers, 1821 turn up in the statistics: but Rud never
identifies these as the nten transported for tlie Grange M oor rising
near B am sley, a fam iliar enough event. It is o f interest to know
how the leaders - A ddy and Com stive w ent on in V an Dieniens
Land, but it w ould have been o f m ore interest if R ud liad put his
own findings together w ith those in recent doctoral theses (Kajage,
Domielly, B axter). A nd if these can easily be overlooked, there is
surcly less excuse for m issing Joyce M arlow s The Tolpuddle
M artyrs (1971), w hich devotes m ost o f five chapters to the
experiences o f the D orset men in A ustralia and w hich discovers
ccrtain details w hich correct R uds account.
Tlie later the period, and the m ore copious the unconsulted
sources, the m ore R ud stum bles and fum bles. From gnomic
194 MA K I N G H 1 S T 0 R Y

Tasmanian records he tries to puzzle out for what ofFences

Luddites were transported: but plentiftd accounts exist. He does
not sccni to know that od Tilomas Bacon o f the Pcntridge afFair
was an od Jacobin and a political leader o f stature. He does
not seem to know Gwyn W illiams definitive articles (and now
book) on the Merthyr rising o f 1831. William Ashton and
Francis Mirfeld flit across his pages as industrial protesters,
filling their prescribed role for destroying linen yam . But
Ashton and Mirfeld were leaders o f a major - and fiilly-reported
- strikc o f Barnsloy lincfl-Weavers; they were singled out as
K)lilical rebels, and (by Ashtons account) they were framed; in
response to memorials froni their fellow-weavers they were
pardoned before their sentences expired, their fares lime were
paid by money raised hv tlreTYorksliire radical movement, and
they both tlicn played a leading part in tlie Banisley Chartist
movement. Ashton, a most articlate if somewliat opinionated
man, was imprisoned for two years for his Chartist activities,
while Frank Mirfeld m il repafeetai Bamsley' at the Chartist
National Convention of Ashton, having quarrelled fiercely
with OComior, retumed to Victoria as a voluntary emigrant, and
continued to send accounts the new territory back to the
Bamsley press: The same system prevails here as is the general
rule at homo - the rich get rieher, whilst tile poor get poorer.
Nono of this in Rud. Moving on to Chartism ones heart sinks
cven lowcr. If Rud really wishes to know whether the Coin
(Laes) riot of 1840 in which a policcman was killed liad political
associations, he would do best to consult, not Tasmanian records,
but the Lancashirc and Chartist press: he will there discover that
policc-bashing is not an adequate catcgory for analysing rcsistancc
to the new plice. The scissors nuist be brought out once more for
his accounts of what he iusists upon calling the Plug-Plot Riots
of 1842. Thcsc did not, as he once sccms to propose, assume the
complexin of a food riot'! Once again, devout atteution is paid to
what the transported fclons saiti they had becn transported for
when they arrived in Tasmania. With delight Rud italicises every
confession- by a convict that his offence had becn to riot fo r an
lacrease o f wages. This seems to Rud to be a proper prolctarian
motive, as against any high-flying bourgcois-democratic false
 SOLD LI KE A SHEEP FOR 1 195

consciousness, sucli as staying on strike until the Charter was tlie

law o f the land.
Well, yes, the strikes and riots were about wages: they were
about tlie Charter as well: and for some they were about the
miilenium. As hundreds o f depositions, and scores o f extcnsive
press rcports make plain. Must it always be either/or? And lias it
not occurred to Professor Rud that if you are a convict facing a
prison officer's interrogation in Van Dieniens Land, you select
aniong possible responsos the one most likely to meet with the
approval o f your interrogator? If you squared your shoulders,
looked the officer in the eye, and said: Every valley shall be
exalted, and every bleeding juniped-up mole-hill like your honour
shall be laid lo w \ then you would find yourself, with a bare back,
chaincd to the flogging triangle. But even prison officers liad heard
about Political Econoniy and could understand that the poor wanted
more wages. And even James Hammett, with his scandalously low
levcl o f Theory, was sly enough to know his way tlirougli the
proper responses.
So ... But, wait, what does Rud think he is doing when he
describes William Ellis, the Chartist leader in the Potteries, as a
fircbrand and one o f the most dangerous men in the potteries?
His sources? The A nnual Register and a historical novel published
in 1962!! But all Chartists and many otliers believed that Ellis was
framed: his conviction rested upon identification by a dubious
witness who claimed to have glimpsed him, with blackened face,
on the scene o f arson. Elliss own letters o f indignant rebuttal were
published; his fellow-prisoner, Tilomas Cooper, championed him;
he was the subject o f a national campaign for pardon, and his
lame was oen added to tliat o f Frost, Williams and Jones, the
leaders o f the Newport rising. Ellis was a temperance advcate and
an Owenite socialist (in prison aer being sentenced to twenty-one
years transportation he spoke, wrote Cooper, of the coming age of
universal brothcrhood, o f the world-spread establishment o f the
great community'). Waiting in the transport off Spitliead this
dangerous firebrand wrote urgently for Bumss poems and tlie
poctical works o f Percy Bysshe Shelley. Not a word of this in
Rud.
And what about John Frost? O f his Australian experiences,
1% MAKING HISTORY

Rud tells us only that Frost escaped any dire penalties, w as first
a clerk and then a schoolm aster, and tlien held teaching posts in
various parts o f the island. All very com fortable, and perhaps a
prcmonition o f subsequent academ ic careers? B ut that fine histo
rian, David W illiams, in his biography o f F ro st tells another story.
A lettcr home w as brokcn open in w hich F rost referrcd to Lord
Jolin Russell vvith sarcasm . In consequence, F rost w as sentenced, at
the age o f fifty-seven, to tw o y ea rs h ard labour in a quarry.
[David W illiam ss sources in the W elsh press are far more
informativo than the terse T asm anian records.] 1 do not know o f
the evidence which substantiates R u d s claim th a t F rost, on his
retum to England, gradually abandonad his od political beliefs. It
is truc that lie gave up the pastim e o f m arching in drencliing rain
at the head o f arm ed C hartists upo n N ew port, but some respite
may be allowed to a m an in his seventies, and in any case
Chartism w as now quiescent. F ro st duly took p art in a great
Chartist rally w ith its last leader, E rnest Jones, and to suggest that
he cver abandoned the cause o f the C harter seems to me to be
calumny.
Some o f these errors and om issions m ust have resulted from the
difficulties o f conducting research from A ustralia or C aada. Even
so, a publishing-house as prestigious as O xford m ight surely have
found a reader who w ould have pointed som e o f thcm out?
And George Rud. It gives me no pleasure to w rite so severely
about an od colleague and m entor o f mine. W hat has gone wrong?
The m ajor problem is this. Rud has becom e the prisoner o f his
own method, and then has transported th at m ethod to the wrong
century. W hen he commcnced to w ork in the eighteenth century,
all that arca w hich has now becom e the history o f the crow d was
simply an indistinct blur labclled as riot or m ob. By tracing the
members o f that m ob back into legal records or rate-books lie
gave to them a b ricf identity: occupations, roles, faces, and
sometimes voices. H e broke open the w ay to new questions^ the
trades and their solidaritics m otivations and beliefs. This choscn
method w as then essential because, in th at century, so little other
evidence existed, or, if it did, it could only be prised open by their
prior enquiry.
But this docs not assign to this method some universal and
 SOLD LIKE A SHEEP F O R 1 197

prior virtue. W hen \ve m ove into a period in w hich tlicrc are
copious alternativo records, then the nicthod m ay rem ain as a
uscful control but it is folly to em ploy it as if it w ere some
guarantec o f objcctivity and rigour a t the expense o f the cqual
rigour dem andad by the legal and literary records. A method w hich
opened one century up sim ply shuts the next century down. Before
R uds scrupulous investigation, the stature o f obscure m en and
w om en in the eighteenth century enlarged; before the sam e
treatm ent, in the nineteenth century, their stature shrinks. The
protesters end up in these pages w itli less intclligencc, self-
consciousness, political conviction, and com plexity o f m otivation
tlian w e know them , from other sources, to have liad. All are
reduced to the sam e uninform ative level o f entries in the schedules
and ledgers o f the prison authoritics - records which, in some
cases, w ere only a cover-up. Tliis is to order historical evidence not
according to the consciousness o f the prisoners but accordhig to the
their adm inistrative disposition by the authorities.
W hat then are left are a succession o f m inute details o f men
whose consciousness lias been excluded by the very nature o f the
convict records. F or som e o f these details we m ay be grateful:
what happened to the United M en o f j 7 9 8 , when Tilom as Bacon
died. T his last p art o f the book will be m uch consulted, and,
ultimately, revised.
But even this final p art m ight have prom pted questions more
interesting than any that are asked. R ud shares with much
dominant historiograpliy and sociology a positivist faith in tlie
virtues o f quantities and a suspicion o f literary evidence which
raises questions too large to enter here. B ut here are a couple o f
niatters w hich seem to arse from his ow n material.
First, how did the protesters experience life in the Southern
hemisphere? I do not m ean the sub-life o f the convict settle-
ments, the chain-gangs, the triangle: H am m ett has answered that.
But, once tlie ticket-of-leave carne through, and tliey conunenced
to work at their ow n trades, how did tliey respond to the culture
shock? Rud adds m any touches w hich lead one to suppose that
tliey responded well: they liked A ustralia. M any accum ulated land
or money enough to have paid a passage home; but tliey stayed.
A few retum ed to their homelands, and tlien went back: John
198 MAKING HI STORY

Frosts daughter, Caroline; William Ashton who, having tried

America, took his family to Victoria. Five o f the Tolpuddle
Martyrs felt so unsettled back k England that they took off
again, not to Australia, but to Caada. One suspects that many
of them experienccd their new life as in part a liberation, from
the tight class structure and obligatory deference, the spatial
closures, o f the od country. And in this new enviromnent it was
not necessary for them to abandon their od protesting beliefs:
perhaps William Elliss dreams o f universal brotherhood became
dim but they may have blended naturally into a more humdrum
and practical egalitarianism. W e m ust look once again at Ruds
sources, and also at the accounts and letters in the British and
Australian press, to tease this problem out.
Second, tliere is the interesting question o f kinship ties and
familial and neighbourhood relationships. Rud cites briefly tlie
letters which Tilomas Holden, a Lancashire weaver transported for
Luddite oath-administering, sent back from Sidney to his wife and
parents. He appears to have overlooked the fact that extensive
extracts from these, together vvith details o f the Holden family,
were published a few years ago in the Tram aclions o f the Laes &
Cheshire Antiqnarian Society. These letters tells us little about
political protest, and not much about New South W ales, but a great
deal about the tenacious maintenance o f familial ties across half the
world. And, if we run through tlie material looking for this,
evidence accumulates. Wives and children joined tlieir transported
husbands; correspondence and messages passed; Irish wives and
swecthearts (Rud tells us) would bum down haystacks in order to
gct free tickets as arsonists to join tlieir lovers. Convicts, trans
ported for the same offcnce from the same village or town, would
pass messages and kcep an eye on each others welfare, oven when
illiterate and divided from each other by hundreds o f miles o f
bush. (They also, as is the way o f exiles, sometimos quarrelled
violcntly, as did somc Scottish Jacobins and as did the Wclsh
Chartists, Williams and Jones).
lt is from material of this kind (and o f course this is only onc
straw from a whole rick) that 1 derive my sccpticism as to thosc
modera theories of the family which offer kinship loyalties as a
middle-class innovation, and see the working peoples familial
 S O L D L I K E A S H E E P F O R 1 199

rclations as brutish, instrumental, casual or almost unstructured. O f

course, some wives and some convicts got tired o f waiting, and set
up nevv familias, pcrhaps bringing down a charge o f bigamy to add
to their archives. But such has bcen known to happcn evcn in the
m ost modorniscd and bourgcois o f cstablishments. The evidcnce is
mixed and does not allow for a fn n statistical conclusin, hi 1896
an od woman died near Burford (M .K . Ashby tells us in her study
o f Bledington) whose husband and brother liad botli been trans-
ported in 1831, as Swing rioters, for 14 and 7 years respectively.
A fter seven years, when neither carne back, she comforted herself
with die thought that ie one m ust w ait for tlie other. Fifty years
later they still liad not come and she died in her chair looking
tovvards the east - as she thought tow ards A ustralia. W hat is one
to make o f that illiterate od lass, yvhose patience w as so large, and
whose knowledge o f geography w as so small? It is not recorded
that anyone thought o f presenting her witli a gold watch.

Froni New Sociev

 History and Anthropology

I nuist come bcfore you at once with the frank confession that 1
am an impostor. In my currcnt work, over the past ten years, in
eightecnth-century English social history, it is true that I am facing
problcms of the recovery and understanding o f popular culture and
ritual which may, very generally, be described as being closer to
the concems of social anthropology than to those o f economic
history^. I hope to explain this fiirther. It is also true that I am
increasingly attempting to put to use folklore matcrials. But I
certainly cannot offer myself to you as one who is qualified in the
discipline o f anthropology, or as a conventional scholar of
folklore; my knowledge o f W estern anthropology is intermittent
and eclectic, and o f Indian anthropology and folklore it is not even
rudimentary. Much o f vvhat I have to say m ay well appear to you
to be commonplace and to require no saying.
There may, however, be something which still requires debating
among historians vvithin the M arxist tradition (East or W est) who
have shown overmuch reluctance, until recently, to come to terms
with certain problems. I intuid in my conclusin to offer, as a
historian of this tradition, some points in M arxist self-criticism. But
first I would speak more generally to the profession, and enter a
dcfence of that very eclecticism to which I have pleaded guilty. In
a recent exchange in the Journal o f Inerclisciplinary H istory
(1975), Keith Tilomas, the author o f Religin and the Decline o f
Magic (1971), was takcn to task by Hildred Gcertz for exactly this
sin. The implication o f her critique was that Tilomas liad borrowed
approaches from scvcral disparate anthropological schools, whereas
he should have clearly placed himsclf within the discipline o f one
or another. Without a consistent theoretieal discipline such borrow-
ings betray cmpiricist opportunism or merely amateurism. Witch-
craft must be explained in one way or another: we may not play
with scvcral altemative catcgorics o f cxplanation, drawn from
incompatible anthropological tlicorics.
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 201

But in tliis controversy I would stand with Tilomas. Anthropo-

logical studies of Witchcraft (or of other beliefs and rituals) n
primitive societies, or in more advanced contemporary African
societies, necd not provide us with all the necessary categories of
explanation for Witchcraft bclicfs in Elizabcthan England or in
eightecnth-century India, where we ntay have more complex plural
societies, with many IevelS of belief, sophistication and scepticism.
Categories or models derived froni one context must be tcsted,
refined, and perhaps re-formed course of historical investiga-
tion: we have to sit to them loosely, for tile time being. In nty
own practice I stand closely with Tilomas and with Natalie Zemon
Davis;1 for us, the anthropological impulse is chiefly felt, not in
niodel-buildings but in locating new problems, in seeing od
problems in new ways, in au emphasis upon nomis or value-
systems and upon rituals, in ' exoressive functions of
fofnis of riot and distarbaiic^OT^Ifpffl^M iibonc expresilons of
autliority, control and hegcm c^H P W F ^^^H common in departing
sharply frorn positivistic or utilitarian categories of explanation, and
from tlie penetration of these categories into an economistic
tradition of Marxism. But W W ^B B p^B K B provisioiial. Clcarly,
differences of enipliasis can BES^B^B P W pS B vhich foreshadow
debates within liistorical anthropology between functionalist, struc-
turalist,'symbolist and other ulB^ W B a i iiptions. But in my view
diese debates can be delayed; until muWi more work has been done
- and comparative work in several national histories - it would be
premature to forc mam on to a conclusin.
I was led to these problems, in my own work, at tie point
when I completed The Making ojmthe English Working Class
(1963), and decided to carry my researches backwards in time, to
the plebeian consciousness and fomis of protest (such as food riots)
of the eighteenth century. Tliis entailed leaving tile territory of the
Industrial Revolution and exploring what is sometimes called a
pre-industriaP society. It is au unsatisfactory tem; for eighteeni-
ccntury Britain (as eighteenth-century India) contained a vigorous
manufacturing industiy, albeit mainly handicraft. But to move from
the irst society to tlie second was to move from a society witi an
accelerating rate of change to one which was, to a niuch greater
extent, governed by custom. There were customary agrarian prac-
 m a k i n g h i s t o r y
202

tices, custoniary forms of initiation to skills (apprenticeship),

customary expectations as to roles (domestic and social), custoniary
modes of work, and custoniary expectations and vvants or needs.
But thc consideration of custom leads on to problenis which
cannot be handled within the discipline o f economic history. or
can orally transmitted customaiy nornis be handled as a sub-section
of the history of ideas. For some part o f the evidence as to
customs and tlieir significance I found myself turning to the
compilations of folklores. Now I need not insist, in this gathering,
that such evidence is sadly unsatisfactory. I was so much impressed
with this fact - indeed, prejudiced - that i con^ess with shame)
when I wrote The Making oflf/g English Working Class I had not
even read Jolui Brauds Ohservations on Popular Antiquities
(1777). This foundation-study of folklore set a pattem which was
followed by British folklorists throughout the nineteenth century -
and by sonie British customs - and in its
organization according to calendar customs and customs surround-
ing tlie rites of passagelits influence may still be detected in
sophisticated ethnographic studies in our two countries today.2
The descriptive material gathered by nineteenth-century folklor
ists was of valu and can still be drawn upon with caution. But
custom and ritual were seen, often by tile paternal ^utlemn (or
even, as in india, alien) from $&ve and 'Jcross ^ class gulf, and
divorced from their total situation or context. Questions proposed
of customs were rariy those of contempoiajy usage or fimetion.
Customs were, rather) ^seen as relies of a remte and lost
antiquity, like the crumbled miflg of aucient hill-forts and settle-
ments. They were seen, sometimes, as clues to a pre-Christian,
pagan, or Aryan inlieritance: these broken forms survived, and the
vulgar people repeated them by rote, like somnambulists, witli no
notion as to their meaning; or perhaps, as in thc derivation of
rituals from fcrtiiity cults, with a subconscious, intuitive acceptance
of their meaning. To this was addcd, under the impulse of the
linguistic rcscarches of Max Miiller and others, the notion that
folklore could be used as a tool for dctccting the prchistoric
dispersal of races and cultures. Reviewing Edward Bumct Tylor's
Researches inlo the Early History o f Mankind and the Develop-
wenl o f Civilisation (1965), Miiller claimed that the ground-plan
 H1STORY AND A N TH RO PO LO G Y 203

of a new Science has been sketched out, and broken relies of the
ancient folklore of the Aryan family llave been pickcd up in the
cottages of Scotland, tlie spinning-rooms of Germany, the bazaars
of Herat, and the monasteries of Ceylon.-1 This notion of a
conmiou Indo-Europcan Aryan inlicritancc led, as Romila Thapar
has noted,4 to a quite new sympathy with India culture on the
part of European Indologists and etluiographers. But its conse-
quences for the study of folklore were less happy. For what
intefested Tylor and his fWlotvefS, wltett they considercd customs,
was how far these prcfVided TeBBence bearing on the early history
of mankind, and how far these customs showed tliat the people
who observed them are allied by blood, or have been in contact,
or have been inflocnced MjPctly oWfrom fflBtlier, or both from
a common source ... .5 There followed upon this a cise
I classificatory interest in custom and myth, akin to the classificatory
interest in other nineteenth-century Sciences; customs and bSefs
were scnipulously examined according to their formal attributes,
and then these formal across immense
gulfs of (Suture and of time; nffifrfcJ n a few pages from the
ancient Hindus to tlie GermairP of Tacatitus to contemporary
Greenlanders to Java and PoMBIHBnffiflIB B B and the American
Indian Mandans and Choctaws!6 The end of this road was finally
reached in Sir James Frazers The Golden Bough (London, 1936).
The academic disrepute into which that work fell dragged
folklore studiesflin British uuiversitics, under vvitli it. In French
scholarship no such eclipse of folkore took place, because it
effected, in the work of Amold van Gennep, a junction witli
anthropology. But in Britain anthropologists have seen folklore as
an antiquarian pursuit of customary and mythic relies, wrested out
of their context in a total culture, and then arranged and compared
in improper ways.7 And to this academic disrepute there was added
the political suspicions of Marxist and radical scholars. In the early
years o f this century, the collection of folk song, dance, and
custom in England liad been a cause which enlisted the sympatliies
of the intellectual Left, but by the 193 Os this sympathy liad
dispersed. The rise o f Fascism led to an identification of folk
studics with deeply reactionary or racist ideology. And even on less
sensitivo historical ground, an interest in customary behaviour
 m a k i n g h i s t o r y
204

tended to be the prcrogative o f the more conservative historians.

For custom is, by its nature, conservative. H istorians o f the Lcft
tended to be interested in iimovative, rationalizing movements,
whether Puritan sects or early trade unions, leaving it to Sir Arthur
Bryant and his friends to celbrate M errie England with its
maypoles, its church-ales, and its relations o f patem alism and
defercnce.
Tliis thumb-nail sketch, vvhich passes over too m any difficult
questions too easily, may go some w ay tow ards explaining why
folklore is so little studied today in English 8 universities; and
how I could have written The M aking o f the English Working
Class without having read Brand. The vigorous revival in recent
years o f interest in folk song and custom has taken place outside
the universities and only the prelim inary evidence o f any revival
in academic interest can as yet be seen.y B ut in self-defence it
should be said that the problemg facing a British liistorian, in
the scholarly use o f f J^ ^ S m aterials, are perhaps greater than
those which are encountered in tliis country. O ur m aterials are
dead, inert, and corrupt vvhereas yours still live. Folklore, in
England is largely a literary record o f eighteenth and nineteenth
century survivals, recorded by parsons and by genteel antiquarians
regarding tliem across a g u lf o f class condescension. In the work
o f a contemporary Indian scholar I leam that he collected liis
rcsearch in two villages (one in Rajasthan, tlie otlier in UP)
1500 folk songs, 200 folk tales, 175 riddles, 800 proverbs and
some charms.10 I tura green with envy as I write tliis, as would
any British collector, who might consider him sclf lucky if in the
course o f one years collccting he found one original folk song,
as vvcll as a few corrupt variants o f songs already known.
So that what wc have to do, in England, is to re-examine od,
long-collectcd material, asking new questions o f it, and seeking to
recovcr lost customs and the bclicfs which infonned tliem. I can
best Ilstrate the problcm by tuniing away from tlie materials and
the method, and addressing the kinds o f questions which must be
asked. These questions, when we examine a customary culture, may
often be conccrncd less with the processcs and logic o f change
than with the recovery o f past States o f consciousncss and the
texturing o f social and domcstic rclationships. Tliey are conccmed
 H IS T O R Y AND A N T H R O P O L O G Y 205

lcss with becoming than with being. As some of the leading actors
o f history recede from our attention the politicians, the thinkers,
the entrepreneurs, the generis - so an mmense supporting cast,
whom we had supposed to be mere attendants upon this process,
press tliemselves forward. If we are concerned only with becoming,
then therc are whole periods in history in which an entire sex has
been neglected by historians, because women are rarely seen as
prime agents in political, military or cven economic life. lf we are
concerned with being, then the exclusin of women would reduce
history to futility. W e cannot understand the agrarian systern of
sniall cultivators without examining inhcritance practices, dowry,
and (where appropriate) the fantilial development eyele.11 And
these practices rest, in tum, upon the obligations and reciprocities
o f kinship, whose maintenancc and observation will often be found
to be the peculiar responsibility of the women. The economy can
only be understood witliin tlie context o f a society textured in these
kinds o f ways; the public life arises out of the dense determina-
tions o f the domestic life.
I am especially concerned to recover evidence as to the nomis
and expectations in sexual and marital relations in the customary
culture o f eighteenth-century England - a subject about which a
good deal has been written but very little is known. They are, in
fact, those aspeets o f a society which appear to contemporaries as
wholly natural and matter-of-course wltich often leave the most
imperfect historical evidence. A historian in two hundred years
time may easily recover how todays industrial citizens felt about
having too little rnoney - or about other people having too much -
but he will find it more difficult to recover how we felt about
rnoney itself, as the universal mediator o f social relations, because
we assunte this so deeply that we do not articlate it ourselves.
One way to discover unspokcn nontis is often to examine the
Htypical episode or situation. A riot throws light upon the nontis
of tranquil years, and a sudden breach o f deference enables us to
better understand the deferential habits which have been broken.
This ntay be true equally o f public and social and of more private,
domcstic, conduct. M N Srinivas notes, o f his own field work, that
it was when disputes suddenly arse in the village that faets
norntally hidden surfaced:
 206 MA K I N G H I S T O R Y

The passion which was ignited during tlie heat of a dispute led
the disputants to say and do tliings which revealed motivations
and relationships with the clarity with which lightning illuniines,
albeit momentarily, the surroundings on a dark night ....
Disputes roused peoples mentones and led to the citingand
exaniination of precedents .... Disputes ... were a rich mine of
data which the anthropologist could not ignore.12

Even a highly untypical ritual may thus provide a valuable window

onto nonns. I becanie interested some ten years ago in the ritual
sale of wives in Engiand in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries. This practice, found arnong Iabourers, famiers and otliers,
cannot be taken as typical of anything. But I llave found a
sufficient number of cases (some 300) and sufficient evidence to
show that the practice was universally understood among the lower
orders, and that the rituals were endorsed by the working
conununity as signifying a legitmate transfer of marriage partners.
But it remans an unusual ritual wliich provoked comment -
indeed, a small sensation.
The ritual liad to be undergone in proper form: in a public
niarket-place, with advance notice, the wife led by a halter
around her neck or middle, witli an auctioneer (usually the
husband), open bidding, and finally tlie transfer of tlie end of the
halter from the seller to tlie purchaser. My collection of cases
has been built up, partly from brief newspaper paragraplis, partly
from the records of folklore collectors. Editors, joumalists and
folklorists were all in general outside spectators, looking in upon
a spectacle whose signifcance they attenipted to read from its
formal attributcs: as a sale. An enliglitened middle class which,
in the nineteenth century, liad become vociferous in the cause of
anti-slavery was deeply embarrassed to find this barbarism in its
own midst, in the heart of progressive Engiand. A few
folklorists toyed half-heartedly with notions of pre-Cliristian
Anglo-Saxon survivals; one or two (and these exceptions are
always the important ones for the historian) even examined the
practice with the insight of objective observation. But in general
the practice was condcnined in the stemest and most moralistic
tcmis.1-'
 HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY 207

However, closcr cxamination of tlie evidence has enablcd the

practico to be scen in a different aspcct. The ritual was in fact a
fbmi of divorce, at a time wlicn no other form of divorce was
available to tlic pcople of England. In ncarly cvcry case tlic
sale took place with tlic wifes consent. In most cases the
prcccding marriage had alroady broken down, and it can be
shown that the opon auction was only fctional - the wife's
purchascr was pre-arranged, and in niany cases was alrcady tlic
wifes lovcr.
Moreover. the liusband who was selling a wife whoni,
eniotionally, he had already lost, often behaved with a generos-
ity more humane tlian is encountered in todays divorce courts.
Tlie aair was perfonned in tlie public eye, and he covered his
sliame at having lost his wife, first by the fctional ritual that it
was he who was selling her, and second by some gesture of
liberality or goodwill. Conunonly he gave all or most of the
small sun exchanged as purchgse money to drink the healtli of
tlie new couplet s the m a rra f^ ^ H On occasion a husband
parting witli his wife caused the church bells to be rung, paid
for tlie new couples coach-hire, or gave them a gift of food or
clothes.
Tlius the ritual tunis out to have complexities. At first sight
we appear to have a form reminiscent of negative bridewealtli, or
perhaps of mere chattel-purchase: tac wife. with a halter around
her, sold in the cattle-market, is seen as a chattel or beast. Here
is the ne plus ultra of a dominant male order. But at second
sight, when we look through the form to the actual relations
expressed within it, it appears differently. The ritual (whatever its
origin and manifest symbolism) has been adapted to new
purposes in which it reglales an exchange of partners by mutual
consent. But although we find within the ritual greater evidence
of sexual equality (han we had, at rst, expccted to find, the
ritual itself remains ono of feminine subordinaron. Wives did
not, except in very exccptional circumstance, sell their husbands.
Thus tlie untypical may serve to give a glimpse into nonns.
And in the course of tliis research I have been afforded otlier
insights into the ways in which marriage was regarded by the
labouring people in England: that a public (and shaming) ritual
 of tliis kind vvas employed to legitmate divorce is, paradoxically,
evidence that marriage was not lightly regarded. The meaning of
tlie ritual can only be read when the evidence (some of it
recorded by folklorists) ceases to be regarded as a fragment of
folklore, a survival, 14 and is replaced within its total context.
But ritual of course pemieates social and political, as well as
domestic life. In recent years, liistorians have been looking in
new ways at long familiar aspects of the life: at the calendar of
ritual and of festivity, both in the countryside and in the
corporate city;15 at the place of sports in social life;16 at the
different rhythms of work and of leisure before and after the
Industrial Revolution;17 at the changing place of adolescents
within die coimnunity;18 at the market or bazaar when considered
less as an economic nexus than as a social nexus, and as a
gathering-centre for news, gossip, rumour; and at the symbolic
meaning of forms of popular protest.19 Historians in the Marxist
tradition who have been influenced by the Gramscian concept of
hegemony have also been looking with fresh eyes at the forms
of ruiing class domination and control. Very rarely in history -
and then only for short intervals I does any ruiing class exercise
authority by direct and umnediated military or even economic
forc. People are bom into a society whose forms and relations
seem as fixed and immutable as the overarching sky. The
commonsense of tre time is saturated with tlie deafening
propaganda of the woms quo; but the strongest element in this
propaganda is simply the fact that what exists exists.
In examining the fonns of this control in the eighteenth
century I have myself increasingly been using the notion of
theatre. In all societies, of course, theatre is an essential
component both of political control and of protest or even
rebellion. The rulers act out the theatre of majesty, superstition,
power, wealth, sublime justice; the poor enact their counter-
theatre, occupying the stages of tire streets for markets and
employing the symbolism of ridicule or protest. To say that
control or domination may take tre form of theatre is not (I
have argued) to say that it was immaterial, too frage for
analysis, insubstantial:
 HISTORY AND ANTH RO PO LO G Y 209

To define control in terms of cultural hegemony is not to give

up attenipts at analysis, but to prepare for analysis at the points
at which it should be niade: into tire iniages of power and
authority, the popular nientalities of subordinaron.2U

In eightccnth-century England the law provides the most formidable

theatre of control; and Tybum and other public places of execution
tlie most dramatic occasions. One may point here to a contrast
between quantitative and qualitative methods in the analysis of
crime, or violence, and its repression. Those historians who have
entered this field, employing the quantitative statistical techniques
appropriate to economic historyC have concentrated their efforts
upon counting offences, offenders, and so on. There have even
been extensive labours expended upon countering the somewhat
dubious quantities of violence or disturbance. There are very
great problems here - for example, as legal categories of crime
cliange or as the efficiency of poce improves. The best scholars
are, o f course, aware of these problems and develop techniques for
taking such variables hito account. But even when such problems
are carefully handled, we with only a very limited
knowledge. For tlie symbolic importance of violence - whether the
violence o f tlie State and the law violence of protest - may
have no direct correlation with quantities. A hundred people may
lose their Uves in a natural disaster and it will provoke no more
than pity; one man may be beaten to death in a plice station and
it may provoke a wave o f protest which transforms the politics of
a nation. We need only consider the consequences of the massa-
cres at Peterloo and at Jallianwala Bag; in botli cases these
episodes assume, in historical perspective, the character of a victory
for the victims. In botli cases tlie ensuing wave of popular outrage,
skilully employed by the victims (in inquests, triis, enquiries,
protest meetings), resulted in a consensus which inhibited the
repetition o f such repressive actions and which even induced some
split witliin the ruling authorities themselves. Neitlier terror or
countcr-terror can disclose their meaning under purely quantitative
examination, for the quantities must be seen witiin a total context,
and this ineludes a symbolic context which assigns different vales
to different kinds o f violence.
210 MAK1 NG H I S T O R Y

Thus attention to the forms and gestures o f ritual can afford a

significant addition to historical knowledge. And certain forms can
only be fiilly understood if vve recovcr the beliefs o f the customary
culture. Thus Tybum, the central place o f execution in eighteenth-
century London, is a supreme exaniple o f the theatre o f class
control, through the terror of example. There is no straining of
metaphor in describing this as tieatre: it was clearly seen to be
such, at the time, and mmense attention was given to the
ceremony of execution and the publicity afforded to the exam-
ples.21 Publicity in those times depended upon local resources: the
crowds which witnessed the procession to the gallows, the ensuing
gossip in the markets and the workshops, the sale o f broadsheets
with tlie last dying speeches o f the victims. As the means of
centralized publicity have, in tliis century, enlarged, so perhaps
even a small quantum of terror can produce an even greater effect:
the resources of a mass circulation press, o f the radio or televisin,
magnify the event, tuming up the volume-control o f terror. One
thinks - as an example - o f the extraordinary impact upon a whole
nation of the execution of two individuis: the Rosenbergs.
Since the eighteenth-century State did not have such resources,
recourse was taken to forms o f aggravated terror against offenders.
For several centuries the punishment decreed for certain offences
entailed not only execution but also tlie p ost mortem mutilation o f
the corpse. Smugglers or highwaymens bodies were hanged in
chains near the site of tlieir offence, until iey corrupted to
skeletons; pirates were left hanging at tlie docks; the heads o f
traitors were left, for rnany years, on spikes over gates on busy
thoroughfares; and, later, the more rational nicthod was taken o f
granting the bodies of murderers and others to tlie surgeons as
specimens for dissection. Against this aggravated penalty, as Peter
Linebaugh has shown, the friends o f tlie condenmed rioted around
tlic gallows.22 But we can only understand the outrage provoked by
such penalties if we understand also that the mutilation o f the
corpse (the refusal of Christian burial) was indeed an aggravated
terror, since the authorities were dcliberately breaching the most
sensitive popular taboos. To understand the nature o f tliese taboos
- the deeply superstitious respect for the integrity o f tlic corpse -
Linebaugh has taken the evidencc upon death customs o f folklore
 H 1 S T 0 R Y AND A N T H R O P O L O G Y 211

collectors; and by putting this cvidcnce to new uses he has, in tum,

transformcd infonnation whiclj was only antiquarian and inert into
an active ingredient in social history.
1 liope that it is not necessary to arge the case for renewed
attention to folklore materials any further. It is not a matter of
drawing upon this material uncritically, but of eniploying it
selectively in the examination of questions which earlier folklorists
often passed by. But when we bring social history into relation
with the greatly more sophisticated discipline of anthropology, thcn
clearly we are faced with greater theoretical difficulties. It is
sometimes supposed tliat anthropology can offer certain findings,
not about particular societies but about society in general: that
basic functions or structures have been disclosed which, however
sophisticated or masked these may be in mdem societies, still
underlie mdem forms. But history is a discipline of context and
o f process: every meaning is a meaning-in-context, and structures
change while od forms may express new functions or od
functions may fmd expression in new forras.23 As Marc Bloch
remarked: To the great despair of historians, men fail to change
their vocabulary every time they change their customs, and this is
tme also o f the vocabulary of ritual formspj!
1 will Ilstrate this by taking issue with one passage in the
work o f a historian who is, like myself, writing within the Marxist
tradition. Gareth Stedman Jones, in an able study of Oulcast
London 25 in the later nineteenth century, offers a chapter entitled
The Defonnation o f the Gift. He is analysing rniddle class
attitudes towards poverty and charity, and concepts of Weber and
of Marcel Mauss come to hand. These enable the social meaning
of charitable gift-giving to be properly understood:

In all known traditional societies, the gi has played a central

status-maintaining function. Fronr the work of sociologists and
social anthropologists, it is possible to isolate three structural
features which are to a greater or lesser extent inherent in the
act o f giving.

These are, first, the idea of sacrifice - primarily to God - or as an

act of grace in the giver. Second, gifts are symbols of prestige,
212 MAKING HISTORY

implying subordination in the recipient. Third, the recipient s

placed uiidcr an obligation: henee the gift serves as method of
social control. Once these points are properly understood, Sted-
man Jones is able to offer an analysis o f attitudes of poverty in
London (and of the ideology o f the Charity Organisation Society)
in temis o f the deformation o f the gift, a deformation brought
about by the separation o f classes - the social and geographical
distance betwcen rich and poor - which destroyed the original
integrity o f the gift relationship, with its elements of prestige,
subordination, and obligation.
I wish to examine this argument closely. First, there is a
suggcstion o f some constant, primeval relationship - an act of
giving - which in all known traditional societies has three
structural features. Tlie first o f these does not appear to be a
structural feature at all. The notion o f charity as grace, and of the
holiness o f the beggar, not in himself but as one whose need
occasions grace in the donor, takes very different expressions
within different ideolgica! and reiigious contexts, even in tradi
tional societies. It s u n ^ e s into mdem societies in varied (for
example, Catholic, Hind or Buddhist) fomis. Although Protestant-
ism is generally resistant to this notion (and its deformation or
drastic limitation may be coincident with capitalist ascendancy) it
can still recur, in comparatively recent times, as in Wordsworths
Od Cumberland Beggar -

Whilc from door to door,

This od Man creeps, the villagers in him
Behold a record which together binds
Past decds and offices of charity ....

I am more rcady to sce the other two features in structural

terms, sincc prestige, subordination, obligation and social control
imply a coincidcnce betwcen the rclationships implicd in the act
o f giving and the context of particular social structures which
might (despite major changes) still maintain universal features.
But one must still ask why these features, and only these
features, are given hcuristic priority? Is it suggestcd that there is
some deep levcl of stnicture, disclosed by anthropological
 H I S T O R Y AND A N T H R O P O L O G Y 213

findings and in the study of traditional societies, which must be

prior to any functions subsequently disclosed? For other features
in the act of giving may easily be proposed. Thus the
dcscription offcrcd is seen from above, whcrcas from bclow
vcry different, and more calculated, features may be disclosed.
The beggar or the poor may wish to cxact all that is possible
from tlie rich; thcy know that the refusal of alrns provokes guilt
in the refuser, and that guilt is an excellent soil in which to
sow slight suggestions of physical or magical threat. The
rccipicnt o f gifts nced not feel an obligation to the donor or
acknowledge his prestige, except in the necessary dues of an
assumed deference and the degree of subordinaron ensured by
charity may depend upon a calculation of advantages.
Thus even these features appear to be seen undialectically. The
structure, in any relation betvveen rich and poor, always runs in both
dircctions, and the same relationship, when tumed around and viewed
in reverse, may present an altemative heuristic. But if one tliinks of a
defmite modera contextH let us say eighteenth-century England - the
act o f giving may suggest other features. Prestige (a reputation for
liberality) rcmains eminently present: one thinks of the elabrate
gifts o f venison and game by the aristocran park-keepers to the
subordnate gentry and clergy. But gifts rich to the poor have
become exceedingly complex. Some gifts are already mediated by the
Poor Laws, a continuing arena of conflict, of discipline, and of
protest: can the wholly characteristic form of a dispute betwecn the
overseers o f two adjacent parishes, each anxious to expel to the other
a sick or pregnant pauper, be subsumed within any of Stedman
Joness three features? Other gifts, such as tlie bribery of electors, are
a direct and undisguised form of purchase of influence. Gifts, such as
the farmers payments in kind to the their labourers or vails' to
servants (that is, gifts of clothing, food, or tips by visitors to the
grcat house), are equally direct means of reducing money wages and
enforcing dependence and subordination. And perhaps the most
important gifts o f all - charity and subsidizcd foods in times of dcarth
- are (as I must have argued clsewhere2fi) enforced directly upon the
rich by the poor by a highly devcloped practice of riot and threat of
riot, a practice which has structural features of its own. And finally
there remam cxamples o f uncalculating generosity which belong to a
 214 MAK1NG H I STO RY

minority tradition o f benevolcnt paternalista whicli, whilc it may be

related to these three structural features, m ay not, under cise exami-
nation, fall wholly *within them. T hus neighbours wlio provide, at
Christmas or at other times o f feast, food and drink to their poorer
fellows may have been expressing other ( stru ctu ral?) comniunity
solidarities which take us into a different field o f analysis.
ln short, if there is any constant - the g ift - w e m ust say
tliat it was altogetlibr deforniedw by the eighteenth century.
Stedman Jones account suggests a constant w hich breaks down,
suddcnly, in the L#tidon o f the 1860$. T hereby his account
ovedeaps (amotig other m attcrs) the T ud o r dissolution o f Church
charities, the ElfraJbetlnui Poor L aw s, the sham eless appropriation
o f foundations by private interests in the eighteenth century, the
complex structural mtfjjgfiiv betwcen rich and poorM evidenced by
food fats, the uhtitffcMp <5WBEailcM by the 1834 Poor Law,
and so on. But even if he w ere to revise his account and make
the procesa o f protracted, m y central objection
would still stand. There is no sucli constant act o f giving with
constant i&diir#3, which m ay be ^ S a t e d from p articu lar social
contexts: indeed the is to be fotfhd in historical
particularity o f o f 10& social relations and not in a
particular ritual or from th e s e .^ In history new
features arfery and th e structural organisfion o f features to the
whole 'hapgeS as the structure o f socfeties change. Tliis m ode o f
transposing RnJ.lydpolpgical fndings to h istb ry is wrong.
And >yetj a f 't h e point o f saying th i& ? m y criticism appears
ungcnerous. It is not only tliat I hve p u t undue w eight upon a
suggeslive tw o-page passage o f tliis histo rian s w ork, w hich w as
never intended to carry such "weight. It fe also tliat, by introducing
a synchronic model o f the act o f giving, Stedm an Jones succeeds
in m aking us sce the relationship cntailed in charity in th e 1860s
in new w ays, and he provokes one also to generalized com parativo
thoughts as to the functions o f charity in different historical
contexts. Scores o f histories o f ch aritiea or o f the P oor Law s have
been w ritten w hich scarcely raisc the critical question o f prestige,
su b o rd in aro n and social control (or, as I prefer, class control): at
their w orst these represen! the donors w holly in term s o f their own
professed intentions, self-im age and ideological ju stieatio n s. Sted-
 H I S T O R Y AND A N T H R O P O L O G Y 215

m an Jones m ay llave offered too tidy an explanation. But by

inducing this kind o f reflcction he has opened the way to serious
analysis o f a new kind. Henee my criticism must be inadequate. If
we m ay not transpose synchronic finding in this way - as ideal
types, constant unctions, universal deep structures - we can rarely
discover the inwardness o f a particular context without having
some such typology to bring to it and to arge with.
I have found m yself forced to reflect upon this m my currcnt
w ork on rough m usic or charivari,28 Here I am examining
another border ritual which throws light upon nonns. The rituals
expose some individual who has offended against community
nonns to the m ost public forms o f insult, humiliation and
sometimes ostracism - riding victims upon an ass or upon a pole,
buming them in efFigy, perform ing raucous music outside their
cottages upon tin cans, the hom s o f beasts, and so on, and reciting
obsceno traditional rhymes. 1 have argued that these fomis are o f
importance, not - as L vi-Strauss has suggested - as universal
structures but precisely because the immediate unctions o f the
rituals change. T he kinds o f offender subjected to rough music are
not tlie same, from one country to another, or from one century to
tlie next. So that once again I have liad to resist an anthropological
finding that charivari has one constant trans-cultural function or
significance.29 Henee the im portance o f tliese rituals lies in the fact
that, since tliey identify w hich kinds o f (sexual, marital, public)
conduct incurred outrage in the community, tliey also offer a
signpost to that com m unitys nomis.
But, even so, I feel the need for guidance at many points from
social antliropology - and for m uch greater expertise in the discipline
than I possess. I f w liat goes on within the forms changes, the fonns
still remain important; and the fonns themselves deploy symbolism
which derives from the ulterior cognitive System o f the community.
(Tlie driving out o f evil or o f the other by raucous noise is one o f
tlie most constant and m ost ancient symbolic modes.) Just as Stedman
Jones needs to tliink about the act o f giving, so I need to tliink
about the act o f ostracism , the expulsin o f the other, the ways a
boundary is set upon a nonn. In this way, a dialogue with antiropol-
ogy becomes an insistent need.
In the examples w hich I have given I m ust apologize for
216 MAKING HI STORY

drawing so exclusivcly upon English materials. T o attenipt a

translation into Indian temis would only be to expose my own
ignorance. I must leave tlie translation to my auditors. I have been
told that charivari is well-known also in ludan village life, and
that the ritual shaming o f riding upon an ass may still survive in
some parts of uorth India. 1 have no doubt that the ancient
traditions o f charity and o f ritual mendicancy in India offer
examplcs of social niediations which require more delicate retrieval
and more subtle analysis than any I have offered. And o f course
tire kinds of sources which we must use will be different. But I
suspect that both British and Indian historians face a similar
problem in the fact that those who recorded the evidence which we
must employ often failed to pentrate to the meaning o f what they
recorded. The great class distance o f the British gentry when facing
the common people of their own or o f other countries requires no
fiirther conunent. But it is often suggested that the bralimin
tradition also failed01L many occasions to pentrate all the
mcanings of the culture o f the Indian poor.30 To the British rulers
the defences of these poor were often seen as passivity or
fatalism. But within this fatalism there may have been hidden a
wisdom of survival: as the Chnese proverb has it, Do not help on
tlie great chariot, you will only get covered in dust, or, as they
say in north Lidia, Spitting on tlie sky falls on ones own
mouth.31
If we need this dialogue with anthropology, there are still some
problenis as to the way in which this can be conducted. The
equation comes easily to mind: just as economic history presup-
poscs the discipline of economics, so social history (in its
systcmatic examination of nomis, expectations, vales) must pre-
suppose tlie discipline of social anthropology. We camiot examine
rituals, customs, kinship relations, without stopping the process o f
history from time to time, and subjecting the elements to a static,
synchronic structural analysis.
Let us say that there is some truth in tliis equation. But it
remains a little too easy. Economics and economic history devel-
oped in cise intellectual partnership. But more recently emergent
social history has been offered (or, more often, has had to solicit in
the face of some indiffercncc) a partnership with social disciplines
 H I S T O R Y AND A N T H R O P O L O G Y 217

which are, in some prt^ e x S c itly h-histoncll; oile thinks o f tlie

influence o f Durkheim, Radcliffe-Brjmn, Talcott Pafsons and
Lvi-Strauss. Moreover, some social santhropology is also anti-
economic, or, more accurately, innocent of advanced economic
categories. That is, wftile it ikes in considerations o f material Ufe
af the leve! discussed by Priiafld BraMC,32 its traditional subject-
matter leaves it thin, and omStintes actively resistant, to econ-
oniies. But vve cannot wish to scc an advance in systematic
social history which is purchaspd only by tucning its back upon
economic history. And, fihail^ scdfe-^torvbmic istory already has
its own concepts a n d ' categories - and gpHong these, and o f
paramount importance in the M arxist tradition, the Concepts o f
capitalista, o f i^cology, and o f social class -vn$6h are hisfofical
concepts, atising firont the analysis o f diachronic process, o f
repeated regularities o f behaviour over time, and which for that
reason are often reSisted, and even Wijifu% ( misunderstood (as ilj
the case o f class) by the Synchronic disciplines.
This is to ^ n p h a s jz e . *Aa| while a rclationship niust be
aicouraged so c irj J t^ to iy , lit is ,
cannot be any kind o f relaftowshfl A fljiit party is *teede<|. as
inatch-mker, whose ame is gencrally given as philosophy. If we
try t bring pars o f the cKsiplip& |&gdjiik$r % jStiag, p blind
dates - introducing positivist e c o io > ire < ^ j|p o ry to t v i4Straus-
j^ian structurafising or M arxist historiograplSuto the sociology o f
Talcott Parsons - then we can be very sure that no censummation
will ensue.
This is increasingly recognized by rscliolars witlfn each disci
pline. But when we come to this point, we m ust cease to pretend
to speak for our discipline as a whole, and can only speak for our
own position within it. In aiy own case, I would have to define
my relation to the M arxist tradition. I could not use certain fam iliar
sociological concepts unless they were given, first, a new dialecti-
cal ambivalence: an act o f giving* m ust be seeit simultaneously as
1 an act of getting, a social consensus as a class hegemony, social
control (very often) as class control, and some (but not all) norms
as nccds. But, equally, if I w ish to effect a junction not vvith
social anthropology but with, a , M arxist anthropology I am
persuaded that I must abandon that curiously static concept, b asis
 218 MAKING HISTORY

and superstructura, which in a dominant M arxist tradition identi-

fies basis vvitli economics and afFimis a heuristic priority to
economic needs and behaviour over norms and value-systems. We
may botli assert that social being determines social consciousness
(an assertion which still calis for scrupulous examination and
qualification) vvhile leaving open for common investigation the
question as to how far it is meaningul, in any given society, to
describe social being independcntly o f the norms, and primary
cognitive structures, as well as m aterial needs, around which
existence is organized.
We may conclude by examining tls problem a little more
carefiilly. Historical materialism has, in general, held finnly to an
underlying model o f societies, which, for the purpose o f analysis,
may be seen as horizontally structured according to a basis and
superstructura. The M arxist method has directed attention first to
the mode of production and its attendant productive relations, and
this is conunonly interpreted as disclosing an ultimate economic
determinism. This m o d e l lias often been employed vvith great
subtlety by historians who have borne in mind such w am ings as
those o f Engels in his famous letter to B loch;33 in recent years
there has been rcnewed emphasis upon the reciprocal interaction o f
basis and superstructura, upon the relative autonom y o f elements
o f the superstructura, and o f determination being only in the last
instance economic. And there has been some further refmement
and qualification o f the notion o f detennination.
What is radically wrong, however, is the analogy, or the
metaplior, we start with, and also the employment o f too narrow a
catcgory, economic. M arx him self did not frequently employ this
analogy, although he did so once in a critically im portant sununary
o f his theory, which proved to be influential.34 B ut w e should
rccall that on occasion he had rccourse to quite different analogies
for the historical process.
Thus in the G rundrisse he wrote:

ln all forms o f society it is a determnate production and its

relations which assign every other production and its relations
their rank and influcnce. It is a general illumination in w hich all
other colours are plungcd and which modifies their specific
 H1STORY AND A N T H R O P O L O G Y 219

tonalitics. It is a spccial etlicr whicli defines the specific gravity

of cverything found in it.-15

Wliat tliis empliasizcs is the simultancity of expression of

ciiaracteristic productivo relations in all systcnis and arcas of
social life rather tlian any notion of the primacy (more real) of
the economic, vvith the nomis and culture secn as sonie
sccondary rcflection of the primary. What I am calling in
question is not the ccntrality of the mode of production (and
attendant relations of power and ownership) to any niaterialist
understanding of history. I am calling in question - and
Marxists, if they wish to have an honest dialogue with anthro-
pologists, m us cali in question - the notion tliat it is possible to
describe a mode of production in economic terms, leaving aside
as secondary (less real) the norms, the culture, the critical
concepts around which this mode of production is organized.
Such an arbitrary theoretical divisin into an economic basis and
a cultural superstructure may be made in the head, and it may
look all right on paper for a while. But it is only an argument
in the head. When we turn to the examination of any real
society vve very rapidly discover, or ought to discover, ie
fiitility o f attempting to cnforce such divisions. Anthropologists,
including Marxist anthropologists, have long insisted upon the
impossibility o f describing the economy of primitive societies
independently o f the kinship systems according to which these
are structured, and the kinship obligations and reciprocities which
are as much endorsed and enforced by norms as by needs.36 But
it is equally true that in more advanced societies the same
distinctions are invalid. We cannot even begin to describe feudal
or capitalist society in economic terms independently of the
relations of power and domination, the concepts of usc-right or
prvate ownership (and attendant laws), the culturally-endorscd
nontis and the culturally-formcd needs characteristic of the mode
of production. No agrarian systeni could be continucd for a day
without contplex concepts o f riglits o f use and acccss and
ownership: where are we to putsuch concepts - ina basis or
a superstructure?37 Where are we to put customs of inhcritancc
f patrilinear or matriclinear, partible or impartible - which are
220 MAKING HISTORY

tenaciously transniitted in non-econoniic ways and yet which

profoundly influence agrarian history?38 Where are we to put the
customary rhytluns o f vvork and o f leisure (or festival) 0f
traditional societies, rhytluns intrinsic to the very act of produc-
tion and yet which are often ritualized, whether in Hind or
Catholic societies, by religious institutions and according to
religious beliefs? There is no way in which I find it possible to
describe the Puritan or Methodist work-discipline as an element
o f the superstnicture and then put work itself in a basis
somewhere else.
However much the notion is sophisticated, however subtly it
has on many occasions been eniployed, the analogy of basis and
superstnicture is radically defective. It cannot be repaired. It has
an in-built tendency to lead the mind towards reductionism or a
vulgar economic detemiinism, by sorting out human activities and
attributes and placing some (as Law, the Arts, Religin, Morali-
ty) in a superstnicture, others (as technology, economics, tlie
applied Sciences) in a basis, and leaving yet others (as lingis
ta s , work-discipline) to float unliappily in-between. In tliis fomi
it has a tendency to move into an alliance with utilitarian and
positivist thought: that is, with central positions, not o f Marxist,
but o f bourgeois ideology. The good society can be created
simply (as in Stalinist theory) by building a heavy industrial
base; given this, a cultural superstnicture will somehow build
itself. hi more recent (Altliusserian) form, with its emphasis upon
relative autonomy and in the last instance detennination, tlie
problems of historical and cultural materialism are not so much
solved as shuffled away or evaded; since the lonely hour o f the
last instance never strikes, we may at one and the same time
pay pious lip-service to the theory and take out a licence to
ignore it in our practice.
I am o f course by no means the first Marxist to have voiced
thesc objections.39 Indced, the objcctions have now become so
apparent that one wishes that more o f ones fellow Marxists
would attend carcfully to the argument before sniffing the air for
heresy. A Iiving systcm o f historical and political thought lias
come to a point of crisis if its continued existence depends upon
maintaining an ill-considcred analogy. The question o f the
 H I S T O R Y AND A N T H R O P O L O G Y 221

catcgory of economics raises other questions again. We all

think tliat we know what we mean by the term, but historiaos
do not need the reminder that it is a tem of comparatively
recent evolution. Still, in eighteeni-ccntury England, oecononiy
couid be uscd to mean the regulation and adjustmcnt of all the
affairs of a household (and, by analogy, of a State), witli no
particular reference only to those material and financial affairs
which, today, we would desgnate as economic. If we tum to
earlier British history, or to other societies in many diffcrent
stagcs o f developmnt, we find that economics3 in the niodem
sense, is a notion for which there is no word and no exactly
corresponding concept. Religious and moral imperatives rernain
inextricable intcnneshcd with economic needs. One of the of-
fences against mankind brought about within fll-grown market
societj'i and witln ts ideol<ig$3n|% been, prccisely, to defme all
compelling social relations as economicj* and to replace affective
bonds by the more impersonal but no less compulsive bonds of
money.
It kfoIIdyS tliat econo^H categorics of extjlanation, wliich
may be adequate for industrialized societies, are oen less
adequate for understanding earlier societies: This is not of course
to arge that there can be no valid economic history of
pre-industrial or pre-capitalist socie^H but to remind ourselves
that the expectations and moivaHRs of the people who tlien
lived camiot be understood in nachronistic economic tenns. The
same problem reappears 'in a moreHubtle fonn witln industrial
capitalism itself. When Marx cbntested the dominant bourgeois
political economy o f his time, with its underlying assumptions as
to the nature of acquisitive economic man, he counterposed to
these tlie proletariat, or exploited economic man, who was
destined to become, through economic struggle, revolutionary
man. But while tliis was not the whole of Marxs meaning, this
deeply affected an economism in the theories and stratcgics of
subsequent Marxist thinkers and Marxist parties. These too oen
forgot the prior offence of capitalism in defining all relations in
economic tenns at all. And in fact we fmd that antagonistic
vales add to a general criticism o f the coimnonsense of power.
By involuntary chango I mean those ulterior changes in technol-
222 MAKING H IS T O R Y

ogy, demography, and so on (Braudels material life - new

crops, new trade-routes, the discovery o f new reserves of gol
changes in the incidence of epidemics, new mechanical inven-
tions) whose involuntary consequences affect the mode of produc-
tion itself and perceptibly alter the balance of productive
rclations.
This last may still, perhaps, be seen as a change in the
basis. But no such involuntary changes have ever spontaneously
restructured or reorganized a mode o f production; they have,
perhaps, brought new forces onto the scene, altered the balance
of power and wealth as between different social classes: but the
consequent restructuring of relcttions o f power, forms of domina-
tion and of social organization, has always been tlie outcome of
struggle. Change in material life determines the conditions of that
struggle, and some of its character: but the particular outcome is
deterniined only by the struggle itself. This is to say tliat
historical change eventuates, not because a given basis must
give rise to a correspondent superstructura, but because changes
in productive relationships are experienced in social and cultural
life, refracted in mens ideas and their vales, and argued
through in their actions, their choices and their beliefs.
hi my own work 1 have found that I can handle neither the
congruities or the contradictions of tire deeper historical process
without attending to the problems wlch anthropologists disclose.
I am well aware that other historians have long reached the
same conclusin, and that they have not found it necessary to
justify their enlargement of historys methods and resources with
this kind of theoretical disquisition. I have attempted this only
because it seems to me that historians in the Marxist tradition
have shown some reluctance in irthering this necessary enlarge-
mcnt; and it has seemed that this has ariscn from an ulterior
theoretical resistance, which rests upon an over-narrow notion o f
the economy and the use of an unliappy analogy. If I have
helped to identify where the difficulty lies, then my purpose has
been satisfied. lf not, tren you must fbrgive me for thinking
aloud.

Tlris is a revised versin of a lectura given al the India Hisiory

Congress, Calicut, Kerala, 3Ulh Dccember 1976.
 H I S T O R Y AND A N T H R O P O L O G Y 223

N otes

1 Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, California,

1975).
2 Brands Observalions may best be consultcd in subsequent edilions
(1813, 1849, &c.), ediled and enlarged by Sir Henry Bilis. Tire
lerm 'folklore' did not come inlo use until 1846, when it vvas
cmploycd by Williams John Thoms. For ils subsequent history, see
Richard M Dorson, The Brtish Folklorists & History (London,
1968).
3 Max Mller, On Manners and Customs, in Chips Jrom a Geman
Workshop, ii (London, 1867), 260.
4 The Past and Prejudice (New Delhi, 1975), pp. 8-10.
5 Tylor, op.cit. p. 273. Tylor preferred the lerm ethnologist lo
folklorist.
6 Max Mller, op.cit. ii, 265-70. Mller, however, was severely
crilical of loose and unscholarly attempts lo offer analogies
between Indian and European myth and cuslom: see ls Folklore,
a censorious review of W K KellySCur/os/7/e.r o f Indo-European
Tradition and Folklore (London, 1863)1 in Mller, op.cit. ii,
197-207. Inslead of facile comparisons (he arges) the mytlis and
tales of each continent should be traced backwards lo tlieir
original source in AryauMmtiquily, and tlien let us see how the
same conception and the same myths have gradually expanded and
become diversified under the bright sky of India and in the
forests of Germany.
7 The conventional Britisli academic case against folklore is restaled
(anonymously) in The Study of Folklore, Times Literary Supple-
m ent, 16 Seplember 1969.
8 I say English rather llian Brtish, since Celtic and nalional
traditions have (as might be expected) received grealer favour in the
universities of Scollaud, Wales and Ireland. One might menlion the
work of the School of Scotlish Sludies, Edinburgh University, and
the iniluence in several universities in Wales of the folk-life studies
pioneered by Dr Iorwerlh Peale.
9 The pioneering work of G C Hontans, English Villagers o f the
Thirteenth Century (New York, 1941) had no successor for several
decades. More recenlly, Centre for Folk-Life Studies has been
established at the University of Leeds. The signs of reviving inlerest
can be seen in Charles Phylhian Adants, Local History and Folklore
(Slanding Conference for Local History, 26 Bedford Square, London
WC1, 1975).
224 MAKING HISTORY

10 Sliab Lal Srivastava, Folk Culture and O ral Tradition (New Delhi,
1974), p. 8.
11 See, inter alia, Jack Goody, The Evolution of the Family, in Peter
Laslett and Richard Wall, ed, H ousehold and Fam ily in P ast Time
(Cambridge, 1972); Goody, Inherilance, Properly and Wornen: Some
Comparalive Considerations, in Jack Goody, Joan Thirsk and E P
Thompson, ed, Fam ily and Inheritance (Cambridge, 1976); Lutz
Berkner, The Stem Family and the Developmental Cycle of the
Peasant household, The Am erican H istorical Review , 1972; S J
Tambiah, Dowry and Bridewealtli and the Property Rights of
Wornen in South Asia, in Jack Goody and S J Tambiah,
Bridewealth and Dowry (Cambridge, 1973).
12 The Rem emhered Village (Delhi, 1976), p. 42.
13 For an inleresting late example of such condemnation, see H ostages
to India, or The L ife Storv o f the A nglo-Indian Race (Calculta,
1936), pp. 78-9.
14 In fact the full ritual of the public wife-sale probably was not any
kind of survival, huO wiis developed in the eighteenth cenlury.
15 C Phythian Adams, Ceremony and the Citizen: the Conununal Year
at Coventry, 1450-1550, in Peter Clark and Paul Slack, ed, Crisis
and Order in English Towns, 1500-1700 (London, 1972).
16 Robert W Malcolmson, P opular R ecreations in E nglish Sociely,
1700-1850 (Cambridge, 1973). See also the suggestive article by
Gerald M Sider, dursim as M ununing and the New Year in Outport
Newfoundland, P ast and Present, May 1976.
17 Keilli Thomas, Work and Leisure in Pre-Industrial Societies, Past
and Present, December 1964; C Hill, Tlie Uses of Sabbatarianism,
in Society and Puritanism in Pre-R evolutionary England (London,
1964); E P Thompson, Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial
Capilalism, P ast and Present, December 1967; Douglas A Reid,
The Decline of Saint Monday, P ast and Present, May 1976;
Herbert Gulman, Work, Culture and Society in Industrializing
Am erica (New York, 1976).
18 Keilh Tilomas, R ule and M isrule in the Schools o f E arly M odern
E ngland (Universily of Rcading, 1976).
19 See, for example, Michelle Pcrrol, Les ouvriers en grve (Paris,
1974); Williams M Rcddy, The Texlile Trade and the Language
of the Crowd at Roucn, 1752-1871, P ast and Present, February
1977.
20 E P Thompson, Patrician Sociely, Plebeian Culture, Journal o f
Social H islory (USA), Sumiller 1974.
21 See Douglas Hay, Property, Authority and the Criminal LawJ in
 HISTORY AND A N T H R O P O L O G Y 225

Douglas Hay, Peter Linebaugh and E P Thompson, ed, Alhion's

Fatal Tree (London, 1975).
22 The Tyburn Riot against the Surgeons, in ibid. pp. 65-117.
23 See Keitli Tilomas. Hisloiy and Anthropology, Past and Present no.
24, 1963; E P Thompson, Anlhropology and the Discipline of
Historical Conlext, Midland History (Birmingham Univcrsity), i, no.
3, Spring 1972.
24 The Historian s Crqft (Manchesler, 1954), p. 35.
25 Oxford, 1971.
26 E P Thompson, "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the
Eighleenlh Cenlury, Past and Present, February 1971.
27 See Marxs Sixlh Thesis on Feuerbach.
28 E P Thompson, ^ Rough Music : Le Charivari anglais, Annales:
Economies, Socits, C iviliSalit)^ Mars-Avril 1972.
29 See C Lvi-Slrauss, Mylhologiques. I. Le Cru et le Cuit (Pars,
1964).
30 See M N Srinivass self-critical comments on the limitations of a
Iiigh CBSte vievv of villagfc -SoeiStyH RSfnembered Pillage, pp.
197-8 et passim.
31 S K Srivastava, op.cit., p.
32 Capitalism and M aterial Life, 1400-1800 (London, 1973).
33 Engels to J Bloch, 21 S^jfeStfrst^lS^Bpb Mehring, 14 July 1893:
Marx-Engels Selecled Correspondence (London, 1936), pp. 475-7,
510-13.
34 In the introduction to tlie Critique ttf Political Economy.
35 For a slightly differenl translation, see Karl Marx, Grundrsse
(Penguin edilion, 1973), pp. 106-7.
36 See, for example, Maurice Godelier, Perspectives in Marxist Anthro
pology (Cambridge, 1977); Jack Goody, Production and Reproduc-
tion (Cambridge, 1976).
37 Tltis point is argued further in E P Thompson, Whigs and Iunters
(London, 1975), pp. 258-69.
38 See Goody, Thirsk and Thompson, ed, Family and Inheritance.
39 Raymond Williams has for many years been pressing similar
objections: see his very lucid trealment of lite problems of basisl
superstmcture and of dctermination in Marxism and Lileralure
(Oxford, 1977). My own objections have been further expressed in
The Peculiarities of the English, Socialist Register, 1965 (Merlin
Press, London, 1965), and An Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski,
Socialist Register, 1973.
 Left Review

The original Lefl Review was in thrcc volumes, the monthly

numbcrs o f which ran from October, 1934, to M ay, 1938. Casss
new imprcssion (by photolithography), which was published
thrcc years ago, has been conveniently divided into eight
volumes o f somc 300 pages each. A t 48 the set, this is 6 a
volunte - a safe enough price, one would have thought (at 1968
costs), to be covered by the purchase o f a few score sets by
libraries. The economics o f the case can be left aside: though
there is au irony in a review w hich w as kept going by a
fighting-fimd o f its own readers - and whose editors and
contributors were unpaid - becoming a commercial property in
this way. However, the purchaser can surely expect some
editorial effort from the publishers? A part from the caption on
tlie front page o f each volume English Little M agazines No. 3:
edited by B.C. Bloomfeld there is no evidence o f editorial
attcntion o f any kind. There is no editorial introduction. There is
not cven an ndex to the contributors.
This prescnts difficulties to tlie reviewer in the 1970s. It will
prcsent grcatcr difficulties to the schoiar in the 1990s. An important
arca o f obscurity is in the editorial conduct o f the review. L eft Review
was founded, late in 1934, by the novelist and critic Montagu Slater,
Amabcl W illiams-Ellis and Tom W intringham. (In May, 1938, a brief
retrospcctivc article associatcd with these thrcc the ames o f Ralph
Fox and Edgell Rickword.) Solo editorship was takcn over in January,
1936, by Rickword (him sclf a veteran o f the C alendar o f M adera
L eiters), and he continucd in office until July, 1937, when Raudal!
Swingler succeedcd him. Swinglcr remained as editor until the review
was, abruptly and inexplicably, closed in M ay, 1938. A new and more
anibitious monthly review was promised as successor: but no sueh
review appcarcd, unless (cventually) the more populist O ur Time
comes to mind.
 LEFT REVIEW 227

So m uch is at lcast partially clear. O ther m atters are not. Tliere

w cre sevcral refcrences along the w ay to the reorganisation and
extensin o f the editorial board; bu t the actual am es o f the board
w ere never published. R alph Fox chaircd a contributors conference
in A pril, 1935, and claim cd a circulation o f 3,000, b u t for th e next
thrce years thcre is no infonnation. T here w cre clearly sonre slight
sliifts in editorial influcnce. M rs W illiam s-E llis, w hose main
contribution appears to have been the organisation o f com petitions
w hich encouraged som e interesting w orker w riters, w as less
evident after the first year. G reybeards atnong us will rem em ber
th at T om W intringham took p a rt in th e Spanish Civil W a r (w riting
E n g lish C a p a in ), w as suspected o f (fem inine)T rotskyist contam ina-
tion, broke w ith the C onununist P a rty over its initial attitude to the
w ar, ad vocated the p rep aratio n in B ritain o f g u errilla w arfare and
helped to found the C onunon W e alth P arty. Tlie S panish W a r
severed o ther contributors frorn th e review m ore abruptly: R alph
Fox being only one o f seven o r eight m o rtal casualties.
L e ft R eview w as a co nununist literary joum al, th o u g h it
operated not as th e intem al o rg an o f a sect b u t as a national
review, in the p resence o f a n ational public, draw ing upo n m any
non-conununists am ong its contributors. T he poin t m u st be
clearly m ad e b ec au se tw o erroneous stereotypes are som etim es
encountered. A ccording to one, L e ft R eview w as an are n a w here
contributors v ented th e ir callow leftist ju v e n ilia befo re arriving,
by various p ath s, a t rep u ta b le anti-co m m u n ist m aturity. A ccording
to the other, L e ft R eview w a s a co n u n u n ist fox in th e la m b s
clothing o f th e P o p u la r F ro n t, lu rin g th e iiuiocent lib eris into its
literary lair.
W ith the w hole ru n to g e th er it is p o ssib le to see th e falsity o f
both stereotypes. F o r th e second, n ea rly all th e editors w ere w ell
known as co n u n u n ists (W in trin g h a m h a d bcen one o f th e B ritish
conununist leaders trie d in 1925), a n d th e re w as never any attcm p t
at the least vvoolly disg u ise. N o n -c o n u n u n ists contrib u tcd - one
notices the g o o d -h u m o u re d g rim a ces o f E ric G il an d o f H crb ert
Read - b ecau se th e y w ish e d to do so, a n d b ec au se they respected
the conununist ed ito rs en o u g h to w ish to a rg e in the sam e pages.
An e x a m in a ro n o f th e firs t ste re o ty p e b rin g s m ore interesting
rcsults. O ne is im p ressed , less b y th e nu m b er o f th e now
228 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

reputable and orthodox who committed youthful indiscretions in

these pages (there are of course some o f these), but by the solid
majority of contributors who evinced - and, in some cases, still
evince - a lifetime of conimitment to the left: and who, while
some of tliem may have broken at this point or that any ties
they liad with tlie Communist Party, never signalled tliat their
revolutionary god liad failed. Tliis is true of tlie editors: and
among contributors one notes A.L. Lloyd, Douglas Garman, Alick
West, J.D. Bernal, Jack Lindsay, Hugh MacDiannid, James
Boswell, Alien Hutt, Alan Bush, A.L. Morton, F.D. Klingender,
T.A. Jackson, Tilomas Hodgkin, Dona Torr, Nancy Cunard and
Thomas Russell. The settled tenacity with wliich some of this
group maintained a commitment, over thirty or forty years, to a
defmed political and intellectual position recalls tlie tenacity of
some eighteenth-century dissenters. or is this true only of tliose
very cise to the communist intellectual orbit. It is true of other
writers, who defmed tliemselves at other points on the left: in
the second number (November, 1934) Stonn Jameson wrote a
stinging open lctter To a Labour Party Official, from her
standpoint as a constituency worker, whose drift could be
endorsed by thousands (and perhaps still by its author?) today.
There were also birds of passage, o f course. These were not to
be distinguished from their companions by the brilliance of their
plumage, the originality o f tlicir fliglit; neither Cecil Day Lewis or
Stephen Spender contributed any of tlieir more substantial poems to
the review, and their lucubrations on the artist and society are
among the contributions one more gladly skips. or were they
wooed to stay and nest. The regular contributors fixed tliem, ratlier,
with the eye of the Teacher, now patronizing, now reproving.
Spenders (unimpressive) Forward from Liberalism illustrated that
the fact that the author has not intellectually come very far forward
from Liberalism is not duc to any insincerity, but only to
insufficient thinking, lack of familiarity with the basic wo.'ks of
MarxisnT, Day Lewis, wrote another reviewer, is still far from an
undcrstanding of Marxism.
How far, thcn, did a proper understanding of Marxism vitalise
the contributions of tlie editors and their collaborators? Left Review
did have vitality, pace, and stylc; successive editors handlcd their
 LEFT REVIEW 229

materials witli competence: the bold cartoons and drawings of

Boswell. Fitton, Holland and others emphasized hard moral defini-
tions; stories and reportage (James Hanley, Ralph Bates, George
Garrett) were sometimos too messagey but are generally well-
observed and economically written: there is a broadening interna-
tionalism - the reader was ntroduccd, perhaps for the first time, to
Mayakovsky, Brecht, Malraux.
AJI tliis is rnuch, and may come in tlie fnture to seem more,
when readers are less oppressed by historical hindsight: when
tliey are more ready to perceive the enlargement of sympathies
and the originality of themes (as compared with any literary
movement of tlie 1920s) and less sensitive to tlie bliglit laid
upon tliis promise by the encroachment of doctrinal Stalinism
within tlie review.
Even so, L eft Review was weakened by a certain staccato style,
wliich never paused long enough to I B down intellectual or
Creative foundations for the left. Few contributions were as long as
3,000 words: henee more substantial work was drained off else-
where - perhaps to M S t Wriling, or or the Fac
pamphlets, or to Unity Theatre productions. The most original
communist critic of the 193 Os, Christopher Caudwell, never contrib-
uted in his lifetime: any one of the 'J W les^fn a Dying Culture
would have been too long.
Moreover the review, like radical and socialist periodicals
before and after it, was continually under two heavy, unrelenting,
and related pressures; the pressure of immediate, urgent political
responsibility, and the pressure upon the editors of a loyal,
entliusiastic readership (upon whom its circulation and ftnances
rested), eager to offer imperious and contradictory advice. We
dont want so much o f tliis belly-aching psychology, growled
one contributor (a seaman) at the first L eft Review conference.
Left Review should become a kind o f working-class Tit-bits after
tlie style o f New M asses, denianded another. Siniplification and
again siniplification, dcnianded a tliird. There is a lack of
position, direction, purpose, coniplained tlie D aily Worker. No
wonder there was a note o f desperation in Montagu Slaters
reply to such critics. One o f the functions of Left Review, he
wrote:
230 MAKING HISTORY

is to begin to catch up the leeway o f forty years stoppage of

Marxist thcory in England. There has been a good deal of talk
at Left Review conferences and elsewhere about the uselessness
o f intcllectuals (a slogan less fitted to revolutionary thought than
to fascist lack o f thinking). W hat Left Review should say to
intellectuals is: Intellect is what we want more than most
things! To the intelligentsia: Be intelligent!

Slater, Rickword, Swingler consistently maintained tliis sense of

intellectual function. Tlie pressure upon them, according to folklore,
was not only tliat o f that section o f their readership who had only
the most limited utilitarian notion o f a review: it carne also frorn
the apparatus o f the party at King Street, which judged the
usefulness of the review only as an organising mdium.
But the pressures were within themselves also. As tire menace
o f European fascism grew taller (and as Stalinism hardened within
tlie intemational conununist movement) there is a sense o f growing
doctrinal inhibition in tlie review. Douglas Garman, a former editor
o f the Calendar o f Modern Letters, was still writing in early
numbers (for example, in a review o f Eliots Afier Strange Gods)
as if there were an argument to conduct, sharply, with precisin, in
the face o f a public. In later numbers commination against
bourgeois decadence sufficed. When, midway through the reviews
life, Herbert Read carne forward (reviewing T.A. Jacksons Dialec-
tics) to suggest, without the least rancour, tliat M arxist anthropol-
ogy and social psychology were in need o f development, the
argument was simply closed by Jackson: Nothing has been
brought to light in either feld which in tlie least shakes eitlier
M arxs fundamental premises or his basic conclusions. Towards
the end o f the reviews history, the appearance o f L.C. Knightss
truly seminal Drama and Society in the Age ofJonson was met, in
a review o f sustaincd hostility, by Alick West: A doubt o f the
relevance of Marxist analysis, not merely to literature, pervaes the
book. Knightss courteous and open reply to West, in which he
attempted to continu a discussion, dropped into silence.
The silence, perhaps, o f paranoia - he who is not for me
A psychological deformation which, with a great deal less
justification, is vcry evident in some sections o f tlie intellectual
 LEFT R E V IE W 231

left to this day, and which, more than anything clse, prevens
them from either developing their ideas or communicating what
ideas tliey have to an uncommitted public. What is interesting is
that the founders of Left Review, in 1934-35, very rarely used
this tone. Both Slater and Wintringham wrotc witli a well-
infomied muscular middlcbrovv fluency, while Ralph Fox avoided
doctrinal cant absolutcly and could 011 occasion (as in two
essays, one on monarchy, the other on a single days issue of
tlie D aily Express) vvrite with a lyrical, highly modulated polemic
- feinting, dancing, jabbing - reminiscent of Hazlitt. Fox was
surely, like other editors and contributors, a premature revision-
ist, who would have understood instantly and made common
cause with Wazyk and Kolakowski in 1956. Indeed, one can see
tlie battle-lines being drawn as early as October and November,
1935. Francis Klingender let loose a severe, abstraction-laden
doctrinal reproof against Slater, which, taking off from differing
judgments of the merit o f Tsaplines sculpture, escalated into a
general theory of Marxist art criticism:

Tlie Marxian critic must convince ^ th e abstract artist] that only

the class struggle pervading every sphere of our existence, only
tlie aim of the working class to establish a new social order can
enable him to find vital content for art to-day.

Tliis (and much more) brought the light of polemic to Foxs eyes.
In a furious assault (Abyssinian Methods) he unloaded upon
Klingender his pent-up fiiry at the whole doctrinal emaciation of
language and of sensibility:

Mr. Klingender is sure that the best way to help Tsapline is to

tell him he is a misguided bourgeois with a very, very naughty
tendency towards carving molluscs and fishes. I am sure the
best way to help Mr. Klingender would be to deprive him of
pen and ink for the rest of his life .... Where in all this
conception is dialectic? In this horrible jumble of rigid moral
and sociological conceptions, where is the idea of inner
development, where the real connection between fonn and
content?
232 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

lt w as Foxs last article for the R eview . ju s t over a year later he

w as killed in action on the Crdoba front.
Trese sevcre pseudo-M arxists, S later com m ented in the same
controversy, renounce life like puritan s. But, in the end, puritan-
isnr closed in. The reason is not to be attributed as the
pscudo-Trotskyist explanation now so prevalent and so fashionable
vvould have it - solcly to tlie evil genius o f Stalinisnr. It lay in the
actual evil o f the times. It w as not unrelated to tlrat generous death
at Crdoba, and to so many other deaths, in Spain, in Germany, in
Italy - round the world. From C hina to B razil, the Review
editorial ised in August, 1936, men are being oppressed, tortured
and killed for their opinions w ith a ferocity and on a wider scale
than the world ever knew, even at tlie w orst times o f religious
persecution. In the final year o f tire review the sense o f the
inrminence o f war, o f the urgency o f the tim es, w as all-pervasive:
the contributors were like men gesticulating on a raft which is
being carried towards the rapids.
In such a context the function o f the review simply as an
organiser o f intellectual opinin for short-term political urgencies
inevitably engrossed all other functions. Tliat kind o f political (or
human) responsibility was a sufficient cause o f Creative and
intellectual inhibition, even if it liad not been seconded by a
doctrinal sclerosis. Looking back across tlrirty-odd years it is
natural that one should ask o f L eft R eview . w hat lasting additions
did it make to the cultural sum, or, in a more limited view, to
the sum o f the socialist intellectual tradition? N o doubt the
editors o f the contemporary New L eft Review would - if tliey
acknowledgcd any kinship at all - shakc their litist heads and
answcr, very little.
But, after the first year, onc doubts whether editors or contribu
tors cxpccted to be judged according to such a function. They
looked, not back down a tradition, but across the sea to Germany
and Spain, and forward to the next World War. Increasingly they
saw themsclvcs as activists, mobilising a sector o f public opinin.
If this mobilisation could be shown to have bcen effcctivc cnough
to have contributed, at this point or that, to the ultmate defeat o f
fascism, they would probably have found L eft Review to have
fulfillcd its function The weight of this political urgeney was so
 LEFT REVIEW 233

grcat that it meant, for some o f thcm, tlie death or tlie suspensin
o f their own Creative identity. To recognise a conimunal need',
wrote Raudal I Swingler, is to be Hable at once to a claim which it
will be desperately hard and perhaps dangerous to answer. (It is
notable that editorship o f the review scems to have entailed, for
both Rickw ord and Swingler, a Creative intennission.) As for the
revolutionary socialist tradition, they were, increasingly, less con
cerned to affirm it tlian to preserve the human conditions within
w hich it could in the end be once again affirmed.

Times Lilerary Supplement, 19th February 1971, reviewing Left

Review, Oclober 1934-May 1938 (8 volumes). Cass.
 Edgell Rickword

I have never known Edgell Rickword well. But we have had

friends in common over the years, and have trudged on together -
a few files apart - in the same disorderly contingcnt of the Left.
Somet mes we have exchanged a few words.
I saw him most often, I suppose, in a pub near the offices of
Our Time in Southanipton Street. I would cali in, on leave froin
tlie anny (1942-43), in search of my particular friends, Amold
Rattenbury and (latfer) Randall Swingler. I doubt whether Edgell
often saw me. I was a nineteen-year-old in uniform, like half of the
rest of the world, and (on closer acquaintance) an exceedingly
callow youth, fiill of anti-fascist bluster and instant political
Solutions to every cosmic qucstion. Edgell would be talking to one
of tlie reviews contributors, or he would be squinting witli intense
concentration into the^fflH bottom of his beer glass - a habt of
abstraction wliich offered a defence against the importunities of
youtii.
After tile war I was three years older by biology and some eight
or nine years less callow. There was a hoppy year or two - 1946?
1947? - which I caiuiot now reconstruct accurately from niemory,
when I was around Soutiiampton Street once more, before I took
ofif for the North and drifted beyond itsj'ievv. There was some
snarling row going on within tile cultural appendices of the
Communist Party. In retrospect it can be seen tiiat tlie shadows of
the Coid War were closing in, tile radical populist euphoria of
1944 was collapsing, and certain administrators at King Street
were rehearsing for parts as local Zhdanovs.
Jack Lindsay was umnasked as some kind of revisionist heretic.
He had fallen on the 1844 MSS, was high on alienation and
rcification (which he insisted upon renderng as tiiingification),
and he had put Marx and Freud together in the bed of a single
book. Tliis book or another was (as I recall) withdrawn as
 EDGELL RICKWORD 235

incorrect, and Lindsay was denounccd at an enlarged aggregate

o f tlie W riters Group. I remembcr the inimense shaggy head o f the
antliropologist V. Gordon Childe, just in front o f nie, shaking in
fury at the general scene o f dogmatism. Lindsay tells me that I was
one o f tlie only ones to rise to his defence, but that - and all else
- has slipped my mind.
Tliat time produced one o f the sharpest mental frosts I can
remember on tlie Left. Vitalities shrivelled up and books lost thcir
leaves. (It was at about tliis time that the Party blocked the
publication o f Hamish Hendersons translation o f Gramscis prison
letters - it liad been discovered [we were told] that Gramsci was
guilty o f some nameless deviation). O ur Time was to come to an
end as a casualty o f the same State o f mind. Its circulation was
falling - as was that o f nearly all cultural reviews i the aftemiath
of war, when tlie inimense railway bookstall sales plummeted -
and the M arxist theoreticians at King Street decided tliat tliis must
of course be because o f its incorrect line. Entile Bums was
superimposed upon its structure, and King Street descended on
Southampton Street, ratlier as Laputa descended upon a refractory
province, letting tlie Island drop directly upon their Heads, which
makes a universal Destruction botli o f Houses and Men. Palace
revolutions were engendered, and the Party solicited the aid of
youtli, who, as we know, always have correct and uncomplicated
views. There was some strategy o f replacing tlie flagging od guard
of Rickword and Swingler witli a whole team or collective o f
youtli, and, for a month or so, I was nominated to this team.
I attended a disgraceful meeting, at wiiich Emile Bums
scolded Rickword and Swingler for their political, cultural,
publishing and financial sins and omissions. (1 should add that
the Party neither owned the publishing fmi, or had set up the
review.) Scolded in tliis way, these two immensely more wise,
more deeply-political, and more cultured men - men who were
heroes to me, and to whom I looked for guidance - sat
passively, winced, and suffered without making a defence. They
agreed tliat the falling circulation figures convicted tliem. It was
a slianiefiil episode and I shared in tlie shame, for, however
youtliful I was, I had allowed m yself to be made use o f as
part of the team o f uncultured yobbos and musclemen under the
236 MAKING HISTORY

conmiand o f tlie elderly Bums. But I was sad and puzzled also
that my hcroes liad not allowed me to fight on their side.
They liad at once lost all their custoniary confidence, wit and
vitality when placed in the fonnal posture o f receiving criticism
froni one o f the Partys snior officers. 1 felt - and I still feel
today - that Edgell Rickword received some brutally insensitive
treatnient, at more than one time, from officials o f the Party to
whicli he has rcmained so loyal; that the cultural consequences of
this kind o f dirigism e were very seriously destructive; and that
Edgell has been over-reticent about these episodes, from which
writers and socialists may still have something to leam.
I am sorry that my reconstruction o f these events is so
imprecise. I may do better one day. M y theoretical conclusions,
which may overleap the facts and which are influenced by much
subsequent discussion witli Randall Swingler and others, are ratlier
more clear. First, there was not only a fonnal structure but also a
psychological structure among Communist intellectuals from the
mid-1930s to the late-1940s wliich left us all lacking in self-
confidence when confronted by the intrusin o f the Party. The
political issues o f those years were so critical as to make all
literary or cultural concenis appears as somehow subordinate. Tlie
practical initiatives o f the Party and o f its membership were so
ardent, so fraught with significance, and sometimes so heroic (in
successive numbers o f L e ft Review in 1937, Edgell Rickword, as
editor, had to pay tribute to Ralph Fox, John Coniford, Christopher
Caudwell and Charles Donnelly - all o f whom had met their
dcaths in Spain), that this imputed a peculiar merit to tlie Partys
leaders and officials: the heroism and significance o f the times
invested a ccrtain charisma on them.
1 doubt whether, in Edgclls case, the elassie self-abnegation
o f bourgeois guilt and sclf-mistrust in the face o f proletarian
truth had much part to play. He had, he has, too strong a sense
o f cultural rcalitics to fall for that. But by the 1940s the stream
o f apostates was so ftill that all o f us were apt to recoil,
wilfully and unthinkingly, from the brink o f any heresy for fcar
o f toppling into the flood. And we had becomc habituated to the
fonnal rituals o f criticism and self-criticism - in origin an
admirable dcniocratic process, but one which had bccome per-
 EDGELL RICKWORD 237

verted iiito a ritual in which tlie criticism carne always from the
Partys snior spokesmen on cultural matters (Garman, Bums, Dr
Jolui Levvis) and tlie self-criticism was intoned by congregated
intellcctuals in response.
Hiere was, indeed, a certain obliteration of the intellect
inseparable from the Partys rehearsed collective fomis; wit,
independence, vitality, humour, were somehow displaced from the
agenda in the interests of an eamest and self-righteous sense of
political responsibility. The comrades, chatting outside the door,
or, later, in the pub, were always more various, more observant,
and more intelligcnt tlian when they had gone inside to pray. 1
dont say this as an anti-Communist jibe. It is just the same
today in the Labour party and the Marxist sectsJperhaps in
institutions of most kinds. But it was very much the case in the
intemational Communist movement, whose forms and ideology
were cloned everywhere, in those years.
What I am saying is that tliis small and shameful episode, when
Emile Bums bullied Rickword and Swingler, and when they - ie
founders o f the review and creators of a certain cultural moment -
responded witli vexed silence, can |VMniJBI|SJf)j' only witli a whole
set o f forms and also a mind-set within the intemational Commu
nist movement of that time. It $ $ a little shadow-play reflecting
those more grotesque plays o f selik-apcnsqlup cnactcd in the Soviet
Union and Eastem Europe in those years. Its outeome was
characteristically destmetive. Rickword and Swingler were evicted
from Oitr Time (they probably resigned with a sense of relief) and
tlie review, after a year or so of opportunist tacking, collapsed.
Witli its collapse a decade of aggressive cultural vitality on the
Le carne to an end.
My second conclusin, or observation, is tliis. Long before
1956 there were centres o f premature revisionism among
Communist intellectuals and others, who resisted the didactic
niethods o f the Partys officers, the wooden economism of its
policies, and the correct pabulum offered as Marxism. Tliis
incipient heresy was unfocussed, lackig in articulation, was
expressed as often as not in jokes and resistances, and we
identified our enemy far too loosely as King Street - a bullying
and bumbling bureaucracy ratlier than (as it was) a liighly-
238 MAKING HISTORY

articulated Stalinist clerisy. Like it or not, Edgell Rickword was

cise to one of the sources of this revisionist resistance.
He may not wish me to say so. He may even arge that this is
a case of misrecognition. But I and my friends among tire
dwindling numbers of tlie Conununist intellectual youth recog-
nized him in that way. It was not only - although this was always
important - that in every line that he wrote there was a more
mcasured cultural response, a wider resonancc, than in the abbrevi-
ated class taxonomies which passed for M arxist criticism, even at
times in such fertile minds as those o f Caudwell and Fox. It was
also, and particularly, a matter o f the Englishness o f Edgell
Rickword.
This is a difficult question to discuss, for two reasons. First, it
is paradoxical, since this national emphasis is not evident in Left
Review when it was under his editorial conduct: indeed, it is the
intemationalism o f that moment - and the sense o f European crisis
- which first strikes the reader. (With Our Time, during the war
years, preoccupation with national democratic traditions is more
evident). Second, it is exactly this emphasis upon national cultural
experience which a contemporary generation o f M arxist intellectuals
in England (but not in Scotland or Wales) most distrust and deride
in tlieir forerunners. Are we not told, and on every side, that
British intellectuality became submerged, until sorne moment in the
1960s, in a suffocating provincialism, and that tire British Left was
a vector o f the same insularity and chauvinism?
So that it is precisely within the context o f premature
rovisionism - the struggle for vitality and for actuality against the
dracin uniformity and abstracted intemationalist lingua franca o f
the Stalinist zenith - that the significance o f the retum to national
cultural resources must be understood. Fuller analysis would require
the painful attention to the denaturalized rhetoric o f such texts as
the Third Inteniationals lnprecorr or the British C Ps World News
and Views. The Conununist mind o f the decade 1936-46 was not,
as is supposed by some today, corrupted by the gross epistemologi-
cal errors of Frederick Engels but by row upon row o f Selecled
Lenins and Collected Salins, by absurdly utopian fairy-tales about
tlie Soviet Union, by sloppy Russophilia, and by the mediocre
productions o f idcologues o f the International whose mental
 E D G E L L R1 CKWORD 239

strategies and vocabularies were designed to evade actualities. The

Short History o f he C.P.S.U.(B), which was the fundamental
education text of Conununists from Stalingrad to Cardiff and
froni Calcutta to Marseilles, is a document of the very first
historical importance - a gigantic historical fabrication for the
induction of idealist and niilitary mental habits.
It was against hat which Edgell Rickword, Randall Swingler,
Montagu Slater and tlieir friends were fighting - against those
habits of idealism, falsetto utopianism, and the consequent evacua-
tion of actuality. Others will be writing in these pages about Edgell
Rickwords poetry, liis criticism, and his editorial influence. These
were, no doubt, his major contribution, his rnode of insertion into
his times. I wish to add a tribute to tvork which he may himself
have regarded as more marginal - his influence as a historian.
When Christoplier Hill, Margaret James and Edgell Rickword
published, in 1940, The English Revolution. 1640, tliis initiated a
major reconstitution of se v en ^ H S ttW iy historiography. It was
also a major step towards the apprqusSron of actual and complex
cultural evidence as opposed to preconcqji^S class taxonomies. It is
difficult to explain today, thirty-eight years later, the piquancy of
the title of Rickwords own essay: Milton: the revolutionary
intellectual. It proposed not only a revaluation of Milton (perhaps
the gem of Hills recent study), but also a revaluation of the
notion of a revolutionary intellectual which could not be so tidily
composed witliin Bolshevik categories as some liad come to
suppose.
Tliis essay has not been forgotten. What has been forgotten by
most conteniporaries is the remarkable Hcmdbook o f Freedom,
prepared by Rickword and Lindsay, first published in 1939 and
re-issued in the Workers Libraiy in 1941 as Spokesmen for
Liberty. Tliis extraordinarily ricli compendium of primary materials
was selected from twelve centuries of English Democracy. It is
impressive for its leugtli of reach (one hundred pages, or one
quarter of tlie book, precedes the year 1600); the diversity and
catliolicity of tlie sources drawn upon, bringing, witli a sense of
surprised recognition, unlikely voices into a common discourse; the
generosity of the editorial minds which called such diverse vales
into evidence; and the implicit intellectual command not only of
240 MAKI NG HI STORY

these various sources but also of tlie wider historical process out of
which these voices arse.
I think that the Hcmdbook o f Freedom was among the two or
thrce books which I managed to keep around with me in the army.
Certainly I knovv tliat others did so. When I left for the North,
aftcr the choppy year or two in which Our Time entered its
tenninal stage, I took, the book with me; I used it in adult classes
and in political meetings; it led me to new sources, and thence to
researches and work of rny own. In retrospect I have sometimes
reflected upon the reading that went into that book, reading which
must have gone on during the extreme emergencies of the late
1930s. If we look at L eft Review under Rickwords editorship, we
see an alert and infomied intemationalist concern. But it must be
that at the same time he was renewing his confidence in human
resources by retuming, througli his reading, to a more local
tradition o f democratic assertion and organization. In recovering
this particular English tradition - voices which were passionate but
never correct, spokesmen who made affinnations but who never
descended to concrete fonnulations - Rickword and Lindsay made
these energies available at a time when they were needed once
again.
The English Democracy which they presented was a particular
historical record of struggle and of practices. As Rickword wrote in
his Introduction:

Experience, too, bitter experience, has weaned us from over-

much entliusiasm for freedom in the abstract, for the freedom
which is the climax of the politicians oratory. We have always
been conccmed with freedom in some specific form, of associa-
tion, or from arbitrary imprisonment, and such rights have
proved essential tactical positions when it comes to defending or
extending the material conditions which really measure the
degree to which a society is efectively democratic.

Notice the stubborn avoidance of jargon, and the use of we, with
its confidcnt assertion of the continuities of an altemative tradition.
Notice also how the critics eye for the resonance of a word is
tumed to historical analysis:
 EDGELL RICKWORD 241

It wi be noticed how tlie word coninion and its derivativcs,

now so strangcly altcrcd in drawing-room usagc, appear and
re-appear like a theme throughout tlie centuries. It was for tl*e
once vast coninion lands tliat thc pcasants took up arrns; it was
as tlie true conmions tliat tliey spokc of themselves when tliey
assemblcd, and it was the aspiration of mcn not corrupted by
petty proprietorship that all things should be in coninion.

This insight, and the critical and editorial work which supported it
over the years, gave to sorne of us a notion of Communism with a
new complexity and also concretion. I arn arguing that Edgell
Rickword was an architect o f the conjunction between an intema-
tionalist socialist theory and a vigorous national historical practice.
Between 1930 and 1950 a similar conjunction was being made in
many places and in many minds: one might think of Hugh
MacDiamiid in Scotland, D.D. Kosanibi in India, Tibor Dery in
Hungary, even of Gramsci. In conteniporary fashion the insularity
of this national tradition may be seen only as a matter for regret. I
liave been arguing on the other side: I see this premature
revisionism, this resistance to the abstracted idealist modes of
intemationalist Marxist dogmatism in the era of Stalin, and this
tum towards coniplex cultural actualities, as a liberating nioment -
very certainly liberating for the critic and the historian, but
ultimately liberating for theoiy itself. I say ultiniately, for, in the
first place, the nioment appeared as a flight from a theory which
had become brutalized and dogmatic, and a retum to the direct
appropriation of the text of the poeni and of the historical record.
But the mind which retumed was not an innocent mind: it was
theoretically-infomied. How niatters have gone on since, and how
they go on now, is anothcr argunient, and one which is not yet
closed.

A contribution to a syniposium reported in Poelty Nation Review,

Supplement xxviii, Vol. 6 No. 1, 1979
 Country and City

The British new left was among the first o f tliis inteniational
family. It began in the mid-ffties as a strongly political movement,
taking hostile views o f both orthodox social deniocracy and
communism, and since 1960 it has gone through many mutations.
Tlie founding influences - such men as Claude Bourdet, Lelio
Basso, Wright Mills, Isaac Deutscher, the voices o f communist
dissent - gave way successively to other influences such as those
of Sartre, Marcuse, Fann, R D Laing, to tie rediscoveiy o f Lukacs
and of Gramsci, and thence to a highly sophisticated European
Marxist tradition. But if we are to understand Rayinond Williams -
and his remarkable and stubbom consistency - we have to retum to
the early moment.
Tlie British new left is supposed to have arisen on the tripod o f
tliree experiences: the communist crisis o f 1956: the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament, which enlisted onto the margins o f British
political life a new generation o f activists: and the far-reaching
cultural criticism of contemporary society identified with tlie ames
of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams. Tlie tripod explana-
don is much too tidy, but the influence o f Hoggart and Williams
was of undoubted importance, and o f the two, Williams was the
more important thcoretician.
What is remarkable is that Williams remains an influence,
outlasting changcs in fashion. He has never allowed faddists-
campus Guevarists, for cxample - to ruffle his socialist composure.
He has argued quictly and rationally, endorsing what is worthwhilc
in recent movements: the resistancc to imperialism and racism, the
necessary transformation o f acadcmic institutions and routines.
His work can be accused o f insularity: certainly it has grown
from avowcdly national cultural traditions. Culture a n d Society
(195X) owcd something to an od dialogue with F R Leavis,
surveying and drawing conclusions from a long nativo tradition o f
 C O U N T R Y AND CI TY 243

nioralisni froni Burke and Cobbett to D H Lawrence and Orwell.

His best novel, Border Counlry (1960), is partly autobiographical
and explores tlie contlict of vales between a railwayman from the
Welsh border and his son who cntcrs a wider intellcctual universe.
The Long Revolulion (1961) offered both a critique of Marxist
cultural theory and an interprctation of the history and sociology of
British writing, publishing, journalism: it concludcd with a state-
ment of the political positions of the (then) British new le. In
1967-68 when tliis movement liad fragmented, he brought some
elements back together and edited the M ay Day Manifest, one of
tlie most concrete works o f political analysis to come from the
British left.
I emphasise these works over his more specialised criticism of
drama and the novel because I wish to emphasise Williamss
importance as a political theorist. Tliis emphasis explains also the
unusual and unassimilated nature of his position in England. For
English intellcctual tife has tendeney to assimilate the
radical and the nonconfonnist. Tlie islands institutions, its modes,
its inliibitions against the vulgarity of plain speaking, its cise
intellectual cousinship, its traffic in favours and privileges - all
combine to produce a ritual B a a S S i^ B o n and accommodation.
Dissent appears less as discord than as one more sound to be
orchestrated in a sceptical, w orld^5R 3 consensus.
To reniain unassimilated is Rayniond Williamss special
achievement. No one has been able to orchestrate liim, and it is
apparent, after the last twenty years, that no one ever will. He
remains at Cambridge a plebeian rock sticking out above the
fashionable rightist or leftist tides, a doggedly democratic, anti-
utilitarian, revolutionary socialist. In the 195Os he was unfashion-
able in maintaining an open but critical dialogue with Marxism: he
was never a communist, and was perhaps cise to some of the
independent radical positions of The M onihly Review. In the 1970s
he has been overtaken by a fashionable and sometimes scholastic
Marxism that derives not from his own work but from Pars or
Miln. He has taken from the Marxist tradition a complex and
flexible sense o f capital as a process, but whatever else Marxism
offers, as philosophy or doctrine, he is ready to question.
A stubborn indifFerence to the reputable world is evident in the
244 MAKING HISTORY

fomi o f the The Country and the City, which considers changing
attitudes toward rural and urban society, niainly in England. It
ignores - and for tliis it has been disliked by some - the sacred
academic unities of period, subject, and tone. Williams discusses
tile tradition o f tile country-house poem, with acute attention to tile
poems tiiemselves; and then nioves abruptly to social history, to a
chapter of analysis of mortgages, entail, rack-renting, marketing, in
which the contradictory findings o f experts are worked into his
ovvn synthcsis. He discusses the images of anomie and alienation
clustcring around the city, and then shifts without apology to an
account o f trade unionism, town plaiming, local govemment.
This book is angrier, more impatient of academic evasin, more
plain-spoken than some o f Williamss earlier works. Tliere are
moments when he considers several centuries o f polite culture, of
its retrospective celebration of patemalist or organic country
vales, then exposes this culture to the scrutiny of a field
labourers experience and sensibility - makes an abrupt gesture of
dismissal and tums to musing on other matters.
The musing is that of a scholarly mind. But tile book is not
a conventional work o f scholarship, and whoever attempts to read
it in this way will end up only in disagreements and irritation. It
is the work of a moralist, wearing a literary habit. (Tliis is why
it cannot be assimilated to tlie dominant mode of Marxist
thought today, which as the Althusserians are busily telling us,
consigns moralism with humanism to the most treacherous
regions o f bourgeois false consciousness.) The Country and the
City belongs to a line which ineludes Burke and Cobbett,
Thoreau and Emerson, Ctdure and Anarchy and Unto This Last,
the cssays o f William Morris, D H Lawrence, and Orwell.
Williamss mind moves among whatever evidencc seems relevant,
regards history and literature as aspeets of mans experience,
reiuses to pcrniit questions of knowledge and questions of valu
and poiitical choice to be segregated in specialist cnclosures. Tliis
is, o f coursc, thinking of the most scrious kind. But it also gocs
without saying that thought of this kind is of interest only if the
thinker has an interesting mind.
This Williams has: but his style bears some scars from his long
strugglc to resist assimilation. He is rarely a crisp writer and he
 C O U N T R Y AND CI TY 245

can be a portentous one. He can iniply depths which he does not

always disclose; he is over-fond of the words decisive, in the
end, fundamental, and yet it is not always clear what has, in the
end, been fundamcntally dccidcd, since we retum, as we began, to
complexities. He is sometimos a little dcaf to other voices, too
detennined to stand aside on his own.
The book begins powerfully and witli conviction. The country,
tlie city - diere are few stronger sources of imagery than the
opposition between these: sometimes fomiulated as nature against
culture, as purity against corruption, as organic against artificial
society, sometimes as"rural idiocy or escapism against enlighten-
ment or against the city seen as tlie arena for every decisive social
conflict.
And in few countries has the country/city opposition entered
more pervasively into central lite#&iy traditions. In Britain tlie
worlds first industrial revolution was preceded by a capitalist
agrarian revolution. For generations, for centuries, money made in
trade or in the city was invosted in land. lt was invested, at the
same time, in status; and with landed status went identification
with a certain group o f supposedly rural vales - the vales of
settlement, of paternal authorifiK and care, of a bountiful and
beautiful mode o f agrarian production, and lesser vales of
hunting, horsemansliip, attaclunent to country crafts. Aromid and
witliin this repeated movement of wealth back to the countryseat
tliere grew up a celebration o f retrospective vales - indeed, an
entire way o f feeling - whose supreme term of approval was
od. ^Good Od England!
As Williams shows, tliis structure of feeling was supported
always by illusion. lt was the newly rich and settled who were
most anxious to be seen to llave the status of settlement. Ben
Jonsons idealised countryseat, Penshurst, reard witli no mans
ruine, no mans grone, was in fact a manor which liad been lost to
its owners by execution and attainder fifty years before the poem
was written, and had come into the possession of its new owners
througli court favour. Here we llave lands seized from the Church;
there we have the fruits o f court faction; here again of successul
conunercial speculatiou. But it is not only tliat the od settlements
and seats liave such ruthless origins; tlie illusion o f od and simple
246 MAKING HISTORY

country virtues can be sustained only by concealing the fact that

the rural gentry are pursuing tlie same aggressive capitalist modes
of exploitation - mediated by mortgages, advantageous marriage-
settlements, rack-renting, or enclosure - in tlieir normal agrarian
relations.
Tlie illusion, however, was so powerul tliat those writers who
criticised tlie inliumanity of these practices did so only by clinging
the more closely to rural fantasies. It was always the vulgar new
mcn who were coming into the country and disturbing good od
customary agrarian ways. From tliis there grew up an entire cultural
myth, in which approved vales always were seen as existing not
here and now, but as vanishing into a recent past:

Thus a humane instinct was separated from society: it became

temporarily absent, or as the good od people succeeded by the
bad new people - themselves succeeding themselves. W e have
heard tliis sad song for many centuries now: a seductive song,
tuming protest into retrospect, until we die o f time.

For the humane retrospective compassion o f Goldsmiths Deserted

Village this is just. But the myth, Williams arges, extended itself,
by way of subtle transitions, to an artificial moral view, from
which industrial capitalist society could itself be criticised. As the
city carne to be seen as corrupt, exploitive, atomised, so the
country was seen as whatever was not-city - and henee pre-
capitalist or not-capitalist. At tliis stage the rural myth becomes a
main source for the perpetual retrospect to an organic or
natural society:

But it is also a main sourcc for that last protecting illusion in

the crisis of our own time: that it is not capitalism which is
injuring us, but the more isolable, more evident System o f urban
industrialism.

To sustain this important argument it is right and necessary that

the author should move simultancously into political, cultural, and
cconomic evidcncc. Tliis he docs, and with succcss. I found his
cvidcncc most convincing herc when he was attending most closely
 C O U N T R Y AND CI TY 247

to tcxts - notably in his discussions of Dickens and Hardy - and

also in somc of his very gcncralised, sincwy passagcs of historical
argunicnt. His social history is thc liistory of a moralist with a
profound scnse of tlic proccss of capitalism.
At points whcrc I would arge with him thc history has not yet
bcen adequately writtcn. Thus Williams is right to question thc
mytli that tlie cnclosure movement of the cightccnth ccntury
displaced at a blow an organic pre-capitalist conununity. The
unenclosed open-field village at that time showed often only tlie
husk o f communal fonns, while the grain within liad long been
caten away by capitalist relations. But he overstates the case: and
this may be bccause our historiography still fails to give an
adequate account of tire breaking of copy-hold and customary
tenures, and tile effective demise of the yeoman, in the century
before tlie mximum enclosure took place. The previous contests
between the customary users of tjSL land and tlie new market-
exploiters had been very sharp. Althougli the enclosure of the
commons was only the last episode of this struggle, the petty
use-rights wliiqy j vem part of the economy -of the poor
and o f the highly. They were
seen as the last resource of an independence, and as such they
became a symbol and entered into mral myth.
But the repeated contest over commons were not mythical. or
was the feeling of a faced the loss of
generations o f tenure merely nostgBBs: i e was giving up something
valuable to liim Itere and now, albeit based on inherited right. The
defence o f threatened rights or usages is not necessarily retrospec-
tive in any nostalgic sense. Most radical criticism of society, and
especially o f capitalist society with its repeated rationalisations,
starts froni such a sense o f being threatened. The Luddites of 1811
were defending craft skills and the Clydeside engineers of 1917 or
of 1971 were defending established craft positions.
What was wrong witli this myth of rural life was that it
became softened, prettified, protracted, and then taken over by
city-dwellers as a ntajor point front which to criticise industrial-
ism. Tltus it becante a substitute for the utopian courage of
imagining what a true community, in an industrial city rnight be -
indeed o f intaging how far community may have already been
248
MAKING HISTORY

attained. England and tlie United States have different modes: we

have different woods to go back to. But Williams would see the
iHralidim of country life as a continuous cultural haemorrhage, a
loss of rebellious blood, draining away now to Walden, now to
Afglianistan, now to Comwall, now to Mxico, the emigrants from
cities solving nothing in their own countries, but kidding them-
selves that they had somehow opted out of contamination by a
social system of which they are themselves the cultural artifacts. In
a sombre late chapter he reminds us that the idyllic labourers, the
Corins and Mertillas upon whom the myth was long sustained, are
now the poor of NigerimRjvia, Pakistn.
It is not of course the actual emigrations to the country that
concern Williams but the intcllectual or spiritual emigration from
our own intemal cultural complexities. His target here is a certain
view of an od organic society which did central Service in the
thought of F R Lcavis, and which, at its worst, could tum every
contemperan,' problem into a lament for the loss o f older ways of
social life, older language, older sensibility.
Regrettably the argument, which broadens and becomes more
complex as it proceeds, appears to break up at the end. The
compressed critical become more abrupt, less supported
by texts. This makes me mieasy. 1 have no objection to a critic
writing as a moralist. Those who do object must discard not only
Williams but also Trilling, Orwell, Lucien Goldmann, Edmund
Wilson - indeed any writer who st*avs beyond the fences of the
safely academic. But the fkerary judgments must carry critical
conviction, and in diese final chapters tliey are too compressed to
do so.
There are other difficulties, Williams defines tlie capitalist
process so inclusivcly that it becomes difficult to know if there is
any cultural phenomenon of the past four hundred years which
could not be found relevaut to his theme. Capitalism, he arges,

is the mode o f production, which is the basic process o f what

we know as the history o f country and city. Its abstracted
cconomic drives, its fundamental priorities in social relations, its
critcria of growth and o f profit and loss, have over several
centuries altered our country and creatcd our kinds o f city. In its
 C O U N T R Y AND C I T Y 249

final forms o f imperialism it has altered our world. Seeing the

history in this way, I am then o f course convinced that
resistance to capitalism is the decisive form of tlie necessary
human defence.

T o this, and most o f all to the final sentence, I assent. But then
everything in four centuries o f literature must relate in sonie way
to this. Capitalism, like sin, is ever present; and if ficld labourers
may escape the moralists lash, since tliey are always in the last
analysis tlie exploited, every other class, and its culture, becomes in
some w ay contaminated by its covert or overt association with sin.
W e need reminding o f this truth: it takes us a little way. But
only a little. For we live in society just as we live in our flesh.
And it is within a more precise view o f society that discriminations
o f valu must usually begin. For if capitalism is the basic
economic process o f four centuries o f history, there has been
evidence throughout (and this is the challenge which socialist
theory makes) o f hum an processes that are altematives to capital
ism. W e have to go on to ask: vvhat fonn could a human protest
take against an ongoing, all-trimnphant economic process unless as
retrospect? And it is exactly this defence - o f use vales against
money vales, o f affections and loyalties against the marketing of
vales, o f ideaiised od community against new competition - that
we find in some o f the most interesting works of English literature.
Williams, for example, could have looked more scrupulously tlian
he does at the vales at stake in that central Leavisite text, George
Sturts W heelw rights Shop.
But the major omission in a book with this theme, is any
central treatment o f Wordsworth. There are perceptive pages on
how W ordsworth saw the city. For the rest, we have little more
than a comment upon The Od Cumberland Beggar, a conuncnt
based on a selective reading, with which I am in disagreement and
which does not come to terms with the central concern o f the
pocm: its radical assault upon utilitarian attitudes.
Williams offers his reading o f the poem as an ndex o f the
inauguration o f a decisive phase o f country writing. But other,
and no less decisive, issues have been overlooked. Williams has
not examined W ordsworths transposed Godwinism, his Jacobin-
250 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

ism of the primary affections and loyalties, situated (it is true) in

an idealised rural scene, which is strongly felt in tlie poetry of
1796-1806, and which institutes a far more decisive break with
the patemalist sensibility than anything to be found in Crabbe.
Even if some of the themes have been flogged to death, it is
still inipossiblc to examine that profound and contradictory
coniplex of attitudes we fmd in Wordsworth without some
attention to Rousseau, the idea o f Nature, Jacobinism versus
Godwinism.
This perhaps could not have been attempted in a book o f this
sweeping scale. For after decades o f Wordsworth scholarship, many
issues remain unclear. It is necessary to go back to the notebooks
and drafts of The Prelude: to observe how patemalist attitudes
excluded from Tlie Ruined Cottage were later stealthily restored
as tlie poem was revised for The Excursin. Without examining
such evidence one camiot understand how a certain tradition of
nature poetry could be a resource o f defences against capitalist
Utilitarianism - defences far more intransigent than Williams
suggests.
I find two other major difficulties in the books conclusin, but
these lie in the intractable nature of the problems being dealt with.
Tlie first is posed by Williams himself. If resistance to capitalism
is the decisive form of the necessary human defence, and if this
is properly seen as relevant to literary valu, then to what social
ideis (as opposed to rural, organic, and nostalgic ones) may this
resistance rally?
Tlie difficulty, for this very political moralist, is, exactly,
political. Williams was never a Stalinist, or was he ever much
attracted by orthodox Trotskyism. W hat he fmds discouraging in
the dominant Marxist traditions is their sanctified catch-phrases
about mral idiocy; their ambiguous assent to the progressive,
rationalising charactcr of capitalism; the stratcgic priority they
attribute to the role of an urban prolctariat, all combining to reject
tliose emphases upon natural process to which (with whatever
qualifications) Williams cvidently rcmains stubbomly committed.
Thus Williams is 011 the sidc of use vales as opposed to market
vales, and he shares with his own labouring grandparents a
sympatliy for certain traditional niodcs of human growth and
 COUNTRY AND CI TY 251

expericnce as opposcd to thc arbitrary rationalisations of adminis-

trators. But thc loudcst Marxist voiccs describe cxactly thesc
prcferenccs and sympathises as scntimentalism about rural idiocy;
while both capitalist and communist apologists are committed to
thc arbitrary rationalisations of industrial bureaucracy.
Thus both orthodox conununism and orthodox social dcmocracy
shared, twenty-five ycars ago, thc same intellectual priorities as
capitalist thought itsclf - a contenipt for rural backwardncss (which
could only too easily justify imperialist cxploitation) and a practical
acccptance o f the divisin and opposition between to\vn and
country, manual and mental labour. Such arguments were used to
justify Stalins victory over the kulaks, which Williams sees as
one o f the rnost terrible pitases in the whole history o f rural
society.
But to recognise this, twenty or thirty years ago, was to
recognise also that ttere was no social forc to which ones
aspirations could be attached. It was to be pressed back toward the
extreme subjectivisnt and fatalisnt which tlien, and for a generation,
doniinated our thought. The deadlock, he suggests, has been
breaking up in practice, as, following the Chinese exantple,
revolutionary agrarian moventents have, in the undeveloped world,
enforced change upon the cities: and, ultimately, have challenged
tlte developed w orld itself. But the deadlock rentains witliin the
culture o f the developed world - and not least within the ntinds of
an urban M arxist intelligentsia - which rentains assured o f its own
priorities. One objective o f this book is to help break this deadlock.
W hich leaves us with a final difficulty - not overlooked by
Williams, but the niost critical o f all. For we are trapped, as he has
shown, within certain structures o f feeling: the prevailing rationalis-
ing urban ntode on the one hand, the evasive, retrospective rural
ntode on the other. And you cant arge people into a new
structure o f feeling. W hat is needed, at the end o f this book, is not
an argument but a poent or a novel: B order Country rcwritten front
the authors new standpoint.
Perhaps an English canvass would be too narrow for this. The
cvidence for a new structure o f feeling is unlikely to be found in a
island whose peasantry is a ntentory and wltose beautiful country-
side is regarded in an urban consciousness as a park land to be
252 MA K I N G H I S T O R Y

maintained by farmers but to be conserved for urban aesthetic

consumption.
Williams tries to redress the picture by inserting a late
discursive chapter surveying writing from the former colonial
world. But the survey is too compressed. All the major novis of
agrarian life in this century come from outside the British Isles.
And even in the densely urbanised United States there are
traditions of writing which might have enabled Williams to define
more exactly the changed structure of feeling for Which he is in
search. One thinks of the first book of Thomas McGraths Leer lo
an Imaginary Friend 1 that record of the growth of a twentieth-
century poets mind, a Prelude in which the mountain shepherd (or
Frosts New England. wanaifigof Cumberland statesman) is
displaced by the combiT#Jgf8Ka and the conflictt of Wobbly
organisation in North Dakota. Tliis is a landscape, whether urban or
rural (and McGraths imagen^ serves to break down conventional
dichotomies and to MB&wM^feriences botli of exploita- J
tion and of resistance) undcr the continual wind of money, that
blows the birds through At the end of tliis book,
McGrath returns to Dakota from the city, with a retrospect seen in
a way whifsjj Williams P ^ B j^ p ig h t approve. It is not my past
that I mourn - that 1 can n e s g ^ ^ ^ ^ 3 |

- No, but the past o f this place and the place itself and what
was: the Possible Future that never arrived ...

For the past, and especially the rural past, neednt always be seen
retrospectively, in a lament over od and dying modes which, when
examined scrupulously, were never real. It may also be seen as a
vast reserve of unrealised, or only partially achicvcd, possibilities -
a past that gives us glimpscs of other possibilities of human nature,
other ways of behaving (even organic ones). Tliere are passages
of Wordsworth which can too easily be faulted by contrasting them
with the reports on Cumberland of the Poor Law Conunissioners.
For these passages could also be read as the evocation of the
future that never arrived, which offcrcd just enough evidencc, in a
rite of neighbourhood, in a tradicional skill, to fumish fuel for a
pocts imagination
 COUNTRY AND CITY 255

I dont think Williams would disagree. or would he disagrec

that his themes must be pursued far beyond bis own national
exploration. For if his material is largely national, thc moral
inquiry which infonns his book is not. lt rcmains part of that
stubbom , uncompromising clarification o f socialist thought which
historians will come to see as more important and more lasting in
influencc tlian better advertised products o f the intcrnational new
Ieft. Tliere is something in the unruffled stamina of this man which
suggests a niajor thinker. The very awkwardness of his style is that
o f a rnind w hich m ust always find its own way. The idiom is too
English to fall easily into intcrnational discourse; but 1 believe that
in tim e it will.

From the New Yoi% Review tf f Books, reviewing The Counlry and
the C ity by Raymond Williams. Oxford University Press.

Note
1 Swallow Press, 1970.
 George Sturt

One of my English teachers at school was strongly influenced by

F.R. Leavis and he introduced his pupils to tliis book. That will
have been (for me) around 1939. For George Sturt (1863-1927),
writing under the ame George Boume, was warmly approved
of by Leavis, and several of his books^B notably Change in the
Village (1912) and The W heelwrights Shop (1923) - were
conunended in the Leavisite canon, not only for tlieir lucid and
economical English but also as exemplars o f the organic
communitv.
For example in Culture and Environm ent (1933), Leavis and
Denys Thompson wrote:

Sturts villagers expressed their human nature, they satisfied tlieir

human needs, in terms of the natural environment; and the tliings
they made - cottages, bams, ricks, and waggons - together with
their relations with one anotlier constituted a human environment,
and a subtlety of adjustment and adaptation ...

This was contrasted with the mcchanical organisation of mdem

industrial society, in which work is meaningless to most workers,
merely something they have to do in order to eam a livelihood
and to gain some leisure; and henee the leisure, exploited by all
the rcsources of commercial society, is meaningless also. Raymond
Williams in Culture and Society (1958), while praising the original
and valuable obscrvation in Sturts books, contcsted the uses to
which the Leavisitcs put his work as myth, a late versin of
mcdievalism, with its attachments to an adjusted feudal society ....
If thcre is one thing ccrtain about the organic conununity, it is
that it has always gone. However this argument (which still
contines in new forms) is resolved, The W heelw rights Shop
contines on in its indcpcndent lifc.
 GEORGE STURT 2J5

But t is worth rcnicnibcnng that wc owe tlic rccognition of tlc

book as a classic to litcrary critics rathcr than to social historians,
and historians should be gratcful to litcrary critics for thcir
pcrcipicnco. Tliis accords wcll with Sturts own inclination. He
bccanie owner and manager of a whcelwrights shop, not by choice
but trough forcc of circunistancc. He always saw himsclf as a
writer, and tliis is abundantly clear in his journals 1 Also, at the
time of his initiation into tlic wheclwright's trade, in the years
18X490 upon the rccollection of which rnuch of this book is
based, he saw himself as a revolutionary socialist. Sturt docs not
tell us tliis, although there is a reference to my Ruskinian
absurdities.
In tile early 1950s, while researcliing a book on William Morris,
I was surprised to come across a number of articles by George
Sturt in the joumal of the Socialist League, Commonweal. These
commence with a letter (5 February 1887) deploring the attacks
which Justice and Commonweal made upon each other: a protest
on belialf of we Socialists in small towns or villages, who, from
our isolated position, feel especially the need of unity and
good-feeling. They concludeiwith a brief note on 18 January 1890.
lu between is a series of fiffigKalBfeonWHl^Pjr distinction, several
of which give the impression of being literary exercises. If one
looks for any closely observed passages on labour or on country
life one will be disappointed. The more successful pieces are
polemics with the comfortable anti-socialist lampoons of the time.
The Gatling gun gets a roasting? Think of it, you Christians, and
invest your money! For every dead nigger w p 1 help to swell your
dividends! (12 May 1888). But the impression left is most
un-Sturt-like: of a theoretic socialism, which liad little engagement
or traffic with experience. In a long letter (20 April 1889) he
referred to Ruskin (to whom I owe it that I am a Socialist) but
also declared himself an Anarchist, with strong sympatliy for
Communism. It is not clear why he discontinued his contributions
- or perhaps the editor of Commonweal no longer accepted tliem?
His last article was on 21 December 1889, recommcnding in an
overblown and patronising ntanner the work of tlie Ruskin Reading
Guild: tliis is not a thenie likely to commend itself to tlie excitable
anarchists who were taking over the Socialist League.
256 MAKING HI STORY

Much of tlie rest of Sturts Ufe can be read in the Joum als,
or inferred from them. He once claimed, in a letter to Amold
Bennett, tliat the joumal is the best book I shall ever write. It
is not. When he commenced it he was heavily under the
influence of Thoreau and, to a lesser degree, Emerson and
Whitman. It is curious that little direct influence o f William
Morris can be detected: in 1892 he deplored the contemporaiy
fantastic reversions to od methods and attempts to revive
traditions dead and gone, and instanced M orriss Kelmscott
Press. But Sturt was not at that time consciously reflecting on
traditional skills. Tlie charactfcr of the early Joum als is self-
consciously and sometimes pretentiously literary, and it would
be possible for an inattentive reader to hurry through the early
years unaware that the author was in the throes o f apprenticing
himself to a highly skilled trade. There is one sentence, in
November 1890^it is tru S which suggests the gem o f The
Wheelwrights Shop:

It has come to my mind, that an account, however scrappy, o f

my relations with the ni<ya at work for me would somewl^n be
interesting, - even peB t^p of some valu.2

But the book, when it carne thirty-odd years later is never

scrappy, and the entry suggests that Sturt was at that time less
interested in the work and transmitted skills than in his
nianagerial functions and of being a Socialist
employer of labour.3 His early Journals are largely made up of
studious exercises in the desflption of weather, light, and
landscape, notes on liis reading, and pseudo-philosophical reflec-
tions upon such topics as Art, Duty and Self-Realisation.
Tlie wheelwrights business is sensed, off-stage, as a distraction
from his literary vocation. Minor disputes with his workers about
time-keeping and so on caused him excessive irritation. Customers
were worse:

If I could carry on business without customers, I think I

shouldnt hale it (thougli I might get deadly sick of it). A Iow
mcanminded lot, always looking to take advantage of you.4
 GEORGE STURT 257

As early as January 1891 he w as trying to sell tlie business.

W hat began to change w as not the w orkshop but George Sturt.
Ttere are gaps in his Journals for niost o f 1893 and all o f 1894.
Thcy resum e in 1895 w ith a ntajor new character, Frederick
Grover, w hose recollections filled up ntuch o f tlie Journals until
G rovers death in Scptember 1905. G rover (or Bcttcsworth) was
an od villager whont S turt cmployed as gardener and handyman at
his cottage near Fantliant; he w as full o f convcrsation about
country lore, traditions and skills. H e w as S tu rts tutor, teaching
hint to observe more closely and also to write in a new way.
Arnong the fruits o f tliis new influence w ere The Bettesworlh Book
(1901), Memoirs o f a Surrey Labourer (1907), Change in the
Village (1912) and Lucy Bettesworth (1913). It is not too ntuch to
say tliat G rover took S turt out o f his self-preoccupied literary
niannerisnts and taught hint to listen and to w atch the world
around hint.
For Sturt becante an excellent listener and observer, as tliis book
testifies. Increasingly his Journals carry entries like tliis one
(October 1908):

My nele last w eek gave nte the following nantes for the
different parts o f a flail:
1. HandstafF.
2. Start (a metal knob or button in tlie end o f the handstaff).
3. Capping (a piece o f bent w ood fastened over the capping
(start?) apparently w ith a slot in it to receive the thong on to
the start).
4. Middle-band (the leather thong uniting the tw o staves).
5. Swingle (Pronounced w ith a soft g. This is the other
staff).

He was concemed to record in exact detail tools, tlieir operation,

and tlie materials operated on. Tliis took him into dimensions o f
epistemology which tlie academic mind, now as tlien, rarely
enters or even allows for. It is the formation o f knowledge, not
from theory, but from practice and practical transmission, from tlie
ground up. The skilled workm an is tauglit by his materials, and
258 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

their resources and qualities enter through his hand and thence to
his niind. The artefact takes it fomi from the fiinctions it must
perfonn, tlie dish of a wheel from the movement o f the horses,
tlie ruts in ie tracks, tlie weight of the average load. These are not
finely calculated on paper, tliey are leamed tlirough practice.
Sturt, as he records this, is always aware o f the wider
iniplications for the less practical reader. The skills must llave
emerged with tlie invention of the wheel, in pre-historic times;
indeed, some must have preceded this. Sturt plays somctimcs with
tlie notion of tlie memory o f tlie race and o f the wandering
tribes who first brought their skills to England. (His Journals, at
the time when he was writing this book, have many reflections on
the Group Life and the Group Understanding.) But at a time when
academic hubris has never been higher, it is of great valu to have
this whole mode of transmission and o f leaming - which applied
in all trades, including the skills of domestic homework, and which
still applies in many today - recorded with such observation and
truth. One leams from Sturt of the multiplicity o f skills which must
be acquired by a tradesman in any craft, skills often assumed or
passed over unseen in the single word, apprenticeship; as one also
leams of the many skills that must be combined to make a single
artefact, such as a fann waggon: felling and carrying timber,
seasoning, tlie work of sawyer, tlie work o f the foreman or
manager in selecting timber of the right kind and grain, the work
of tlie wheelwright witli his many skills, and then the skills o f the
blacksmith.
There has been, in heavy theoretical fields, much discussion
about at the point of production, a point defuied in theory but not
in observation. It is, then, refreshing to find Sturt at the end o f his
life, insisting upon the closcst attention to tlie Moment o f
Production, when the Crasman is actually getting his effects - this
Moment which has been at the heart of Village life or o f all the
labour of Pcasants - a moment (Sturt implies) negleced or
misunderstood by most academic minds:

At the very moment of change, when tlie effort actually comes

off and has its effect - this keeps the peasant more or less
satisfed, but superior people never experiencc that satisfaction.
 GEORGE STURT 259

The nionicnt o f effcctivencss, wlicn skill is changing the raw

material into the dcsircd product is alw ays worth rcalising.
It is monicntous every time ,...5

H iere is sometliing heroic about the writing o f tliis book. As Sturt

indicates in bis Pie face, he w as paralysed by a stroke in 1916, and
despite some recovcry successivc lesser strokes followed. Y et the
next ten years were productive, and, witli m uch help from his
unmarrcd sisters. M ary and Susan, he persisted witli his w ork with
much fortitude. H e w as confned in the niain to his bed or to a
cliair, his pow ers o f speech w ere inipaired, but until his final year
he could still w rite legibly. There is an entry in his Jo u rn a ls tliat
suggests tliat the m ajor tliemes o f tliis book w ere assenibled in his
mind by 30 January 1919.6 H e m ust have comnienced the book in
that year, and despite tw o m ore strokes in 1920, he w as writing the
last note to the book on 12 M ay 1921. O ver a year later he found
a publisher in the C am bridge University Press, but his constant
helper, M ary, liad tlien died.
It is a superb and necessary contribution to cultural theory,
social history and (in its upside-dow n w ay) epistemology. It w as
Sturt who m ade the best conunent on his ow n lucid style: all I am
conscious o f is the effort to get very cise honie to a subject, to be
very trutliful in dealing witli it, even to the faintest cadenee.7 This
conunended the book to sensitive critics, and it should still
conunend it today. O ne should also note the elegaiac mood in
which niany passages are w ritten. Tliis m ay com e in p art ffom
Sturts sense o f loss a t the passing o f ancient trades and customs.
And it also comes from S tu rts recognition o f the passing o f his
own healtli and strengtli. T he book, afier all, records in the main
his experiences in his tw enties. A nd m any passages - for example,
when he recalls opening up the w orkshop at six o clock on a coid
winter moming, or his visits to the w oods to inspect and m easure
timber - reveal botli the pleasure and the pain o f recalling lost
youth. As he w as confned by paralysis he seems to have been able
to rehearse past activities witli the greatest veracity. W hat might
seem to be things recalled the m akers o f those things and the
environment: the repairs to rollers are singularly pleasant to
remember, so suggestive are they o f surnm er and country roads.
260 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

When the time carne for repairs,

You felt as if you were on a dusty road then. For road-dust lay
in the wheel-track which the roller so closely followed; hot
sununcr road-dust rose in clouds from the horse hoofs and
smothered the roller. No doubt there was somctimes mud, yet
that was not what you tliought o f when you saw the roller, or at
any rate what I remember now.

So writing The W heelwrights Shop was a resource which enabled

Sturt to endure his disabilities and equally his disabilities enabled
him to find the patience to retrace all those activities o f his youth.
Cultural theorists may have been wrong to make an organic
conununity out of all this: testimony from other sources o f
evidence is less reassuring. But they are wholly right to see this as
a work of classical distinction, whose testimony must weigh
heavily in the scales of judgement.

Foreword to re-issue of The Wheelwrights Shop (Cambridge, 1992).

N otes
1. His Joumals continued from 1890 until tlie year of liis death, 1927,
and they have been ediled in two volmnes by E.D. Mackerness, and
pubiished by Cambridge University Press, 1967.
2. lbid., I, p. 62.
3. lbid., I, p. 127.
4. lbid., I, pp. 98-9.
5. lbid., II, pp. 879-80, November 1926.
6. II, p. 816.
7. lbid., II, p. 868.
 The Grid of Inheritance

Tlie essays in tliis volunie have told us a grcat deal about the
sociological fextre of given communities and about existent
relationships within them, as exemplified by their inheritance
practices. We nave perhaps leamed less about process over time,
slice intentions in inheritance Systems, as in other matters, often
eventuate in conclusions very different from those intended. If we
anatomize inheritance Systems in a condition of stasis, it is possible
for the mind to assent to a fallacy which, in our waking hours, we
know Very well to be untrueP tliat what is being inlierited remains
a historical constant: property, ownersliip, or, more simply, the
land - land wliich, after all, did pass on front generation to
generation, which is still there for us to walk over, which may
even carry today much the same kind of crops or timber or stock
as tliree hundred years ago.
Of course we know tliat tliis constancy is illusory. In land
what is being transmitted througli inheritance systems is very
often not so much property in the land as property in the
usufruct, or a place within a complex gradation of coincident
use-rights. It is the tenure - and sometimes fiinctions and roles
attached to the tenure - which is being transmitted. Perhaps a
little light may be thrown backwards upon what was being
transmitted by considering aspects o f the decomposition of certain
kinds of tenure in Englaud in the eighteenth century.
It is diflicult to estmate the proportion o f landholdings
govemed by copyhold or by other forms o f customary tenure in
tlie years from the Restoration to the mid eighteenth century -
tlie period which is generally accepted as the classic period for
the accelerated decline o f the yeom an. W e should remember
that there are two different totals to be counted. the acres and
the fmiers. It is not difficult to find, in the early eighteenth
century, manors in which the average size o f customary holdings
262 MAKI NG HI S T ORY

was sninll so that tlie acreage o f freehold or o f land subject to

non-customary economic rental greatly exceeded the acreage in
copyhold, but in which the total number o f customary farmers
exceeded the number of freeholders or o f tenants-at-will. Tlie
point is important, since the economic historian may find that
the clues to expanding agrarian process lie in the freeV sector,
vvhilc the social historian may find that the psychological
horizons and expectations of the majority of the famiing conimu-
nity lie still within tlie customary sector.1
Without attempting any quantitative assessment it will be suffi-
cient, for this comment, to emphasise that the survival o f customary
tenure into the eigliteentli century was very considerable: in very
many prvate manors: in Church and collegiate lands: in Crown lands,
forest areas, etc.2 It is also nty impression that there was, from the
1720s onwards, some revival of careul court-keeping, and consider
able activity in tlie field J^ ^ R to m ary law. This had nothing to do
with some unlocated reactio or R ith antiquarian sentiment. Cus-
toms of manors were scrutinized in new ways by stewards and by
lawyers, whose employers saw property in new and more marketable
ways. Where custom iqliihit^Hrack-renting, Siringe use-rights
timber, mineral-rights, ston^- peat and turves - might assmne even
greater importance for the manorial lord anxious to improve liis
revenue. In general agricultural improvement and the enlargement of
the market economy meant that customary use-rights had a more
valuable cash equivalent than before, if oqly tliey could be prised
loose from their sociological and tenurial context.
Despite the consolidation at law of rights of copyhold in the
late fourteenth and fifieentli centuries, diese were not of course
absolute. If copyhold could be sold, mortgaged, bequeathed in any
direction (although not according to the custom of all manors), it
could still be forfcited for felony and for waste: and it was on
occasion so forfcited.-1 Tenures unsecured by a will or by a clear
lincage of heritable descent, according to the custom of the manor,
could fall back into the hands of the lord. Where tenancies for
lives were predominant, as in some parts of western England, the
cightcenth century may have seen greater nsccurity of tenure. Such
tenures were copyhold (in the sense that thev were held by copy of
.1 , 11, i ,. 11 11. .. i -,,i il ' II n. I . . , .
 THE GRID OF INHERITANCE 2f>3

arbitrary fines at the entry of ncw lives.4 Perhaps such insccure

tenures wcrc increasing.5 Where fines were truly arbitrary this
cernid effcctively enforce insccurity o f tenure: thus at Whiston and
Caines (Wores.) it was reported in 1825 that the customary tcnants
have been copyholdcrs of inhcritance until within these hundred
years ... But for many years past the tcnants have been constrained
to fine at the lord's plcasure; and some to let their inhcritance be
granted over their hcads, for want o f ability to pay such great fines
as were required o f them, or to try their rights with the lords.6 m
other W orcestershirc nianors there is an evident tensin between
custom in the sense o f practices and expectations, and custom as
enforceable in tem is o f law. At Hartlebury the custom is to grant
one life in possession, and three in reversin, and to alter and
change at the vvill o f the lord; when three lives are dropt the lord
may grant the estte to vvhom he pleases; though the tenants claim
tlie first ofifer.7
But in general custom ary tenures in the eighteenth century
appear to have been falling aw ay through a process o f attrition
ratlier than through any frontal assault from landowners and the
law. (Since m any substantial landowners themselves liad an interest
in copyhold, through purchase or inheritance, the fonn o f tenure
was by no means coterminous w ith the interests o f the yeoman or
husbandman). I f the lord or liis stew ard could see an advantage in
bringing the land back into hand, eitlier to set it out again in an
economic leasehold or in anticipation o f enclosure, tliey liad
opportunities to hasten on the process. Fines on entry or on
surrenders could be forced up, based upon the improved rather than
upon the custom ary rents, and these could hasten a copyholders
career tow ards indebtedness. T he w ell-situated copyholder could
claim equal security o f tenure w ith the freeholder. But he could o f
course claim no g re a ter security. Both w ere equally subject to
those vagaries o f econom ic or fam ilial situation which could lead
them to m ortgage their lands and to heap debts upon the heads o f
their sons. A nd, w hen w e discuss inhcritance systcms, w e should
not forget th a t one o f their im portant functions in some peasant
and petty tenurial societies w as precisely to ensure security down
the generations fo r the landlords or m oneylenders interest upon
tlie farm ers debt.
264 MAKING HISTORY

Customary tenure is seen, very often, iii its legal sta tu s only, as
defrned as case-law. B ut custom alw ays liad a sociological dimen
sin also, and one recognized a t law in the reservation according
to the custom o f the m anor. T his can perhaps be seen m ost clearly
in the in-between w orld o f C hurch and collegiate tenures. Such
tenures did not have the security o f copyhold, o r can they be
regarded as tenancies-at-will. Tlie defm ition is not one a t law but
in customary usage. The historian o f the finalices o f S t Jolins
College, Cambridge, comments (on tile seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries):

For somc reason tlie College over a long period appears to have
acted on the assum ption th at it w as precluded from varying the
rents o f its estates. It is not possible to discover an entirely
satisfying ground for this assum ption. So far as is known it
rests on no legal basis ...8

But he goes on to show that successive Bursars found ways o f

overcoming their inliibitions from the first quarter o f the eighteenth
century; and the increase in revenue carne first o f all from fines.9
The reason for this situation lies less in law tlian in a certain
balance o f social relations. From 1576 (Sir Tilomas Smiths A ct
o f 18 Elizabeth) Church and college tenures were nomially limitad
to three lives and 21 years, witli renewals expected every seventli
year. Undoubtedly Church tenures, as well as royal and manorial
over-rights in forest areas, liad been deeply shaken in the Interreg-9
num. After the Restoration, the Church scrutinized all tenures and
raised substantial fines upon tliose vvhich were confmned. These
tenants, and their children, no doubt felt tliat they had paid for the
security o f a copyhold. Their tenure had (it was argued) by long
Custom become Hercditary, purchased almost as dear as Freeholds,
from the Confidence reposed in their Landlords of Renewals on
customary Tenns.10 But the security o f tenure was never endorsed
at law. Church and college tenures remained as beneficia! lease,
in which the right of renewal at a reasonable fine was assumcd
but not prescribed.
T hat fines became less reasonable after 1720 was a conse-
quence o f the W hig ascendancy, and the greed o f the Whig
 THE GRID OF INHERIT ANCE 265

b is h o p s .11 T h e raisin g o f fines o f co u rse encountered resistance: a

ste w a rd vvill re p o rt (as one rep o rted to S t Jo h n s fro m W indlesham ,
S u rrey , in 1726) th e H o n iag e insisted th a t m y deniands w ere very
e x tra o rd in a ry . 12 O n su c h a m a tte r th e hom age could u su ally b e
o v erru led . B u t to o v erru le o r alin ate a honiage w as n o t quite as
sim p le a m a tte r a s it m a y a p p e a r to o u r eyes - eyes w hich have
long b een h ab itu ated to seeing p ro p erty -rig h ts overruling functions
an d needs. T h e se w ere th e farm ers, la rg e an d srnall, on tie spot,
an d a d ista n t c o rp o ra te m an o rial ow n er found it n ecessary to w ork
in som e co o p e ratio n w ith th e m .13 T h e stew ard o f C ollege or
C h u rch m ig h t en c o u n te r, o n so m e m a tte r o f antagonistic interest, a
c o n sp ira cy o f silen ce arnong th e ten an ts. In 1687 an inform ant
w rote to th e B u rs a r o f S t Jo lm s a b o u t one estte:

I ca n n o t lc a m w lia t life is in it, I am told by som e tis an od

w o m an in S u ffo lk e an d b y o th ers th a t tw o od wornen have
th eir lives in it. T h e y p o ssib ly m ay b e dead, an d th e thing
c o n c ea ld ...14

T he B u rsa r w a s a t a loss to o b ta in tru e inform ation ab o u t m atters

in o th cr m a n o rs. W h e n h e so u g h t to secure th e help o f the
incum bent o f th e C o lle g e s living a t Ipsden, asking him to enquire
into m a tte rs a t N o rtlisto k e (O x o n ) in 1683, th e v icar w as tlirow n
into a p a ro x y sm o f alarm . H ie r e w o u ld be suspitio n and great
je alo u sies i f he w a s k n o w n to rep o rt to th e College: his affections
to the C o lleg e a lre a d y m ad c him su sp ect. A s to one enquiry:

T h is is th in g o f so te n d e r a n a tu rc th a t i f diere be given any

shadow o f su sp ic io n I am u n serv iceab le fo r ever, fo r it is the
m axim o f th e c o u n try p eo p le to be v ery silent to these ... and it
is in all v irtu e am o n g them , to be vindificative [sic] w here their
Interest is a fie c te d ...

Even to se t th is d o w n in w ritin g m adc th e p o o r gentlem an sweat:

I desire to h e a r th a t m y le tte r co m ed safely to y o u r hand, I slia.ll
be in paine till I a m a s s u re d th e re o f ...15
A rich b ish o p ric , like W in ch e ster, w a s better equipped w ith a
bureaucracy o f ste w a rd s, w o o d w ard s, etc., to deal w ith such
266 MAKING HISTORY

problems. St Johns (and no doubt other colleges) g o t round the

problem in the eighteenth century by leasing w hole m anors to
prosperous laymen.
But in the seventeenth century the benefcial lease still involved
non-economic niutualities, and even som e paternal responsibilities.
In 1610 Joan Lingard, a widow o f over seventy, w as petitioning
the M aster o f St Johns on a delicate m atter. H er tenure (described
as a copyhold) was by virtue o f her w idow s free b en ch in the
right o f her first husband. B ut in the interval o f tw enty y ears since
this husbands decease she liad m arried tw ice m ore an d h ad been
left twice more a widow. H er second an d th ird husb an d s continued
the tenancy o f the Iand, but in her w idow s right. She h ad n o issue
by her first husband, and now w ished to surrender h er copyhold to
her eldest son, by her second husband: h er son h ad convenanted to
reserve for her use a tenement together w ith other helpes tow ardes
my niaintenance during my lifc ...16 T en u re is here being sought as
descending tlirougli the w idow s right: p resum ably filis w as con-
trary to the custom o f the m anor, an d fo r th is reaso n the
permission o f the M aster and Fellow s w as solicited.
In the case o f beneficial leases, renew al o f tenure w as not o f
right, but it appears to have been difificult to refuse. W e still
understand only imperfectly the tenacity and forc o f local custom .
In a lease for three lives or 21 years surrenders m ust be m ad e and
fines paid for the renewal o f years or lives w ith regularity. I f the
renewal was left over for m ore th an seven years, the fine w as
raised in proportion. The balance betw een custom and co u rtesy here
is illustrated by a letter to the College in 1630 from an od student
o f St Johns, soliciting charity for a poor w idow , his ow n
kinswoinan. She w as the relict o f a tenant whose loase w as w ithin
four years o f expiry, and she doubted w hethcr the C ollege w ould
renew bccause o f the tardy application. Pcradventure, her kin sm an
wrote, you may thinke that hir husband and his son, both now
with God, had noc purposc to be suitors to your Colledgc in
renewing thcirc lease in regard they detractcd and let thcir lease
wearc out alniost to the stum ps. But (he cxplaincd) her husband
had had a lingcring illncss, had left debts, and six sniall children;
while the son - a sevcnth child - had cnjoyed only one y e a r's
tenure, during which time he had settlcd his father's debts, and
 tlicn limisclf dicd, leaving a widow and three childrcn in his tum.
The widow so circunistanced could clearly not pay the high fine
due at a point so cise to the expiry of the lease. The charity of
the Master and Fellows was invoked, in the ame of the vowes
and prayers of widdovvcs and fathcrlcs childrcn. 17
In theory beneficial Icases could be allowed to run out,
unrenevvcd, and the Church or collcgiate owncr could bring all
back into its own hands, in ordcr to lease the land out once again
at its improvcd or market valu. This did happen on occasion,
vvhere only a few tenants were involved.18 But it entailed an
inunediate loss of revenue - the existingHves and leases must be
run through, and meanwhile ThCTe would be no revenue from
fines.111 Tliis required an a rich one
witli several rnanors in hand. It also required an expansionist
agriculture in which suitable new tenants, with capital on hand,
were available. Morco vqrs wherelrights in usufruct extended over
conunon Iands ~ and flus includcd upon ficlds held in severalty but
over which lanunas grazing rights existed, etc. - the tenants, if
tliey briefed a good lawyer, could prevent the manorial owner from
eutering into his land until ie last lease had fallen in. For the
inheritance which we hagM igre is that of conununal usc-rights,
govemed by the custgmj o f secured at law. When
tlie College detemiined to regain possession of one manor in 1700,
it was advised that this could mofBM fftgljy? until the death of the
last survivor - namely the l i^ H th e n in beit and the last
widdowe ... Serjeant Wright o f the Temple added: The Tenants
must now spit on th eir hands and live as long as they can, and the
estafes will be good to tliem to the end of the last life and
widdows estte ...20 Only then could the College accomplish its
proposed rationalization, reletting the land at economic leases for
21 years.
By the early eighteenth century we have the sense tliat tliere
was a deepening (albeit submerged and confused) conflict as to tlie
very nature o f landed property, a widening gap between definitions
at law and in local custom - and by custom I do not mean only
what die custunial may say but the denser reality of social practice.
In Berkshire and in Hanipshire in the 1720s, conflict over turves,
grazing, tnber-rights and over the raids by deer upon the fanners
268 MAKING HI S T ORY

com, contributed to episodes o f armed disturbance.21 But my point,

in this comnient, is only to emphasize that it is not helpful to
discuss inlieritance systems unless we keep always in mind what it
is that is being inherited^H* we refer vaguely to Iand then at once
anachronistic images spring to mind o f the patrimonial farm, with
its ancient olives or its well-drained pastures, laboriously-built
sheepfolds or dNreading oaks. But in many of the farming systems
under consideration inlieritance o f tenure was not so much the
passage of land from one gcncration to the next (although certain
closes and tenements might so pass) as the inlieritance o f use-rights
over land (sometimes inlierited only as security upon debt), some
of whicOrights might be held in severalty, much of which was
subject to a t ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ ^ m a u n a l and manorial control and
regulatio ^ Q
Tliere is social psychology. The farmer,
confronted with in different lands, and with
prescribed stints in the connnons, did not (one supposes) feel
fiercely that he owneii this land, that it was his. What he inherited
was a place within the hierarchy o f use-rights; the right to send his
beasts, with a follower, down the lane-sides, to tether his horse in
the sykes or on the baulks, the right to unloose his stock for
laminas grazing, or for the cottager the right to glean and to get
away with |gjnt: timber-foraging and casual grazing. Alt this made
up into a delicatc aguaran equilibriuni. It depended not only upon
the inlierited right tm tajS upon fhe inlierited grid of customs and
Controls within which tliat right was exercised. This customary grid
was as intrinsic to inheritance as tlie grid o f banking and of the
stock exchangc is to the inheritance of money. Indeed one could
say that the beneficiary inlierited both his right and the grid within
which it was effectual: henee he must inherit a certain kind of
social or cominunal psychology of owncrship: the property not of
his family but of his-family-within-the-commune.
Tlius alongside the Cartesian logic of differing inheritance
systems we must place the complementary logic of diffbring
agrarian prcticos and tenures: and then assess the impact of the
logic of the market, of capitalist agrarian practices. For what my
seattered Uustrations of the operation of some tcnurial systcm
shows, at the point of dccomposition, is (1) the rcification of
 THE G R I D OF I N H E R I T A N C E 269

use-right and its divorce from the actuality o f use. An od woman

w hose dcath m ay be concealed is a property, albeit o f uncertain
valu. Stints, abandoned messuages and tenements to which com-
m on rights are attachcd, the reversin o f lives, may be bought and
sold, independent o f tlie user, ju st as dove-cots or pig-styes may be
bought and sold for the burgage-rights attachcd to tliem. (2) The
grid itself w hich validates the excrcise o f thcsc rights is becoming
increasingly insecure. The reifcation o f the rights o f some may
m ean in p ractice the limitation o f tlie rights o f the rest o f the
community. In extrem e cases the manorial owner may be able to
extinguish tlie grid w ithout recourse to enclosure, although if his
custom ary tenants know their law and have tlie stomach and purses
to take recourse to it, the grid will survive as long as the last
surviving custom ary tenant or his widow. As the grid becomes
threatened, tlie sm all m an (the copyholder or the freeholder with
conunon riglits appurtenant) m ust calclate his advantages. Enclo
sure m ay bring absolute freehold heritable rights, as well as the
extinction o f som e petty custom ary claims over their land by the
poor. B ut it m ay also threaten the equilibrium o f crop and stock, in
which the od grid carried m any advantages. Some o f these
advantages w ere those sanctioned in practice in the village,
although tliey could not be sustained at law.22 (3) There is some
evidcnce o f the breaking-apart in the seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries o f the agrarian inheritance System (conceived
o f as a body o f rules enshrined in case-law) and the received
customary traditions and practices o f the village.
This breaking-apart lay along the lines o f socio-economic
cleavage, between the greater and the lesser rights o f usage.
Kerridge has identified the advance o f capitalist process with
greater security o f tenure:

To assert that capitalism throve on unjust expropriations is a

monstrous and m alicious slander. Security o f property and tenure
answered capitalism 's first and m ost heartfelt need. Where
insecurity reigned, it w as because o f the absence, not o f the
advent o r presence o f capitalism .23

No doubt, for tenures and rights o f substance, the judgement is

270 MAKING HI STORY

true. But to tlie degree that substantial usages were defmed and
secured, the insubstantial usages were disallowed. Kerridge (and
many others) step bravely into a self-fiilfilling argument, whose
premisos are cntailed in its conclusions. Those usages which the
law subsequently endorsed and secured as rights (such as heritable
copyhold) are seen as genuine and lawfiil usages, those usages
which the law subsequently disallowed are seen as pretended rights
or illicit intrusions upon the rights o f others. And yet it was the
law itself which allowed one and disallowed the other; for it was
the law which served as a superb instrument for enforcing the
reification of right and for tearing down the remnants o f the
threadbare conununal grid. At the outset o f the seventeenth century
the judgement in Gatewards Case both confmned the customary
rights o f copyholders and disallowed those o f vaguer categories -
inhabitants, residents: if the latter were to be allowed their
claims upon use-rights, then no improvements can be made in any
wastes 24 But still in many areas indefinite rights o f inhabitants
prevailed until demographic pressure or the realities o f local power
resulted in their extinguishment or their tighter regulation by
by-law. In many forest areas - among them Windsort the New
Forest, the Forest of Dean - large and ill-defmed rights were
claimed throughout the eighteentli century, and they appear to have
bcen effectively exercised.25 How far this situation obtained de
pended upon factors peculiar to each regin and each manor 26 But
where the appeal was made to law the decisions moved in one
direction: that of reification and limitation.
Copyhold itself, as an alienable property with a cashable
monetary cquivalent, liad bcen very widely secured by tlie sixteenth
century, partly bccause many men of substantial property and
interest liad a stake in this kind of tcnure themselves. During the
eighteentli century it bccame of more evident advantage to such
men to bring into their own liands messuages which would carry at
enclosure, substantial common-right vales. But as the indefinite
rights of the poor were exeluded, so what may be called the
fringe-benefits of the conununal grid were extinguished. In a
Chanccry decisin of 1741 an indefinite claim by occupants to
enjoy the right of turbary was disallowed in the tradition of
Gateward's Case: the claim was found to be a very grcat
 T H E G R I D OF I N H E R I T A N C E 271

absurdity, for an occupant. who is no more than a tcnant at will,

can never have a right to take away the soil of the lord.22 Similar
judgemcnts extended ovcr other fringe rights. In 1788 the claim of
poor, necessitous and indigcnd houscholdcrs in Whaddon (Bucks.)
to take dead wood in the local coppice was disallowcd sincc there
is no limitation ... the dcscription of poor houscholdcr is too vague
and uncertain ...28 Tlie famous decisin against gleaning in the
same year did not of coursc extinguish (unlcss here and there) the
practice o f gleaning. What it did was to extinguish the claim of
tlie villagers to glean as o f right, even though that right may be
seen clearly defined in dozens o f early manorial by-laws.29 Henee,
at a stroke o f the pen, a most ancient use-right was decreed to be
uncasliable at law - might one use such an ugly concept as
reified?
Tliis law evolved from a Baconian and not a Cartesian mind. It
is a law which resisted (as Blackstone proclaimed with proud
chauvinism)30 the influence o f Justinian and of the revival of
Romn law in general. Its precedents were piecemeal: it evolved
with empirical caution. But behind tliis empirical evolution one
may detect the no-less-Cartesian logic of capitalist evolution.
Cokes decisin in Gatewards Case rested less upon legal than
upon economic logic - no improvements can be made in any
wastes . The judges sought to reduce use-rights to an equivalent in
things or in money, and henee to bring tiiem within the universal
currency o f capitalist definitions o f ownersliip. Property must be
made palpable, loosed for the market from its uses and from its
social situation, made capable o f being hedged and fenced, of being
owned quite independently o f any grid o f custom or of mutuality.
As between substantial rights, and even as between the greater and
the lesser o f such rights, the law was impartial: it was tender of
property o f whatever degree. What it abhorred was an indefinite
sociological praxis, a coincidence o f several use-rights, unreified
usages. And this English law, following upon the heels of the
Pilgrim Fathers and o f the John Company, attempted to reify and
transate into temis o f palpable property ownership tlie customs and
usages o f wliole peoples which had inherited communal grids of a
totally difFerent character.
The consequences in tliese cases were far-reaching. The bearing
 272 MAKING HISTORY

upon the problem o f inlieritance in England w as more subtle. Any

system o f impartible inheritance in an agrarian system which has
ceased to expand m ust be subject to a delicate demographic equilib-
rium. Tlie fringe-benefits o f tlie grid are not tliings distinct from the
transmitted tenurial rights. Some laxness in the defmition o f rights of
grazing, gleaning, firing, etc., can help to support the sons who do not
inherit tenures, stock and implements. W ith tliese benefits extin-
guished, the excess population m ay be reduced to a landless prole-
tariat or ejected like lemmings from the community. One need not
propose a simple typological model o f a sw apping equilibrium, one
son inlieriting, one daughter m arried to a tenant or freeholder, half a
son or daughter remaining to be provided for. It is rather that we have
to take the total context together; the inheritance customs, tlie
actuality o f w hat w as being inherited, the character o f the economy,
die manorial by-laws or field regulations, the poor law. I f in the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries younger children sometimes inlierited
beasts or implements (but no land) w e m ust assum e that tliey
expected access to land somehow. I f (as I suppose) in the same
centuries communal agrarian regulation becam e tighter, excluding
those without land from certain unacknowledged but practised graz
ing rig h tsp th e n to the same degree w hat die occupier inlierited
became better, w hat the younger child liad left to him became worse.
Tlie yeoman is advantaged: it is less easy for his brother to make do
as a husbandman or a craftsm an with a few sheep and a cow on the
conmion. W hat m atters tlien becomes the inlieritance o f capital, for
both land and stints on the conmion m ay still be rented.
In certain areas, such as forests, die fringe-benefits m ay be so large
as to afford a livelihood o f sorts for m any younger brodiers, and even
iimnigrants. This will also be so in areas where a scanty agrarian
income m ay be supplemented by developing domestic industries and
crafts. Such areas, one might suppose, favoured practices o f partible
inlieritance - practices which caimot be deduced from the registration
o f tenures in the court-roll. The successor who enters upon tiie tenure
may be seen (from the evidence o f the will) to be acting as trustee for
tile widow 31 or, as trustee for the children whose portions are to be
divided share and share alike.32 Form s may grow up whereby die
lives in being 33 or reversionary 34 entered in tiie court-roll are
fictitious. The actual practices o f inlieritance, as evidenced by vvills,
 THE GRID OF I N H E R I T A N C E 273

may be conipletely at odds with the recited customs of the manor;

and cven where custoni specifically enforced the impattibility of a
tenure, devices could be arranged to circumvent custom.35
In Windsor Forest in the early ycars of the eighteenth century
ttere is a little evidence o f such practices of partible inheritance.36
Percy Hatch, a yeornan o f Winkfield, witli about 70 acres (niostly in
freehold) sought in 1727 to benet his four sons and a ntarried
daughter.37
In tliis (p. 344) the oldest son is clearly advantaged, although the
other sons receive sonie nioney in compensation. The second son,
who is charged vvith his sisters dowry, is also advantaged, but as

Hotos? Land Furniture Money

lst Son Messuage & IV A acres & Furnace

Fannltouse, 4 dotes of Clotlves- press
Suniertons landjj^l Biggest spit
conunon felds Malt ntill

2nd Son Messuage & c. 14 tps. 30

Fannhoue,
Berkshire
House

3rd Son - 11 acres - 20

4tli Son 11 acres Is executor and

has residue of
estte

Daughter - - Best cliest of a

drawers

3 The daughter was ntarried to a substantial famer. The second son

was cliarged to pay 60 to her husband. This presuntably was her
dowiy, but it is not clear w hether this debt was her settlement in
part or in iull.
 m a k i n g h i s t o r y
274

betwccn thc second, third and fo u rth th e re is clearly som e notional

scnse o f equality. Eleven acres o f p o o r land m ight seem inadequate
for a lvelihood: but W inkfield, an extensive p arish in the heart o f the
forest, enjoyed large grazing rights, for sheep as w ell as cattle,38
substantial (if contested) rights o f tu rb a ry , access to tim ber, as well as
brick-kilns (perhaps this explains the fu m ac e? ) an d a little forest
industry. There were several branches o f th e H atc h fam ily in the
parish, the eldest o f w hich tim e out o f m ind h as h ad an handsome
estte and good intcrest thcrein ...3y W e do not know th e degree of
kinship o f Percy H atch to this older branch: but som e degree of
kinship w as likely to have added a su p p o rtiv e social context to the
younger sons strugglc for a livelihood - an d w e know from other
cvidence that W inkfield parishioners defended their com nw nitys
rights with the greatest vigour.40
M uch o f this rests on inference. B u t it m ay add a little flcsh to
thc bone o f the conjecture th at it w as in su ch a contcxt, w here the
grid o f conununal inlieritance w as strong and w here fringe-rights
were indefinite and extensive, th a t a yeom an could risk the practice
o f partiblc inlieritance w ithout condem ning his childrcn to poverty.
Below a certain m inim um further partitio n w ould be ridiculous:
husbandmen (in thc cvidence o f one local study) w ere unlikely to
divide their land.41 B ut in thc norm al course o f succcssion portions
would not only be divided but also, through m arriage, deatli,
lcgacics from childless kin, be throw n together: P ercy H atch
evidently held tw o distinct farm s, one o f w hich ( Sumerton*} he
left intact to his oldest son, from th e other o f w hich ( Berkshire
H ousc) he took out portions o f land for his third and fourth.
I f w e lcam m ore abo u t the regions ^ w h ere su c h 1 egalitarian
practices w ere prevalent, these m ay th ro w liglit upon the relation-
ship o f inlieritance custom s to in d u stialisatio n .4* B u t in fieldcn,
arable regions, in which* little extensin o f latid-uso w as possible,
such share and share alike practice w ould liavc ded to economie
suicide: tenure m ust pass as one pajfagl along w ith buildings,
implements and stock. B ut this certainly faced jtligf yeom an w ith a
dilcmma. K iernan doubts w hether a love o f p riv ato property can b $
seen as a constant in hum an n atu rc * and oij m ay agree. B ut a
desire to secure the expectations o f ones children - to try to throw
forw ard some grid w hich w m | support them has at least liad a
 T HE GRI D OF I N H E R I T A N C E 275

l*'g run in social history. It is licre that Spuffords findings are

iniportant, for they secm to emphasize that the yeoman were
seeking to transmit dovvn the generations not only land (particular
tenures) but also a social status to a ll their childrcn. Tlic nobility
and gentry devised with care their own grid of transmission
through entail and marriage settlemcnt. Such a grid was not
available to the yeoman. The mcrchants and professions might
throw forward a grid o f money. The small fanner could hopc to do
a Iittlc in this way himsclf. by bequeathing legacies as a charge
upon his estte. In such cases, the nionient o f death was for the
small man a moment o f great familial fnancial risk. M.K. Ashby,
examining tlie village o f Bledington - a village with slight
manorial presence and with a large number o f freeholders - keeps
a careul eye on the fam iers wills. She observes two points o f
change. In the early seventeenth century the wills o f famiers and o f
widows indicate still a world o f wide family connections and
affcctions, a valuation o f persons and also o f objeets, goods:
charitable bequests are frequent. But the movable property given
away is in small amounts. After 1675 the fam fryrecognised is the
immediate group o f parents and children, charity is absent and
money is prominent, and in larger am ounts. The second change is
in accentuation o f the frst: by the early eighteenth century famiers
are leaving their estates burdened by very large monetary legacies,
to be paid by those who inherit tie land ... The pattem they adopt
... is that o f the owner o f large estates in which, e.g. the head o f
the family provides for widow, dighter and younger sons out o f
the receipts o f a landed estte.43 But the outpaynients to be made
by their heir sometimes appear as unrealistic. Mortgages must be
taken up or debts incurred to meet the legacies. Possibly it is
exactly in this inheritance practice that we may see the death-
warrant of the yeomanry as a class? They were seeking to projcct
forward a grid o f legacies upon which the children who did not
inherit land or its tenure could yet be niaintaincd at yeoman status.
In doing so they were withdrawing capital which could have been
dunging their own land. N ot all o f this nced leave the village:
some would pass, by way o f a daughters portion, to another farm:
some younger brothers might rent land and stints or settle to local
crafts. But it would seem that the practice o f laying legacies upon
 276 MAKING HISTORY

tlie heir (a practice with some analogies to the French recall)

could equally have been a w ay o f diverting capital from the
countryside to tlie town.
Tlie attempt to impose large portions - perhaps approacliing to
some notional share and share alike - upon the heir led him not
only into debt but into a difFerent kind o f deb from the neighbour-
hood borrowing often found in the traditional village. Tliis neighbour-
hood petty indebtedness was itself a sort o f sw apping which often
had a social as well as economic dimensin: loans were exchanged
among kin, neighbours, sometimes as p art o f a reciprocity o f Services.
Tlie new mortgages carried the small m an into a wider and more
ruthless money m arket quite outside his own expertise. An alert
manorial owner who wished to bring tenures back into his own hands
could take advantage o f the sam e situation by granting and foreclos-
ing mortgages upon liis own copyholds: by such means the St Johns
o f Dogmersfeld managed in tlie years after the Soutli Sea Bubble to
lose a village and tu m much o f it into a deer-park 44 In tliis case some
o f the tenants seem to have resorted to arson, to the shooting o f cattle
and tlie felling o f trees. B ut so far as one can see they were victims
not o f forced dispossession but o f fa ir economic process, o f good
lawyers, and o f the debt incurred by the Bubble.
Tlie od communal grid had been eaten aw ay by law and by
money long before enclosure: eighteenth-century enclosure regis-
tered the end rather than the climax o f tliat process. The tenures
which we have been discussing can be seen also as roles,
unctions, access to use-rights, govem ed by conununal rules and
expcctations as well as by custom ary law. Tliey are part o f one
impartible bundle, a dense socio-economic nexus. The attem pt to
defne these by law w as in itself an abstraction from tliat nexus.
For a practice to be offensive to the community or to the homage
does not provide any conipelling reason at law or in cash for the
practice not to continu. But opinin can be more effective than we
suppose: in some parts o f Ireland in the eighteenth and early
nincteenth ccnturies tliere was no reason at law why a landlord
might not expel his tenants and lease more advantageously to new
ones. The only trouble was that the steward might be shot and the
new tenants cabins be bum ed down. In Hampshire in 1711 they
were more polite. Whcn Bishop Trclaw nys asscrtive, rationalizing
 T H E G R I D OF I N H E R I T A N C E 277

stcward, Dr Hcron, showcd cxccssivc zcal and rapacity in scizing

herriots upo thc dcath o f a tcnant, he was exposed by thc
bcreavcd son to public rcbukc in front o f iiis oficcrs and strangers.
This cost tiic stcward no more tlian somc loss o f face, he should
have taken it as a danger signal, an inliibition upon his action.
When he failed to do so, thc tcnants and otlier episcopal officcrs
elosed against liim and conimenced an agitation which forccd tlic
bisliop to rcplacc his stcward.45
Smali victorics likc tliis, in dcfcnce o f customary practice,
wcre won here and tiierc. But thc canipaign itsclf was always
lost. (Tlic bishop's next steward attained much thc sanie ends,
with a littlc more diplomacy and a Iittle more care in favouring
his subordnate officials.) For to the impartible bundle o f
communal practice capitalism introduces its own kind o f partible
inheritance. Uses are divorced from the user, properties from the
exercise o f functions. But once you break the bundle up into
pars what becomes inlierited is not a communal equilibrium but
the properties o f particular nien and o f particular social groups.
Le Roy Ladurie speaks o f the equal divisin by valu o f tenures
as egalitarian; and if we mean by this notliing more tian equal
divisin then the term need not be disputed. But he proposes to
take tlie thought fiirther: spreading progressively tlirough the
rural world this current o f egalitarianism will ... fnally submerge
all the hierarchies o f ordered society.46 But we have here
proposed tliat in some parts o f England the egalitarian desire o f
the yeoman to advantage as far as possible equally all o f his
children ended up, through a surfeit o f mortgages, in submerging
not tlie hierarchies o f ordered societies but the yeomanry as a
class. We should perhaps recall some lines o f William Blake:

Is this thy soft Family Love

Tliy cruel Patriarchal pride
Planting thy Family alone,
Destroying all thc W orld beside,

And Blake adds to this a suggcstion o f the same logic through

which the yeomen fell:
278 m a k i n g h i s t o r y

And he who make his law a curse

By his own law shall surely die.

For it had been these sanie copyholders, anxious to m aintain their

status within the rural hierarchy, w ho had taken an active part in
the previous tw o centuries in breaking the coniniunal bundle apart,
in drawing up m ore stringent by-law s w hich advantaged the
landholder and disadvantaged those w ithout tenures, in limiting the
fringe benefits o f the grid, in setting use-rights to m arket.47 In their
anxiety as a social class to plant their ow n fam ily alone they
prepared tlie means o f tlieir ow n destruction.
Perhaps another characteristic o f traditional tenurial society
was lost. Free bench or w idow s estte, as it pertained in many
manor into the eighteenth century, did allow for a considerable
feminine presence. Fem ale tenure, either as free bench or in the
w om ans own right, does not o f course prove that the agrarian
and other attendant functions w ere alw ays perform ed by the
tenants: a subtenant could be pu t in, or the farm could be left
under the control o f m ale kin. B ut w e w ould be making a hasty
judgement if we assum ed that m ost feminine tenures were only
fictionally so. T his w as certainly not true at the top o f society,
which saw the form idable presence o f such women as Sarah,
duchess o f M arlborough, or o f R uperta Howe, the ranger o f
Alice H olt Forest. And we m ust all have encountered evidence
which suggests that women o f the yeom an class acquitted
themselves, at the head o f fanning houscholds, with equal vigour.
In the early eighteenth century a stew ard o f St Johns was
engaged in a protracted and inconclusive negotiation with one
infuriating tenant, w hose evasions alw ays left her in possession
o f all the points at issue: I had rather (he wrote) have
business with three men than one vvoman. 4!
Tlie custom ary grid did allow for a female presence, although
usually but not neccssarily rW o n condition o f either widowhood
or spinsterhood. There w as an eye an in the eighteenth century
a continuing eye upon the continuity o f the familial tenure
through the male Une. Free bench w as often conditional upon no
rcmarriagc, and also upon chaste living - a prohibition which
arse less from P uritanism th an from jealousy o f the influcncc o f
 THE GR1D OF INHERITANCE 279

new children, or of the waste to tlie estte which might be

conimitted by the stcpfather. Where tlie widow did not lose her
tenure upon remarriage tliere is sometimes a suggestion that the
lord, his stevvard, or the homage had some kind of paternal
responsibilities for overvvatching the childrcns riglit. In 1635 a
clcrgyman petitioned St Johns on behalf of the children of
William Haddlcscn. In this case, the father had willed his lase
to the children, who were not yet of age; and Haddlcsens
widow hath married verry unluckely, so that if the Colledge
stand not the childrens friend to lett it to some in trust for
their use (for the mother is not to be trusted) the children are
like to be undunne ...49 (One wonders whether it was cases of
remarriage o f this kind which would have been the particular
occasion o f rough musi* in England and charivari in Franee?)
M anors had different customs to rnake allowance for frailty or
to deal w ith unusual circumstances. The jocular customs of
Enbome (Berks.) and o f Kilmersdon (Somerset) - and probably
o f other places were not as ridiculous as they may seem. In
Enbome if the wornan conunits incontinency she forfeits her
W idows estte -

Yet, after this, i f she comes into the next Court held for tlie
M anor, riding backw ard upon a Black Ram, with his Tail in her
hand, and says the W ords following, the Steward is bound by
the C ustom to re-adm it her to her Free Bench:

Here I ani,
Riding upon a B lack R am ,
Like a W hore as I arn;
And for rny C rincum C rancum ,
Have lost rny Bincurn Bancuni;
And for m y T a ils gante
Am brought to this W orldly S lame,

Therefore good M r S tew ard let m e have m y Lands again.

At Kilmesdon the recitative required w as m ore brief, and the

offender need only ride astrid e the ram:
280 MAKING HISTORY

For mine A rses Fault I take this Pain,

Therefore, my Lord, give me m y L and again.50

In other customs more rational Controls or adjustments are

established.51
One trouble witi the customs o f m anors rehearsed between 1660
and 1800 is that we know rather little about the relation o f custom
to practice. And this is, mainly, because w e have not bothered to
find out. Tlie W ebbs noted in 1908 that there w as no comprehen-
sive study o f the L ords C ourt in the period 1689-1835 52 and the
position remains m uch the sam e today. (Recent advances in
agrarian history have inevitably been addressed more to the
improving and market-orientated sectors o f the economy than to the
customary.) In the case o f custom s o f the m anor goveming
inlieritance, tliese carne into forc only when the tenant died
intestate and w itliout effecting a previous surrender. and it was
usual to allow a death-bed surrender, in the presence o f two
custom ary tenants, bequeathing the tenure to an heir. Henee
practice and recited custom s o f inlieritance m ay long have parted
company, But there is a further difSculty o f a different kind.
Customs fom ially presented a t a survey (for example, upon the
entry o f a new lord) m ay have recited only a sm all portion o f the
uncodied but accepted custom ary practices o f a manor. The
uncodied portion could have rem ained in the custody o f the
memorics o f the stew ard and o f the hom age, w ith reference to the
case-law built up in the court rolls. O nly when w e fm d a strong
body o f copyholders whose custom s have bccom e insecure in the
face o f an invasive or absent lord do w e fuid an attem pt to codify
this case-law in all its dense social particularity.5-*
Probably the practice o f w idow s estte or free bcnch is least
confuscd by these difficulties. Sincc the w idow nonnally entered
upon her free bcnch witliout any fne, this constituted a bonus o f
years to the existent tenure. Unlcss the husband had somc distinct
rcason for ntaking an altcm ativc arrangem ent, he w as likcly to
lcave the free bcnch to run according to tlic custom o f the manor:
and even the briefest cightccnth-ccntury recitis o f custom s nor-
mally take carc to cstablish w hat the custoni on this uuportant
point was. T hus custom here is somc indication as to practico.
 T H E G R I D OF I N HE R I T A N C E 281

Perhaps custom within the manor may even have influenced

practice outside the customary sector? The custonis o f W altham St
Lawrence (Berks.), rehearsed in 1735, afford to the widow full free
bench during widowhood and chas te living. I f she remar res or
Iives unchaste, she is to have onc-third o f the rental valu o f the
tenure - tliat is, a reversin to an earlier notion o f dow er.54 B ut if
she liad liad issue befare niarriage, then she liad neitlier free bench
or nioiety.55 W altham S t Law rence lies w ithin the sam e hundred
as W arfield, and it is interesting to find tliat a yeom an o f W arfield,
in 1721, willed eight acres o f fre e h o ld to his w idow for Ufe, on
condition that the tiniber w as not to be w asted or the land
ploughed: i f she broke tliese conditions m y will is th a t she sliall
thenceforth have out o f tlie sanie no m ore tlian her D ow er or
Thirds.56 A t nearby B infeld in W indsor F orest in the sam e year
anotlier yeom an left all lands and tenem ents to his w ife during h er
natural life i f she keep h er selfe a w idow b u t if she should happen
to be m arried again ... tlien only to have and enjoy the T hirds
thereof ...57 F o r som e forest farm ers, custom and practice in free
bench ap p ear to h ave ru n a p arallel course.
Custom s v aried betw een one regin an d th e nex t and, w ithin
each regin, from one m a n o r to anotlier. I ca n offer only an
inipression, b ased on lim ited rese arch into tw o o r three distriets. It
would seem th a t b y th e eighteenth-century free bench w as one o f
the m ost secure an d u n iv ersal o f custo m s, applicab le b o th to
copyholds o f inheritance a n d te n u re s fo r lives; distinctions betw een
customary an d co n u n o n la w te m is o r b etw een ten u res o f cu sto m ary
or demesne lands h a d g cnerally la p sed , an d free b en ch generally
signified co ntinuance in tlie w h o le te n u re , n o t in a m oiety o f its
profits. T he cu sto m s co llec te d in W a tk in s Treatise on Copyholds
(1825 edn) o ffe r no sy ste m a tic sam p lc, b ein g su c h as carne to the
editors han d o r w ere se n t in b y co rresp o n d e n ts. C u sto m is o ften
reported in im p recise te n n s - th e w id o w h a s h e r fre e b e n c h , th e
manor gives no d o w e r. B u t f o r w h a t th e collection is w o rtli it
reports the sta tu s o f w id o w s in so m e s ix ty m a n o rs in te rm s w h ich
suggest th a t th e c u s to m s w e re still o p e ra tiv e o r h a d a t le a st
survived into th e e ig h tee n th c e n tu r y .58 O f th e se so m e fo rty show
free bench, eith er fo r life o r d u rin g w id o w h o o d ; te n sh o w n o
dower; ten sh o w d o w e r o f o n e -th ird m o ie ty , a n d o n e o f o n e-h alf.
 282 MAKING HISTORY

The manors with free bencli are drawn froni ffteen counties (with
Worcestershire grcatly over-represented). Tile m anors wili no
dower or moieties only are drawn from six counties: in these
Norfolk is over-represented, while in M iddlesex and Surrey it is
probable tliat tie custom o f free bench w as w eak w here the
practice o f the altemative fonn o f security - the jointure or
joint-tenancy o f husband and wife - w as strong.59
Where free bench was assured the m ain distinction between
manors tumed on tlie question o f its continuancc or discontinuance
upon rcmarriage. At Mayfield (Sussex) the ancient distinction
between bond-land and assert-land tenure survived: yard-land
widow, to hold during widowhood, A ssert-w idow during life,60 At
Littlecot (Wilts.) the widow has full w idow s estte and m ay m arry
again without the loss o f her tenure, but if she w as a second wife
she can have but her widowhood. 61 A t Stoke P rior (W orcs.) tlie
widow enjoys the m oiety of the lands and to receive only the
rent o f the heir if tliey can agree - any difference to be referred to
tlie homage.62 At Balsall (W arw s.) free bench w as granted to tlie
widow if a first wife, but only one-third m oiety o f rents and profits
if she was the second or third.63 A t Fam ham , a m anor witli a
strong homage, jealous o f its privileges, the custom s w ere rehearsed
in 1707 with great vigour and detail and it is fair to assum e that
they were correspondent to practice and that w e have in them some
codification o f the precedents that had com e before tlie court. In
these a surrender by the husband (even to the use o f his w ill) bars
the wifes dower: such a provisin w as essential if the land w as to
be alienable. But the husband could, by surrender in the court or
surrender to the use o f his will, reserve his w ifes life: th at is,
afford her free bench in precedence to the next reversin. I f he
were to surrender without making any such condition then his
widow shall neither have tearmes o f Life or W idow s estte; b u t if
he die without Surrender she shall have her W idow s estte if she
live sol and Chastly.64 And, by an additonal provisin, if she
comes to the next court after her husbands dcath and pays h a lf a
fine, she bccomes tcnant for life, and m ay m arry again w ithout
forfeiting her estte/ '5
These divergent customs record different Solutions offered to
adjust the same insoluble problcms. On the one hand there is an
 THE GR1D OF 1NHERITANCE 283

attcmpt to atTord sccurity to the widow, and pcrhaps to her

undcragc children. On the other liand if copyhold was to be truly
alienable then no absolute sccurity could be afforded. Moreover
where tenure was expcctcd to dcsccnd to the children, rcmarriage
prcsentcd a threat to the line o f inhcritancc. Tiiis also callcd for
nice adjustnients, somctimcs rccorded in the custonis. Once again
the Famham customs o f 1707 reveal a complex codification and
sociological govenunent. Where a teant had a daughtcr by one
wife, and a son and daughter by a second, the daughter by the
second ntarriage had precedence over the daughter by the first,
even if the son (her brother) had predeceased the tenant and never
been admitted to the tenure (yet shall liis sister by his niother
inherit tlie land ... as heire to her brotlier ... notwithstanding her
eider sister by the first woman ...)66 It is difficult to address
Cartesian logic to this solution. It Iooks very much like a piece of
case-law, decided by the court and tlien added to the custumal.
What appears to be emphasized here is the transmission o f the
tenure with the least domestic friction: presuniably tlie first
daughter will already be likely to have Ieft the farm, the second
wife (now widowed) is likely to rentain in residence witli her
daughter: she seerns the m ost natural heir.
In any case we are not looking at any sort o f sexually
egalitarian customs. N o jo cu lar custom has yet come to Iight in
which a fomicating od widower had to submit himself to the pain
of riding into court on a goat. But we do have an accepted area of
feminine presence, and this may have been an effective and
Creative one, and one felt, at any given time, palpably in the
customary village.67 Kerridge, who sometimes appears to hold a
conspiratorial theory o f tenure, in which the customary tenants are
seen as constantly seeking for new ways to exploit tlieir lords, has
doubts as to the m orality o f the practice o f free bench: it was
Jo p e n to abuse in a loose and disreputable manner, as when an
aged and ailing custom er took a young wife merely in order that
she or a tliird p arty might enjoy the holding during her expected
widowhood. 68 N o doubt on occasion this happened:69 but as a
general comment on the valu o r fimetions o f free bench the
judgement is flippant. It is even possible that habituation to this
active feminine presence in areas o f strong customary and yeoman
284 MAKI NG H I S T O R Y

occupancy served to modify sexual roles and inheritance customs

more generally, even outside the customary sector.70 Where I have
compared the wills of Berkshire yeoinen and tradesmen with the
customs in Berkshire parishes in tlie 1720s and 1730s I have noted
no evidence in the former of any bias against female kin,71 and, on
occasion, a little bias the other way.72 W hen in 1721 the Rev.
Thomas Power, the crate of Easthampstead (Berks.) sought to
persuade his recalcitrant vvife to sign over some messuages to him
by hanging her by a leg from tlie window and tlireatening to cut
the rope, so far from meeting with the applause o f the neighbour-
hood he was subjected by some local gallants to some very rough
music and to a mock execution.73 But this no doubt is another
example of loose and disreputable practice.
Freehold could of course also be transmitted to women: and it
was so transmitted, to widows, to sisters, to daughters and to
grand-daughters. But if S e accept that between 1660 and 1760
there was a severe decline in the numbers o f yeomen, both free
and copy, it may follow that there will also have been an
equivalcnt decline in the effective female agrarian presence. Where
lands carne out of customary tenure, and were leased out again at
will, they would be leased to men. A tenancy-at-will carried no
widows estte: at the m o stjit would be allowed as a favour.
Security of the customary grid was lost; and if the yeoman was
only at a further point in his secular decline, the yeowoman liad
been served notice to quit.
As a final point I wish to retum to the difference between the
inheritance of a family, and inheritance o f security, status, power,
by a social group, caste, or class. The first depends generally upon
the second. We have the particular inheritance practices of families,
and the grid of law, custom, expectation, upon which these
practices oprate. And these grids differ greatly between social
groups. What is happcning is the devising of rules and practices by
which particular social groups projcct forwards provisions and (as
they hope) guarantccs of security for their children. Cooper has
examined the grid of the great. The nioneyed class liad a different
grid, although it meshed in closely with that of the land. But the
eightccnth century liad also a third, complcnicntary, grid for the
propertied elasses: that of interest, prefenuent to office, purchase of
 THE GRID OF 1NHERIT ANCE 285

commissions, reversions to sinccurcs, placings witliin thc Church

and so on. In this grid of nepotism and intcrcst, posscssion was not
all: onc must also supplcmcnt posscssion with continuing intcrcst
and thc right kind of political conncctions. Onc must both have (or
fmd for ones child) an office and maintain thc influcncc to cxploit
tliat office to thc full. The parent might attcnd to thc first: his child
must scc to thc sccond.
Throughout thc cightccnth ccntury thc grid of intcrcst and
preferment remained as a bundle of that kind. Along this grid thc
lesscr gentry sought to sccure the futurc of their familics. The
papers o f thc great patrons show the incessant activity of petition-
ers on behalf of their kin, in the attempt to secure the whole
structurc o f the Church and State as a kind of Trust for their own
class. Middle-class reformers, rallying under the baiuier of the
career open to talent, at the same time sought to secure the futurc
status o f their own children upon a grid of educational qualification
and professional exclusiveness. Moreover, this reminds us tliat a
privileged group could - and still can - secure its own grid while
trying to tear down jiie grid of another. In the twentieth century the
see-saw o f social-democratic and conservative politics has often
tumed on such rivalries. But in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries similar contests were fought which will be overlooked if
we only take into account post-mortem inlieritance. Sabean appears,
momentarily, to have allowed this oversight to cnter when he cites
the case o f a poor village in the Sologne and concludes from its
evidence that in the absence o f property there is little tendeney to
develop extended kin ties.74 O f course if there' is an absence of
land and o f movable property then neitlier of these can be
transmitted through inheritance: or are the poor in any position to
arrange for good marriages. So that Sabeans generalization may
hold good for a poor peasant cconomy. But cven for the landless
rural labourer, and ccrtainly for an urban prolctariat, thc critical
point o f familial transmission has not bcen p o st mortem but at the
point o f giving the children a start in lifc. If we wish to examine
inlieritance and the family in the eighteenth ccntury among urban
craftsmen, we have to look, not at wills, but at apprenticeship
regulations, apprenticeship premiunis, and at trades in which a
strong family tradition was preserved by offering a prcferencc to
286 MAKI NG HI S T ORY

sons or kin and by limiting apprentices.75 Even among the rural

poor (one suspects) the business of placing a son on a good farm,
a daughter in Service at the great house, occupied much effort and
anxiety, and was part of the effort of transmitting to the next
generation a respectable status, on the right side of the poor law.
And in the early nineteenth century, by clipping away at appren-
ticeship, by repealing the Statute o f Artificers, the rulers of
England vvere threatening the inlieritance system of the skilled
worknien; while in 1834, by striking at all out-relief, they
threatened the only grid of ultmate security known to the poor.
Of course, no guarantee has ever secured to the individual
family immunity from tlie accidents of mutability. Remarkable as
are certain among aristocracy and gentrylthere are
many more cases. ..ot tum of fortune V* wheel. As
Raymond the very literary vales of
landed estte and are often those espoused by the
newly-rich anxious to pretend to the vales of settlement. Pen-
shurst, the subject of Ben Jonsons classic country house poem,
raised by no mans ruin, no mans grone, was in fact a manor
which had lapsed by execution and attainder some fifty years
before Jonson wrote.76 FacQtber, poets tlie family and its fortune
are taken as an illustration of mutability:

And what if my descendants lose the flower

Through natural declension of tlie soul,
Through too much business with the passing hour,
Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?
May this laborious stair and tliis stark tower
Become a rooflcss ruin that the owl
May build in the crackcd masonry and cry
Her desolation to the desoate sky.

For Yeats no forethought could hold back the cyclical mutability of

things;

The Primum Mobile that fashioned us

Has made the very owls in circles niove ...
 T H E G R I D OF I N H E R I T A N C E 287

Yeats underestimated certain continuities, and notably the remark-

able longevity o f certain corporate landowners - those wise od
owls, Merton College and St Johns College, Cambridge, have
flown directly to us from the twclfth or thirtccnth centuries. But
common observation (or a brief consultation o f any genealogical
authority) confirms this thought: as Yorkshire people have it, from
clogs to clogs in three gcnerations. W hat this may conceal is that
indepcndent o f the rise and fall o f families, the inlieritance-grids
themselves have often proved to be extremely effective as a vehicle
of another kind o f corporate inheritance - the means by which a
social group has extended its historical tenure o f status and of
privilege. W e are busy with it still today, as accountants and
lawyers devise new trusts, new hedges against inflation, setting up
investment trusts with one leg upon each o f the four comers o f the
capitalist world. But we should be on our guard. W e commence by
examining the inheritance systems o f particular families: but, over
time, family fortunes rise and fall; w hat is inherited is property
itself, the clairn on the resources o f a future society; and the
beneficiary may be, not any descendant jf that particular family,
but the historical descendant o f the social class to which that
family once belonged.

From Family and Inheritance, ediled by Goody, Thirsk and Thomp

son. (Cambridge 1976), the report of a Past and Present Conference.
These coinmenls which arse in the course of the conference are
based upon work, some of which is yet to be published: for the
forest areas of Berkshire and eastern Hampshire, Whigs and Ilunters
(London, 1975) and for some ollier aspects of eighteenth-century
cusloms, Common Right and Enclosure in Customs in Common. In
any case, many points are proposed Itere as questions, requiring
further research, ratlier than as conclusions. My thanks are due to
Jeanelte Neeson and lo editors and contribulors to this volume for
reading this conunent in manuscript and for sending me valuable
criticisms, some of which raised questions too complex to answcr in
tile conlext of this sludy.
288 MAKING HISTORY

had largely displaced all other tenancies: Eric Kerridge, Agrarian

Prohlems in the Sixteenth Century andA Jier (London, 1969), p. 46. But
the nuniber of occupying customaiy tenants remained substantial and
they should not be allovved to be lost to view.
2. Here I will use the lerm customary tenure in a general (and
sociological) rather than precise (and legal) definition. Copyhold
need not be held according to tlie custom of the nianor, wltile
beneficial leases were not, at law, customary tenures although
Churchfind collegiate manors were in fact oflen subject to
customary p ractic Sce Kerridge, ch. 2 for a lucid discrimination
between forms of tenure, ^ B ic h (howevcr) affords priorily to legal
definitions ovcr customary practice.
3. Thus the Court Barn of Uphaven (Wiltaf), 20 October 1742; Rinaldo
Monks copyhold cottage forfeited to the lord, he having been con-
vicled of felony and transported: P.R.O. T.S. 19.3. Forfeiture for waste
(olien compounded by aT5^) is more common.
4. In a copyhold of inheritaiis&" even a fine uncertain must be
reasonable* - a definition which was set by common law at around
lwo ycars' impro ved renta 1. ]%0lfecqpijhold at the witKof the lord
Limited fines to ltfj^iiMW |ll9l|tt^toialit)*<R.B. Fisher. A Practical
Treatje on Copyhold Tenure (London, 1794), pp. 8 1 - ^ 9 0 . Six or
seven ycars im p ^ ^ ^ ^iU aM ^ g h t be chargcd in such cases, tlie
only allernnlivc lcft lo QEffinflnt is to p a th e fine, or let the estte
faf V .
5. R.B. Fisher who was C ^ E d of M jS&len College claimed to be
wriling from practical k n jJ u m S of ran o c iS usages in many parts
of the counlft. Coke had jtf^ ^ g P W p n ly of pur and genuine
copyholds but al tftk lime of day* ttere is a sort of bastard species
... a copyhold tenure, j.e. copyhold for lives, which was to be fouud
in a multiplicity of manors L th in the kingdom. How far this
bastard species was of recent creation, how far it indicated a
degencralion of pur copyhold could only be established by many
local studics: ibid., pp. iv, 14-15, 90.
6. Charles Watkins, A Treatise on Copyholds (4th edil, 1825), ii, pp.
549-550. It is difTicult to set a date lipn the customs which
Watkins editor asscmblcd for the 100 pages of Appcndix III to the
4th edition. Sonic customs cited date from the sevenleenth century
or carlicr: but others, including most of the Worcestershire customs,
appcar lo llave been sent in by a corresponden! in the attcmpt to
describe contcinporary or very rcccnt practico.
7. //>/</., ii, p. 55.7. At Tcbbcrton the custom as presented in 1649 was
dial llic lord lialh always used to gran! llic copyholds for llirce lives
 THE GRI D OF I N H E R I T A N C E 289

iu possessioa, and tliree in reversin, the fines being arbilrary; bul

Walkins* corresponden! noles tliat of late years the lord llalli only
granled for tvvo lives in possession and two in reversin, wliicli is no
invasin of the ancicnt custoni, as granls are entirely at the lords
pleasure. A coinmcnt on the case of Broadwas perhaps generalizes
the experience of insecurity in a nunibcr of Worcestershire nianors:
tliesc servile tenures are inconsistent vvith the present times; and
occasion ill-will to the lords, and uneasiness to many honest men:
ibid., ii, pp. 546, 564. It is interesting to note tliat the only instance
of wrongful treatment tovvards copyholders which Kerridge, after his
very extensive searches, is able to confirm as at least an allegation
which found some support concerns tenants of the Dean and
Chapter of Worcester Cathedral forced, in the early seventeenth
cenluiy, to take leases for years in place of copyholds of inherit-
ance: Kerridge, op. cit., p. 83.
8. H.F. Howard, An Account o f the Finalices o f St. Jolms College,
Cambridge, 1511-1926 (Cambridge, 1935), p. 47.
9. See also R.F. Scott, Notes from the Records o f St. John s College,
Cambridge (St Johns, Cambridge), Second Series, 1899-1906, no.
xiv, who estimates that the usual fine for surrenders and renewals in
the seventeenth century was one years gross or extended rent: tliis
was raised over the course of the eighteenth century to VA, VA and
thence to two years. See also W.S. Powell in Eagle (St Jolms
College), xx, no. 115, March 1898. By the nineteenth century the
fine was generally 2.6 of the gross letting valu: St Johns College,
Cambridge, calendar of archives, drawer 100 (70): Stalement of
Snior Bursar at Audit for 1893. I am indebted to the Master and
Fellows of St Johns for permission to consult their calendar and
archives, and to the Libraran and Archivist for assistance.
10. Ann., Reasons for a Law to ohlige Spiritual Persons and Bodies
Poliick to Renew their Leases for Customary and Reasonable Fines
(London, n.d., c. 1736).
11. Or so it is argued in Whigs and Hunters (London, 1975), Chapter 4,
passim. The Church appears to llave introduced new tables for the
assessnient of fines, computed according to the interest on the
capital investment, the age of the life in being, the number of years
lapsed since the last renewal, etc., at some time between 1715 and
1720. The rules demanded VA years extended rental valu for
renewal of Iwenty-one year leases, and so in proporlion for more or
fewer years out: and, in leases for lives, two years valu be insisted
on for one life out, and where two are void in proportion, or
(preferably) conversin of a lease for three lives to a twenly-
 MAKING HISTORY
290

one-years lease. Tliese lables, know n as Sir Isaac Newtons

Tables, crealcd great resentment am ong tenants: they raised fines,
replaced personal and flexible negotiations by a uniform rationalized
standard, and above all disallovved the tenants claim to liave
cstablished themselves by long precedent in tenures vvliich in effect
were customary, herilable and subject (like copyholds) lo a fine
certain. See St Jolms College calendar, draw er 109 (38), Rules
agreed to by the Churcli o f Canterbuiy at your Audit 1720,
according to Sir I. Nevvtons Tables, thus allowing your Tenants 9
per cent wluch they lliink favour sufficient: also. C. Trimnell to W.
Wake, 4 Ju lw l7 2 0 , Christ Cliurch College Library, Oxford. Arch.
Wake Epist, XXI. For the case o f the tenants (sorne of whorn were
subslantial laudholders), R easons fo r a Law, cit. supra note 10;
Everard Fleetwood (Samuel Burroughs). A n Enquiry into the
Custom ary-Estates and Jepant-R ights o f those who ho ld Lands o f
Church and other Fonndations (London, 1731). For the case of
Cliurch and Colleges, see nter alia, Ann., Tables fo r Renewing and
Purchasing o f C ihdral <Churches and C olleges (London, 1731).
12. Jolrn Aldridge, 27 October 1726, St Johns College calendar, drawer
109 (185). For other coniplaints at the raising of fines, all in 1725,
see ibid. drawer 109 (80), (84), (92), (99).
13. This was acknovvledged by the Colleges ovvn defenders. Thus
Tables fo r Renewing, supra, p. 55, agreed tliat leases of a
considerable lerm of years, and reasonably renewable, were benefi-
cial to both parties because M en o f Letters and Bodies Corporate
cannot so well manage their Estates as Laymen or a single Person
may do, if they kept llieiu in their ovvn Hands, or let them out at
Rack-Rent, especially where such properties were at a distance. In
sucli circuinstancc a good tenant might be given favour much as if
he were acling as the Collegcs Steward: thus M r John Baber was
cnlcrcd as tenant of the manor of Brooinhall (at Sunninghill, Berks.)
in 1719: he was long in possession, and vvhen tliere was an
extensive fall of timber in the manor in 1766 it was resolved tliat if
the sale of the timber nnswcrs our expcctations [we intendj lo make
hiin a present of fifty guineas for the care tliat has been taken of it.
The sale exccedcd expcctations and Babers gift was increased to
100: Si Johns College archives. Od Dividend and Fine Book, p.
66; Conclusin Book, I, pp. 176, 178.
14. Howard, Finalices oJ'St. John's College, pp. 71-2.
15. Rcv. T. Longland lo Snior Bursar, 27 Novcnibcr 1683, St Johns
College calendar, drawer 86 (62).
16. Joan Lingard (a tenant at Stavclcy) to Maslcr, ib id , drawer 94 (25).
 THE GRID OF IN H ER ITA N C E 291

Tlie College Iield cerlain properlies llirough gi or purchasc in

wliicli regular copyhold (rallier (han beneicial leases) pcrtaincd.
17. Robert Pain lo Masler, 26 October 1630, ibicl., drawer 94 (52). Tlie
(enant in queslion licld lad in Paxton Magna (Hunts.).
18. George Davies, 3 July 1725, ibid., drawer 109 (96), concerning a
few tenants al Marleet (Yorks.): I am of opinin it will be belter
for (lie College tlia tliey do not renew bul take (lie estates, as tliey
fall, into tlieir ovvn liands.'
19. The College did not llnally decide lo end the system of beneficial
leases unlil 1851. The Fellows endured a loss of revenue froni fines
in tile 1850s, but benefited considcrably from tile improved inconic
froni ccononiic rentis after the mid 1860s: Statement of the Snior
Bursar at Audit for 1893, ibid., drawer 100 (70).
20. John Blackburne to Charles Head, 27 August 1700, ibid., drawer 94
(284). Tliis manor liad come lo the College as a gi from the
Duchess of Somerset: Howard, Finances o f St. John's College, pp.
98-9.
21. See my Whigs and Hunters, paxsim.
22. Tlius it was said tliat the signatories to a petition against the
enclosure of the conunon fields at Hooknorton in 1773 were made
up from tlie smaller proprietors who have now an opportunily of
conunilting trespasses on tlieir neighbours property with tlieir slieep,
whicli in so large a ield cannot be altogetlier prevented: R Bignall,
10 Januaiy 1773. Bodleian Libraiy, MS Oxford,. Ardid. Papers,
Berks. b.5.
23. Kerridge, Agrarian Problems, p. 93.
24. 6 Co. Rep. 59/b. As Lord Eversley poinled out we sliould be carefiil
not to confuse a legal decisin o f general signiicance witli the
general adoption o f it in practice: so long ... as a conunon retnained
open and uuinclosed, (he decisin in Gatevvards case did not
practically alfect the position of the inhabitants ... (who) continued
to exercise the customaiy user of turbaiy, estovers, or pasture. Lord
Eversley, Commons, F orests and Footpalhs (London, revised edn,
1910), pp. 10-12.
25. For a not exceptional example see the customs claimed in tlie manor
of Warfield in Windsor Forest during a survey of 1735: all tenants
and inhabitants have common pasture in all conunons and wastes
for all kinds o f beasts as well without stint of number, as also
without rcstraint of any season or time o f year. Rights were also
claimed to dig loam and sand (and to cut heath, fcrn and furzes
without any leave, lycence or molestation). Only the part of the
claim inserted wiliiin brackets was objected to by the steward as an
292 MAKING H I ST OR Y

innovation on lic od books of survey. Berkshire Rec. Off. D/EN M

73/1. For practice in llie forest generally, see Vhigs and Hunters,
pp. 32, 239-40.
26. In the poor soils of Windsor Forest (within the Blackheath Country)
and of the New Forest the family farnier carne inlo his own, largely
in subsistence husbandry on land that working and genllemen
farmers considered unfit for their purposes: E. Kerridge, The
Farmers o f Od England (London, 1973), p. 81. In the case of the
Forest of Dean the Free Miners were very fortnate that their
ancient usages were not challenged at law in the eighteenth century
since thcy would alinost certainly have been disallowed in the spirit
of Gatewards Case: see Lord Eversley, op. cit., pp. 178-9.
27. Dean and Chapter of Ely v. Warren, 2 Atk. 189-90.
28. Selby v. Robinson, 2 T.R. 759.
29. It is Irue that this right was controlled and regulated (like all other
coninion rights) and oflen limited to particular categories of persons
- the very young, the od, the decrepit, etc.: see W.O. Ault,
Open-Field Farming in M edieval England (London, 1972), pp.
29-32. Ault appears to take Blackstone to task for accepting
gleaning as a right of llie poor by the conunon law and cuslom of
England (Commentaries, 1772, iii, p. 212). But it would not have
dislurbed Blackstone to know that there is no reference to such right
in thirteentli-cenlury by-laws, or is there a single mention of the
poor as gleaners. Custom did not rest on suppositious origiu but
established itself in conunon law by four criteria: antiquity, continu-
ance, certainly and reason - and customs are to be construed
according lo vulgar apprehension, because customs grow generally,
and are bred and brouglit up amongst the Lay-gents: S.C. (S.
Crter), Lex Cusumaria: or a Treaise o f Copy-huld Estoles
(London, 1701), pp. 27-9. By such criteria gleaning by the poor was
of greater antiquity, and of equal continuity, certainty and rationality
as most customary tenures.
30. Blackstone, op. cit., i, section 1.
31. Tlie form can be seen in the uianor of Barrington-in-Thriplow:
Benjamn Wedd is adnvitled (11 November 1756) according to the
use of llie will of his deceased fatlier-in-law: he is charged by this
will lo pay au annuity of 60 lo his mothcr-in-law: St Johns
College calendar, drawer 99 (214). Such prcticos were of coursc
very widespread.
32. The form may be seen in the will of William Cooke of East
Hendred (Berks.), probat. 7 September 1728, who lcfl two sons and
lwo daughters. After small monelary tegacies, the residuo of hs
 THE GRID OF I N H E R I T A N C E 293

cstalc was lcft lo his brolhers Tilomas and Edmund Cooke, in trust
to divide amongsl all and every of his childrcn share and sharc
alikc. The lives of his brolhers are in the copy of court roll by
wliicli 1 hold iny copyhold, bul the brolhers are bound to surrender
all rents and profils (o the above used, and lo distribute it among
the children share and share alike: Bodleian Library, MS Wills
Bcrks. 20, p. 48.
33. This form was especially used in copyholds for Uves, as two or
three lives in being, others in reversin: one or more of the lives in
being vvere inserted as trustccs for the actual tenants, as security tliat
the lenure should pass on to his heirs: on occasion the actual tenant,
who paid for the enlry fines, was not even entered in the court roll:
see R.B. Fisher, op. cit., pp. 15-16.
34. The form may be seen in the will of Timothy Lyford of Drayton
(Berks.), probat. 5 December 1724: whereas nty daughter Elizabeth
Cowdrey is the first reversin named in nty copyhold estte in
Sutlon Cortney my will is that the said copyhold estte be
surrendered inlo the hands o f the Lord of the tnanor pursuant to a
certain obligation to me entered inlo for that purpose with intent
that my daughter Jane the wife o f John Chear may be admitted
tenant thereof for lier own life and such other lives as site can agree
for: Bodleian Libraiy, MS Will Berks. 19, p. 239.
35. As in Knaresborough, where it was possible ... for a man with more
titn one son to ntake provisin for the younger sons by transferring
the tille o f part o f his land to them during his lifetime, receiving
back a life inlerest: A Ilistory o f Harrogate and Knaresborough, ed.
Bernard Jennings (Huddersfield, 1970), pp. 80, 178-9.
36. When I say a liltle evidence I m ean that a little evidence has
come to my hand w hile w orking on other matters. Ttere may (or
may not) be ntuclt evidence. T he impressions offered in ltese pages
are not intended as a substilute for the syslentatic research wltich I
have not underlaken.
37. Bodleian Library, MS W ills Berks. 19, pp. 338-9.
38. Percy H atchs daughter was ntarried lo W illiant Lyford. This could
ltave been the sam e W illiant Lyford who was presented at the
Windsor Forest Swanimote court in 1717 for slaflherding sheep in
the forest: P.R.O. L.R. 3.3 S laffherding (accompanying the sheep in
Ute forest with a herdsm an) w as an oflence since it frighlened lite
deer and secured the best grazing for the sheep: lel to tlteir own
unaided competilion the deer enforced tlteir own priorities.
Reverend Will W aterson, M em orndum Book, I, the Ranelagh
School, Bracknell, Berks.
 294 MAKING HISTORY

40. See Whigs and Hunters, Part I, passinv. W inkiield vvas the epicentre
of Blacking in Uie forest in the 1720s.
41. See J.A. Jolinston, The Probale Inventories and Wills o f a Worces-
tershire Parish, 1676-1775, Midland History, i, 1 (Spring 1971), pp.
20-33. The autlior linds that the husbandnien all showed an
inclination to preserve tlieir estates intact, all leaving tlieir land to
tlieir eldest sons: tliey also favoured tlieir niale relations outside
tlie iiiiinediate faniily. No other social group showed sucli rigidity
of custom, or a stress on prniogeniture: o f 87 landowners, 36
willed tlieir land intact to a single heir, the reniaining 51 lel tlieir
land lo 122 new owners. The parish in question (Powick) is only
two miles froni Worcester: ricli land witli opportunities for daiiy
farming, fruit growing and sonie horse-breeding. Possibly tliis could
be another kind of rgimen in wliicli partible inlieritance was viable?
42. Bernard Jemiings infonns me tliat in tlie veiy extensive manor of
Wakefield practices o f partible inlieritance vvere continued analogous
to those in Knaresborough (supra, note 35). His researches, witli the
cooperation of extra-mural classes, llave dem onstrated a coincidence
betvveen lilis practice and tlie density o f looms in diTerent districts
of the West Riding: i.e. where the holding vvas too sniall to provide
a Iivelihood tliis becanie an incentive for the developnient of
domestic industiy (spinning and weaving), in the first place as a
supplementary income. One looks forward to tlie publication o f diese
findings.
43. M.K. Ashby, The Changing English Village: a History o f Bledington
(Kineton, 1974), pp. 162-4, 194-5.
44. See Whigs and Hunters, pp. 106-8.
45. Ihid., pp. 125-33, and Articles against H eron and H erons re-
sponscs, Hants. Rec. Off. Herons reply coniplains that at W altham
Court, without any Previous notice, tlie Son of the Widovv was
brought into the Room where wce dined (witli some Clergymen &
Strangers of Mr. Kerby's Acquaintance all unknown to mee) to
Cliallcnge mee publickly for tliis unjust Seizure. Tliis confrontation
was engineercd by Kcrby, the Woodward, and H erons rival.
46. See above p. 50.
47. 1 hope lo substantiale these gcncralizations in Conimon Right and
Enclosure, Customs in Comnwn.
48. St Johns College, Cambridge, calendar, drawer 109 (16). But M rs
Alien who liad outlived two husbands and liad repudiated the dcbls
of botli - a very Sharp self interested woman - may be untypical
and may ofler evidence on Le Roy Laduries side of the question:
since she turns out to have becn a sauey Frcnchwonian; and an
 T H E G R I D OF I N H E R I T A N C E 295

unaccountable Frenchvvoman, and regars no body: ibid., 109 (7),

(13), (14).
49. Reverend Richard Perro! lo Collcge, pelitioning on behalf of a
cuslomary tenant a! Marfleet (Yorks.), 2 February 1635, ibid., dravvcr
94 (289). The Manor Court a! Farnham also look unusual care lo
overwalch Ihe inlercsl of orphans. It is a principan poynt in the
Court of tliis Mannor and lo be remcnibcred Ihat if a Icnanl left an
orphan under age then the next in kind and farlhicst froin the Land
shall have the tuition and Guardianship of such an heir untill he
come to tlie age of 14 years, wlien he may cliose his ovvn tenant to
farni. The guardin shall pay his wards charges and education, and
account to liim for the rest. But if the appropriate person as
guardin 4be insufHcient by defect of Nature or othenvise, then the
court, witli the consent of the liomage, could appoint a guardin. By
next of kind and fartliiest from the land' I understand the closest
kin who is at the same time not in the direct line of cuslomary
inherilance: e.g. an nele or aunt on the mothers side: Farnham
Custom Roll, 1707, Dean and Chapter archives, Winchester Catlie-
dral Library. Compare the custom at nearby Woking: If any
copyholder die, his heir being within age, the cuslody of the body
and the land of such heir shall be committed by the lord to the next
of kindred of the heir to whom the land cannot descend, he being a
fit person ...: Walkins, op. cit., ii. p. 559.
50. Josiah Beckwiths edilion of Tilomas Blounts Fragmenta Antiquita-
tis; or Antient Tenures o f Land, and Jocular Customs of Some
Manors (York, 1784) pp. 265-6. A similar custom is claimed to
have exisled in Tor (Devon).
51. At Balsall (Warwks.) the customs presented in 1657 included the
provisin: If any female heir, being in possession of any copyliold,
for lack of grace sliould liappen to comniit fornication or be
begotten witli cliild, she was not to forfeit lier estte, but she must
come into the lords court and pay a fine of ive shillings: if a
widow committed fornication or adulteiy she is to forfeit lier estte
for lier life, until she agree witli the lord by fine to be restored:
Watkins, op, cit., ii, p. 576. It is doubtful wlietlier such customs
were efiective in the eighteenth century, unless in unusual circum-
stances; however, in 1809 Lord Ellenborougli, C.J. upheld judgement
for the plaintilf, tlius ousting from her tenure a widow (a tenant of
Lord Lonsdale in Westmorland) who liad breaclied the custom of
tenure during lier chaste viduity by liaving a cliild: but a witness
could cite only one ollier case in that manor in the previous sixty
years (in 1753) and in tliat case the widow liad died before the case
296 MAKING HISTORY

carne to an issue: William Askew v. Agnes Askew, 10 East. 520.

52. S. & B. Webb, The Manor and the Borough (London, 1908), p. 11.
53. An excellent example of tliis is to be found in the Famham Customs
of 1707. Here we have a strong body o f customers prospering
through liopfarming, claiming the security o f socage tenure, but
suflering from the insecurity o f being a Church manor (the Bishop
of Winchester). The homage recited its customs with unusual detail
and precisin because of continuing disputes with successive Bishops
and their officers: every new Lord brings in a new procurator who
for prvate gains Rackcth tlie Custom and oftentimes breaketli it ...
Mrs Elfrida Manning of the Farnham Museum Society has recently
discovered an almost identical Farnham Cuslumal o f the 1670s.
54. Dower in conunon law was defmed as a moiety and the custom that
the wife shall have the whole as free bench is contrary to the
maxim of conunon law: but the custom of each manor remained
good and overrode conunon law: S. Crter, op.cit., p. 34. Thus a
textbook of 1701. By the 1790s the term s free bench and dower
were often being used indiscriminately, although they differed: Free
bench is a widows estte in such lands as the husband died seized
of, and not of such lands as he was seized of during the coverture,
whereas dower is the estte of the widow in all lands, tire husband
was seized of during the coverture: R.B. Fislier, op. cit., p. 26,
citing 2 Atk. 525.
55. Survey and customs o f W altham St Lawrence, November 1735,
Berks. Rec. Off. D/EN M 82/A /l.
56. Will of Richard Simmons, probat. 21 April 1721, Bodleian Library,
MS Wills Berks. 19, p. 100.
57. Will of Tilomas Punter, probat. 21 April 1721, ibid., p. 97. But
forest customs varied from parish to parish: in the neiglibouring
parish of W inkeld it seerns that the widow could rcmarry and lier
husband enjoy her estte in her right during her Ufe, subject to
stringent provisions against waste: Rev. W ill W aterson, M emorn
dum Book, pp. 362, 365 Ranelagh School, Bracknell, Berks.
58. 1 have sublracled from this saniple some customs which evidently
dated back to the early years of the scvcnteenth cenlury or before,
bul others may well have becn obsoletc.
59. Watkins, op. cit., ii., pp. 477-576. T he N orth and the North
Midlands are scarcely represented in this collection.
60. Ibid., ii, pp. 501-2.
61. Ibid., ii, p. 498.
62. Ibid., ii, pp. 552-3.
63. Ibid., ii, p. 575.
 THE GRID OF INHERITANCE 297

64. Farnham Custom Rol!, 1707., Winchester Cathedral Libraiy.

65. This last provisin is ciled by Watkins, op. cit., i, p. 552 and
indcales a sliglit modification and clariicalion over tlie 1707
Customs.
66. Farnhain Custom Roll, 1707, h e. cit.
67. The eTect of fice bcncli in strengthening a fcmininc prescnce in the
village in late medieval sociely is discusscd by Rodncy Hilton, The
English Peasan/ry in the Later M idle Ages (London, 1975), ch. vi,
esp, pp. 98-101. Many of his commcnts may rema in apposite to
distriets in the eightecnth centuiy which maintained traditions of
yeonian customary occupancy: for an example of strong feminine
tenure, see Matthew Imber, The Case, or an Ahstract o f the Custom
o f the M anor o f Mardon in the Parish o f Hursley (London, 1707): in
tliis Hampshire manor, whose customs were borough English, more
tlian 20 per cent (11 out of 52) of the copyholders were wornen.
68. Kerridge, op. cit., p. 83.
69. By tlie custom of Berkeley (Glos.) marriage in extremis gives no
free bencli: Watkins, op. cit., ii, p. 479.
70. In the parisli of Winkleld the Earl of Ranelagh founded a charity
scliool for forty poor cliildren. The Reverend Will Waterson, Rector
of Winkleld, was also Master of the school for more than thirty
years. He took in the daughters as well as the sons of tile parish
poor, but noted: Its much to be wishd that the Girles were
restraiird from learning any thing that is not requisite in an ordinary
servant, and that tliey were imployd in Spinning and makeing their
own and the Boys cloths ... Fine work ... serves only to puf tlieni
up with pride and vanity, and to make them slight and overlook
such places as they ought chiefly to be qualied for. But Waterson,
writing towards the end of his life, liad perhaps become disillusioned
and defensive in the face of accusations that the charity schools are
nurseries of Rebellion, and disqualify poor children for such counlry
business ... as they are most wanted for. For boys also (he noted)
the plow must find them eniployment, or tliey11 do notliing: but he
appears to llave conscientiously afforded to the children of both
sexes elenientary instruction in literacy and numeracy: Waterson MS,
Reading Ref. Lib. BOR/D: the passages cited were perhaps written
in the early 174s.
71. Among wills o f yeomen and husbandiuen in Berkshire at this time
one frequently finds cvidcncc o f attention to the interests of female
heirs. Thus Robert Dee o f W inkeld, yeoman (probat. 10 April
1730), left lwo pareis o f land, one o f W A acres, the other of VA
acres: the larger parcel was w illed to his grandson, together witli
298 MAKING HISTORY

house and furniture, the smaller to his grand-daughter: but (in

compensation) the grandson was to receive also 100, the grand-
daughter 200. Among freeholders, tradesmen, etc., there is sonie
cvidcncc of egalitarian inheritance customs: thus Joseph Collier
(probat. 12 July 1737), a Reading yeoman who owned some
lenements and milis: all left to his brother in trust to sell and
distribute share and share alike among his six children (four
daughters - all married - and two sons); M aiy Maynard (probat. 20
May 1736) the widow of a Reading waggoner - a business which
she had continued - the estte to be valued and to be distributed
share and share alike among six children (three of each sex) as
each attained the age of 21: the two oldest children (one son, one
daughter) lo act as executors, but the daughter to lapse her function
if she marries: Bodleian Library, MS Wills Berks. 20, p. 117; 21, p.
113, p. 72 verso.
72. Thus the will of W illiam Towsey, yeoman, of Letcombe Regis,
probat. 22 August 1722, leaving to his daughter Ann Hawks 50 to
her own seperate use and disposicon wholy exempt from the Power
or intermedling of her husband Thomas Hawks notwithstanding the
Coverture between liim and my said daughter: ibicl., 19, pp. 150-1.
73. See Whigs and Hunters, pp. 71-2. If, as I suppose, Mrs Power was
bom Ann Ticknor, then she hold more than 80 acres as well as
barns, orchards, cottages, etc., in the forest, in jointure with her
sister: the jointure explains why the land could not fall to the
Reverend Power in consequence of his avaricious coverture. (Yeo-
men were perfectly capable of using tlie devices of jointures and of
trusts lo safeguard their daughters rights). It is reassuring to note
thal Mrs Power endured the hazards of her marriage and died
without doing any Act to affcct her property: Abstract of Aaron
Maynards tille to four closes in Wokingham, Berks. Rec. Off. D/ER
E 12.
74. Above p. 98.
75. For a study of artisan occupational inheritance see William H.
Seweli, Jr, Social Changc and the Rise of Working-Class Politics in
Ninclccnth-Century Marscillcs, Past and Present, 65, Novembcr
1974.
76. Raymond Williams, The Counry and the City (London, 1973), pp.
40-1.
 Happy Families

Lawrence Stone ofers us a history of the faniily in England

betvveen 1500 and 1800, a history of social attitudes towards the
faniily and marriage, and of domestic and sexual behaviour. The
aspect of tliis history wliich most interests him is tliat of the
evolution o f afective relationships: familial and sexual nomis,
expectations, roles, and the feelings which infomied tliese.
This history comniences with the Open Lineage Family of the
16th century and carries us through to the Closed Domesticated
Nuclear Faniily o f the 18th century, which is itself the precursor of
tlie Modem Family. But this has not been a simple unilinear
evolution, since it was interrupted, in the 17th century, by the
Restricted Patriarchal Family characteristic of Puritanism. As the
nuclear faniily closed itself off from the wider society and shed its
diffused supportive network o f kinship, so tlie intemal bonding
became more tight. But the 18th century did not bring us to the
threshold of liberated modemity, because tile 19th century was an
era of reversal, and Victorianism saw a retura to patriarchal nontis
and sexual repression. Stone hints that ttere ntay be sorne cyclical
oscillation betvveen permissiveness and repression: we can expect
the northem ice-cap to expand at any tinte now. But titis is not
central to his general argument, which turas away front any
monocausal explanation and entphasises, instead, the contplexity of
the interaction of ntany variables.
Nevertheless, through all ttese coniplexities one very substantial
change has been steadily ntaking its way: the rise of Afective
Individualisnt. Tliis is, Stone arges, one o f the most significant
transfonnations tliat has ever taken place, not only in tite ntost
intiinate aspects o f human life, but also in tite nature o f social
organisation.
This notion is not original, but Stone is the first to isolate its
filia l and sexual consequences in English history in titis way,
and (o submit thesc to sustained m tcrrogatioa Affective individual-
ism should no< be with affecoo. T ruc, the pornt vvbcrc
we commcncc, wiib che Opea Lineare Family, is scen as ooc
without warm affective domestic booding. Procrcatioa perpetuales
the 'Une and tbc Une is supported by tbc netvvork o f cousinsbips
and kin. The tightly-swuddlcd infant is fostered out w ub a
wct-nursc; retuming borne, he or she is entrusted to servants, and
then departs once more, beforc rcaching tbc tecos, to s e n e (or be
cducatcd) in tbc houschold o f otbers, perhaps km. Demography
suggests that if tbc cbild did not dic, it was probable tbat tather or
mother might. In all tbese circumstanccs parents and cbildrcn savv
little o f eacb other, and th a r feclwgs remained coid and distant.
8ut it should not be supposcd that warm emouons, demed
familial cxpressioos, suffusod a wider society o f neighbours and
associates. Thesc svvaddled and fostered demi-orphans, their wills
broken by beaong, entered adulthood with 'pnm ary responsos to
others ... at best a calculatmg indifference and at vvorst a mixture
of suspicion and hostility, tyranny and subnussioo, alienation and
rago. The analysis is den ved m the mam from tbc upper levis of
society, but for somcwhat abrupt reasons Stonc is ready to
gcneralisc it to 16th century society as a wbolc. The Eluabclhan
village receives a sad testimonial , as *a place fiilcd with malicc
and hatred, its only umfymg bond bemg the occasional episode o f
mass hystcria directed agamst the local vvitch. Emotion, displaced
from personal rclations, surged mto rehgious cnthusiasms (mainly
hatred o f religionists o f other persuasions), or found expression m a
high general level o f violcncc.
But, in the Puritanical society o f 17th ccntury England or New
England, the evidence o f stronger affective bondmg need not be
found in any grovvth in sentiment or love. The invigilation o f a
child's psyche or plain old-fashioned punishmcnt could be the expres
sion o f a new kind o f concern and caring. lt is only in the lXth
century, and then at rst only among the urban bourgeoisic and the
gentry, that strong affective bonding found unambiguous expression
in sentiment and permissiveness towards children, and in less inhib-
ited sexuality. Interrupted by the 19th century rcversal, wc are today
the beneficiarles o f the fuli fruition - and thencc extensin to other
subordnate social elasses - o f that 1Sth century breakthrough.
 HAPPY FAMILIES 301

One niust write beneficiarles and breakthrough' because,

despite disclaiiners of any nomiative intcnt, Stone cannot prevent
the modem family froni becoming tlie hero of bis book. Tliis
hero has even uianaged to find its way onto the dustjacket: the
modem family is liberal rather than patriarchal in the distribution
of power; bonded by affcction bctwecn spouses rather than
economic interests; deeply concemed with and attached to children;
and frank in its expression of sexuality.
Tliis is certainly a ycs-type defmition. Tlie prospective purcliaser
is supposed to squeal excitedly: Darling, look, the history of us!
Instantly The Modera Family is visualised, tanned and beautiful,
gazing into each otliers companionable eyes, caring and sharing
like tlie Co-op, and always clinfAxing together. Who among us will
dar to vote publicly against any o f these virtues of modemity?
Against these, how pitiful or reactionary apj^M tliose ancient
virtus o f honour, or chastity, or good housewifery, or filial
obedience!
Tliis defmition of niodemitj* is cise to that offered by
l'modemization theoffM a p^wdo-kiWTOSfe^jBRch has prestige on
a fevv American campuses. Stone rejeffi vis tlieory, becau^S his
Modem Fainil/ originated in mP upper bourgeoisie (the profes-
sional and mercantile i n i d d l siunBre gcfitte) and only
thence difused itself to lesser mortalsP whereas the standard
Modem Family of M Theofy' d p P f f l P the and
industrialization. In Edward ShoitCT recent historical imposture,
The Making o f the M odem Family, the MF is the product of the
liberated sexuality of the lads and laswgRset ffee by the industrial
revolution, and thence it wtmcswits w tf n/nvards to the benighted
bourgeoisie. Stones 'view is patem aliR ^tad Shorters view is
populist; we niay make our choioe according to temperament, since
neither view is supported by any relevant evidence.
Both Stone and Shorter agree, however, as to vvhat was not
modem: specifically, the families of the poor peasantry or of tlie
labourers at any time before 1800, at which time, in Stones view,
the Sunday School began to convert some respectable workers to
familial virtues and affections. (How the Sunday Schools inculcated
frank sexuality is left unexplained). Before 1800 these families
were not sharing and caring or companionate or sexually frank or
302 MAKING HI STORY

fulfilled. Marriage was fomied from motives o f economic interest,

children vvere bred by the parents with a view to their subsequent
cxploitation (or to provide a pensin finid for the parents) and there
was no trace of affection in the marital relationship. It is difficult
to document this kind o f negative, so that at this point Stone
several times falls back upon Shorters French reserves. Thus. a
late 18th century doctor, writing about the Auvergne, which is
admittedly notorious for its backwardness, was shocked to find that
people do not feel tliat true happiness consists o f kindness to
those about you, who will always respond in like manner.
One would not like to tliink that any o f the English were ever
as backward as that. However, Stone is reasonably confident that
tlie labouring poor were much given to infanticide, child-battering
and wife-beating. When not beatmg them, the husbands treated
their wives as domestic slaves. One reason why the spouses did
not love one another was that they were illitrate j Anthropological
studies of the many societies in which sentiment is unknown (no
such studies are cited) support the view that love is a product of
leamed cultural expectations. But by 1600 or 1800 the English
peasantry and working people liad not liad any chance to leam
about love, because leaming requires literacy. They did not leam to
love each other because they couldnt read novis, and they
couldnt have a companionate marriage because, until botli husband
and wife could read the newspapers, they could have little in
comnion to talk about.
It should by now be apparent that Lawrence Stone has written a
very odd book. Since the author is a fonnidable scholar, this book
will undoubtedly acquire, in some quarters, an awesome reputation
as a work of formidable authority and leaming. But it is not. It is
a curious, hit-or-miss affair. Sonic parts - those dealing with the
upper elasses, about which Stone knows a great deal - are o f great
interest. Other parts - such as the chapter on plebeian sexual
behaviour - should be pulped.
How did this come about? Some part o f the trouble Stone
brings upon himself by over-confidcnce. He likes to present himsclf
as a sturdy, no-nonsense Anglo-Saxon thinker, indeed as a bit o f a
bully. As he lays about him on all sides with his stout quarter-staff
of common-scnsc, cffeminate and alien thcorics fall away to right
 HAPPY FAMILIES 303

uid Icft nursing thcir cracked ribs.

This is usually good fim, because Stonc is an unaffccted and
scrious man, intcnt upon stirring up an argument about significant
issues. He doesnt mind chancing bis arm in the process. He is
rcady to slap down on the page sentenccs so brash or inept as to
make other scholars blcnch: tliere were ccrtainly plenty of cheerful
and affectionate Wives of Bath in real life as well as in the works
of Shakespeare. Wliere other historians might spend weeks in
covering up their own sensitive areas of ignorance, Stone shouts
Dont know! and vvalks blithely into them, w histling and
swinging his good ashplant.
Such sensitive areas, in this book, inelude much of 18th century
intellectual and social life, and nearly all of the experience of the
lower classes. Unless I have misread him, Stone appears to think
that assizes were held four times a year; tliat the Dissenters liad
become confonnist Unitarians by 1720; that there was no radical
feminist movement betvveen the time of Mary Wollstonecraft and
the 20th century (and that Hannah Moore was a feminist); that the
system of sinecures in church and State for the sons of the rich did
not come under attack until after 1850; and that in the early 19th
century parents in Betluial Green succeeded in hiring out their
children for labour for sums (15s 8d and 25s 6d a week) well in
excess of the wages of skilled artisans.
Maybe the last results froni an error in transcription (Stones
source gives ls 8d and 2s 6d, in the 1860s), and maybe tie
transcription was a Freudian slip, since it makes tlie parents
seem more avaricious and mercenary (part of Stones argument).
Many slips add up to a mist, and that is what Stone likes
fighting in. Tliat way he can pulverize the features of an
opponent before we can even see them. It is never clear whether
Stone doesnt know, doesnt want to know, or doesnt want its
to know. On one occasion (let me cite die page, which is 646)
he clearly identifies capitalism with tlie factory system, and tlie
spread of a market economy with industrialization. Now Stone
knows very well that these entities are not identical and are not
historically coincident, and that none of the important originators
of thought in his chosen area, the rise of affective individualism,
supposed that they were: I am thinking of Marx, Weber and
 304 MAKING HI STORY

Tawney. It is, however, convenieat for Stone to create this

definitional since it enables him to am bush and beat into
pulp at one go several antagonists who have never even been
introduced to tlie reader: in this case, several contemporary
descendants of marxist and Weberian theory.
But in this book he has allowed the mist to spread too far.
Some demographic evideace apart, f e relies for his central evidence
upon a great quantity of literary material - many volumes (mostly
pubshed^ of diajfes', cofRjjMsindence, and m e m o rie ^ o f the aristoc-
fcacy, gentry and professional bourgeoisie. One hazards that in
plougfeig through all this materiai he has employed, among othcr
things, a careful subjcct-index, and has entered each refercnce to
adultcpy; anal sex; contraception; courtship; kinship networks;
kissing ,ih* public; n aa l^ b atk in ; midwives; toilet training; wives
(beatn); wives (deserte^ wives (murdered); and so on. In this
fe^^M M eSjteresting and curius information is assembled.
In addition, in some of the p l anes o f the book,
p jjp y runs through individual casc-studies, where the docunignta-
liotifcis unusually good. 9N pfa$|W m ake very lovely reading: some
of tfe sexual studiesfc (BosjMeJls utterly self-centred sensuality)
might be a*mpdScal record of male excretion. Indeed, as in otner
studics drawn from this kind of material, 'ttpneat appear more
subjeets o f hi$tr$j
than they ever allowed to be.
The d iffcu M > ^ m Stohe jir fetpddt i; that th a rqgearch Js $ery
rarely finely-enough aimed. Therc is something about most things,
but nothing* veiy decis&eF about fUM& He (j$\oo eajiiy content with
the t e i S g l out o f the diarie onto h ita
cards. But on a huudred subjeets, from o q jS id cs to domestic
architecture, some finely-aimed research into different kinds of
sources eould have given a quite different authority to his findings.
H i s S a f pages on marriage l a s a r e perftm ctoryflcase-|a${ is
scarcely^onsulgj, the church courts make only a brief appearance.
His evid^npqnSi tfe t critically important arrangeroenl, the marriage
settlcmenf, is largejy basepjj a 25-year-old article by Habbakuk:
an adequate article for sopsgpurposes, but noTfor the purposes of
the historian of the f a m i^ H
Thus there are problema of method and interpretation, even
 H A P P Y F A M IL IE S 305

when we consider tliosc social groups which left copious literary

evidence about thcir marrages and affairs. How is Stone to write
the history o f tile family among tliose groups snia.Il farmers,
sliopkeepers, artisans, tlie labouring poor - who were either
illiterate o r left little written record? Dcmographic evidence apart
(and Stone is able to draw upon statistics for prenuptial pregnaney,
and so on, to be found in Shorters and L asletts work), what else
is there to go on?
There are several answers on offer. Quantifers arge (naturally)
tliat only quantities are real. O r it m ay be argued tliat it is
impossible (or prem ature) to w rite a history o f the family which
extends to all classes tliat until something more than demo-
graphic generalities are available, the historian would do best to
belt up. Law rence Stone w ould regard tliat evasin as despicable
cowardice. So he opts for the m ost unlikely answer o f all: since
the lower orders left no literary record o f their interior and familial
emotional life, this is evidence tliat tliey had none.
His huge self-confidence niakes all worse. W hen dealing witli
the common people, Stone assum es tliat whatever he does not
happen to know is either unim portant or unknowable. Opportunities
for research as into dow ry and inheritance practices among small
famiers - are passed by. H is accounts o f popular customs
(spousals, bundling, wife-sales) are skewed, and misunderstandings
are compounded by m istranscribed dates and the misreading o f liis
own sources. Page after page about the labouring poor or plebeian
sex are beyond repair: i f one took them out with scissors, one
would be left w ith a better book.
There m ust be some ulterior theoretical explanation for this
disaster: and indeed there is. It arises from tire prior assumption
that there can be such a tliing as a history o f the family. In this
first error all tlie subsequent errors are entailed. I f tliis history is
defined as one o f afect or attitude, then it m ust be located
somewhere; a history o f feeling m ust be a history o f someones
feeling; what better locus than the garrulous and literary upper
middle class? All tliat lies outside th a t history then becomes nuil, a
darkness: a darkness w hich m ay only be enlightened according to
Stones Law o f stratified difusion or seeping down from the
middle class to the plebs. A t last, in o ur own time, light has
306 MAKI NG H I S T OR Y

broken over the whole social landscape: we have The Mdem

Family.
I am fiilly pcrsuaded o f the importance o f historical attention to
familial and sexual relations. But there cannot be any such
historical cntity as the family. For familial relations are inextricably
part and parcel of every other kind o f relation and occupation: that
is, they are components of a whole way o f Ufe. And the way of
life of Stones leading sector, the upper bourgeoisie, has been so
remte from those o f the majority o f the English people as to leave
no room for one single history o f attitude or affective relations.
Stones hypotheses (as to the great outer darkness) are that the
affective familial life o f the conunon people was either nuil, or
competitive and hostile (tlius, the poor resented their own children
as competitors for food); and that their motives were either
animalistic or economic in the meanest and most calculating way:
tliey married wives and begat children in order to exploit them.
These hypotheses reproduce, with comical accuracy, the ideology
and sensibility of 18th century upper class patemalists, prior to the
Wordsworthian challenge. That is, Stone has fallen into tlie traps
laid by his own gentry sources, witli their incapacity to accept the
authenticity of the experience of those to whom words are but
under-agents of their souls. These are traps which have a special
succulence for browsing academics, for whom it seems self-evident
that the professional classes are the leading sector - as well as by
far the most sensitive people - and that both wisdom and
sensibility must seep downward from them through the channels
o f litcracy and education.
1 wont attempt now an agenda for an altemative history o f the
family o f the conunon people. But a great dcal can be found out
about that history, certainly in the 18th and 19th centuries, by
paticnt and logical attention to many kinds o f source. A first
principie o f this inquiry must be that wc cannot put affect or
feeling here, and cconomics or interest there. Very obviously,
ccrtain kinds of emotional and familial and sexual expression -
such as courtly lovc or writing diaries or keeping actrcsses as
mistresses - presuppose leisure and resources which belong only to
the upper class. Stone tends to offer this as if the emotional life
has somchow become liberated from cconomics, and has at the
 HAPPY FAM ILIES 307

same time become more real and more deeply-felt. This is

nonsense: leisure allows for the cultivation of some kinds of
sentiment, but economic neccssities have only been masked or
distanced, and Boswells narcissistic sexual exploits dcpend upon
the ulterior exploitation o f tlie Scottish poor. The genteel sensibility
is, in tliat sense, a product of surplus valu; and the genteel family
is as much a consequence o f economic proccss as is the harsh
contest for a marginal existcnce (the men at risk at sea, the wonien
carrying peats homo on their backs) of the Highland croers.
But tlie Highland croers family was not the same as the
Comish tinners or as the Yorkshire weavers. And to understand
tliese families, and to detect the signs and gestures wliich disclose
their interior emotional life, we must attend very closely indeed to
economics - or to that daily occupation (fanning, fishing,
weaving, begging) which gives us their way o f living: a way o f
living wliich was not merely a way o f surviving but also a way of
relating and o f valuing. Some o f the best historical work now
being done on the family - Hans Medick, o f Gottingen, outlines it
in a recent issue o f Social H isto ry ffoni Hull - arises, exactly, out
of the closest examination o f the whole way o f life o f Germn
cottage industry.
I am not criticizing Stone on the grounds that marriage and
the family indcate unchanging universals o f relationship and
feeiing (or o f human nature) - that, at bottom, the 18th century
poor felt ju st like us. They did not, and Stone is right to hold
resolutely to a historical perspective; as our ancestors knew,
manners makytli man, and woman also. It is true tliat whole
cultures seem to swing between the repressive and the relaxed,
and in addressing such problems, and reusing the mono-causal
explanations beloved by psycho-historians, Stone has advanced
knowledge.
But he sadly niisundcrstands the diferential social and occupa-
tional detenninants upon sexual relations; how, for tlie majority
throughout history, familial relations have been intenneshed with
the structures o f work. Feeiing m ay be more, rather tlian less,
tender or intense because relations are economic and critical to
mutual survival. Anthropologists m ay know o f societies witliout
sentiment but they do not often show us societies witliout nonns
308 MAKING HISTORY

or value-systems. That people did not feel and relate like us does
not mean tliat they did not feel at all or relate in ways which to
them were imbued with the profoundest nieaning.
Tlie history of the lower sort o f people between 1500 and
1800 discloses many different familial modos: sonie may seem to
us to be rough, lacking in any foresight,, picaresque: otliers may
seem to be coid and bound to elemental needs. But the point of
history is not to see their occasions through the mist o f our
feelings, or to measure them against the Modem Us. It is first of
all to understand the past: to reconstruct those forgotten norms,
decode the obsolete rituals, and detect the hidden gestures. Because
peasant marriages were arranged out of circumstance and necessity,
it does not mean that many families did not leam a profound
mutual dependence, ^JaahiLof love. Why should Stone assurne (for
example) that when men marry older women it is evidence of
marriqgg for the sak&i$ interest or economic advantage, whereas
when men marry younger women it is proof o f a sltift towards
marriagc foundcd upon affection? That is a culture-bound assump-
tion, an expectation learncd within our own inmiature but sexually
overstimulated time.
M am persuaded that we are different, as parents or as lovers,
from those in tlie past; but I am not persuaded that we are so
much better, m ^ companionate, more caring, than our forefa-
thers and mothers. It ma>2depend, somewhat, upon class and
occupation, tlien and now. As a quantitative certainty we ~aall of
us have more leisure to examine our own feelings than all
except a small elite used to have; buL jt is lejs certain tliat, in
those days, hearts broke less painfully or lifted with less joy
tlian they do now. It amioys me that both Professor Stone and
Professor Shortcr leave their readers to feel so r.omnlac^ni about
their own modcmity. It amioys me even more that both should
indict tlie poor, on so little evidence, of indifference to tlieir
children and of callous complicity in their high rate of mortality.
Much the same is said, in some quarters, about the Indian poor
today. No doubt the Modem Family would do better, since it
would never allow itsclf to become so poor or to have so
many children. But if the lower orders liad not fomied some
kind of affcctive bonding and familial loyalty, we, their descend-
 HAPPY FAM ILIES 309

ants, might never have made our gracious descent.

I suppose that Lawrence Stone wished to stir tliis kind of
argunicnt up. He is an excellent historical provocateur. He is also a
good photographer, and tlie best illustrations in the book are from
his own photos of monumental tombs. The notes are at the end of
tlie book, which, in a work of tliis weight, is a disgrace for which
both publisher and author must share responsibility. There are some
1,300 notes, but, as a conscientious reviewer, I have had to
scrabble tlirougli to the back to find them some 2,000 times.
Perhaps tliis made me cross.

From fle w XSdCiety, 41 no. 779, 8tlr Septeniber 1977 reviewing

Lawrence Stones. The 9 and Marriage in England,
1500-1800, New York, Harper & Row 1977.
 Herbert Gutman

Hcre is a rich book - a dozen essays, o f uneven quality, some

hitherto unpublished, some published in inaccessible places, which,
taken together, offer a conspectus o f Herbert Gutmans energetic
genius. Yet the volume would seem shapeless and sprawling - now
labour struggles in the Gilded Age, now coal miners on the prairie,
now the post-eniancipation efforts o f black communities to found
and support their own schools - if it were not for the introductory
study by the books editor, Ira Berln.
This seventy-page essay is outstanding, a model o f what such a
study ought to be but almost never is. Tliis is far more than a
conventional tribute paid to a friend and fellow scholar. Berln has
read with care all o f Gutmans published and much o f his
unpublished work; he places it in its context, evaluates it, provides
necessary intellectual biography, assesses, commends, praises, and
on occasion criticises. In doing this with such clarity and honesty,
Berln has not only given unity and focus to this collection, he has
also written a major study in recent intellectual history.
He has, furthermore, given a more analytical account of
Gutmans historiographical project - o f the direction and param-
eters o f his work - than anything given to us by Gutman himself.
This may be considered by the sophisticated upthrusting generation
to be disgracefiil, and to be yet one more illustration o f the
theoretical immaturity o f the historical profession o f yesteryear. If
Gutman was a major historiau - as so many o f his contemporaries
insist - where are the conceptual breakthroughs? If tliese are
essays on the American Working Class, where is the essay tliat
defines the nature o f class? If his work was about power and
culture, where are these two concepts ratified and defined?
Confronted by the rigorous inquisition o f todays aspirant theo-
rists, Gutman does not come out o f it too well. He started publishing
late. He did not plan his oeuvre as a real historian - Iet us say
Foucauli - would do: one mighly general study after another, tire
results already known (and arriving frorn somc ulterior theoretical
area) in advancc of thc rcsearch, and the rcsearch performed by
obedicnt assistants in order to Ilstrate the theses. Gutinan muddled
into arguments, which grew into articles too long to be published,
went into bottom drawers, were dug out and rewrittcn, grew cven
longcr, and in some cases had to be rescued and shaped by editors or
publishcr. (He was fortnate to fmd in Pantheon a publisher botb
strongly supportive and intellectually adventurous.) So far frorn
knowing always where he was going - what his conclusions would or
ought to be - he suffered frorn prolonged writing blocks and
depressions. Writing was never easy for hirn and sometimos his early
drafts buried tire reader in a reiteration of examples. If he wished to
demnstrate a contested point conclusively, he would do this, not by
elegant formulations but by emptying a whole sack of confirmatory
evidence upon the readers head.
Gutman could not meet with my notional critics approval. Yet,
viewed frorn another aspect, Gutman was one of the most critically
alert historians of our time. His blocks and depressions, his
rewritings and polemics, wereJexactlyHtestim ony to this critical
engagement with the past - reformulating od historical problems
and proposing ncw ones, questioning received texts and their
stercotypes, experimenting with novel methodologies, reading
widely in adjacent disciplines (ethnography, demography, sociology)
in search of new ways o f decoding slave cultural inheritances or
artisan work customs.
lf ntusicians or artists are bom before they are trained, then
it ntay not be unreasonable to suppose that ttere is such a thing
as a historical sense, a sense with which Herb Gutman was
endowed in superabundance. I do not know in what part of the
cranium phrenologists place the historical imagination or with
which facultics it is associatcd, but one could not be in Herb's
company for half an liour without being astounded at his rcstlcss
and inquisitivo historical consciousness, his superb capacity for
cnipathy with thc anonymotis workers o f the past to whont he
gave back voices and identities. Add to this a craftsman's
PPctite for thc archives and a trained skill in interrogating thc
aiM^ onc *s sonte way towards itemising his qualitics.
 312 MAKING HI STORY

I think of his working life as being spent in a kind of wrestling,

and this collection exemplifies this stance. His favoured mode was
dialogue. He situated himself between the evidence and the
received historiography and made them interrgate each otier. He
tried out his ideas (and read aloud his latest nds) in a ceaseless
dialogue with friends, colleagues, graduates, and with his wife and
fellow historian, Judy. His prose flowed most readily when he was
cngaged in polemic, and several o f the studies in this collection
liad tlieir origin in this kind o f engagement: his poleniic against
stereotyped views o f general working-class assent to the vales of
the Gilded Age, his polemic against models o f the breakdown of
immigrant cultures and traditions.
If this is not theoretically informed history, then I do not know
what that can be. The interventions were alvvays in sensitive and
significant areas. Hiere is the tumultuous (and sonietimes hilarious)
polemic against Fogel and Engermans Time on the Cross,
published as Slavery and the Numhers Game (and some part
republished here), and first appearing in the Journal o f Negro
History in 1975. W hat is difficult to remember now is the ecstatic
temis in which Time on the Cross liad been received on almost all
sides, at a time when cliometrics was carrying all before it. The
critique o f Time on the Cross was a decisive check to the
excessive claims o f the quantifiers and to their uncritical reception.
Gutman himself was in no way hostile to sophisticated tech-
niques o f counting, as several studies in the book demnstrate. But
he showed that no elaboration o f statistical teclmiques could
displace the need for historical logic - the asking o f intelligent and
appropriate questions - or could the Computer somehow sanitise
the evidence and provide a positivist guarantee against the infiltra
ro n o f ideological assumptions. He was acutely aware o f the way
in which the ideological prcmises o f the present put down roots in
the form of falsified histories, in a self-fiilfilling procedure by
which one feeds the others.
The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom found its source in
precisely such a polemic, in this case against Daniel P. Moynihans
rcport on the racial crisis in American cities, in which much is set
down as caused by the deterioration o f the Negro family, which
in its tuni is given a historical explanation in the dcep-seated
 HE R B E R T GUTMAN 313

stnictural distortions in the life of the Negro American, created by

slavery and segregation. Tliis gave to Gutrnan a tlresis against
which his research proposed antitheses. To arge, as 1 am doing,
he wrote to me, that blacks - even as slaves - rnade their own
history ... is to quarrel with 3/4tlts of a century of terrible
scholarship mired in class and race bias. It also led him to Iris
own countertheses. In tire boolc (he explained) slavery is described
as an adaptive experience, and ... the blacks are viewed as a special
instaucc o f a working-class population.
Yet even when Gutrnan arrived at dieses, these were not
carefully crafted and given dogmatic finality. In this book one
can certainly fmd defmitions o f culture, class and class forma-
tion, and the rest. Butthese appear seriatinr, in tre course of
argument and critique, raier titn as System. They are not, in
my view, the worse for tiat; indeed, when theory is presented as
critique, it acquires definition and clarity. But what leaves sorne
readers dissatisfied is tiiat Gutrnan offers every finding as
provisional, every definition as imperfect and awaiting refinement,
every conclusin as open-ended and under the professions
review. Even Itere, in Power & C ulture, ttere are several places
where he reviews and revises his own earlier work, or accepts,
with frankness and generosity - perhaps, in his interview with
Mike Merrill, accepts too easily? - the criticisms of others.
This was a quality in him that was adntired by his fellow
historians. His opon, strenuously argumentative, self-critical style,
his way o f proposing new questions and agendas, rnade for
stimulating sentinars and for memorable interventions at confer-
ences. There was nothing sniooth or self-defensive about this
style. Its vigorous interrogatives had a way o f leaping over
barriers o f language and o f culture. My wife, Dorothy, and I
visited several history departments in Chtese universities in
1985, a year or so after a group o f American scholars, which
mcluded Herb, had been through. The intpression he liad rnade
was profound, and at every place they were scheming to get him
back. He had conveyed, not so ntuch a method - perhaps they
have enough methods and too ntany answers? - but an anti-
niethod: stop looking for answers and start looktg for the right
questions.
314 MAKING HISTORY

When I speak o f antimethod I do not mean lack of

theoretical concern or o f consistency. 1 mean, rather, resistance to
conceptual closures and to the reifcation o f fmdings into
Systems. Perhaps provisionality and open-endedness was itself his
method? Nowhere is this more clearly presented tlian in the
interview (for the Radical Historians Organization, MARHO)
undertaken by Mike Merrill and included in this volume.
The interview form can be a lazy one. But Merrill is a gied
interviewer, an able historian, and he prepares his interviews with
comprehensive reading and with a careful selection o f points of
pressure. The passage where Merrill is trying to clariy Gutmans
allegiances and his relation to M arxist historiography deserves to
be quoted at length:

Q: How does the new labour history answer the question, Why
has diere been no mass sociahst movement in the United
States?
Gutman: I dont think that is a well-put historical question. We
need to put aside notions tiiat workers movements have
developed properly elsewhere and in the United States they
developed improperly. W e need to put aside the English model,
the French model, and the Cuban model, and tiien ask a set of
very, very tough questions about what American workers
actually thought and did - and why ....

Q: Based on your work for before 1900 and on [David]

Montgomerys for the period after 1900, can you make judg-
ments about whether or not workers movements in these
periods were adequate to tile historical tasks they faced if they
were to achieve their political goals?
Gutman: I dont think that way as a historian. W hat does it
mean to talk about historical tasks that workers faced? We are
letting in through the back door a notion o f fixed and
predetennined historical dcvelopnient. We are measuring the
American worker (or the French worker of the Polish worker)
against an ideal type. That is the Whig fallacy of history once
again.
 H E R B E R T C U T M A N 31 5

Q: /l is not ju s t tlic W liig fallacy. Sonic w ould cali it thc

M a rx ist fallacy.
G iitiiian: Y es, llicrc is a M a rx ist v a ria n t o f thc W liig fallacy. It
c o m e s from a n c sse n tia list vievv o f w orkers o r thc w orking-
c la ss, o n e th a t em p liasizes a p rcd ctcm iin c d p a tte m o f liistorical
developiiient.

Q: B u t so m c w o u ld a rg e th a t su c h a notion is cen tral to

c la ss ic a l M a rx isn i.
G u tn ia n : A n d it c o n ta in s w ith in it d a n g ero u s notions of
v a n g u a rd le a d c rs h ip a n d v a n g u a rd p a rtio s ....

Q: B u t v a n g u a rd p a rtio s a re not c e n tra l to thc visin o f c la ssic al

M a rx isn i, th c M a rx is n i o f M a rx . W lia t is cen tral is som c notion
o f h isto ric a l p ro g re s s a n d so m c d irc c tio n to lnstory. W liat is lcrt
o f M a rx is n i, in y o u r v iew , w licn y o u h a v e strip p cd a w a y this
a sp e e!?
G u tn ian : W lia t is left w h cti y o u c lc a r a w a y thc d e te n n in is t a n d
tolco lo g ical c lc m c n ts is g o o d q u e s tio n s th a t d irc c t y o u r a tte n tio n
to c ritic a l w a y s o f lo o k in g a t o n g o in g h isto ric a l p ro c c ssc s ....

Tliis docs not sccm to me to be evasive. Gutman's rcfusal to be

tied in with any notion of fixcd and prcdetcmiincd historical
devclopnicnt is a defence o f thc discipline of history. The
historians object is. in part, to understand history - that is, to
nnswer relevant questions tliat are appropriatc to thc cvidcncc. To
this Gutnian adds less manifest fimetions:

Tlie central valu o f historical understanding is that it transforms

historical givens into historical contingcncies. It cnables us to
sce the structurcs in which we live and the inequality people
experience as only one among many other possiblc experiences.
Bv doing that, you free people for Creative and critical (or
radical) thought.

The argument is th a t h istorical understanding liberates the mind

from the fatalista th at both ignorance an d an inert capitulation to
dctcmiinism bring: O nce you su rre n d er tlie fixed older fom is o f
316 MAKI NG HI STORY

historical explanation and process, the future becomes open. It

thcn becomes even more important to analyse and examine the
history o f those stnictures and ideologies that shape our lives.
But neitiicr the goals of history or historys meaning are
inscribed within history itself. These are premises imported by
the historical observer - and legitimately imported if the contra-
band is not concealed. The premises of Gutman are tliose of
democratic socialism, revealed on page aer page in his interest
in working-class self-activity and in mutuality. To this one might
add a respect for the anonymous individual and her/his experi-
ence. Nothing drove him more swiftly to polemic than the
contemptuous dismissal of the experiences of ordinary working
people, whether it carne from modemisers or Marxists or
quantifiers or intellectual elitists. He expected to find that any
individual vvould tuni out to be extraordinary.
I notice that some commentators assume that Gutmans style
o f history, and its reception, belong in some way to the radical
1960s as one of the fashions of that time. This suggests an
activity more ephemeral and less solidly constructed than is
revealed in this volume. There is something in it, but only if vve
see the 1960s as more contradictory than the stereotypes propose.
For one thing, some of the BNew Left intelligentsia did not
vvant to knovv about working-class history at all. At the end of
that decade Herb wrote to Dorothy and me about a talk he gave
to the Socialist Scholars Conference:

It was a disaster - to put it mildly. The young radicis vvould

havc none of this kind of history. The responses were wild,
not niild, and some were very angry because I liad obfuscated
the criminal character of our entire history by talking about
work habits, culture, etc. There is a very real necd for such
persons to believe that this has always bcen a culture dominated
by the industrial-military complcx. Their alienation from the
prcscnt drives thcm to rcject the past in its entircty. The
American past is the unredccming saga of a mixture of
corporate exploitation, all-pervasive racism, and a compliant and
cornipted working-class and radical movcmcnt. It is almost as if
Mayor Daley and the Chicago plice landed at Piymouth Rock
 H E R B E R T G U TM A N 317

and as if agcnts for General Motors dumped the tea in Boston

Harbor.

Tnis malees it clear that Gutman was not somc cphemeral radical
culture hero. At the same time, he was a stanch and active
supporter o f the civil rights movement and the opposition to the
Viet N am w ar, and he admired many o f the initiatives o f SDS. His
letter to us continued: 1 have a group o f really fine gradate
students [at Rochester] .... The young American new left is not
the monolith that popularizers have rnade o f it. Arnong these
dedicatcd young people are a number deeply committed to serious
social history and to m between th at commitment and an equally
strong des ir to alter this society.
What rnade Herb growl was the limitless capacity of the
intelligentsia to write off working-class initiatives within elaborately
thcorized systems - structures or determinisms - frorn whose
compulsions only they, the intelligemsia, are supposed to be
exempt. W hat made lnt growl even louder was when intellectuals
theorised such compulsions in radical or M arxist rhetoric, offering
conservative or defeatist ideology in faney leftist dress. (This is in
fact one leading fonn tliat reaction takes today on many campuses
- sometimes in the faney dress o f M arxism or o f critical theory -
whose strategy is to show that all, except a small nmnber of
initiated theorists, are unfree.) It concemed him that such defeatism
(and fear o f all populism) blocked the channels of conununica-
tions between the campus and the general public.
A m ericans*joss o f historical memory is the thenie of the final
chapter. He was concemed, as the poet Thomas McGrath has been
concemed (although expressed in different tenns), that, in the
eastem United States, history no longer functions, has been
forgotten, has been paved over" In the E ast man begins every day
for himself.' In G utm ans w ords there was a vast distance
separating working historians and other American intellectuals -
and, indeed, ordinary Am ericans o f all kinds. In his last few years
Gutman did more and more, through summer schools with trade
unionists, through the A m erican Social H istory Project (a project
that contines), and through efforts at some popular synthesis o f
the new history, to open the clogged channels o f communication.
318 MAKING HI STORY

But he did not overlook the fact that some o f the Ioss o f historical
memory was self-willed and owed as much to the self-suppression
of an alienated and privileged left as to the ideologically
motivated amnesia of the right.
If I have not entered into a cise discussion o f several o f the
tliemes in this book, that is because it would have taken me
beyond my competence. But there is one matter within my
competence where I must dissent from Ira Berlins excellent
introduction. Ratlier too often throughout it there is reference to the
Thompsonian influence upon Gutman. One would not suppose,
from this account, that the influence was very much two-way, and
should more properly be called a dialogue. When I was first
invited by Herb for several wgel^g. to Buffalo in 1966 I did not go
there as an instructor. On the contrary, from my first arrival at the
airport I was immersed and |was subjected to an intense
course of instruction in American labour historiography. Our
dialogue soon took in ,on both sides of the Atlantic,
so that it would be possible to chart, not a Thompsonian influence,
but an Anglo-American impiiE. in social history. or is there any
warrant for identifying this aSS^ompsonian culturalism -Hcultur-
alism is a tenn tliat Herb and I always refused, a spurious tem
invented by systematizers whose business it is to rigidify differ-
ences and to set up specious boundarieS between approaches that
are perfectly compatible, Gutman never proposed that there was
only One Tme Method of history -^indeed, one of my strongest
recollections is of the generosiwP and enthusiasm witli wliich he
would commend tlie work of scholars whose approach might differ
from his own.
1 should add that Power & Culture ineludes an excellent
chccklist of Herbert Gutmans published writings, prepared by
Andrew Gyory. It is an iniportant and necessary book, but not one
to read at a single sitting. The essays should be savoured one at a
time. And pondered.

From Dissent, fall 1988, reviewing Power and Culture: E ssays on

the American Working Class, by Herbert G. Gutman, edited by Ira
Berln,. New York: Pantlieon, 1987. 452 pp. $29.95,
 Which Britons?

King Henry: Methinks I could not die anywhere so contented as

in the kings conipany, - his cause being just, and his quarrel
honorable.
Michael Williams: T hats more than we know.

Since I ani going to arge with some parts of this book, let me say
at once that it is a significant study and well deserves the praise
with which it has been jeceived. Linda Colley writes with clarity
and grace I and how much is won by these uncommon virtues!
She also has a capacity for historical generalisation which puts her
into the front rank among her contemporaries. She has also been
well served, in most respects, by her publishers, Yale University
Press, who have allowed her a multitude of illustrations - perhaps
one to every five or six pages o f text. These are evocative and
well-selected, even thoug n ^ s o i^ .r e g n n a magnifying glass to
understand (but vvhy not?). Professor Colley has an alias as
Director o f the Lewis WalpoleTLibrafy at Yale, and she has clearly
put time there to good useB Sce o f the illustrations are
extraordinaribOgood, such as R onm c^H Eton EleSVing portrait of
the young Charles Grey, and very ntany will be new to most
readers. The one respect in which the publisher fails is in putting
the notes at the end o f the book fflstead o f at the foot o f the page.
This is to wreck a historical but I will not arge that
familiar case over again. The directors o f a prestigious academic
press should be ashamed.
Britons is an interpretive essay and not a chronological study.
Colley has an enviable command of the secondary sources pub-
lished in the past fifteen years, although her recourse to primary
evidence is less flucnt. Her thesis is that it was in the 18th century
that English, Welsh and Scots became a British nation, and that a
shared Protestantism facilitated this and gave to this junction an
320 MAKING HI S T OR Y

identity. This in tum vvas enforced by a century and more of wars

and confrontations witli the French Other, a Catholic Other which
vvas also a prime compctitor in trade and empire. The rivalry with
France and, to a lesser degree, with another Catholic power, Spain,
Consolidated the British nation and pointed out the Jacobite and
then tlie Jacobin oppositions as treasonable.
War vvas the formative and binding British experience o f tlie
18th century (her thesis contines) and this had unplamied and
unintended consequences, or vvhat Pastemak once called the
consequences of consequences. For the men, Service in the
anned forces educated tliem not only in patriotism but also in
citizenship - they retunied after the Napoleonic W ars to demand
political rights. Although the culture o f loyalism in the same
period was profoundly anti-feminist, yet the widespread participa-
tion o f women in patriotic activities and in support o f the armed
forces provided them with education in self-organisation and with
a new sense of public space. At the apex o f this loyal new
nation of Britons was the monarchy, and George IIIs long reign
culminating in liis apotheosis as the king was celebrated with
more and more elabrate ceremony. In a few suggestive asides
Colley hints that today, in the absence o f an enemy Other and
with the decline of Protestantism, the British nation may be
about to fall apart.
It is a persuasive argument which hangs together vvell. But some
parts o f it are presented too confidently, and I am sure that Colley
would prefer to be challenged rather than receiving facile assent. In
any interpretive cssay the author tends to select evidence which
confirms the interprctation and to ncglect whatever is inconvenient.
I am sure that I have been guilty of this sometimes myself. In tliis
case there is no micromctcr which will measure degrees o f
patriotism or loyalism. Colley is able to make convincing sound-
ings herc and there. Her general thesis about Protestantism will
scarcely be challenged, and she can confrm it with reference to the
Gordon Riots (1780), sparked off in large part by crovvd hostility
to the rclicf of disabilities on Catholics; this disposition continucd
to be evidcnccd by the volume of petitions against Catholic
Emancipation in 1829. Hovvcver, in using Protestantism as a
blanket tem she has little to say about the fact that that
 WHI C H B R I T O N S ? 321

cxtraordinary hybrid creature, the Church of England, balanccd

itsclf betwccn two opponents, the Catholics and tlie Dissenters
(who also vvere subject to limitations on their civic riglits). The
cnsuing divisions wcre more significant than her somcwhat compla-
ccnt account of Protestantism suggcsts.
The difficulty of intcrprctivc sclcctivity rnay be illustrated with
reference to two othcr recent books which deal with the British
people - or sonie British people - in the same period. One, by
a Conservativo peer and sound historical scholar, Ian Gilmour, is
entitled Riot, Risings and Revolution: Governance and Violence
in ISth Century England. This chronicles and analyses the
repeated confrontation between a turbulent crowd and the authori-
ties which punctuated the entire century. Another is the striking
work by a North American Marxist, Peter Linebaugh, The
London Hanged, which examines frorn below the short life
experience o f many of those and ended up on the Tybum
gallows; quite a few of these liad served in the armed forces or
at sea in defending and extending tlie British empire. Taking
these books with Colleys, each of tliem might be describing
different Britons. Tliis also indicates some of the evidence
which Linda Colley hum es past with verted eyes.
Despite her high intelligence and liberal disposition she has
written a top down history, flattering to a conservative self-
image of Britons. One is often impelled to ask: which Britons?
How far has she written a thesis on the making of the British
ruling class, and how far is she entitled to incorprate the
common people into the same thesis? The first thesis is
undoubtedly true, and she shows it to be so. As to how far the
connnon people participated in this new loyal British conscnsus,
I remain sceptical. As Michael Williams said, when King Hal
wandered incgnito among his troops on the eve of the battle of
Agincourt, Tliats more than we know.
I have been trying for niuch of my life to find out, but 1
remain an agnostic. The answer probably varied according to
persons and places, times and contexts. The disposition of the
majority of Britons was probably ambivalcnt. Colley makes her
argument easier by laying great stress upon the papers of the
Volunteers, those part-time civil defence forces which were raised
322 MAKING HI STORY

to meet a French invasin, in 1797-1800 and again in 1803-08.

Inevitably such evidence will tend to confirm a loyalist thesis.
But in doing so she passes by the considerable archive of
Home Office Papers - that is, the extensive correspondence
between anxious magistrates and tlie Home Office. This tells a
very different story, of popular disaffection and class alienation,
especially between 1797 and 1803, years of severe food shortage
and soaring prices, of discontent against taxes (which extended to
the middling orders), of mutiny in the navy, insurrection in
Ireland, and war weariness which may have compelled govem-
ment to accept the brief Peace o f Aniiens. This evidence has
been drawn upon extensively in two books by Roger Wells,
Wrelched Faces and Insurrection. If one were to discount all this
testimony, one would have to conclude that the British ruling
class was rnade up o f paranoiacs and fools, which it was not.
The Mjdence of Volunteers j s not as unequivocal as might be
supposed. Tltose who volunteered were exempted from Service as
regulars. They might serve only in their immediate vicinity and
choos preferred (non-military) roles such as waggoners or
drovers. Colley makes much o f their numbers, but does not tell
us much about what they did. M ost o f the yeomanry/cavalry
were sub-gentry or their clients and tenants, and one of the
things that m a n j^ o f them did was to join or form fox/hunts,
where they could ride about in a manly way and signal their
loyalism by calling the unfortunate creature whom they pursued
Charlie, after the radical and pro-peace Whig leader, *Charles
James Fox. (To this day English fox-hunters cali the fox
Charlie, although few know why.)
They also, as Colley acknowledges, dressed up in unifonn,
rod around in macho postures, and were sometimos employed
against crowds who were rioting against the high price o f bread;
one anonymous letter writer remarked that we dont care a Dam
for them fellows that Cali Themselves Gentlemen Soldiers 3 u t in
our opinin they Look moore like Monkeys Riding on bears ....
or necd their loyalty be ahvays assumed. We know that some
rcformers joined the Volunteers in ordcr to gct hold o f anns. In
1801 scnsationally scditious anonymous letters were circulating in
a c n r n S n f Soincrsct'
 WHICH BRITONS? 323

Tlien raise yr drooping spirits up

or starve by Pitts dccrce
Fix up the sacrcd Guillotine
Proclaiifi - French "

The authorities, by coniparing handwriting, identied the suspected

author o f tliese lettcrs as a sefgearA in the Volunteers. (This does
not mean tliat \ve mus take those sentiments at their face valu,
for in an od tradition, which i llave called counter-
theatre, the d iS tyjrtq^t chose the - Jacobite or
Jacobin - m ost likcly to a lann the authorities). .
Wil 1iam Cobbett, himself a fomier regular who liad
not yet cfo s s a O & -dSdBised the
Volunteft. In 1804 he described the Manchester VolultcCrs as
parcel o f enipfy toxcombs o f manufacturera, whom the ifnbecility
o f governmefy: liad dressed up inE a a lf f ljl and red coats. No

a better account o f theniselves. But the French did not, so

valour and lo y a ftj^ ^ V th e V o lu ^ ^ K must remain a hypothesis.
One must tecali that the most triumphant engagcment of their
direct succcssors took place a f t c r against
Britons, whcn B f f l B p f e clerks, dancing masters and
winernien^iants in fancy dress rod down the Lancashire working
pcople o f botli sexes who were demonstrating for political refonn
in thajbattle o f P ffid o o .
My examples are more btased tlian aro C olleys. There is no way
of fclling hovv many shared the views o f Jonathan Panthcr, a London
K aSm iaker,^vho w o s & c t e d for seuitpus'viibel in A ugusf 1803, for
saying^it js a w ar o f tl rich men against the most sober, Honest and
Industrous part o f the people o f this nation, who hawj always been
the principal support o f the ffich . . . j W e haye nothing like tlie
remarkable testimonies o f liberated slaves now presented by Ira
Berlin and his colleagues in Free at L ast (New Press). If we should
treat.with respect Colleys informeS hunch (for it is not much more)
as to British loyalism, then I niy be allowed to offer my own
different hunch. I think that there w as a marited change in popular
responses between the first and second French W ars. h t the first there
was widespread disaffection, o f the Jonathan Panther kind, and even
324 MAKING HISTORY

some sympathy with the French. In the second war - the truly
Napoleonic War - there was a powerful surge towards a national
patriotic and anti-Gallican consensus. Undoubtedly this was stimu-
lated from above, but it met with a strong response as French
invasin forces threatened the British coast, and it canre to a climax
in the farnous naval victorftof Trafalgar.
At any time between 1803 and about 1810 the Colley thesis
is probably right. There was a political element in this change
also. These years were the very nadir of any British Ja co b in a
enthusiasm. The earnest follower of Tom Paines Rights o f Man
was Irtte* turaed ofF France by French betrayal of revolutionary
principies - by the e le v ^ ^ M o f Napolen as First Cnsul and
tlien as Emperor, by tlr^Hestabhshment of liierarchyjand of
slavery, by French aggression and aggrandisement in Europe.
Most of those middle^lass refonners, as well as working-class
Painites who had been disaffected the first French war became
ardent anti-Galucans in t i " second. Wordsworth, who was
surveilled as a suspected *Jacobin in 1797Bwas drilling with the
Grassmere Volunteers 1803. gran Tlielwall, tlie leading re-1
former of theB 1790s, r r e B cro riting an ode on the death of
Admiral N dljpt^fl 18(;5.
All tliis madc a differenc. Such persons were the potential
leaders of an altemative Britain. People api swing swiftly between
poles when their leaders shift. B t'^vea loud patriotism mus be
inspected carefully for its nuances,*' its authenticity and also its
ego-trips. Whole cart-loads fof patrifitic ballads carne off tlie presses
in those years. Most oF them were songs that one suspects were
never sung, such as one in praise oF the Royal Manchester
Volunteers to the tune of Our Camin Balls, and Bumshells:

Youll have a Band of Music Boys,

Your Loyal Hearts to checr,
A dashing sword, Yoursclf to guard,
Roast Bccf, and British becr;
Your hcad adorned with Ribbon Bluc,
And in cach Arm, - a wcnch;
And all the work you have to do,
Will be to beat the French.
 WHICH BRITONS? 325

C.horus
In the M anchester Volunteers,
Haste, Britons, Haste to go,
Along with Captain Delhoste,
To fight tile Gallic foe.

(Perliaps tlie Volunteers were somewhat encumbered in their

military duties by tlie wenches on their anns, whict may be why
the dashing svvord was reserved for wielding against the unamied
handloom wcavcrs and cotton spinnersnon the field of Peterloo).
Thcre were also Kierfy ballads-jffcisil Bj^relmMi-G^ican toul court.
Tlius one, called Jolly Jack o f Dover n i s supposed to be spoken
by a ferryman vvho brought emigrants across from Calais:

I brought o er a Milliner, who said her ame was Nancy.

She said she liad some fringes tliat would arouse my fancy;
But I said avast thcre, njL d e a t I ani not so eager,
or so tird o f English meat to long for your soup nieagre.

ChoiS
0! no, the Devil a bit with jolly Jack o f Dover,
None o f your m urdring Frenchmen to England shall come over.

As with all texis in popular culture, then as now, it is not easy to

decide whedjaj;, such provided texts revea! JS sJ thouglrts o f dieir
readers. But the reader or the viewer to d ajaat least musft choose to
buyrt% rubbish or to tum on the knob, .whereas bundles of these
masterpieces w e re jlik e Hamiali M ores^S /etf/i Rejiopfforv Tracts,
bought in bulk by t h a gentry and their ladies to be sent down to
the servants quarters or distributed to the poor. Coflgjjj at one point
high-mindedly rebukes unnamed historians for confusing patriotism
with simple* conservatism, or smothering it with damning and
dismissive references to chauvinism and jingoism. The point is
valid, but die would be more persuasive if she flllowed her readers
to leani that some Volunteer patriotism was humbug and tliat
chauvpsm and jingoism were among its components. She insists
that patriotism requires flexible, sensitive and above all, imagina-
tive reconstruction. Yes, but if such ballads as I have quoted -
326 MAKING HI STORY

and tliey were numcrous - did not represent chauvinistic humbug,

tlien, daniniit, what does? And can a sensitive and im ag in ativ a
reconstruction succecd which holds its hand over this kind of
inconvenient evidence?
T l stk jp t to theses but to sMc. to qualify
thcm. y th ey u e^ ^ M cojreaet tima my od study, T he M atng
o f Ihe E nglish nnj^t le wrong. For I argued
ttere, and j&esSjiarc, that a significant p a r t o f fher British
experience in these years was the fonnation of the stmctures,
oppositions and of - Tag . plffpgs*, was
1970s and it has become
boring. It is a conccpt long past its sell-by date. Collcy
appears to share the view and evades any full
discussion of the alicnation, in the 18th between
patricians and plebs, and in jtjp f p y between
m kW h|K fc^ and the emergent working class. But
I am not rcady to univocal nation
of 'i S t S aL*to the apotheosis of
G e c ^ n f l^ ^ n f in d in Jhe sources some examples o f conciliated
crowds shouting G o d Save the King, b u t m a is a ritualised
concession to loyalism and it upon the royal
person. (By contrast disloyalty could focus sensationally on the
person of Q n ^ ^ H ^ i p the Q i^e* Caroline agitation). I consider
that C o ll^^B pch ovcrstates - and M g 'e B M E B H flB - her case
by asserting that training in noray under the auspices o f the State
... was the most conrmon col lectivo working-class experience in
the late eighteenth and e&Slyfl luneteenth centuries and ffitpre
conimon than the . (I wondcr if it was evcn
more common than H E a supplicant for the Poor lau ?) And I
consider that the coinmon people were p v - always as snipid as
she appears to suppose: at one point she reinarles approvingly of
the cult of monarchy under George III it was more securely at
one with the politics of unreason and emotionalism. As Ameri-
cans may remember.
This leads into another quarrel which I must deal with more
briefly. There is a Whiggish tone to some o f Colleys argument
the gradual but rclentlcss shift o f opinin - which sometimos
suggests that all carne about in a determined way, and witliout
 WH1CH BR1T0NS7 327

sharp conflict or purposive agcncy. 1 will take as an cxample hcr

treatment of fcminism in tlie 1790s. Colley says that the revclations
about hcr prvate life after her death in 1797 savagely limited
[Wollstonccrafts] influence. That is about all that we hcar of the
feminist impulse of the 1790s: it was savagely limited by an
unfortunate contingency. It is perfectly true that William Godwins
posthumous Memoir of Wollstonecraft was tactless and sadly
inopportune. But what savagely limited and indeed defeated the
cause o f the Rights o f Woman was the unprecedentedly strident and
brutal attack upon tliem, frorn such quarters as the Anti-,Jacobin,
and tlie loyalist equation of Wollstonecraft and feminism with
promiscuity and p o ta jia r treason:

Fierce passions slavK she veerd with every gust,

Love, Rights and Wrongs, Philosophy, and Lust.

Tlie sheer volunte and unfvffishlity of tliis anti-Jacobinism (the

British precursor of McCarthyisni) is scarcely glimpsed in Britons
and jflSLit vvap the inseparable obverse of loyalism. It can be seen,
for example, in a House of Lords debate in 1798 on a divorce bil.
Lord Auckland said that such a billBw as better adapted to the
proceedings before the municipality of Paris.
A loud cm .o f Hear, hear! frorn the Bishop of Rochester and
others.
The Bishop of Durliam concurred.

The French rulers. achile p e y despaired of rnaking any intpres-

sion on us by forc of antis, attempted a more subtle and
alarming warfare, by endeavouring ... to taint and undennine the
moris of our ingenuous youth. Tltey sent amongst us a nuntber
of fentale dancers, who, by tlie allurement of the most indecent
attitudes, succeeded but too effectually in loosening and corrupt-
ing the moral feelings of the people.

And so on. Ttere are mountains of such huntbug, which contrib-

uted not only to halting but to reversing tlie feminist impulse. We
often think of Dr Bowdler, who gained fante by bowdlerising
Shakespeares plays, as a Victorian figure, but he bclongs - as do
328 MAKING HISTORY

many features o f that repression which we have com e to think of

as Victorianism - to the anti-Jacobin repression o f m e 1800s.
All this did not ju st happen, in a W liiggish way. It w as made to
happen, by some men and women and against otliers. I am
uninipressed by tlie argument, heard often to d a w and even s u p - i
ported by some feminists, that H annah M ore, tlie Iwell-supported
anti-Jacobin and anti-fem hst pofeBicist. w as in fact enlarging
feminine space and -expectations by becom ing such a public figure
(Linda CpJJey makes Sjpme portentous concessions to th is vipw and
adds that Mofe was tire first British w oman ever to nrake a
fortune jw ith B r a p s g and this facj alone should w am us against
seeing hcr simply as a conservative figure. W ith equal or more
forc one might say the same o f M argaret Thatcher, tlie first
B rifflr w om an to become prim e minister. B ut if M ore and
T hatchA w eiflirot b n s e r v a ^ ^ B h a t are vfte to cali tliem?)
On the other hand, there were som e w om en and some men who
stood up against the o f state-sponsored anti-Jacobinism.
And refonners, like royalists, could have t h e 9 ow n ceremonies.
Tlius in the parliam R jtary o f 1802 advahced refonners
wer^ ^ e c te d in some constituencies w ith a w ide franchise. W ind-
ham, the W ar M inister and ajse ally o f Pitt, w as defeated in
Norwich. And m Nottinghanr, w h ^ | a refo n n e f^ H rr d e c te d , au
over-excited magistrate sent to the H om e SfflrotaW a sensational
account. Tire reform er liad secured & c l m > |^ t h p M p s u p p o r t o f a
lawless m ob, and the ensuing triunrphal procession was done in
a style unlike anyrylring ever betore*etWbited in this Country:

The Goddess o f Reason attended by four & tw enty Virgins

dressd or rather h alf dressd in Hvlrite in the French fashion,
followed by the Tree o f Liberty and the tricolourd Flag; a Band
o f Music playing the Tune o f M illions be free and tire
Multitude singing the words ...

In other accounts the Goddess o f Reason w as nakcd, although shc

was probably wcaring a flesh-colourcd gamrent. No wondcr that a
committce o f the House o f Comnrons solcnurly declared the
elcction to be invalid.
My point is not only that the evidencc is difficult to rcad but that
 WHI CH B R I T O N S 7 329

it is always cvidence o f conflic, o f competing agencies, with the

outeome undecidcd, and not o f determined Whiggish evolution.
Hannah M ore had tire goodwill o f the whole State and o f much of the
ruling-class to propel her to famc and fortune, whereas the Notting-
hani Goddess o f Reason was bound to be found, on enquiry, to be
invalid. But tliat is no reason for historians to follow suit.
Perhaps we could conipromise by saying that ie trutli lies
somewhere between my view and Colleys? I am certainly not
proposing that diere was an almost-revolution in Britain in the
1790s. In my view - as I ve said before - the only time when that
was a historical possibility WaT during the Crisis leading up to the
Reform A ct o f 1832, when the rulis wefe divided and when great
sections o f the middle and working classes were making common
cause. I concur strongly vgith a note o f Colleys in wliich she says
that to d i s & s O t s f strains o f ^GT790s p rim arily in tenns o f the
potential for f^ o lu tio n is unhelpful. B u F ffistill remains necessary
to take the full message o f those strains to qualify the dieses o f
B r ib ffr f
W hat all this is about m ay only be a m atter o f emphasis. Most
of my points w ould be acknowledged b y to ll ^ , and indeed fmd
some mention (if only m arg in alm in her carefiilly-qualified argu-
ment._5he may T airl'respond that h is to r i^ ^ written enougli
about riots and popular radicalism, and that her purpose is to mark
out fmnly the boundaries o f national all
that took p l S ^ She does tliis superbl y ^ w ^ T B th controlett'
judgemems and w ith abundant infonuation. Her stimulating book
will be, and deserves to be, influential. Instead o f trying for some
mid-way conipromise, we might say that both views might be true.
Not only were the British sometimes highly loyalist and sometimes
decidedly not so, but also Colleys argument about the making o f
one British nation need not contradict arguments about the Two
Nations o f class. A fter all, English, Scottish and Welsh refonners
and Chartists managed to w ork together, and the most prominent
British Chartist leader, Feargus O C onnJ was an Irishman. Tliere
are times when the patriot m us also be a revolutionary. And on
that note I am willing to welcome this book and to cali out Pax!

Froin Dissent, Sununer 1993, reviewing Linda Colleys Britons

M1992),
 Commitment in Poetry

I distrust the tem commitment because it can slide only too easily
into usages vvhich defeat its apparent intention. In the first stage,
commitment appears as ah attitudc appropriate in a poet, without
fiirther relational defmition: that is, it finds its defmition in tem is of
the poets own sensibility or ego-state - one poet has Fancy, another
has Self-concehtration, and anotlies has Commitment. In tlie second
stage, commitinaml m ust be followed b * in or to : ?the comrnit-
ment is a disposition o f concern in the poet, b u t w hat the poet is
committed to lies ready-made, over there, outside the poet awaiting
appropriation. The poem does not create the commitment, it simply *
endorses causes which are already known and which have been
disclosed without any poets Ixercise.
I will not delay to arge w ith this slide in usage: in the first
stage it has a romantic, in the second stage a utilitarian pedigree.
Taken together, these leave the poet free to choose causes like hats,
whether from historys attic or fom i the radical boutiques o f today.
In either case the hats should be scrutinised, since their selection
may well be the ndex to ulterior commitments, o f IC profounder
kind. Tlie advanced *jadical vvlio continually chooses to wear
military or M aoist forage caps m ay perhaps be signalling a
commitment to self-display, a g ? .itc h for violence and verbal
outrance, at odds w ith his professedly rational or democratic
commitments. W hat the royalist may be signalling when he tries
on the hat o f M aurras can be disclosed only by the informed
scrutiny o f which John Silkins essay is cxemplary. H istorical hats
(Like the Nazi insignia worn by last years deluded NF youngsters)
may look splcndid, provocativo and bizarro, but tliey ought to
reccive this kind o f scrupulous examination within historys own
terms.
Yct this docs not always settle the matter. Pocts are often
pitifully bad as political judges, and thcy have a habit o f getting
 CO M M ITM EN TIN POETRY 331

lost in mazos o f misrecognition. Sometimos we need to attend more

carefblly to the chooser and his vales, less to tile article chosen.
Caints Craig in his thoughtfiil essay can easily assume that Yeats
was deeply reactionary in his ptJfitics.K53iink otherwise, although
I couldnt hope to defend my view in a short comment. Tliis is, in
sonie par, because I find an unusual disjunction in Yeats between
the opinions he tried on and tlie vales wltich im peled his choice.
As Williant Morris rotntu'kea, after that fracas in the Socialist
Clubroont at"Kclmscoti House, % rang my chainnans bell because
you vvere not being understood. Veiy certaiilly Yits had a genius
for selecting for Iiimself exliibitionist reattiottlhy hats. He courted
misunderstanding.
Atid yet I cant see auy way in which compassion must be
defined as quainyJ^Bid the kind of elf-critical
compassion Twdenced in M e d ita u |\i Time of Civil Wat or in
Nineteen Hmtdred and N ineteenBis^H qualilH and a political
quality part of todays intellectual Left is not
t riclilrfffqgOT: "

We had Te5
The lieart brutal front the fare;
More substarra;. m our eimtities
Than in our love ...

Perhaps one d a " some B lo tie y ^ S ^ wifl tremulouslf* retura to tlie

empty hou o f socialist aspjHffioji TOJlch fnalinism and bureau-
cratic social-deniocracy have vacated. If they do n O tH R I can see
few affimiative prosprcSW 'or attem pts on tlie intellectual Ri^ht w
invoke (on their side!) a liistorical England are ther callow or
whimsical. For if that older organic so cie^ in which ttasses
an unquestioned order o f nature is not an England which sociaM
historians can fmd, the attenipt is certainly far advanced to put us
all into an organic order today. And it is capital - now insecure
and supra-national, but still witli an imperative inertia - which is
daily dismantling that historie England over our heads: inexorably
destroying od landscapes, od buildigs, od cultural m o deslo ld
institutions, and striving to compact us conveniently into a
modemised and managed circuit o f conditioned need and consonant
332 MAKING HI STORY

supply. It is money m ic h seeks to make over society as its organ.

And tlie real Right (not the Right of party hats and churchgoing
homiletics) has long been negotiating points of privilege within this
circuit. They have long been into business studies, iconoclasm,
conspicuous sexual consumption, Auberon Waugh, rationalisation,,
pseudo-classlessness and S jg in g airports. When they are not in
Washington w are packing a weekend bag for Brussels. Or for
Frankfiirt, vvheS the multi-national signs welcome visitors with
Customs, Duty Free Goods, Taxis, and Sexshop, whose sign (for
tie illiterate) is a pair of legs and boobs. That is what the Right is
into now, and I have^io doubt that it gives Davif and Sisson pain.
What does the real Right care about tlieir various EnglandsJS^
Meanwhile hg. od vales (for very few new ones have been
discovered in the last decades) dither around at sixes and sevens in
search of social referents. Above their heads tlie od unrecon-
structed political rhetoric booms on. The Right (just back from
Brussels) Slaim s this and t h 5 or listory^ or (just back
from rankfurt) tli e ^ m il j. The Left (fighting bitterlj over the
texts of 1844, 1848, 1917) claims modernity, progress, innovation.
The vales get bored with all this, and look out for a quiet place
to realign themselves. We must watch and see what they do.

Ev1
One place in which they might realign themselves is poetry.
Perhaps we should reverse the customary question, and ask, not
about poetrys conunitment to ... whatever it may be, but about the
conunitment of people 1jp poetry.
I dont mean the problem of tlie loss of a mass audience for
poetry, of thejgood attendance once at Gahvay Races. I mean
the marginalty of poetry arnong other intcllectual activities: have
the functions conunonly attributcd to poetry in the past, of
signalling shifts in sensibility, of stating and organising vales,
of cnhancing our perccption within the primary tenns of comnni-
nication, and o f disclvxing and defming commitments - have
these functions been displaced, driven into a margin, takcn over
by some surrogate? Or has the place from which some of the
profoundest commitments of the past have arisen simply been
 COMM1TMENT1N POETRY 333

lcft vacant? Left or Riglit, what contemporary poct and which

pocms unlcss as a marginal solace are we to be committed
to? In emergency, in criscs of choicc, or n the longcr reaches of
endurancc, vvhich imagcs and forms assist us to define our
human loyaltics?
It is an unfair i|ucstion. Pcrhaps commilment of that kind, to
poets or to poetry, has always been rare, and has generally been to
poets of a prior generation. And if we have no contemporary poets
who can conunand tliat commitmnt, dwn that is no-ones fault.
But there might be BM Pfflroj1 cxamination. Perhaps,
Itere or there, re pT^ns who 4 more odnductye climate,
have'fGHP tlfl? pfiets or moralists o!f the past decades, whose talents
are buried instead in sdtiology or historical research? And the
paucity of relevant poeticRtateniHtS adjateffl to public and social
life - the kind of sttcmcnt which might enablc pRiple Jg dRlgagl*
political action as the carrier of significant valu - ntay be a very '
substantial part of our problent. By our problcm 1 do not mean a
problem exclusive to visiting histonans, but the
general ftf a society void of aspirations, dircctionlcss. If
we had better we might l i a v j p s bad sociolo0 and less
enipty and -mendcious p o lit^ S People with ^ ^ ^^ H p ercep tio n
would 110 longer tolrate these offences against language and diese
trivialisations o f valu*
III

Thus, when the argument J s r reversed, it a p H H in iis fonn.

Poetry in our time has faitea to State relevant vales, or to disclase
and defne social commitments: diinkers, artists, and1moralists llave
failed also. Henee much of social and pubhK ^^a appears void of
valu unless as a habit of rhetoric. Poets cant be cottniiitted to any
actual politics because diese are devoid of any valu stubbom or
palpable enough to bear the weight of poetic commitmnt. They
are left to espouse tinreal politics (whether royalist or pvolutipn-
ary) which entail few consequences, which enmesh thern in no
enduring obligations or loyalties, and henee which should be seen
as attitudes or poses ratier than as commitments. They are acting
out pars to each other in a psychodrama 011 the margins of society,
some in Guevara caps, others in splendid affairs with plumes.
334 MAKI NG HI S T O&Y

I State iO h u s to cJa^ B arg u m en Q and to emphasis* the

reciprocity implicit in a profounder notiotf of .fom m itntcnt Tfip
poem may sindcate vales > tisclosq political
commitments, and those vvho are politically active may liold
stubbornly to uns> commitnrcnt i bccause they are, in thek turn,
committed to the poem anf|ts vales. Nothing of this kind goes
on now, of coMQe. or do complex historical
processes of valuc-fonnation can rcally be tidicd up inside this
paradigm. This may be how some fish swim, but the fish do qot
control the
The sea itself, the crippling pressure of waters, the flux o f m s J
is taken as given: and, IjS ihW E it js easy to I have
done, t<ff|2|5an^M politics, poetry, vales, as if these were
unproblematic and constant univcrsals. But no
B |H 2 M s e a . We have been passing in the last decades through a
particular historical expericnce and a Mutuo disturbance of vales.
And flieti we look at the wholc seascape, we may flnd tliat our
problem reniains, in the deepest and jfgl generous sense, a
political one afler all: a p ro b lan ^ n o t of *politiSj and poetry/
public and personal, but a particular problem 'of total distrbanos
in a particular moment of historical transition.
I rnade my own diagnosis o f the gnesis o f A e problem in an
essay o f 1959, Outside the W hale, in which I argued that the crisis
of poetry could be understood only in relation to the spiritual
withdrawal conscquent upon discnchantment with Communism, as
well as tire numbing inertia o f the M U W ar. F could not hope to
review that argunrent herat or to If I did
so, I vvould rvish to of Caims Craig's searching view
of the English ^ T B K CmieS! But U H ltitiq u e, rvhicli falls squarely
upon a nostalgia Right, must surely be cclutffCTB f c l by a critique,
no less unforgiving, of a cirae inc Left? For if not only the
utilitarian and positim t Lell H t also (as I have argued in r'T h e
Poverty of Theory) the Marxist-structuralist Left have rcduccd poli
tics to the negotiation or confrontation o f scientifically determinable
intereses, then the very notion of politics as the disclosure and choice
of vales bccomcs suspect and repugnant (romauticism, utopian-
isnr', humanisnr, moralism): at the most, value-fonnation bccomcs
a subordnate and detcmiined exercise, the appropriatc sour spoonful
 C O M M I T M E N T I N POETRY 335

o f de-mystification o f moralistic ideology, thc appropriatc cough in

confirmation o f what scioncc lias discloscd. No poctry witli any
dignity would Icavc its personal comer to enter tlie Service o f that
pliilistinism. And no poets llave.
Wcll, wc may not agrcc on that. We might come eloser to an
agreenient if we looked at oursclves against the background of a
comparable liistorical moment o f profound disencliantment and
disturbancc o f vales. 1 am, as is Caims Craig, preoccupied witli
the 1790s. I have vvalked up and down in that decade for years.
Eveiything in tliose years was shifting or was premonitory o f the
shifts that were to come.
Rlietoric and vales were coming apart, new V ales were in
fomiation. Humane perm issi#^ patenialisni collapsed into hysteric
anti-Jacobinism (the last years o f Burke) or invigilatory Evangeli-
calisni (the Claphani SaintsJH annah More); in a few exceptional
cases (M ajor Cartwright) it broke through to a more active
democratic persuasin. In an astonishing cartwheelSCobbett tumed
over from patriotic anti-Jacobinism to anti-Establishment populism,
ultra-democracy in the garb o f traditionalism. And what o f the
Left^ B id e by^sideB som etim S inliabiting conimon movenients
(opposition to the Frencli W ars and to the Two Acts) we fmd
patrician Wliiggish litism, self-satisfied benevolism, illuminism,
courageous sexual innovation, ag*cjMc republicanism, blunt pop-
ulism, emergent bourgeois utilitarianism. mystic niillenarianism.
Cohabitants o f that L eft are conunitted to antagonistic strategies
and ends, appeal to altem ative vales, and are already meditating
decisions which (by 1800 or 1810) have plainly set tliem upon
opposing trajectories:

That righteous cause (such pow er hath freedom) bound,

For one hostility, in friendly league,
Ethereal natures and the w orst o f slaves;
Was served by rival advocates that carne
From regions opposite as heaven and hell.
One courage seenied to anmate them all ...

What was happening mside the R ight and Left was often of
more significance than the manifest antagonism between tlie two.
 336 MAKING HI STORY

We caimot read off the character o f persons from a recital o f their

opiniom: the advanced Godwinian iconoclast o f 179^, John Stod-
dart (Hazlitts brotlier-in-law) was on liis w ay to becoming (twenty
years later) Dr. Slop, the prosecutor-in-chief o f plebeian free-
thinkers and seditionists. It is easy enough to itemise what people
were against: the Godwinians, vvho were so very Progressive, were
against the farnily, the law, Gotliic institutions, gratitude,, love of
parents for children or children for parents, the ignorance o f the
populace, the inconstancy o f the French, the injudicious agitations
o f popular reforni societies. This left thern with rather little to be
fo r, apart from Reason and Benevolence, for which it was not easy
to find a local habitation and a ame outside o f their own heads.
For some, radicalism was a youthul ego-trip which took them
rapidly to the maturity o f the Right. Perhaps that is w hat that
unsatisfactory work The Borderers is about? For others, disenchant-
ment in the utopian expectations aroused by the French Revolution
led on to prolonged historical and philosophical reflection, and to
self-examination, in the search for secure affirmatives.
We know how important were poetry and criticism in this
whole exploration and re-organisation o f vales. And some o f the
sharpest confrontations were within the L eft: Blake polemicised
against mechanical materitdism and benevolism, W ordsw orth (wliile
still a republican) polemicised against the ghost o f Godwin,
Coleridge at 30 (or at 35 or 45) polemicised against Coleridge at
25: all polemicised against utilitarianism.
I am suggesting, in that can only be shorthand, that our own
times may be something like this. L eft and R ight have lost their
stability o f meaning in similar ways. The pressure o f disenchant-
mcnt has led to cartwheeling conmiitments. Friends and enemies
cohabit in the same movements. It is easier to know w hat other
people (and perhaps oursclves?) are against than w hat we are for.
And we have a similar advanced intcllcctual radicalism o f opinin
which is displaced from any real or scrious social conmiitments
(indeed, which makes a merit o f this displacement) and whose
affirmatives are problematic or have yet to be disclosed.
If this is so, then there is very certainly the most serious work
for poets to do. Historical experiencc, in that period and in our
own, has mado the od kinds o f political commitmcnts irrelevant.
 C O M M 1 T M E N T I N POETRY 337

To rcbuild (lioso commitments, both programmes and people must

be sortcd out, and tlie vales which these stand on - the
affirmatives oven more than the negativcs - must be fully
disclosed. 1 do not arge that in all periods and places poetry must
be the path-finder for intcllcctual culture. 1 am only arguing tliat
we are in such a period now,

IV

If there were such poetry, what would it be doing, what would it

say? The question is ridiculous: if opqknew , in pro&c, there would
be no peed for JKJcts. And ja any case the poets, like those of the
1790stl$y>ud say things.
I would suspect only tl^at a poetry whici^ tecreated the vales of
a L eft might prove to be uncom fortabljlto most o f us who tlnk
ourselves to be on the Left, and sxceedingljJI distasteful to sonte
par oEpthat intellectual Left wltich is so stridently competitive in
its pursuit o f advapped and Tcvolutionary' causes.
But the poets ^Vould n o tjlre a te the p olitiS . Wliat titey might do
fpuld be to d i s e the vales lurking beneath the abstract
constructions, indcate the consonancy o f clusters of valu, and the
inconipatibi 1ity o f one cluster with another. Then people would
h a m to rnake their choice. A n R erciS e o f this kind might bring
light but very little sweetncss. It might tu n T b t that the Left is
inliabift2 by vales at ftirious emnity with each other, and tlrat
people w ould ^ e t on better if theH rearranged thentselvcs in new
parties and Ipomea for d i f f e r ^ ^ ^ ^ B ^ U ' ego-freaks Itere, aggros
there, and
For the Left in the last fifteen years has been beconting a very
odd place. I am not as (EapiiedjtSiiBost intcllectuals seent to be
about the joonservolism o fjraditional trade unionisnt and Labour-
sm ( coQperative, Ztsubordinate, refomtist, &c &c): a bloody-
minded defensiveness against the nianagement of ntoney seents to
me a humane, if not an adequate, response. I am more worried by
the intellectuals, or by sonte o f them. I cant assunte, as Jon Silkin
seents to do, that intellectual violence and litism are only to be
found on the Right. Might not his vigilance and anxiety be
extended also to the Left? N o doubt Malcolnt Bradburys The
338 MAKI NG HI S T ORY

Hislory Man is a vicious counter-revolutionary lampoon, but it was

near enough to the mark to worry me, just as Ben Johnsons
wittier lampoon of Tribulation Wholesome ought to have worried
(and no doubt did) Puritans of that day. There are some on tire
Left vvho flirt witli conceits of violence and aggression in a way
which suggests a disorder of the imagination, a mere bravura of
opinions. I have watched the eyes of a young woman, whom I
kirow to be gentle and sensitive, glitter vvith excitement at the
Manson murders: acts which she supposed to have some revolu-
tionary significance. I have argued more than once with comfort-
able middlc-claS? p e r s o n who wmild regard joining the Labour
Party (or the Communist Party or any other on offer) as an offence
to tlieir high principies, but who have tried to persuade me that
Baader-Meinhof and Red Brigades are engaging in a justified
struggle againstyffl ^remBsive violbice o f the State. Within the
vocabulary o f this kind o f Left there are many dainty terms for
fratricide* -

Terms which we trundle smoothly oer our tongues

Like mere abstractions, flipty sounds to which
We join no feeling and attach no form!
As if the soldier died without a wound ...

Tlie other thing is that an intellectual generation which has made it

through educational selection really has developed a colossal
contempt for those who have not. And I find this also in a section
of the intellectual Left, with its litism, its distrust for experience
and practice, its accent on youth and repute and fashion, its silence
about pcople who are od or monogamous or ugly or unfortunate in
uninteresting ways.
O f coursc, this is not all the Left, or all o f the intcllcctuals.
But it suggests to me that odd separations are going on. And,
oddly again, some of the vales of tradition and of England'
(and Scotland and Wales) are coming across and regrouping at
another crner of the Left. Some of us found oursclvcs, at the
end of 1978, somcwhat to our own surprisc, defending passion-
atcly the integrity of the jury systcm (onc of our oldest
institutions) against not only conservativo judges and plice but a
 C O M M I T M E N T 1N P O E T R Y 339

Labour Attorney-Goneral, and in thc face of an astonishcd

audicncc o f advanccd intcllcctuals and Marxist-structuralists who
saw us as cntrappcd witliin the ideolgica! mystifications of
bourgeois libcralism. Where was thc various England of the
right thcn? And where was the Left?
O f course the Left does not belong to me. Maybe it shonld
belong to revolutionary aggro. But if the message o f the Left is to
be bang! bang! then I wish they would get themselvcs poets to
imagine this, to join feeling and attach fom t to the bangs, so that
these become a full-blooded aggressive commitment to banging and
not the cap-pistol o f opinin. O r if the L eft is to be traded into the
keeping o f structuralist scientists fo r wliom the very notion o f
experience is anathem a ( em piricism ), then let them get poets who
can im agine that. The rest o f u s can then creep out and invent for
ourselves another ame.
Somewhelp (if poets did their work) another cluster of vales
would be dfjftjnt themseffies. These might be a little quieter, less
invigilatory and dominatjS'e. le ^ K trid e n t and more compassionate,
than those rt'dfeiiflyTo be noted on the Left. They might (as William
Morris did) d e n p rtd 1less o ^ ^ ^ relu jes and institutions and more of
our ovvif cretlve resources. The imagination would explore into the
dark altead o f us once m orB instead o f lagging a few paces behind
opinin. As the earth gets colder under the winter o f rnoney, who
knows? A few traditional vales out o f various England might join
this cluster to keep warra. I would not repudate them. It would be
heartless to drive them back into history.
Perhaps a ll this w ork o f disclpsing and defining the vales on
which our commitmentsU tfe based is being done in poetry already
and I have failed to keep up. O r perhapsfct is being done and we
havent yet heard: w h o ,j n the 1790s, knew o f W illiam Blake? All
that I arn arguing is that our sense o f political reality, in any
generous historical sense, has becom e lost w ithin faded rhetoric and
threatening abstractions, and that poetry, m ost o f all, is wliat we
now need. A nd tliis m ust be poetry m ore am bitious, more confident
of its historical rights arnong other intellectual disciplines, than any
that is commonly presented to us today.

The Poetry Magazine, Stand, invited me to conunent on a debate on

this theme.
 PoweFS and ames
(With apologies to Szum a Chien)

, You have the pow er to ame:

Naming (gM'es powgr over all.
But who vvill ame the power to lame?
Asked the Oracle.

^ragp}

Like a silkworm on a m ulberry le a f

The unmaiuicrly carth
Gnawcd at the edge o f the sky and bit out m ountains.

ocean,
Cocooned in unconsciousness and grass,
An existence unknown to itself,
W aiting to be spun by nimble tongues into languages.

Let us conciliate the pojvers by giving theni ames.

Let us swallow the wonn.
Let us tame the world by taking it into ourselves.

Art

Tlie dragons and the lions are furious.

They would like to eat us.
If we model their rage in clay
Will we drive terror away?
 Nu/ninf; the Got/x

Ten suns flared in the sky.

Thoy scorchcd the crops and hatched out of the clay
Fire-brcathing dcmons. The great archer Yi
Chose froni his pouch
Nine arrows flighted vvith a shamans charm
And slew one sun with cach, and ever after we
Named Yi as deity.

But Heaven's pillis crackcd

And water mtshea out of
Wasliing
A paste of
To patch the gashcs in the sky, fgnd frorn a giant turtle
She hewcd its legs to prop Heavcn back in place.
The gOarosrBfcifti be

Then water must be educated

And
Accomplished this in thirteen years o f toil.
A wingcd dragn
And aalfee a bear
To scratch a passage through an obstnate liill.
We named Yu o f the soil

And Ctss son hercditary

Owner o f all under Heavcn, he and his family
In perpeftaw ; f rAST n a ffliip S ta y o w e r
Sprouted the State:
Annies invented sltwpta: asf<spr0hty
Led the stars captve throug^'flie calendar:
Taxes invented the poor.
342 MAKI NG HI S T ORY

The Scholars

In scarcely a millemiium
Spring diminished into auumn.
Was tlie world worse
In tlie time of incessant waFS
Betvveen the city States
Or were there benefits
For the
In tlie comretitioyii of courts?

Congestin on the roads

As tlie Spffifers^uid thir schools
Imagined luminous codes -
Ideologues and ptllaiSs,
An orator with an umbrclla,
A sophist astride a nuile,
A hemiit in sandals of s t r a w ^ |
Pestered for audience,
Oppressed the M irts Qf kings
And persecuted princes,
Urging them to mjjtofft
Obedience to Heavens la\w*'*

When Confucius was lecturing

Lord Ling, the Duke of Ve*
Enforcing Heavens rules
On the virtues of benevolence,
The Duke allowed his eyes
To leave his tutor and follow
Some wild geese in the sky.
At this indiscipline
Confucius took offencc
And gathering up his school
Wcnt off in a huff to Chen.
 P O W E R S AND AMES 343

Says the Grand Historian:

it was a great mistakc
To tutor powcr, for wiien
Tlie iavv at iast vvas learned
From Iegalist or ni)'stic
By the Eniperor o f CJiin
He ordered the imperial rule
O f benevolence to begin:
He buried the scholars alive
And the ofSongs was bumed.

O that Conicius
Had leamed to keep his coo
And had lingered to tVatCh the geffie
Wi th tlie duke and liis fool!

The First EmpHi?

hi the 26th year o f his reign tlie King o f Cliin

Assembled his counsellors.

In the d e s e a o f his nature little winds o f boredom

Stirred eddies o f dust. His throat was dry
And nialice constricted his voice like that o f a jackal.
Dust stirred in his flitted eyes. He said:
I have conquered sif States, IlM V e captured or killed tlieir
kings.
Whoever opposed me has been enslaved.
Ali between the four seas lias fallen under my rule.
I llave defined the laws, niaking known what is forbidden,
And discovering (to the surprise o f sonie) 600 degrees o f sin
Hitherto nanieless and now made nianifest to a 11.
I have closed up the gaps in the Great Wall and garrisoned it
from end to end.
What is there left for me to be omnipotcnt in?
344 MAK I N G H I S T O R Y

The counsellors bowed and puffed their sleeves:

The first minister, the marshall, the grand censor,
The executioner and the eunuchs o f the royal conimission.
They said: O thou ineffable Vocativo!
G reat Staightener, Almighty Rtgulator o f All
How couldst thou be more egregious than thou already art?
Thou has brought letters level, made m easures match,
And tliou hast brought cash and m oris into uniformity.
Men and women must now waffe on different sides o f the Street,
Thanks to thy wisdom. Thou showest no favour no way.
Adulterers (if tliey are poor) m ay be boiled in cauldrons.
Officials abusing g g ordinanccs are a lw a fl castrated.
hideed, thy bcnevolence
Blesses the beasts in the fields, who press to the court,
Bleating to be thy meat. The w atcf buffalo
Bellows th r n a m e ; the beeslbring thee wax; the flsh^
W ish only to be dish; the rica cro w d s kito the carts
And offers itself as ta x ... E t cetera.

Tlie King o f Chin vvas gratified,

H e ordered that their s p e e c h ^ be engraved upon stone
A t the gateways to his 36 provinpes.

Tlien he ascended g th ro n e o f alabm&er

And, hiding his regal j^Jseijce w ithin veils,
Announced that Empire liad conunenced:

Hereby I augrate a new age.

Lo, let us begin by renaming all ames.
Since I have swallowed six kings I now assume plurality.
It is ordered that henceforth we shall be us,
Becoming Our First Exaltcd Sovereign Empcror.
W hatcver we w ant will be known as H eavens dccrec.
Our laws will be namcd edicts.
W e hereby rcname the poor our loyal black-headed people.
Whcn we are satisfied all their wants are met.
W hen w e cat the nntion lias been fcd.
 P O W E R S AND A M E S 345

Wlien we sliit All liavc shat.

On, and since our brilliancc will strikc morais blind,
Hcnccforth onr imperial self will give audience only through
scrccns
And wc sliall never be secn.

The counsellors bowed and trembled for their balls.

They ordered to be engraved in stone on Mount Tai.
The Sovcreign Emperor made decrees and ediets which all ls
subjeets heeded;
Great and nianifest, his virtue is handed down to ages yet to
come, to be followed without change.

Tlie sage Emperor who has pacified all under Heaven is tireless
in his rule;
He rises early and makes marginaba on liis officials reports;
He sets trstandard o f proper B ^ e teS ^ an d signs for all tliings;
The black-headed people are reformed* he surpasses tlie ancients
and has neVfer knowft rror.
Oh gosh! he is so bright that he graciously saves our eyes by
liiding behind screens.
His omnipotence knows no end, and his orders will be obeyed
through etem ity.

Tlie Emperor w as pleased.

He sacrificed 'six white horses to the power o f water,
Drowning Uiern slowly. A picul o f n e and a pig
Were ordered to bfSnt to village in the land.
It was found (alas!) liat demand exceeded supply,
But the intention (at lehst) was distributed to the poor,
Who raised their w ora and empty hands
And blessed the Emperor.

Then he decreed that he liad become inunortal.

And was transmogrified. But was visited by doubt.
He sent boatloads o f children out to fmd tlie fairy isles
Far in the mist eastem oceans where the immortals live.
Tliey did not return. Perhaps they were stopped by whales?
346 MAKI NG HI STORY

He sent out alchcmists to visit the barbarians,

In search of magic fung and cunning elixirs.
But they were thwarted by dcmons

Behind his screens the r raged and aged.

He issued an edict condcmning time:
Wherogs leaming lia? confused our loyal B.H P W^
We abolish all histories vvhich do not mention our ame.
Let only despotic Sciences be preserved:
Geonietry, census, the computation o f tax,
Econometrics, caryatics, castrametation, casuistics,
Cacodoxy, w reidua tMihration. nefandous necmnaigicse
Decapitation, doctrinarianism and the divisin
Let the arts be banncd,
And the Bo m I w K burned and the Book o f Music.
Whoever recalls t^ybastfehall
And % h j^ to r fails to tliese crimes shall be bumed with
_ jra n d s .,f_
The counsellors clapped thcir hands.

The Emperor retired into 20 palaces

Whose walls hung with theiu n L o iS tto u h an c^ ^
The marsh creatures of lust clung around hini.
He fed on s h a r k s a n d ^ba pads?f camels,
Tangerines, lychees and fantasies.
Tlie white faces of treacliery
Whispered around him and nmslgrgd m his lechery.

A eunuch hissed a signal of suspected treason.

Tlie Emperor callcd in the scholars for a course of self-criticism.
They hastened to the court to incrimnate each other.
Chuckling like a jackal he causcd in the sands to be oponed
A vault lit with dark lantcrns
And stocked with the confiscatcd texts of Confucius.
460 sages werc sent iindcrground
To sound off in ghostly seminar through the ages.
 POWERS AND AMES 347

Each day the Emperor rose and wcighed his official reports.
He shifed half a picul o f scrolls from his left to his riglit:
Ali, momentous imauguration o f the dynasty o f bumf!
According to anguries or according to the weather
He markcd in the margins those he decreed to be dead.
On his capital errands
The palacc eunuchs spurred with their imperial wands
In an incessant circulation o f dread.

W hen he liad first ascended to the throne o f Chin

He liad ordered work to begin on a bloody great tomb.
Novv 700,000 castrati, concts and slaves
W ere inipressed to M ount Li
To magniy his giganticTnaasoleum
W hich (howevefy the Emperor did not intend to go dead in,
Preferring to be an Etenial, whom water cannot wet,
W ho rides on the clouds, impervious to fire,
And coeval with evil ...

Changed ame again. Became pur sp irit

We became It:
And, to fox the evil eye, it became invisible.
It flitted in secret
In screened arcades between Its 270 palaces.
Places o f ecstacy, w hat with golden orioles
Shouting in tlie floWering cherries and the lakes stocked
With exotic goldfish. Everywhere bells and drums
Exliorted the Etem al to come,
As did the countless beautieS attendant on its every will
With which the pavilions and secret chambers were stacked.
Sheathed in green gauze
They back-combed their hair into pyramids like orchids
And languished for Its cock
(It having decreed that eacli m us bear It a son
Or else ... )
But were visited only by flaccid concupiscence
Since It could no longer fuck.
348 MAKI NG HI STORY

The Etemal flitted from palace to palace and moped.

It raged and aged.
It pawed and groped.
It wittered and moaned.
It decreed dgath ^
On any who disclosed where It was or where It might even be.
It issijpd an edict tliat It had5ra|rf to exist
Except as despotic Essence.

You must imagine it now as pur vacancy

Here Is^ts'^apie:

* **

300 ^trblpi& is *
Weje abjured to ^pnjir'e bensfieent omens from the'stars.
It ordered the spiritual purication.4pf poetry:
The^hminatiop of dentafcjjthe utter e n d in g ^ f gutterals.
Musicians were ordered to oil their strings.
Ululation of sibilants and labials
As vowels howied in the shrouded corridors
And tlie.jjjm o iM g ile d of im nortality ...

And in the 37tli yqaj of asceud^g to the tlirone o f Cliin

Eleven years on from ^siu n in g ^ cW m e o f We
And two years from the annuncjffioD of spirituality
A stranger thrust into the censor3 hand a disc o f jade
On which was written The Primal Dragn Will Die!
And vanished in smoke ....
In terror it fled.

It consulted oracles. It gave it out

That It had gone to inspect the empires cxtremities.
For fear of lurking assassins
It sent forward convicts to fell the forests ahead.
Archcrs with crossbows niarchcd in the vanguard
With orders to shoot all whales.
 POWERS AND AMES 349

It remained invisible within a covered iitter

Carried by slaves. It decreed tlie pains of hell
Upon any who nientioned death.
And at Pingtai

In tlie 7tli month G?pi^38th year

It died.
But, being invisible, who could tell?

Tlie first minister, Li Szn 4

He wasnt surc the od despot would stay dead.
Besides, he had designs on immortality himself,
By raising his creature, Hu-hai, to succeed as emperor
In place of the CnWWl Prince who had i|ayed in the capital.

Li Szu, Hu-hai, and the chosen kept mum.

1 And so It continued on Its imperial progress

On the
The B .ti.
The the screens bearing dishes
(Which thcy scoffcd with relish within), ushering out
flo S is hin^ f fesll by
Ah, ihpii
Disincamate, aseptic apotheosis of Power,
Whibll issued an edict condemning Its own son and h d ?
(Who H -Ita i^ R the Ebfd High Marshall
(Whom Li Szu disliked). Wjio ^ p h duly died
O f the death-sting of the invisible Eternal
Who at lpngdt beganfijstm k to high heaven.
The stench caused gossip. To cover the matter
A cartload of salted fish was hitched to Its Iitter.
350 MAKING HI STORY

And in this nianner the bizarre procession

Re-entered Hsienyang, capital o f tlie empire,
Where the Prince and Marshalls heads grinned on the gates.

First carne the outriders scouring for rice

Convicts with axes
Alchemists wishing for fungi
Augurers fishing for augiyies
Archers warily watching for whales
Tlie black imperial banners
Trumpeters, drummers
Then:
1 0 ,0 0 0 horsemen, 1 0 0 0 charioteers
A myriad fflt-soldiers sweating in fiill armour
Hu-hai, Li Szu, and the ministers of rank
The in pafenquins
Eunuchs in rich insignia
Then:
tflia.Mitr^anfurled imperial dragn
The in lts Litter
And a cartload of sa^jp igg^J
A few explanation^jSiQMfid^
Followed bv exemplary executions.

After vvhich It was borne

To the yawning mausoleum beneath Mount Li.
Laid in a coffm of copnei^
In a vault over which thp cpnsteMaons tumed
And the floor was tile world_#ver_wEich It liad ruled
With the rivers and oceans sketched in niercury.
AH the imperial palaces wee modelled in jade:
Miraculous artfice guarded by gins and traps!
Oh, and those of the Etemals ladies who liad fallen down in
their function
Of bearing It heirs (viz. malo) (i.e. nearly all)
Were given the honour of going in gorgeous vveeds
lnto the vault to tend lts ghostly necds
and rub unguent on the offal.
 POW ERS AND A M E S 351

In a afterthought
lt w as ordcrcd to cise the inner and outer gates
Upon the artificers and labourers
W ho w ere also imnuircd in that foetid space
So that tlicy w ouldnt betray the secrets o f the place.

T he G rand H istorian erred

In neglecting to record w here the fish w ere interred.

Rebellion

Suction o f te rro rs sw irling hysteria

D rew inw ards all th a t could m ove on wheels or legs
In an acceleration o f dread:
Tlie livestock (including m aidens).
C onscripts to cise the tom b. D roves o f geese.
C arts o f millet. Pigs. W h at nifference did
It m ake to be m arked as dead

O r only a s Usted t o d ie r f f if ) 'villagers

W ere trudging w est w hen the roads w ere barred by floods.
Tliey w ere under orders to garrison the W all,
Led by a farm ers son,
Chen Sheng w ho said: Since it has been decreed
Tliat if w e are late for duty the offence is capital,
W hat is the poi'nt o f it

Strange lights show ed in the temples.

The foxes how led in prophecy:
Heavens m ndate is w ithdraw n from Chin Shih H uang.
A fishcrman
Found in the belly o f a carp a silken clotli
Marked in vermilion lettering:
Chen Sheng will be the king.

He killed the guards

And named him self as M agnifier o f Chu.
352 MAKING HI STORY

The eastem provinces rose up against the west.

Villagers with their hoes
Cut down tre govemors, tire collectors of tax,
And pillaged the palaces. In a ferocious Harvest
They levelled and laid waste

All visible evidence of the Omnipotence

Who still lingered on as awe, an assertion of function
Unftilfilled, a necd for
It hisSa^BlB^^BT
And advertised Its post as a vacancy
And from Its insatiate appetites began
The

The

It had been tlie Emperorf whim

To have his armies buried with him,
But when the exchequer was des titute
He graciously stopped tlie soldiers pay
And pennitted them to substitute
TlieirjSersons nrecisfdCtn^lecf R eB W

For an etemity tlie c m s

Grazed round thejrombOw ope reHud te
Where under earth the HvsymnaKay
Until in the time of immortal Mao
Labour brigaders sinking a well
Carne on the miglity garrison
Still standing guard.

As for the bones

Of the Eniperor, the gencrations
Living beneath the ancestral mound
Have let two millennia pass:
It was best to leave It underground
And mow the last inch of grass.
 POWERS AND AMES 353

Ih e Warrors of Hsienyang

Clay-imagcd warriors drilling M the sand

Stand ready to be inspocted by war,
Tlie kneeling archer has a kthal eye:
The deft fingers of thq charioteer
Contain his mischievous horses as they shy, 1
The sergeant bullshits to belie Jiis fbatf1;.
The browned-pff SldierS waiting fiot commands
Are ready to fight but disinelihcd ta ji$ r

Rank upoivrank tfteir grAM i jjjgagttf '

Stare th rp u g h s hito d isM tJfaec % i
We are thek , f t e A tinges
Which .shinuuer in the
Their scouts inspect us vacantly and say
That we are vapours plagiarising clay.

Neanderthal $&d Peklng M m

Barely $tryived |i$ |g latK d
Neglectig.tp ffike dcolbeg^e

Accurate hieasurenteul ,o f tb b r a n ,
Reveis a eapacity for speeck
Tliis may be toim tedj a#

And proves w hat Conttade Stalin said:

Tools manufactured bumankind:
Nccessity enlarged the head
And matter reflected itself as rnind.

Art plays a contradictory role.

Scapurmiancy was a trick
Uscd as a means o f social control.
354 MAKING HI STORY

Magics arcane languages

Cowed the masses within the caves
And established the shamans privilege.

Astrologers served the ruling class

And sought in the stars a class reflection:
Society caught a religious infection
And primitive coinnumism passed.

History marching through its phases

Found in thelfflfcceQ^af Chin
A monarch to modemise its basis.

The nation
Detennining a progressive mode
O f hvdraulic civilisation.

However many the Eniperor slew

Tlie & ^ tij^ iis t< M a ^ ^
(Wliilp taking yole of contradicen)
Affinns that productive forces grew.

The RectifiGQtionEvrNanis

Heavens mndate yvhrmed the {and like tociasts:

Taxation's inquisition racked the rocks and liles
Extracting the confession of their surplus.
The peasants hacked at faniine with their hoes
And stirred tlie dirt to flower:
A hundred million hoes held up the vault of power.

Or was it propped up by the arch of awe

Whose proper lame is sclf-expropriation?
If so, materialisni tunis a soniersault:
We are the subjccts of our ovvn ncgation
And exploitations basis floats
On the coid surface o f our confiscatcd thouuht.
 POWERS AND AMES 355

Modes o f production like clcctric grids

Transmit us as thcir errands to thcir ends:
From m attcrs terminis to spirits tenninus
The circuits nrn as strict as continence,
Their only business to enforce
Relations o f production into intercourse.

Necessity determinates our patlis

Into preordinates in historys casette:
W e utter into print-out, ruled bV roles,
And ranked like terracotta warriors. Y et
H ow could necessity dictate
T hat inimane ntausoleum, that predatory State,

Unless the progrannner vvas high on mescalin?

Some m anic ego in the m ask o f destiny
Dream s on the highest stair o f ritual,
H allucinating those despotic dynasties
W hich know no longer wfoat th e jf a r e M
Forgetful o f their origins in that exotic air.

W ho tutored tim e in pow ers paradigms?

Did the E tem al on the stairs o f
H allucinate our centurys malignancies
And program m e on our skies a sw ann o f acronyms?
It seems the aim o f m dem man
Is to fiilfil the Em perors two-millennial plan.

O starry Superalpha, tenninal Amen!

Thou great F irst Cause, egregious Omega!
Our eunuchs and our censors clap their hands:
From day to day the unwearied media
Their great O riginal proclaim
And hallelujah their hosannahs to Thy ame.
356 MAKI NG HI STORY

O great totalitarian archetype

In whose ancestral influence we fall,
Who levelled all to uniformity and left
Humanity bisected by a Wall:
Know tliat all prgress tends
To modemise Thy Means and end Thy Awfiil Ends.

The whale-dil gutters in the lamps below.

Tlie vault is sealed. The women fear to stir
Their shadows vvhich are threatening themselves.
Each sings and suffers with her sisters,
Ending as she began
In and ^ ^ ^ S e g o riC T o f man.

Tlie mind is $ ^ fc d with absolutist nouns

Which steal our ames and alinate our powers:
The Eniperor hisses in liis fimeral mound.
Its time the opprcssed arse
And hoes.

From the green earths imagined holocaust

Arise ye starveling ^ ag es'an d blTO , '
Our senyj&hiiinds out of their algorithms
And blow the fiise of m storjfs releo:
Arise and repossess
Tlie surplus valu of your swindled consciousness!

Plato thought nature plagiarises spirit:

Being determines consciousness determined Marx:
But in the contradictions of the Way
The human dialectic osculates and ares
And quarrels to insert
Some transient motive in the motiveless inert.
 P O W E R S AND A M ES 357

By getting right the proper ames of things

Confucius said that oidor would commence,
And Taoism taught all would be kind
l f they forgot about benevolence:
Cut down the props, tlie skies above
Will still hold up upon the menial rites of love

Whose needs are the material habitus

From wliich the goddesses and dragons carne,
Whose archers will shoot down the nuclear re,.
Whose naineless pillars are imaginatiots ames,
Wliose arcane oracles proclaim
Tlie rectification o f flie' human ame.

A Charm agairist Evil

Tlirow the forbidden places open.

Let the dragons and the lions play.
Let us swallow tlie w om t o f power
And the am e pass away;

London Review o f Books 23 rd January 1986

This was written n China in 1980. It is intended not to describe China,
but to convey the bewilderment Western hislorical ftiltd when first
encountering that great country.
 Agenda for Radical History

I feel like an impostor here, because for six years now my trade has
been submerged in peace activity, and I have to explain to you the
position I speak from now. Its been six years, not just of doing this
or that every now and then for peace, but, witli the exception of two
short spells of teaching in this country, total, full-time activity. In five
years Ive addressed more than five hundred meetings, attended
endless conunittees, visited as an emissary o f tire peace movement
nineteen or twsifty different countries. I ve liad in my own house a
weight of correspondenc^Siuch has buried any possibility o f work.
Much of been fascinating papers, letters dropping out of
different pars of the world. A verv curious rebirtli o f intemationalism
is taking place in a very< curious way, not coi\iing tlirough the nonnal
stnjctiiir^of politi^3Lparties or institutions. Partly by accident a few
ames got tlirown up a few years ago and became widely known - of
which mine was one. People found out Me address, and the letters
come to me.
Some letters have to be attended to very urgently. They may
come fromjBihe flthep side; J tli^ L m ay come from Hungarian
independents or persecuted Soviet peaceniks; they may come from
the United States peace movement; they may come from Caada or
Australia or j^M ever, And this has meant that I really have
evacuated perforce my trade as*a*liistrian for a long time.
I dont even have a valid jick et to tlie British Library or the
Public Record Office. As I passed the New York Public Library
this moming, I felt a knife inside me - the sense of how long it
was since I liad been able to work among the bounty that is there.
I am at least five years behind in my reading, including the reading
of the work of cise fricnds, colleagues and fonner students. I'm
trying to retum, but there is no guarantee of ccrtainty. This is not a
position one can easily walk out of. I have to tcll you that when I
was attenipting to get on this year with Cuslams in Caminan, - I
 AGENDA FOR RADICAL HISTORY 359

sutldenly had to tuni asido and to try and master all the weird
acronyniic vocabulary and technology of the Strategic Defence
lnitiative, and to edit and M part) write a book on Star Wctrs.
But this has also involved exchanges between East and West of
a very interesting and pufliaps potentially very important kind. Im
not rccomnionding otH t JS fofflwHuy course. Although one way
to librate wSi want to do so, is for more hands to be
engaging in this inwMMwWa^^Hrk I kiiovv some of you will be
doing tliis. But I nope^^jkjppattds Jffl not start w$ting letters
to me!
Im not apologizing. vfMCn fff u r country, as in yours,
professional groups suStod fonning their own anti-nuclear organisa-
tions, historians had a bit of a probl^if* because, unless they were
post-Hiro'sliiHsa,' there really v$snt very much history that histori-
ans could actually contribute (they thought) to ftte anti-nuclear
anovement. Bdf at length someone carne up with the right banner
for H isto d ^ K : against Nuclear W gapsn Historians Deniand a
BTditinuing Suppl^ of History. And theyre right. Because under
tlie critioisp o f tliis shadow of ttiBlcf war, all talk of history and
ftultire becomeff empty.) Even in this one of the densest
population centres in the world, which is now to become a honic
base .for a nuclear armed prate Annada, the collegcs and the
faculties hete have to considcr their position. Fm therefore not in
any mood to offer advice to iture historians.
If, or as, I return to trade, my prcoccupations are rather
personal: William Morris said to Bume-Joues Bvhen he was my"!
tge, 'the best way o f lyhgtliening out tlie rest o f our days now od
chap, is to finish off our od tliingw And perhaps there is a sense
in which threc o f us on this p lW b rg are dofhg that and neednt
apologize for it. We are completing and enlarging work which was*
commenced in some cases forty or more ycars ago. A certain
breaktlirough in Brtish radical history, associated particulary at
that point with the Marxist tradition, took place some 45 years ago.
(Im sorry to use military imagery.)^ W e are still exploiting the
terrain that was opened up with that breakthrough. F orm e in 1940
as a school student it carne through the work of Christopher Hill:
his first brief study o f 1640. I sat down at the age of 16 to write
for the sixth form history society a paper on the Marxist
360 MA K I N G H I S T O R Y

interpretation of history and tlie English civil war, leafing through

Christophers work, and Bemstein, and Petagorsky, and Win-
stanlcys pamphlcts and such Leveller tracts as 1 could get, and
some Marx, Engels and Plekhanov. And ttere followed upon titis
other breaktlirouglis: one tliinks of Erics magnificent essay on The
Trantping Artisan. Tlte rest of us followed tltrough that gap.
My own od things, most of which are half or more than half
written, inelude the studies of 18th century social history, custorn,
practice, and popular culture, which I cali Customs in Common,
sonte of which has already been published; my half-written book
on William Blake; my work on the Romantics in England in the
1790s - young Wordsworth, young Coleridge, and the assertion
and defeat of tlte cause of womens rights; and I also have a book
I hope to do on an odd comer of the Balkans in World W ar II.
If and I retum, will it be with a different eye? I tliink it
may. I have to say honestly, without any sense of particular
criticism, or of any large theoretical statement, that Im less and
less interested in Marxisnt as a Theoretical System. Fm neither
pro- or anti- so rnuch as bored with some of tlte argument that
goes on. I fmd some of th f l argument a distraction frorn the
historical problems, an unpediment to completing my work. Perry
Anderson and I had an argument - or rather I had an argument
with Althusser some ten ago, and Perry, in a generous and
constructive way, conunented on tliis argument in his Arguments in
English Marxism. Ive been asked wfey didnt I reply to Perry? I
feel no need to reply to Petry. | tliink he had many important and
interesting things to say. I think wed cali it a draw. And I
bequeath it to you to continu that argument, if it needs to be
continued.
I will just say there were two terrible things which Perry did:
he defended Walpole, and he showed insufficicnt respect for
Jonathan Swift. Those two points I might like to arge some time,
particularly bccause I regard Gullivers Trovis as the most savage
indietment of the rcasons of powcr that has ever been written. It
still has a vitality of an extraordinary kind. And if, for political
reasons, wc try to devale that, then somehow our catcgories are
too limited.
There is a political problcm here of a very straightforward kiud.
 A G E N D A FOR R A D I C A L HI S TORY 361

I fnd it difficult to say what my rclationship to the Marxist

tradition is, because, in Mrs. Thatcliers Britain, the popular press
puts down any fomi o f radicalism as Marxist. If I can give one
illustration: four or five years ago I was with my daughter and we
stopped tlie car and went for a walk in an Oxfordshire wood. And
we liad our dog with us, *whod seen a pheasant. Fortunately we
got the dog back on tlie lead when the ganiekeeper carne along
with a gun. He said this wood was owned, not by a Lord now, but
by some huge banking or investment institution, and we were
trespassing and so on and so forth. As a deferential Englisliman I
was about to retreat. Unfortunately my daughter tunied out to be a
freebom Englishwoman. She started to give him quite a lot o f sass
about civil rights and the law o f trespass. Whereupon the
gamekeeper said, W hat are you then, McirxistsV hi a situation like
that, no-one is going to deny tlieyre a Marxist.
I feel happier with the tem liistorical niaterialism. And also
with the sense that ideas and vales are situated in a material
context, and material needs are situated in a context o f nonns and
expectations, and one tum s around this many-sided societal ^ject
of investigation. From one aspect it is a mode of produfition, firom
another a way o f life. Marxism has given us a "ufikersal
vocabulary, although there are some surprises tliat are going to
come to us. A friend o f mine was in the Soviet Union last year.
After a historical seminar in which he was discussing questions of
class stmggle and class relations, he was taken aside quietly - not
by dissidents, but by members o f the Soviet historical profession,
who told him, serious scientists no longer use the concept of class
in the Soviet Union. In so far as an opening between East and
West comes, we may fnd that the teeth o f the cliildren have been
so much set on edge by the sour doctrinaire ideology of the
Stalinist past that the discourse becomes very difficult.
I tliink the provisional categories o f Marxism to which Perry
lias referred - tliose o f class, ideology, and mode of production, are
difficult but still Creative concepts. But, in particular, the historical
notion o f the dialectic between social being and social conscious-
ness - although it is a dialectical interrelationsliip which I would
sometimes wish to invert - is extraordinarily powerful and
important. Yet I fnd also in the tradition pressures towards
362 MAKI NG HI STORY

reductionism, affording priority to economy over culture; and a

radical confusin introduced by the chance metaphor of base and
superstructure. I fmd a lot in tire Marxist tradition - there are
many Marxisms now - marked by what is ultimately a capitalist
definition o f human need, even though it was a revolutionary
upside-downing of tliat defmitioji Tliis definition of need, in
economic material terms, tends to enforce a hierarchy of causation
which affords insufficient priority to other needs: the needs of
identity, the needs of gender identiS, the need for respect and
status among working peopHMiemselvcs. I do indeed agree with
all theSpeakers here u m f lth e need to try and see history as a
whole cloth, as an objcctive record o f causally interrelated activi-
ties, while agreeing also with Perry that the concept of cause is
extraordinarily difficult, toward which we always attain to only
approximate understanding.
I think the renewed emphasiS upon power and power relatio n sj
especially in historC is rigjit Some studi$s o f culture forget tlie
controlling context o f p o j^ m And so m a ta o f the urcaa
problems o f the 20th centuryB something that has called itself
Marxism has had so little helpful to say about. The tenacitie^o f
nationalism; the whole problem of Nazism; the problem of
Stalinism; o f the Chines^, cultural ^S olutiom o f the Coid War
today, wliich in my view is not acting out a conflict between
modes o f production or economies but is acting out a conflict from
an outwom ideolgica! $cript which threaews indgpd to be terminal
to all modes of production alike. I think w eyQ had an insufficient
vocabulary for examining the structure o f power relations through
symbolism, from the awe o f empire or monarchy to tire awe today
of nuclear weapons. Our concern increasingly must be with finding
the rationality o f social unreason. That is not throwing up ones
hands and saying anything can happen in history - but, rather,
finding the reasons of social unreason. To give an examplc
among the few articlcs I vc had time to read rcccntly the one
which fascinatcd me most of all, complctcly outsidc my field, was
an article in Pasl & Present (May 1985) by Inga Clcndinnen on
Tlie Cost o f Courage in Aztcc Society.
And where, again, from the materialist vocabulary do ageney,
initiatives, ideas, and even love come from? This is why l'm so
 AGENDA FOR RADICAL HISTORY 363

concemod with Blakc and Blakcs quarrcl with the Deists and tlie
Godwinian ntilitarians. His polilical synipatlues were with so many
o f their positions; and yet in the end lie said diere mus be an
aftimiation, Tliou Shalt Love. Wliere does the affirmative, Tliou
Slialt Love, come from? Tliis argument witli necessitarianisni
contines M ilton's od argument with predestinarianism and prefig
ures todays argument with determinisms and structuralisins -
whicli tiemselves are ideologically-inflcctcd producs of a defeated
and disillusioncd age. I f we can de-structure the Coid War, then a
new age o f ideas may be coming, as in the 1790s or the 1640s.
I have notliing else to say except that our radical impulses are
really henuned in in many tyays. W eve said little about this, but
we all know it. I dont know exactly how things are in the States,
but, in the last ten years in Britain I feel very much a
closing-down o f tlie situation. A lack o f originality. A playing safe.
A job situation which is so difficult that one senses a loss of
vitality, ti cramping o f the radical initiative. And this comes partly
from straight political ideological pressures.
This symposium may seem rather like an Anglo-Marxist inva
sin o f M anhattan. I remember that tliere was a Collge Des
Hautes Eludef* which had the g^ierous* peleme o f the New
School during W orld W ar II; I wonder whether we are the
forerunners of. a British college in exile in refiige from Mrs.
Thatcher?
I dont want to tell anyone how to write history. They must
fmd out in their own w ayBThose o f us on the platfonn are as
much subject to our own tim es formation and determinations as
any others. I f our work is continued by others, it will be continued
differently. W hats radical in it demands some relations between
the academy and active experience, whether in the forms of adult
education or the kind o f work which MARHO and the Radical
History Review do here in Manliatten; and some distrust of easy
assimilation by th e jo s t society, an awareness o f the institutional
and ideological determinations o f the societies in which we work,
which are founded upon unreason, or on the reasons of power and
the reasons o f money.
Wollstonecraft in the 1790s said mind has no sex. I know that
some contemporary feminists waut to revise that position, because
364 MAKING HISTORY

the m ind is situated very niuch w ithin a gender context. But I

think w e w ant to rem em ber W o llsto n ecrafts astonishing courage in
saying exactly th a t in tlie 1790s. W hen she said mind has no sex,
she boti dem anded entry into tlie w hole w orld o f the mind for her
gender, and she also reused an y privilege fo r h er gender. I f I can
use an analogy, radical history should n o t ask for any privilege of
any kind. R adical histo iy dem ands th e m o st exacting standards of
the historical discipline. R adical h isto ry m u st be good history. It
m ust be as good as history can be.

The New School for Social Research Jle a rn in g that all the contribu-
tors would be in New York at the same time, invited Eric
Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Perry Anderson and myself to take part
in a public discussion, on 20 October 1985. This is my contribution.
My thanks are due to the New School and to Margaret C. Jacob
who initiated the dialogue. The other contributions will be found in
Radical History Review, no. 36, 1986.
 H1STORY/LITERARY CRITIC.ISM

$ 1 7 - 0 0 U.S.A.

B r i n g i n g t o g e t h e r e . p . t h o m p s o n s w r i t i n g s a n d
lectures delivered over a number o f years, M a kin g H istory covers
the key debates in history and cultural theory th at occupied
Thompson throughout his career. M a kin g H istory ineludes such
landmark writings as T hom pson s influential and sym pathetic
assessments o f the historians R aym ond W illiam s and H erbrt
Gutman, as well as his judgements o f the lasting valu o f elassie
Fnglish writers such as William Morris and Mary Wollstonecfaf.
Also included are Thompsons perceptive and always witty contri-
butions to current issues o f debate, such as the role o f poetry as a
political act and the historical m ethod and im agination. T he
book concludes with Agenda for Radical History, T hom psons
inspiring and oft-cited lecture on the fiiture o f history and the
task o f historians in years to come, a fitting conclusin to the
book and to Thompsons own exemplary career.

E.R T hom pson was one o f E nglands forem ost historians and
social critics. His books inelude The M a kin g o f the English W ork-
in g Class, Custom s in C om m on (T he N ew Press, 1 9 9 2 ), W itness
A gainst the Beast (The New Press, 1 9 9 3 ), and m any other works.

COVER OESIGN BY C. NIX

*994 KY THE NEW PR ES S. NEW YORK

PRINTED IN THE U . S .A .