The 1830s and 1840s were the most tumultuous decades in the history of modern Britain: during this period, a social order forged in the seventeenth century came closer to being overturned than at any subsequent point. Yet in the end it bequeathed that order, albeit in modified form, to the present. Pressures bubbled during the Napoleonic Wars, and nearly boiled over after 1815, as twenty years of rising prices gave way to sharp trade depressions, deflation and discontent, amidst the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution. From 1816 to 1819, protest spread in waves through northern manufacturing towns and rural parishes, with the smashing of power-looms and threshing machines, and bread riots involving laid-off operatives and farm labourers. The famous clash at St Peters Field on 16 August 1819 showed how quickly tensions in the country became political: reformers called a rally to demand parliamentary representation for the large towns and votes for working men, and more than 60,000 people packed into the centre of Manchester. Peterloo was the name given to the killings that followed, an ironic nod to the brave hussars who charged an unarmed crowd.
A decade later dissent once more assumed an organized form, this time briefly uniting the middle and working classes in urban political unions, just as agricultural workers were exploding into riot throughout the south of England. For the aristocracy that dominated the House of Commons, the three years from 1829 threatened an upheaval whose terrors it associated with the French Revolution. In 1832 a Reform Bill was passed whose purpose was to reconcile a rising middle class, ‘the intelligent and independent portion of the community’, with an oligarchic system and so divert it from any alliance with the masses below.1 In this at least it succeeded. Radical MPs from the industrial towns trickled into the Commons, which continued to divide along the same Whig-Tory party lines.
But electoral concessions did not stop pressures for reform, even if those who were aggrieved now pursued their goals separately, and as often at odds with each other. Agitation revived at the onset of the economic crisis of 1837, with the almost simultaneous birth of Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law League. The Chartists focused popular anger into six demands, including universal male suffrage and the ballot; what Engels called the ‘first proletarian party’ mobilized new factory workers and once skilled craftsmen now threatened by penury behind it. But the strikes it bred were swiftly repressed, and its petitions fizzled out.2 Based in the manufacturing middle-class, the Anti-Corn Law League was both more ‘respectable’ and far more effective. Avoiding any broader issues, what it demanded was the repeal of the laws that British landowners had imposed in 1815 to keep foreign competition in wheat out of the country, and domestic prices high. This aristocratic tariff squeezed the industrial cotton masters of Lancashire during a severe depression, and obstructed their pursuit of export markets. In the League they created a formidable machine to overturn agrarian protection and move Britain toward unilateral free trade. If its programme was much narrower than that of Chartism, its organizing capacity – drawing in not only manufacturers, merchants and middle-class professionals, but a good many workers too, attracted by its promise of cheaper bread – greatly outstripped it.
Between 1839 and 1843 the League petitioned parliament over 16,000 times, collecting nearly six million signatures. From a Manchester warehouse it shipped 9 million pamphlets, posters, newspapers, almanacs and every other kind of printed matter in 1843 alone. Lecturers fanned out to hundreds of local chapters across the country. There were banquets, balls, conventions, tea parties, bazaars – precursors to the great exhibitions, whose celebrations of technical progress drew hundreds of thousands of visitors. In 1845 Covent Garden was dressed up as a Gothic hall, with industrial displays, libraries, raffles, puppet shows, and stands selling Anti-Corn Law-themed crockery, tablecloths, thimbles, handkerchiefs, scarves, razors and stickers to seal letters at the post office: ‘Free communication with all parts of the empire is good: free trade with all parts of the world will be still better.’ The money involved was staggering: a budget of £25,000 in the first three years, £50,000 in 1842–1843, £100,000 in both 1844 and 1845, with a goal of £250,000 (or £29 million in today’s money) for 1846.3 By then a pressure group seeded in a single chamber of commerce, controlled by factory owners in search of lower labour costs at home and new markets abroad, had convinced much of the rest of the country that repeal was vitally in its interest too, as a master-key to general prosperity. It had also shown how far the issue of free trade could travel, and the passions it aroused. Consciously echoing earlier agitation against the slave trade, and its dissenting and evangelical overtones, the League built links abroad – including to American free-traders, who nonetheless remained a minority in the US well into the twentieth century.4 In no other country would the forces that came together under the banner of the League prove so successful, or enduring, as in Britain.5
Credit for repeal of the Corn Laws, when it came in 1846, went to one League leader above all, Richard Cobden. A calico printer turned politician, Cobden had risen from a clerk in a City of London warehouse to the smoggy heights of Manchester’s cottonopolis: in 1836, five years after moving from commission to factory production, his firm had £150,000 in turnover, with profits of £23,000, a hint of the sums to be made from textiles in flush times.6 John Bright was the other outspoken leader of the League, born, unlike Cobden, to a prosperous family of Quaker cotton spinners in the town of Rochdale in Lancashire. Both were eloquent and tireless proponents of free trade, though in each case – untypically – their radicalism reached past the Corn Laws, to electoral and land reform, an end to primogeniture, and religious disestablishment. ‘The colonies, army, navy and church are, with the Corn Laws, merely accessories to aristocratic government’, wrote Cobden in 1836. ‘John Bull has his work cut out for the next fifty years to purge his house of those impurities!’7 Long before victory over the Corn Laws was in sight, however, Cobden and Bright met James Wilson, a Scottish hat manufacturer and author, whose powerful vision of a free trade world, first set out in 1839, gave their campaign its winning argument.
James Wilson’s Winning Argument
Wilson was born in Hawick, a busy town in the Scottish Borders, whose River Teviot powered the textile mills that sprang up along its banks in the 1700s. His father, William, a devout Quaker, owned one of these establishments and secured from it a very respectable livelihood. His mother, Elizabeth, died giving birth for the fifteenth time in 1815, leaving five surviving daughters and five sons, of whom James, born in 1805, was the fourth. His education was brief. For four years he attended a school run by the Society of Friends in Ackworth where, an aunt recalled, he was ‘exceedingly clever … but never excelled in play’. The austerity there agreed with him: at fifteen he wanted to become a schoolmaster, though he soon thought better of it. After a year at an Essex seminary he wrote home to his parents, ‘I would rather be the most menial servant in my father’s mill than be a teacher.’ He and his older brother were apprenticed instead to a hatmaker, a business their father eventually bought them.
It was during this period, from ages sixteen to nineteen, that Wilson seems to have read most of the authors on whom he would later draw as editor. Adam Smith, James Mill, Thomas Tooke, David Ricardo and the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Say supplied a mix of moral philosophy and political economy.8 The title he later chose for his paper indicates how far these fields of inquiry overlapped. ‘Economist’ had yet to acquire its modern meaning; its sense was ‘the economizer’, he who does not waste money and manages resources efficiently. Wilson was a talented economizer. Walter Bagehot described his approach to intellectual matters in a memorial. ‘For some years at least he was in the habit of reading a good deal, very often till late at night. It was indeed then that he acquired most of the knowledge of books he ever possessed. In later life he was much too busy to be a regular reader, and he never acquired the habit of catching easily the contents of books or even of articles in the interstices of other occupations. Whatever he did, he did thoroughly. He would not read even an article in a newspaper if he could well help doing so.’
These habits may seem strange in someone Bagehot also described as a ‘great belief producer’, but were in fact the precondition for his passionate faith. ‘He was not an intolerant person but the qualities he tolerated
