Women played a peripheral, but critically supportive, role in Luddism. In subsequent agitations, their presence became essential to sustaining the momentum of working-class radicalism. At the Manchester march of the Blanketeers in 1817 the ‘women of the lower class’ were noteworthy for their militancy, raising ‘a very general and undisguised cry’ that ‘the gentry (p.239) had had the upper hand long enough and that their turn was now come’.83 In the following year, they were drawn into the strike wave that swept across the cotton district, not only as factory workers who were prepared to turn out in protest against wage cuts, but as members of an industrial community who denounced the harsh exploitation of wage-earners by ‘overgrown capitalists’ and their refusal to countenance a further statutory regulation of factory hours and conditions.

Women, then, were incited to occupy public space on ceremonial occasions, but in terms that emphasized their role as the representatives of the private, domestic sphere. A firm line was drawn between these decorous entries and other forms of public activism, and the spectacle of female rebellion during the French Revolution was brought into service to deter women from more concerted forms of political participation.

Before we address that theme, we must now consider how women fared in the denser political space of the early nineteenth century. I say denser because the decades after 1790 saw a rapid expansion of the popular press, a deep penetration of political ideologies, both radical and loyalist, the advent of the first popular political societies, and a growing visibility of women as the objects of social and political discourse. From one point of view the period was one of unprecedented advance for women. In the efflorescence of popular radicalism after 1815, women entered the public political stage in new ways. In the re-emergence of the mass political platform after the (p.235) Napoleonic wars, women voted at meetings, presented addresses, and formed their own political associations. By the end of 1819 at least twenty-five female reform societies had been formed in the manufacturing districts of Lancashire and Scotland, spreading to Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, the North-East, and the west of England.73 In the following year, more than twenty-five female addresses were sent in support of Queen Caroline. They solicited over 70,000 signatures and, while half of them came from the industrial heartlands or London, they spanned a wider geographical area, emanating from as far a field as Cornwall, Devon, Huntingdonshire, and Edinburgh.

Women were more active in food disturbances than in any other kind of eighteenth-century protest. They are certainly less visible in labour disputes than men, largely because they were unorganized. Yet in situations where women’s employment was compromised by technological change or trade policies, they could be important players. In 1720, for example, women from the textile district of Spitalfields joined men in protesting (p.234) against the continued importation of Indian calicoes.

Yet women’s role in food riots did not stem from their position as productive partners within the household economy, as John Bohstedt has recently argued, but from their emblematic status as familial and, by extension, community caregivers and from their intimate knowledge of market practices.68 Housewives or not, women were more involved in face-to-face marketing than men, more attuned to neighbourhood gossip, and more adept at detecting frauds and adulterations. In this context, it is noteworthy that, during the food shortages of 1756–7, women’s role in food rioting increased at precisely the point at which the accusations about artificial scarcities became most intense. In these situations, women’s local knowledge about short-weight provisions, inferior flour, and hoarding became critical.

Direct action by women was seldom as flamboyant as this incident, but it was often decisive in withholding local supplies of grain. Women stopped wagons or barges of corn bound for other markets. In 1757 a group of ‘Welsh Women’ seized a wagon load of corn at Hereford market and ‘after a smart Skirmish, in which their Opponents were worsted, they tied Cords to the Waggon, and fastening them to their Bodies … triumphantly carried off their Prize’.

Where women’s livelihoods were imperilled by higher taxes, vexatious tolls, or the imminent loss of male wage-earners, they were noticeably active. This was true of the Glasgow malt-tax riots of 1725 and of the Bristol bridge riots of 1793, where eight women whose ages ranged from 13 to 55 were either killed or wounded protesting the continued imposition of tolls by the corporation.48 It was also true of the London anti-crimp riots of 1794. Women were part of the ‘mixed multitude’ that assembled to pull down a crimping-house in Shoe Lane. One woman with five children and ‘far advanced in pregnancy’ with a sixth even mustered a crowd around a recruiting office in Whitecombe Street where she believed her husband was imprisoned.

Women were also vociferously energetic in protesting the strict rules that governed the public access to paupers in workhouses and in joining mobs that opposed the building of large-scale institutions of this kind. In August 1765, for example, ‘a mob of four or five hundred men and women’ assembled in Wickham Market in Suffolk, and broke into the room where the local gentry were deliberating upon the erection of a new workhouse for the hundreds of Loes and Wilford, forcing the gentlemen to sign a paper ‘promising not to meet any more on that business, on pain of having their (p.229) brains instantly beat out’.47 Later they were part of the crowd that demolished the Bilchamp workhouse and threatened another at Nacton.

Although women never played as conspicuous a role as men in the political riots of the period, they were an important part of the infrastructure of community action, disseminating ballads and broadsides, emboldening men to collective protest, rallying neighbourhoods in their defence, (p.228) flamboyantly parading the symbols of sedition, and, as the Gordon riots revealed, using their knowledge of local networks and reputations to influence the course of action.

The Bridgwater women used their female ‘vulnerability’ to disarm the troops in 1721, just as the mayor used their presumed political ‘incapacity’ to exculpate himself from any responsibility for the riots, claiming that he had taken care ‘that none but some few ignorant women and Children … wore any White Rose’.41 Yet in fact the riot disclosed just how integral women could be in defending the politics of a particular community.

We can get a better sense of just how important that role could be by examining the participation of women in the Gordon riots, the most tumultuous riot of the century and the one in which women were accorded considerable publicity. Eighty women were prosecuted in these disturbances, of which twenty-four were convicted of felony, seven being hanged. Although women were rarely at the forefront of these riots, they were very visible on the streets, aiding and abetting the men who pulled down Catholic houses, extorting money from property owners as part of the mob’s rough (p.227) justice, stealing clothes from the burning edifices, including two petticoats from Lady Mansfield, whose husband had incurred popular wrath not only for his cosmopolitan tolerance of Catholics, but because he was closely identified with the ‘Scottish junto’ at the apex of power. No women are known to have been active in the delivery of Newgate, but one helped burn the bakehouse at King’s Bench in the company of her common-law husband.

Newspaper accounts tended to describe rioters in collective, gender-neutral terms, such as the ‘mob’, the ‘rabble’, the ‘populace’, the ‘common people’, and very occasionally the ‘canaille’. In so far as they attributed any gender specificity to these interventions, they generally assumed that the rioters were male, a discursive convention that harked back to the seventeenth century when mobs were usually associated with, young male apprentices.

Magistrates and peace officers often confronted crowds with only rudimentary policing capabilities. Their disposition was to single out those rioters whom they believed to be the most culpable: especially those ‘captains’ who led the mob; or those who carried seditious standards or effigies; or those actively engaged in pulling down houses. In most cases these were men, confirming cultural preconceptions about the gendered nature of politics.

Women are strikingly marginal, if not invisible, in the major riots of the period; yet they appear rather more conspicuously in cases involving seditious words or political defamation. Tim Harris has found no evidence of women in the demonstrations of the Exclusion crisis, but he does note their involvement in roughly 10 per cent of all cases involving seditious words.22 My own research on the early Hanoverian era would tend to confirm this picture. No women are known to have been arrested in the coronation-day riots of 1714, and only one, perhaps two, in the metropolitan disturbances of 1714–16. Even in the meeting-house riots of 1715, for which hundreds were arrested, only thirteen women were indicted, seven for Halesowen alone.23 On the other hand, women were prominent in cases (p.223) involving seditious words in Berkshire and Buckinghamshire.

The female body served as the symbol of the nation’s health and, indeed, in the figures of Britannia and Liberty, as the symbols of national unity, patriotism, and independence. Yet women themselves were active celebrants of royal-cum-national anniversaries or victory jubilations.

The Duchess of Devonshire’s participation in the Westminster election of 1784 was flamboyant and exceptional, but we should not infer from the dismissive criticism that she encountered that women were excluded from such occasions. In the many prints that have survived for this election, women are quite visible: as the opponents of a proposed tax on female (p.218) Fig. 3 The Two Patriotic Duchesses on their Canvas (p.219) servants; as street and stall sellers involved in the campaign treating; as wives alarmed by the electoral blandishments that were offered to their husbands; as the spectators of electoral parades; as the partisans of electoral affrays. Certainly the activism of the Devonshire coterie and the tax on female servants served to highlight the discursive visibility of specific women in this particular election. But that visibility also served to reveal the commonplace: the very real presence of plebeian women in the hurly-burly of electoral politics.

Finally, women were involved in radical politics. Working-class radicalism in the 1790s tended to have a strongly masculine emphasis. Thomas Paine’s egalitarian theories of rights could have led to an interest in sexual equality, but although feminists such as Mary Wollstonecraft used his ideas in this way, most plebeian radicals were committed to the rights of men. Radicals claimed rights for males on the basis of their independence and their position as the heads of households, and their campaign for the vote consistently focused on manhood suffrage. The post-war radical movement did, however, have wider female involvement. The impetus swung to the industrial north, where women were often in employment and enjoyed a higher status. In northwest England, women attended reform meetings and set up their own reform societies. The Female Reform Society of Blackburn achieved notoriety after its activities were widely reported. Alice K itchen presented a cap of liberty to a reform meeting and delivered a short speech, expressing support for ‘those brave men who are nobly struggling for liberty and life’. Their written address expressed support for the men’s campaign for the vote, since a reformed parliament was necessary to end the tyrannical system whereby the people’s taxes supported the rich, while their ‘innocent wretched children’ starved. They therefore positioned themselves in a feminine auxiliary role and expressed themselves in sentimen-tal, familial terms.

A key form of political expression for working women was crowd protest. Robert Shoemaker argues that women tended to riot in response to a nar-rower range of grievances than men, ‘where they were seen to have had a particular authority’.21 As moral guardians of the community, women could protest where those moral standards had been offended, such as the tradi-tion of ‘rough music’ whereby women would noisily shame a wife-beater or a cuckold.22 As managers of household budgets and provisioning, women were prominent in protests concerning the price of foodstuffs (the ‘just price’ of which was conceived of in moral terms) or the loss of traditional rights to com-mon lands or gleaning. Women protested about the prospect of their menfolk being balloted for the militia, such as in Scotland in 1797.23 Women tended not to be involved in employment disputes as worker’s organisations were men-only, but there were exceptions. Women participated in machine-breaking in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and they took a support-ing role in the Luddite and Captain Swing disturbances. In general, women were less likely to be involved in violent crowd protests than men, instead using defamatory or seditious language as individuals. Although all such ac-tions are ‘political’, women were rarely involved in political riots in its narrow, parliamentary definition: the highest recorded participation of the eighteenth century was during the Gordon R iots of 1780, where 20 out of the 110 pros-ecuted rioters were women.2

However we evaluate these moral campaigns themselves, participation in them was a crucial experience for British women. They gained vital experience of political tactics, of political methods such as petitioning, letter writing and lobbying, and of political organisation, including large societies that could even be nationwide in scope. We will see in Chapter 7 how the anti-slavery campaigns in particular gave women a vocabulary and a range of concepts that helped them to argue against their own subordination. Historians of women in politics therefore argue that these campaigns ‘heightened the consciousness of women’, and that this would be brought to bear in the feminist and suffragist campaigns that followed.1

Women’s support for anti-slavery was instrumental in the abolition of slav-ery in the British empire in 1833. As women tended to take the moral side in the argument, they were key to the achievement of full abolition, rather than the compromises proposed by some pragmatic male politicians. There were also comparable campaigns that concerned the welfare of women in the empire. For example, in the 1810s and 1820s there was a campaign to abolish the practice of Sati, a Hindu ritual whereby the widow was burned alive on her deceased hus-band’s funeral pyre. This was seen as a women’s cause, both because it concerned women’s welfare but also as it had a religious edge.18 This was a missionary cam-paign in which many Evangelical women took a leading role, since it concerned ending ‘heathen’ practices and Christianising the empire. Our evaluation of this movement therefore needs to balance its concern for women’s rights with its role in providing a moral justification for British rule in India. Slave abolition, too, combined obviously laudable objects with a self-congratulatory notion of Britain as a moral leader on the world stage, whereas its empire had played a key role in creating the Atlantic trade in the first place.

As Birkett relates, a key way that women could exercise power was by boycotting consumer goods. Women controlled household budgets and made consumer de-cisions, so women organised boycotts of slave-produced items such as cotton and sugar.

The first women’s abolitionist society was the Birmingham Ladies’ Society for the Relief of Negro Slaves, formed in 1825, and by the mid-nineteenth cen-tury the majority of anti-slavery societies were run by women. Anti-slavery was seen as a peculiarly female political cause: as one commentator put it, ‘pity for suffering and a desire to relieve misery are the natural and allowed feelings of Women’.16 Anti-slavery campaigning literature tended to emphasise the plight of slave women and children in particular, in an attempt to horrify male opin-ion, and this cast British women as their natural defenders.

The most significant female political campaign of the eighteenth and nine-teenth centuries was the abolition of slavery.

Probably the most significant opportunity for middle-class women to get in-volved in politics was presented by philanthropy. Lewis argued that women pos-sessed a ‘missionary spirit’, which combined a natural inclination to morality and religion with an unselfish desire to help those less fortunate.1

Women were readers and writers of political texts, and consumed news just as much as their menfolk: the reading of the newspapers was a daily ritual among many families. Women of the middle classes joined lending libraries and de-bating societies, were canvassed at election time, and were spectators to public electoral and civic rituals.

Finally, there were opportunities for women of the upper and middle classes to vote and stand for public office. Women were, of course, excluded from voting or standing in parliamentary elections, and the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 also excluded them from voting in local elections and for Poor Law boards. But women were able to vote and stand for parish offices. Gleadle shows how later legislation such as the Public Health Act of 1848 and the Towns Improve-ment Act of 1854 did not exclude female voters, but that it was haphazard and much debated whether they were allowed to vote in practice. This both provided contemporaries with examples of female voting and ‘simultaneously reaffirmed women as secondary, borderline citizens’.1

Although in theory women were excluded from the galleries after the 1778 ruling on ‘Strangers’ attending debates, they continue to be admitted to the Lords’ galleries, and they could view the Commons by sitting in the ‘ventilator’ above the chamber.

Georgiana therefore epitomised the difficulties that women faced when entering the political world, but she also demonstrated how an effective political role could be achieved behind the scenes, or when working within contemporary expectations of femininity.

Women born into the British upper classes could expect politics to be a signif-icant part of their lives. Politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was dominated by aristocratic families, for whom politics was the family vocation. Wives and daughters would be expected to take an interest in the political ca-reers of their menfolk, and often to provide support in practical ways. Women often acted as intermediaries in a high-political community that was held to-gether by ties of marriage and personal connection. Political meetings would often take place in private houses, or at dinners for which women were the host-esses. Daughters would act as assistants to their politician fathers, providing administrative support. (The practice is still widespread and is now a paid role: around a fifth of British MPs employed family members as assistants or secretar-ies in 2017, when new rules came into force to discontinue the practice.9) Female relatives could even contribute to the writing of speeches or political works that bore the authorial signature of a male relative, but which were in reality collab-orative efforts.1

Lewis therefore proposed an indirect way into politics, emphasising women’s beneficial influence over their menfolk. The emphasis on morality was key: overt participation in public life could bring their moral character into question, which would imperil the key perspective that women were able to offer, and would prevent them from exercising this influence.

Studying women and politics requires a more social approach to the political world, which in turn reveals that politics was not a discrete activity, but one that seeped into the minutiae of everyday life. Gender history has therefore helped to foster a broader conception of ‘politics’, which we need if we are going to understand the history of citizenship, since it requires a holistic understanding of the place of the individual within the political community.

Political history in general often has a masculine bias, focusing on male actors without seeking to question why men dominated this sphere. This partly re-flects the way that political history has traditionally been done, since it tends to focus on the official structures of politics – the institutions of government and the electoral system – where men predominated.

The usual story in British women’s history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is that the public sphere and the private sphere became more separate: women were increasingly identified with the home and family, whereas men monopolised the political world. Within this narra-tive, it is difficult to conceive of female political participation, but more recent work on women and gender has questioned the ‘separate spheres’ narrative. This chapter will survey this revisionist work, which has shown that there were indeed ways for women to participate in the public sphere. We will see that women fre-quently engaged in types of political campaigning and that – whereas the very presence of women in politics could be regarded as a radical statement – they often did so without challenging the gender norms of the time, nor indeed prof-fering a ‘radical’ political message

By 1850, therefore, both working-class and middle-class women werebecoming increasingly politicized. Although it could be argued thatwomen’s issues-based campaigns of the early nineteenth century, whichhad grown out of familial concerns, had seen radical working-class womendevelop a level of politicization and experience which was more advancedthan that of middle-class women, after 1850 it would be middle-classwomen, in the main, who would go on to campaign for women’s rights.While working-class women’s interest in reform diminished with thereturn of prosperity and the gradual adoption of pervasive ideals ofdomesticity, middle-class women would lead the way in the developmentof a personal and a feminist political consciousness which would becomethe driving force for the later nineteenth-century women’s movement.

The anti-slavery movement was essentially middle class, motivated by Evangelical Christian and philanthropic commitment. The ladies’associations made use of working-class women when they were seen to beuseful – for example, in petitioning – but on the whole, they did not

omen participated in the anti-slavery movement from the 1780s. Thefirst women’s anti-slavery society was founded in Birmingham in 1825 byLucy Townsend and Mary Lloyd, and was quickly followed by many others.The Sheffield Anti-Slavery Society made the moral dimension of women’sinvolvement clear

Women came to Chartism – as did the Chartist leader, Feargus O’Connor,himself – through their experiences in anti-Poor Law agitation. Chartismgrew out of the feelings of disillusion resulting from the 1832 Reform Act’sfailure to give the vote to working men, compounded by the economicdepression that began in 1837. It was essentially a working-class agitationdesigned to gain practical rights for the ordinary working man. The Charterhad six aims: universal male suffrage, the ballot, no property qualificationsfor MPs, paid MPs, annual parliaments, and equal electoral districts.Chartist women were present from the beginning. They formed their ownpolitical unions, democratic societies, and Chartist associations. Theirassociations were well organized, with committees including President,Treasurer, and Secretary, and a weekly subscription. Members frequentlybuilt upon their anti-Poor Law experiences, attending demonstrations,petitioning, propagandizing, and raising funds.157 The position of womenwithin Chartism was ambiguous, however. The original Charter hadincluded a provision for female enfranchisement, but this was dropped forfear of losing male support. Nevertheless, there were Chartist men whosupported female suffrage, including the moral force leader, WilliamLovett, and men like Ernest Jones and J. R. Richardson, who advocatedwoman suffrage on the grounds of natural, civil, and political rights.158Moreover, despite the fact that the Charter would not enfranchise women,male Chartists regularly appealed to them, stressing the importance of the Charter to them and the need for their help.159 In common with theirmale counterparts, Chartist women sought to defend family life against the onslaught of capitalism and industrialization; however, unlike maleChartists, it was this familial argument which lay at the heart of theirpolitical rhetoric

Pro-Reform female activists also encouragedwomen to engage in ‘exclusive dealing’, that is, to buy only from shop-keepers who supported the cause. They justified this by setting it withinthe context of women’s domestic responsibilities: ‘The spending of money(especially in domestic concerns) is the province of women, in it we canact without the risk of being thought politicians.’1

During the 1820s and early 1830s, women from the working and lowermiddle classes attended Owenite lectures, spoke at Owenite meetings, andcontributed to its journal, New Moral World. Owenite communities wereestablished, but, despite the supposed emphasis on equality within them,women found that they were still expected to do domestic tasks. Very fewwomen ever served as branch officials.1

Susannah Wright, along with other women, was prominent in thestruggle for the unstamped press. Government taxes on newspapers roseconstantly during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, meaningthat the price of ‘stamped’ or legally produced papers was out of the rangeof most of the working classes.141 Radicals saw this as a ‘tax on knowledge’and responded by producing a flood of cheap, unstamped newspapers,which espoused radical political ideas, including calls for the removal ofstamp duty.142 Women distributed and sold the papers (criminal offencesin themselves).

Women reformers rarely cast themselves in the role of passive victims;rather, they took the fight to their oppressors. While convention dictatedagainst women speaking in public, individual women appear to have beenquite content to do so. Susannah Wright, while awaiting sentencing at the King’s Bench on a charge of publishing a blasphemous libel in theRepublican, would not be silenced.

As M. L. Bush has argued recently, women’sinvolvement at Peterloo was important:It represents the earliest expression of organized female activity inBritish politics. It also reveals that the driving force was predominantlyworking women. They had been suddenly transformed into a potentand disturbing political force not by the feminist message of MaryWollstonecraft but by the process of industrialization. .

Nevertheless, unlike their sisters in France, who formed their own clubsand debated political rights, British women did not – on the whole – takean active part in the new political radicalism of the 1790s.125 Individualvoices, like that of Mary Wollstonecraft debated political rights in print, butthere is, for instance, no surviving evidence of women participating in the Corresponding societies which were established largely by artisans tocampaign for manhood suffrage.126 Women’s involvement in radicalprotest emerged largely after 1815, when distress and discontent in thepost-war economy led to renewed interest in radicalism.

Women participated to a more limited degree in labour disputes andattacks on new machinery. They did, however, react when they felt theirlivelihoods were threatened. Again, their involvement reflected ideas ofwhat constituted fair competition. Violence was directed against largemachines which were felt to present an unfair advantage over hand-workers. At Spitalfields in 1720, for instance, women protested against theimport of calicoes; in 1739, they burned looms at Macclesfield.118 Womenand men were present at outbreaks in Lancashire in 1776, 1779, and 1826,in Somerset in 1801,119 and at Nottingham in June 1779, where frameworkknitters protested against an attempt to fix prices

Shared familial and community interests were also at the heart of theenclosure riots in areas such as Northamptonshire and Wales. Womenrelied on access to common land to graze animals, which provided theirfamilies with milk and/or meat, and to collect firewood and herbs, the latterin particular being essential for medicines. When enclosure threatenedthese rights, they protested – sometimes, as in Wales, violently.

Their presence in foodriots, as part of a community with ideas of what constituted ‘fairness’, isimportant and illustrative of the idea that women took action in defenceof family interests.1

It will always be difficult to determine the extent of women’s involve-ment in food riots, not only because no official records were kept of theriots, so that what we know stems largely from any subsequent legal action,but also because there was a reluctance to prosecute women for an activitythat went against contemporary ideas of womanly behaviour. Nevertheless,as the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1753 recorded, there is no doubt thatwomen at times did play a prominent role in food riots:

While there were always some women from outside the circle of thepolitical élite who took part to varying degrees in the same kinds ofpolitical activities as élite women – soliciting (and obtaining) patronage,participating in election entertainments and activities, acting as witnesses

After the duke of Marlborough’s death in 1722, his indomitable duchess –already a property-owner in her own right – retained her position as thehead of the Marlborough family. With estates of her own, her birth family’selectoral interest at St Albans, a life interest in Blenheim Park (with itspocket borough of Woodstock), and the threat of disinheritance wieldedunsparingly over four grandsons who had or would have political interestswhen they came of age, she was rightly recognized by the Opposition as apolitical figure in her own right.8

For women, patronage provided an ideal intermediate area of politicalinvolvement. It operated through networks of personal contacts and spider-webs of obligation and influence. It broke down the barriers betweendirect and indirect political participation, public and private life, and thepolitical and social worlds. A patronage request written in the comfort ofwoman’s bedroom was as political, and could be as important, as any madein a dining-room, ball-room, or assembly-room; or, of course, at a levée, inthe parliamentary lobbies, or at a drawing-room at Court.Most of the women involved in patronage were clients. Of the requeststhat women made for themselves, the majority were for pensions or placesthat would alleviate personal or family financial distress.

Even by the mid-nineteenth century, when political reform and modernnotions of professional, meritocratic public service were starting to makean impact, both public and private patronage remained important. Indeed,J. M. Bourne has argued that nineteenth-century patronage, while morecovert than that of the eighteenth century and sometimes operating indifferent areas, remained varied, extensive, and highly unsystematic.

The social arena was not used solely for electoral ends, however; it wasoften a prime location for making, or following up, patronage requests.Political patronage was only one aspect of a many-faceted phenomenon; itwas as likely to be used for recruitment and advancement in the domestic,cultural, social, and economic domains, as in the political.62 Politicalpatronage requests can chiefly be categorized as attempts to secure any ofthe five ‘Ps’ of place, pension, preferment, parliament, and peerage. Evenpolitical patronage operated at multiple levels, in person and in writing,through many different patronage networks, from the independent countrygentleman MP through to the First Lord; thus, quantifying women’s overallinvolvement or success rate is impossible.

As the fora for heterosexual socializing expanded between 1700 and 1850 and women came to take a more dominant position in the socialarena,53 a small group of women emerged who were acknowledged bycontemporaries to be the leading political hostesses of their day. Situatedat the heart of the political world by birth and/or marriage, with convenienthomes in London, these women had the means and the motivation, as wellas the requisite charm or force of character, to entertain for factional orparty ends. They provided like-minded individuals with a warm welcome,comfortable surroundings – preferably with food, drink, and some enter-tainment – convivial company and good conversation.

Correctly gauging the political temperature could provide electoral

Women’s use of the social arena and social contacts for political ends isa well-known aspect of their historical political involvement, but untilrecently it had received little serious attention.47 Given a relatively smallpolitical élite, personal-cum-factional politics, and the development of the London Season in conjunction with the parliamentary year, there wasconsiderable overlap between the social and political arenas. Men andwomen alike used social encounters politically. Walks, talks, and visits; tea tables and card tables; assemblies and balls; attendance at the theatre,the opera, or the court when in London, or at the annual racemeet, the assizes, or public days when in the country. Moreover, social activitieswere inevitably politicized during contested elections or periods of crisis.48 Agneta Yorke’s comment in 1789 – that there was ‘no Subject ofconversation but Politics’49 – could stand as a refrain for any period of highpolitical tension; it was as appropriate during the trial of Dr Sacheverell in1710 as during that of Queen Caroline in 1820

Just as the rise of Parliament after 1688 involved more men more directlyand more consistently than ever before in the political life of the nation,the personal and familial nature of politics that grew up in the eighteenthcentury incorporated more women in more ways. Women’s resultingpolitical activities can be loosely grouped into three interrelated areas:social politics, patronage, and electoral politics. The first half of thenineteenth century saw the political élite adapting gingerly to changesbrought about by the French Revolution, parliamentary reform, emergingnotions of meritocracy, stricter ideas of political respectability, and thegradual development of party politics. Women undoubtedly lost someopportunities for patronage and electoral management as a result. Theyalso had to adapt to shifting boundaries of acceptable female politicalbehaviour, but, as recent work by historians such as Kathryn Gleadle, SarahRichardson, Matthew Cragoe, and Kim Reynolds has revealed, the basicshape of women’s traditional political involvement remained largelyunchanged in the first half of the nineteenth century.4

While more needs to be known about the way that women operated atthe points of transition between court and parliamentary culture, therewas enough overlap that experienced female courtiers, such as Sarah,duchess of Marlborough, and her arch-rival Abigail, Lady Masham, couldextend their activities successfully to the new parliamentary world thatemerged in the Age of Party.42 Where they and other women remainedstymied, however, was in their attempts to direct policy. As the duchess ofMarlborough learned to her disgust, neither her influence at court nor,later, her status as landowner with a recognized political interest gave herthe ability to direct or implement policy: she was ultimately dependentupon, and frustrated by, men.4

Women have always been active and influential at the very top of the Britishpolitical world, be it as members of the royal household, mistresses,daughters, mothers, wives, or as the monarchs themselves.33 Not only doesthe period 1700–1850 open and close with female monarchs – QueenAnne (1702–14) and Queen Victoria (1837–1901) – membership of whosehouseholds provided a small group of élite women with unrivalled access to the monarch and, at least theoretically, the greatest potential forELAINE CHALUS AND FIONA MONTGOMERY222

While there was no woman during this period who could rival thecountess of Sutherland’s personal control of twenty-two of the thirty-four votes in Sutherland,29 there were always some women, such as LadyHyndford who controlled four votes in Peebles, who could and didperiodically control smaller numbers of county votes. In Scotland, as inEngland and Wales, although women could and did inherit property andpolitical interests in their own rights, it was an early widowhood oftencombined with an underage heir that was most likely to place élite womenin charge of family interests.

Nor did their elimination put paid to the belief that voters’ womenfolkwielded political influence and needed to be won over. As Matthew Cragoehas demonstrated, nineteenth-century politicians continued to bestowkisses, compliments and cups of tea on voters’ womenfolk, in theirattempts to secure their support.2

For most of our period, though, women in theninety-two freeman boroughs, who were the daughters or, in some cases,the widows of freemen, had the right to make their husbands freemen andvoters. In cities such as Bristol or Wells, this process was straightforward;in others, it might be limited to the eldest daughters of freemen who hadno sons – as at Hertford – or apply to men only while their wives were alive– as at Dover.17 This ability to make votes gave the women status, added totheir marriageability, and could provide them with substantial electoralinfluence. In the thirty-five burgage and freeholder boroughs, where thevote was based on property ownership, women who bought or inheritedburgages or freeholds had the same right to vote as men.18 While some of these were élite women, such as Frances, Lady Irwin, who in the earlynineteenth century owned most of the burgages – and thus the votes – inHorsham, East Sussex, it also included less lofty women like Mrs MarySomersett, who in 1788 sold her three messuages and garden in Horshamfor exceptional price of £1,750.19

While these beliefs changed slowly, a creative tension existed,however, between the pervasive rhetoric that politics was men’s businessalone and the reality which saw ongoing, significant, and growing – ifwidely varying and unconnected – female political involvement. As a resultof birth, inheritance, necessity, or personal interest and commitment,women at all levels of society took part in politics: their activities rangedfrom the popular politics of food riots, machine-breaking, Chartist actions,protests against the New Poor Law or the repeal of the Corn Laws, throughpolitically inflected humanitarian causes like the abolition of slavery, tovarious forms of social politics, patronage, and electoral involvement.Among the aristocracy and gentry, it was by no means unusual to findwidows and dowagers managing estates and political interests, andcontrolling patronage, either in their own rights or for a minor, ordinarilytheir underage heirs.

No idea is so universally accepted and acceptable in England as thattaxation and representation ought to go together, and people ingeneral will be much more willing to listen to the assertion that singlewomen and widows of property have been overlooked and left outfrom the privileges to which their property entitles them, than to themuch more startling general proposition that sex is not a properground for distinction in political rights.

f sex itself was not an absolute barrier to suffrage, then allwomen should be enfranchised; however, the concept of universal suffragewas not yet widely accepted in the mid-nineteenth century, even for men

While some individual eighteenth-century women may have seenthemselves as politically competent and deserving of enfranchisement, the development of enfranchisement as a goal – and increasingly as theultimate mark of individuation and public recognition of women – tookplace slowly in the nineteenth century and must be seen in context asemerging from a period of hotly contested parliamentary reforms,including the widening of the franchise for men in 1832.

And yet, justly respecting, as we must do, the mental powers, theacquirements, the discrimination and the talents of the women ofEngland, . . . knowing . . . that they have interests as dear and asimportant as our own, it must be the genuine feeling of everygentleman who hears me, that all the superior classes of the female sexof England must be more capable of exercising the elective suffragewith deliberation and propriety, than the uninformed individuals ofthe lowest class of men to whom the advocates of universal suffragewould extend it.

What is missing from Disraeli’stableaux is anyone who represents the third strand of female politicalinvolvement, that nascent feminist political consciousness which woulddevelop into the woman’s movement and, in time, draw in women fromeach of the other female political traditions

In Sybil, we have the new and growing politi-cization and participation of women of the lower and middling classes inincreasingly formalized, issue-based popular politics; in her mother-in-law,Lady Deloraine – ‘the only good woman the Tories have’2 – we have thelong-established traditional involvement of élite women in politics forfamilial, social, and party-political ends.

St. Augustine held that the two powers, ecclesiastical and civil, differed in characteristics and in jurisdiction. They should not meddle. inconsiderately in each other's. affairs. Just as the State should respect the authority of the Church in her own domain, so the Church should respect the prerogatives of the State in its province. It was the State's business to promote temporal, prosperity and to foster peace by wise laws and adequate sanctions; and the Church herself would be the first and chief benefi ciary of public order. During this troubled earthly pit

They have not, for instance, assented to the opinion, which Augustine never retracted, that capital punishment is an infringement of the moral law, an undue exercise of authority on the part of the civil government, since God alone is the Lord of life and deat

And his argument is cogent when he points out that, since all human law is imperfect, the task of the human legislator becomes lighter if the citizens respect the divine law. We must, moreover, pay our taxes, because the state may make such demands upon us for the com600 good. The duty of patriotism follows by an easy illation from his political principles; for after God our country and its laws have the first call upon our devotio

At the outset, St. Augustine places the State in direct dependence upon God, deriving its authority immediately from a divine source of justice and power. The State, therefore, is not omnipotent, nor may it order its citizens nor curtail their liberties by arbitrary counsels of expediency. It must, in all its enactments, take cognis ance of a higher law which exists as a transcendent code beyond the changing conditions of the world. In itself this law is the command of an irrevocable Will determining free creatures to certain choices in accord with evident truths detected by reason. What is out of har600y with the decrees of divine wisdom can never attach our allegiance. Thus right reason, searching out the objective relations between conduct and the nature of the responsible agent, is the criterion of just political action, and not sentiment, nor any other subjective measure. The State, therefore, is not absolute; it is not the fount of all rights; it is not the origin of all liberties. Its action is open to criticism; and, if its ordinances contradict the laws of God, its citizens must refuse to obey them. In setting up a transcendent reality, independent of human caprice, as the standard of all justice, St. Augustine adopts a theory similar to Plato's; but the supremacy of the divine law as explained by St. Augustine, and not so clearly by Plato, is due to its being the expression of a personal will superior to creatures. By this teaching, which the Christian Church has adopted, a most effective bar has been put to tyranny. Kings and parliaments may not now order the world as they please. They are themselves subjects of a higher power

Augustine accepted that Christian Doctrine, that state is a divine institution created by God to remedy the human sins.  He stressed that, authority of state must be respected because it maintains peace and protects property and other belongings of citizens.  Obedience to the authority of state is also observed because it is based on divine sanctions and contributed to the remedy of sins of the people. Thus, he subordinated the state to the higher authority of the God and obedience to the laws and authority of state is justified as long as it did not conflict with the duty towards God’s.  It is because that man obey the civil laws because they are sanctioned by God.  He also said that Emperor must guard the church, he did not accord any authority over spiritual matters. On the other hand he said that citizens should not accept civil authority when it is conflict with spiritual authority.  He wanted both the state and church must work together with mutual understanding.

The earthly city is dominated by principle of self- love to the point where God is held in disapproval.  For its devotees materials are important than the spirit.  The heavenly city is dominated by principles of the love of God for them spiritual things are highest important.

Augustine pronounced history, the unfolding of the divine will and accredited the rise and fall of the empires to a divine plan.  He said that a continuous struggle was going on between the forces of horsy and truth in which the later was bold to triumph ultimately.  Thus he rejected to accept the argument that the Pagan Gods were responsible for the fall of the Roman Empire.  He asserted that the fall of Roman Empire was due to divine will.

Nevertheless, political states, imperfect as they are,  serve a divine purpose.  At the very least, they serve as vehicles for maintaining order and for preventing what Hobbes will later call the “war of all against all.”  In that respect, the state is a divine gift and an expression of divine mercy—especially if the state is righteously ruled.  The state maintains order by keeping wicked men in check through the fear of punishment.  Although God will eventually punish the sins of all those elected for damnation, He uses the state to levy more immediate punishments against both the damned and the saved (or against the wicked and the righteous, the former dichotomy not necessarily synonymous with the latter).  Rulers, as God’s ministers, punish the guilty and always are justified in punishing sins “against nature,” and circumstantially justified in punishing sins “against custom” or “against the laws.” The latter two categories of sins change from time to time.  In this regard, the institution of the state marks a relative return to order from the chaos of the Fall.  Rulers have the right to establish any law that does not conflict with the law of God. Citizens have the duty to obey their political leaders regardless of whether the leader is wicked or righteous.  There is no right of civil disobedience.  Citizens are always duty bound to obey God; and when the imperatives of obedience to God and obedience to civil authority conflict, citizens must choose to obey God and willingly accept the punishment of disobedience. Nevertheless, those empowered to levy punishment should take no delight in the task.  For example, the prayer of the judge who condemns a man to death should be, as Augustine’s urges, “From my necessities [of imposing judgment to a person] deliver thou me.”

The 'downgrading' of society which we have described in thischapter can be looked upon as the preparation for Augustine's finalestimate of human achievement in the Roman state. The realisationthat society in general cannot be considered as part of the mechan-ism provided for man's self-perfecting opened the way for a freshapproach to man's social condition. Instead of the 'cosmological'terms in which he had seen society as part of a universal order, hehad now come to see it in historical terms, as part of the 'order'of God's historical providence. The question about the role ofsocial arrangements in assisting men to achieve their ultimate goodwas superseded by another: what is the relation of the historicalcareer of a society—the Roman—to the divine plan for the salvationof men? Augustine, in the end, answered that question1 in terms ofhis theology of the 'two cities': the Empire—as all actual societiesof men—hovers between the 'earthly' and the 'heavenly' cities,or, more precisely, it exists in the region where the two citiesoverlap. Its achievement is radically infected with the ambiguityof all human achievement. In a sense this answer had been antici-pated in Augustine's rejection of the classical 'politics of perfec-tion'. Only his later thought about the two 'cities' could give therejection sharpness; but in the view that the state is essentiallybound up with man's fallen condition, we already have the germsof this insistence on the ambivalence of social institutions in relationto the ultimates of human destiny. With these ultimates—eitherthe satisfaction of all man's yearning in the eternal 'peace', or hisfinal estrangement from his patria—social arrangements are em-phatically not concerned. They have their place between theseultimates; they meet more limited needs, with no immediaterelation to perfection or salvation.

The check to violence was the public authority's most im-mediately obvious contribution to resolving some of the tensions insociety. But there are expressions, especially in Augustine's earlierwritings, which suggest that the public authority of the state wouldalso make some contribution in securing a space for the develop-ment of the amenities and the arts of civilisation. In his youth hehad lavished eloquent praise on all the varied fields of intellectual,artistic and constructive achievement.3 He thought of them asbound up with the life of politically organised society. Althoughhe was much more reserved about the 'useless arts' only ten yearslater, he still valued social institutions for the sake of more than thebare possibility of life and its continuance. They also help to makelife civilised, they facilitate social intercourse and they define thequality of a common life within a shared culture.4 Augustine knewtoo well that a society resting on no cohesive bond other than thecoercive power of its public authorities was doomed to dis-integration. On these grounds all the institutions which fosteredhuman intercourse and a shared culture were matters of concern toa Christian.5 Even in the City of God, a work whose polemica

The ultimate goal of man's yearning is 'eternal peace'; butthis is to be had by the citizens of the heavenly city only at the end oftheir earthly pilgrimage, in the spontaneous harmony of love whichcharacterises that society. The great need here, in Augustine'ssombre vision of the nasty brutishness of man in his fallen condi-tion,7 was for bulwarks to secure society against disintegration. Inits coercive machinery the state turns human ferocity itself to thelimited but valuable task of securing some precarious order, someminimal cohesion, in a situation inherently tending to chaos.

In Augustine's mature thought there is no trace of a theory of thestate as concerned with man's self-fulfilment, perfection, the goodlife, felicity, or with 'educating' man towards such purposes. Its

This 'natural' superioritywas the foundation for the control exercised by the superior overthe inferior, and where this kind of foundation existed, the sub-jection of the inferior to the superior could be called 'natural'.But no such foundation of'natural' superiority can be found in thecase of ruler and ruled, or master and slave. Here, if there is any'superiority', it is simply the de facto relation in which one of thepartners in the relationship finds himself to the other. His being in aposition to control his inferiors is not here founded upon anantecedent 'superiority', but is in fact the only thing in which hissuperiority consists. And this de facto superiority Augustine refusedto recognise as 'natural'. The bare superiority of being establishedin a controlling position is the only kind of superiority Augustinecould concede to the master over his slaves or to the ruler over hissubjects; in no other sense were his 'inferiors' inferior. For thisreason Augustine rejected the classical models according to whichpolitical authority was represented as analogous to the authoritywielded by God over the world, of the mind over the body or aparent over his children.I The authority of rulers over their subjectscould not be related to an intrinsic superiority over their subjects,and the duty of subjects to obey their rulers does not derive fromany natural inferiority or subordination, in virtue of which theyneed the guidance of their superiors for the achievement of theirown perfection. In some ideal, but fictional, society rulers might bethe wisest and best men, through whose guidance and rule the lessexcellent are enabled to achieve perfection. But this is a modelAugustine rejected. The whole realm of politically organisedsociety with its institutions of government can only be spokenabout in a language appropriate to a world in which the harmoniousorder of such natural relationships is irretrievably distorted.

Theorder of human affairs, however, and their government, derivefrom the other stream of God's governance. The relations ofdependence, subordination and superiority which obtain here arenot 'natural', though they are subject, as are the 'natural' relation-ships, to divine providence. His theory of a dual providence ledAugustine to deny that social or institutional forms of subjectionamong men were 'natural' in the way, for instance, that subjectionwithin the family to its head, or subjection of the passions torational guidance could be called 'natural'.

Evenin his earlier writings Augustine sometimes suggests that humanlaw is concerned with externals and is powerless or neutral withregard to the internal dispositions of men, whether they act inconformity with the law or break it.4 In his later remarks on thepurpose and scope of human legislation the emphasis shifts to-wards stressing this external character of the law. It cannot makemen good, but it can secure public order, security, the rights ofproperty. Stated more generally, its purpose is to help in avoidingconflict and to maintain the 'earthly peace'.

Justice is almost synonymous with the right ordering of humanaffairs; and the right ordering of human affairs is part of man'sitinerary to God:

Augus-tine's notion of law revolves around the idea of a rational principleat work in the cosmos, which can be described either as a divine(or 'eternal') law, or as a principle immanent in nature,1 andaccessible to men through reason—a lex non scripta sed nata, asCicero called it.2 Like so many of the Christian Fathers, Augustineaccepted the substance of this teaching, and often expressed it in aform determined by his theory of human knowledge as dependenton divine illumination. Thus the precepts of the eternal law are* written in the heart of man', or engraved upon it as an' impression'of the eternal law.3 This, in a somewhat fluctuating terminology,remained Augustine's unchanging teaching on this subject.

.1 Dependent on the two streams ofprovidence, there are two kinds of order to be found in the world:the order of nature and the order expressed in human choices andenacted in human action and its results. This duality of order in theworld underlay all Augustine's later reflection on society.

With painful recognition Augustine now denied thatthe order which leads through all things to God is to be found inhuman affairs: hoc nondum est.3 The possibility of securing it throughthe government of wise men, or of men perfectly dedicated to God,is dismissed as an illusory option. The condition of man consequenton Adam's fall does not allow for the achievement of the harmonyand order in which alone man can find rest. Tension, strife anddisorder are endemic in this realm. There can be no resolution,except eschatologically. Human society is irremediably rooted inthis tension-ridden and disordered saeculum

Such are the grounds on which lawfully constituted authoritymust be obeyed—though, of course, obeyed within limits. Manmust obey the state, but not because it can claim to promote thegood life, or to educate him in the ways of the order in the universe.Although, however, the state cannot claim to secure order in thispositive sense, it did, for Augustine, constitute an order of anotherkind

The new perspective of Augustine's reflection on society isdetermined by two poles: the human drive for wholeness, fulfil-ment, rest, peace—the yearning expressed at the beginning of theConfessions; and, by way of counterpoise, the deep and painfulawareness of the human condition, with the vast distance between

Being part of the all-embracing order in theworld, human society is one of the stages of man's advance towardsGod. Hence the importance of ensuring that the social order reallydoes conform to the divinely established order of the universe.

Order, for Augustine, is 'that which, if we follow it in our lives,will lead us to God'.3

The distinction between the historia gentium taught outside theChurch, of which he speaks in the De doctrina christiana, and thehistory contained in the scriptures, the temporaliter praeterita...quae pro salute gessit.. .aeternitas divinae providentiae, as he puts itelsewhere,2 is an inherited commonplace. It is simply the distinc-tion between the biblical redemption history and all other history,and was familiar to any Christian, even of the less well-educatedkind. Augustine took it over as it stood. In the course of time,however, he devoted much thought to the theological grounds forthis distinction.

It is the business ofgovernment to do its best to minimise the power of conflictin society; but government, too, is liable to be infected withthe vices which it is its task to control. It can be the ally ofsectional interests, it can be oppressively dedicated to ideo-logy of one colour or another. To the extent that agovernment serves a particular interest, it falls short of whatAugustine would have regarded as its essential task. Nodoubt, he would have conceded that this would alwayshappen to a greater or lesser degree, even with the best ofgovernments; for rulers, no less than their subjects, are fallencreatures driven by the lust for power. He would, however,have insisted that to the extent that government alloweditself to become the prey of sectional interest or ideology itwas failing in the discharge of its crucial function, thesecuring of a just balance of sectional interests and controll-ing their unbridled pursuit by individuals or groups. To the

The society of mortals spread over the world, in all its diversity indifferent regions, though linked together in a certain kind ofcommunity by sharing the same nature, is nevertheless divided byeach group seeking its own advantage and its own satisfaction; andas these are not the same for all, either no one or not every one issatisfied. Thus society is divided against itself, one part, thestronger, generally oppressing the other ..

In Augustine's mature view of society the purpose ofpolitical arrangements was to contain the disorder and thetensions inevitably present in any society of sinful men. Theingrained habits of self-centred impulse, the competitive andpossessive drives towards domination and exploitation, thepursuit of sectional interet rather than the 'common good' —al that Augustine would have included in the category of the'private' - are inescapable, permanent features of humangroups.

The lust for domination is perverse imitation of God,rooted in pride, from which all sin springs. It is the basis ofall domination and subjection, whether in slavery or in thehistory of the subjection of nations by Empires.13 TheCity of God announces itself as an attack on the arrogance ofRoman imperial jingoism (p. 84).

In all other societies, human relationsare distorted in man's present, sinful state. The 'lust todominate', like other 'lusts', the lust for glory, for wealth,for sexual or other physical pleasure, for vengeance, and soforth, is rooted in man's fallen nature. In the original createdorder, as in the City of the saints, the community is formedby loving dependence. In the fallen order the bonds betweenmen are determined by their desire to secure the dependenceof others, to hold power over them. Rulers are urged toresist the craving for domination, and the good ruler islikened to the head of a family, who seeks to care for and toguide those subject to him. The image of the father can serveas the model for the ruler's conduct, but it cannot be themodel for the institutions through which political authorityis wielded in a society (see pp. 93—4 and Appendix B), forthese are grounded in the fallen order and inevitably disfig-ured by the 'lust for domination'.

Monastic life properly lived lacks, or should strive to lack,the 'lust for domination' (libido dominandi) which corrupts allother forms of society.

The primordial harmony and peace could not be reco-vered in any actual, existing, society of fallen men, any morethan the original wholeness of the personality could berecovered by an individual. The integrity in which sexualitywould 'follow the will of its user, when required, in an easyand concordant harmony' must prove finally elusive in thepresent life (see above, p. xiv, n.8). The 'easy and concor-dant harmony', or the 'miraculous peace' that Augustinesaw as the primitive condition of the unfallen human nature,will only be restored, both in the individual person and inhuman society, in the heavenly society, in the heavenly Cityof the saints. Here on earth we need government, coercivecontrol, to secure cohesion on a more modest level

But Briggs's findings didnot quite accord with his presuppositions: expressing puzzlement,he noted that the invocations of 'middle-class' language before1815 did not draw attention to 'common economic interests', asmight have been expected from the central role which he hadassigned to the social process in their generation. Instead, theyfocused first and foremost on 'the special role of the middleclasses in society as a strategic and "progressive" group'.6

As thefollowing will make abundantly clear, one thing which withoutdoubt cannot be said of the 'middle-class idiom' during the 1790sis that it was 'an almost unchallengeable platitude'. It was thepersistence in enlisting the language of 'middle class' repeatedlyto support a highly loaded political position that was the crucialnew departure of that decade: a new departure not in the concep-tion of a new idea, but in its unprecedented use.8

Yet the crucial point here is the isolation and the ephemeralpresence of these utterances. Prior to the French Revolution, thereseems to have been no political moment in which their potentialwas seized upon in a persistent and effective manner: theyremained sporadic and evanescent, not charged repeatedly withpotent implications serving contested agendas. This remained trueeven at key moments of political confrontation such as the Wilkesagitation, which is often presented as an important 'middle-class'intervention in eighteenth-century politics.

Instead, the 'middle-class idiom5 wasinherently vague, loose and inclusive. Its attribution of a ben-eficial role to the social middle was justified by general politicaland philosophical truisms rather than by peculiar traits resultingfrom their particular professions or forms of property. So whereaslandowners could still be included in the valuable 'middle class',this very possibility was in itself also an indication of the factthat the principles on which its group identity was founded hadbeen fundamentally altered.

For Tooke in 1782, the languageof 'middle class' had not been germane to the issue of reform.But by Stuart's writing in 1794 the language of 'middle class'had assumed new political overtones, on which he was trying tocapitalize; and he recast Tooke's language accordingly.

Between these poles of undivided inclusivenessand sharp exclusiveness stood the 'middle-class idiom'. Theability of its proponents to walk this fine line, allowing forsocial preference but one which was nevertheless flexible andopen-ended, was predicated on the fact that in terms of socialsignification the language of 'middle class' was inherently vague.Few of its proponents ever chose to define it or to specify its

So the anti-war rhetoric of the respectable opposition repeatedlyhighlighted the existence of the 'middle class', its virtues, itswisdom and its moderation, as well as its umbilical link to liberty.But while such persistent statements obviously carried poignantpolitical ramifications, during the 1790s these were only rarelydrawn out and given the form of a specific 'middle-class' platform.

TheCabinet emphasized that 'the greatest quantity of happiness exists ina state of mediocrity', acknowledging the roots of this 'middle-classidiom' in philosophical thinking: 'The concurring voice of allnations and of all ages, of the philosopher, the poet, and themoralist, has pointed out these men as the happiest of the humanrace.' But it too turned this eternal philosophical dictum into astatement about the present: 'our only resource is to turn our eyesto those who form the middle rank of civil society', those who are'not vitiated by luxury on the one hand, and not depressed bypoverty on the other'.50 Finally, this perfunctory survey can takeus to the Monthly Magazine, another periodical committed to peaceand moderate reform, which interpreted its own success as proofthat

That the charged political meaningsof the language of'middle class5 were indeed reinforced persistentlyand frequently by other participants in the same political-linguisticmilieu is easily demonstrable.

The resulting rhetoric, which I call here the 'middle-class idiom', emphasized the singular role of the 'middle class'as the repository of all virtues, the hinge which holds societyand the social order together, the major prophylactic mechanismrequired for a healthy body social and body politic.

By 1795 Wyvill's blending ofthe social and political middle became much clearer: the causeof non-radical reform, he stated, needed the support 'not of thatclass at the lower end of society, many of whom wish for Univer-sal Suffrage only to abuse it, but of those middle classes, whohave had some education, who have some property and somecharacter to preserve'. Politically, these men, mellowed by theireducation, property and social standing, were 'men of mild andpatient characters'.

A key turning point in this explosive fusion of social andpolitical programmatical language was the publication of thesecond part of Paine's Rights of Man in February 1792, a pamphletwhich linked political with economic demands and - as has oftenbeen noted - anticipated key concepts of the modern welfarestate. Paine's themes were then quickly picked up by others, suchas John Thelwall - the influential orator who 'took Jacobinism tothe borders of Socialism'13 - or the more extreme 'proto-communist' Thomas Spence. Indeed, as Gregory Claeys hassuggested, anti-radical writers were probably more apprehensiveabout the egalitarian social implications of their opponents' pos-itions than about their directly political critique; 'Jacobinism',Burke threatened his readers, 'is the Revolt of the enterprisingtalents of a country against its Property.' In the radicalizationof the 1790s, in other words, the second part of the Rights ofMan played a more important role than the first.14 Politicalcategories as a result were now becoming inseparable from socialcategories. The political division between radicals and the estab-lishment (as discussed further in chapter 3) thus became closelyand explicitly equated with a basic social division, of rich andpoor, or higher and lower classes; a phenomenon unfamiliar, forinstance, to the radicalism of the 1760s. In between, the scenewas set for the identity of political moderates to be projectedonto a social middle, a 'middle class5.

'. The middle 'sort' or 'class' were singled out for their 'elegance' (1770); their state of life was 'undoubtedly the happiest' (1782); they fostered 'all the arts, wisdom and virtues of society' and were the true preservers of freedom (1766); they were 'comfortable, modest and moderate, sober and satisfied, industrious and intelligent' (1800); indeed, they were 'the most virtuous, the most enlightened, the most independent part of the community' (1790). T

nge. A gradual verbal shift from 'higher ranks' to 'upper class' was relatively undramatic. It shed the notion of a purely titled qualification, and could embrace a monied as well as landed aristocracy. On the other hand, it still retained a sense of 'altitude'. But it was much more cautious in its expression; and it was certainly less laudatory than older terms that referred to social 'superiority' which had connotations of better as well as higher status.

In one instance, there was legislative endorsement of a tripartite schema, in a differential tariff of fines for public cursing and swearing (which was a behavioural characteristic of all levels of society). The earliest statute in 1624 had contented itself with a single tally of 1/- per offence for all offenders, if charged within a given timespan. Upon re-enactment in 1695, a higher fine of 2/- was introduced, for all those specified as above the rank of a day labourer or a common soldier and seaman. In the Profane Oaths Act of 1746, one further tier of penalty was inserted. Day labourers were still fined 1/-; all others, above the labourers but below the rank of a gentleman, 2/-; but gentlemen and higher ranks (royalty not excluded) were now charged at 5/- per offence.58 This envisaged hierarchy in a definite threefold manifestation, indicated partly by occupation and partly by status (although what constituted a gentleman was not defined). Its effect upon the curbing of profanity was, however, widely agreed to be negligible.

Yet while a Manichean either/or interpretation continued to hold a strong appeal, particularly in times of confrontation, it was under continuing assault in the course of the eighteenth-century from a tripartite classification. More complex and subtle than two, the 'three' was yet finite enough to be readily comprehensible. It e

Certainly, the Great Chain did not envisage structural contest or competition within society. 'Rank struggle' would have been a contradiction in terms. 'Class', on the other hand, contained a potential for change, whether by co-operation, competition, or conflict. It also encouraged a much more conscious scrutiny of human society, in parallel with scientific 'classification' (another new term) of the animal and vegetable kingdoms. 'Through

'Ranks' and 'orders' were used in the most general terms, but they implied that social status was conferred primarily by birth. Individuals could be ennobled by grant from a higher power, but that was though exceptional. In a mobile society where origins and eventualities did not invariably match, 'sort', 'part' and, increasingly, 'class' were used instead

It may well be that the collective affluence of this group was exaggerated, particularly as a result of their new social visibility in the fast-growing towns. Contemporaries faced difficulties in the precise assessment of long-term shifts in the ownership both of capital and of disposable income.27 Many, however, agreed with Wedgwood, in detecting a newly extensive diffusion of wealth.

ement. Trade, commercial services (especially banking), some professions, government, and, increasingly, industry, were all admired in the eighteenth century for their potential power and riches. Diversity encouraged a notable social competitiveness. 'As soon as you mention anyone to them [i.e. the English] that they do not know, their first enquiry will be, "Is he rich?" ', claimed de Saussure in 1

ing' were invoked. A well-ordered sequence of ranks and degrees in human society was deemed part of a divinely-ordained hierarchy that embraced the whole of creation.

Middle-class farmers, manufacturers, merchants and professionals in this period, critical of many aspects of aristocratic privilege and power, sought to translate their increasing econ-omic weight into a moral and cultural authority. Their claim to moral superiority was at the heart of their challenge to an earlier aristocratic hegemony. They sought to exercise this moral authority not only within their own communities and boundaries, but in relation to other classes. Their 'proud pretensions', their critique of the established dominance of the landed class and their belief in their capacity to control and improve the working class, which was at the centre of their claims, was articulated within a gendered concept of class.

Given their involvement in production, design and building, it is not surprising that the middling ranks were the chief exponents of a rational and scientific world view. Nature was to be understood and controlled although not desacralized. In combination, these values sharpened their perceived distance from the easy going, haphazard gentry or the feckless, superstitious working class. Although provincial, the middle-class 'country of the mind' was far removed from the linguistic localism of labourers. 4

Religious belief thus supported a rational outlook and the active pursuit of commerce. Those Christians most attracted to the rational discourse of the Enlightenment moved to Unitarianism, rejecting the God in Christ but remaining within a broadly Christian framework.

The evangelical revival of the eighteenth century had made a religious idiom the cultural norm for the middle class by the mid nineteenth century. At its heart was concern with individual salvation, only to be won by active struggle. This thrusting religion cut through both the fatalism of the labouring poor and the indifference of the rich. As Obelkevich has noted, unlike high Anglicanism or traditional nonconformity, it offered a passionate belief in a future life to counter discarded pagan prophecy. 35 Since all were worthy to be saved, the plight of slaves - souls at a convenient distance - became a major crusade. This outlook fostered humanist compassion for the helpless and weak: women, children, animals, the insane, the prisoner. However, this benevolent concern was tempered with the drive to control these same groups who were regarded as closer to nature and peripheral to, if not outside the social order. 3

One of the strongest strands binding together urban and rural, noncon-formist and Anglican, Whig, Tory and Radical, manufacturer, farmer and professional, wealthy and modest, was the commitment ~o an imperative moral code and the reworking of their domestic world into a proper setting for its practice. In the early part of the period this did not necessarily mean that women had to be confined within this domestic sphere or that men had no part in it. But the home was strongly associated with a form of femininity which was becoming the hallmark of the middle class, although much of it drived from a traditional inheritance.

however, counteracted by both common material interests and fundamental values. The more affluent provided models for the lower ranks who modi-fied these codes to suit more modest circumstances. Family and kinship ties could further bridge the gap, as did similar education, reading matter, and exposure to sermons. The practice of sending daughters of small farmers and tradesmen into domestic service in the houses of the higher ranks meant that notions of gentility were carried back into their own homes.

Despite these differences from both gentry and nascent working class, at the beginning of the period, the middle strata canno be seen as a block. It was criss-crossed by differences of interest and riven with internal dissen-sion. The large sector of professionals and merchants in London differed from manufacturing families in the north and Midlands whose experience differed again from the market town tradesmen and solicitors or the farmers whom they serviced. Divisions between Anglicans (themselves split between Evangelicals and traditionalists) and nonconformists were compounded by a multitude of nonconformist sects. While ostensibly based on doctrinal issues, these denominational divisions often covered latent social distinc-tions. Political alignments ranged from Radical through Tory, often partly reflecting a division between those whose livelihood rested on the production and handling of material goods - manufacturers and farmers -and tradesmen and professionals who dealt in services and did not directly confront a waged labour force. Yet by the middle of the nineteenth century, these disparate elements had been welded together into a powerful unified culture.

Marriage and courtship patterns, too, were changing. 'The distance between the mores of ordinary people, and those of the educated elite had never been greater.'28 Working-class men and women were often now bereft of community support and more reliant on charity or the Poor Law. Meanwhile, the middle class, bolstered by networks of family, kin and the religious community, aspired for inclusion in the governing stata if only in the parish vestry. Like Luckcock, they inserted themselves into the public gaze through a myriad of societies devoted to religion, philanthropy, education, science and cultural activities. The second and third decades after peace saw further distress with falling grain prices and rural wages. Class distance took solid form as the more prosperous watched the night skies flare with burning ricks or saw Chartist crowds sweep past their comfortable parlour windows.

Above all, the more affluent and aspiring were concentrating more of their energies on the management of materials, time and workforce rather than working as craftsmen who depended on their own hand work.

By this period, control by guilds or the state over the terms of labour and prices had virtually disappeared and the gap was growing between masters and farm servants or journeymen increasingly unable to set up on their own. Those who could muster a modest independence, particularly when motivated by religious enthusiasm, spent their small margin on increasing literacy, widening horizons and extending vision.

The concern among people in the middle ranks with control over behav-iour was partly a result of uncertainty, arising not only from shifting economic fortunes but also from the depredations of illness and accident. Despite a relatively high standard of living, they suffered from waves of fever and the cholera epidemics, while death from consumption was an ever present threat. The survivors of both financial and mortal disaster might easily find themselves sunk into the ranks of those who had little but their labour to sell.

Such a case received maximum local and national publicity and enhanced middle-class determination to build their homes into havens of comfort, stability and morality where wives and children would be protected and controlled.

The 'oppositional culture' of the provincial middle classes cannot be understood outside a religious context. 22 Middle-class men and women were at the heart of the revivals which swept through all denominations. Their most vocal proponents had their sights fixed not on gentry emulation but on a Heavenly Home. The goal of all the bustle of the market place was to provide a proper moral and religious life for the family. The dynastic ambitions of the aristocratic model fitted neither moveable capital nor conceptions of immortality. For many middle-class parents, their childrens' inheritance should be their education and religious principles. 23 The cold-

Nevertheless, land remained a unique form of property, conferring a special status, a 'dignity and a set of duties . .. which are peculiar to itself'. 14 Although land could be purchased, the association of name and birth with land as in the Great House, provided the model of leadership. King Property had reigned supreme throughout the eighteenth century, consolidating the rights to absolute property with a range of legislation

Aristocratic claims for leadership had long been based on lavish display and consumption while the middle class stressed domestic moderation. In particular, aristocratic disdain for sordid money matters, their casual atti-tude to debt and addiction to gambling which had amounted to a mania in some late eighteenth-century circles, were anathema to the middling ranks whose very existence depended on the establishment of creditworthiness and avoidance of financial embarrassment

at the heart of much middle-class thinking - between a belief in a free market economy and a commitment to the importance of maintaining ties of belonging to a social order - perhaps goes some way to explaining the persistence of paternalist thinking among many employers. Some refused an exclusive reliance on the language of class conflict and the struggle between capital and labour. Many influential middle-class men stressed the importance of winning the consent of their workers to new forms of organization, new divisions of labour. Employers could be the 'providers' not only for their wives, children and servants, but also for their employees. Wives, children, servants, labourers, all could be described in the language of paternalism as the dependants and children of their father, their master, their guardian.

Smith's Wealth of Nations must have comforted many a corn merchant or miller caught between the pincer of popular belief in the 'just price' and laws of the new market economy since Smith's justific-ation made self-interest the basis for an expansionist economy and society. The attack on apparently traditional rights and liberties could be couched in the language of long-term benefits for all.

The belief in the importance of new business practices and the benefits which they could bring to the whole community, whether through special-ization and the division of labour, the use of new marketing techniques or the introduction of new machinery, found echoes in the language of political economy.

Perhaps the single greatest distinc-tion between the aristocracy and the middle class was the imperative for members of the latter to actively seek an income rather than expect to live from rents and the emoluments of office while spending their time in honour-enhancing activities such as politics, hunting or social appearances. The liquid form of middle-class property which had to be manipulated to ensure its survival, much less growth, encouraged a different ethos, emphasizing pride in business prowess.

It was only after years of struggle that the heads of middle-class house-holds were incorporated politically by the Reform Act of 1832, significantly the first explicit exclusion of women by its limitation of the franchise to 'male persons'. Middle-class interests were prominent in the new Poor Law (1834) and reform of municipal government (1835). The latter, together with the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1829), removed civil disabilities from nonconformists, locally and nationally, opening the way for wider social participation for a critical sector of the middle class.

However, in the 1790s, the growth of a native revolutionary movement and the campaign for political reform, together with the excesses in France, produced a backlash which drew all property owners together. The radicalism of those sections of the middling ranks who had found inspiration in France ebbed as fears for their property grew and Paineite doctrines became more firmly embedded in the artisan communities of Sheffield, Norwich or London.

Many came to feel that the fruits of liberty could not be guaranteed unless a man (sic) had a say in the political decisions which affected him and his family. Court circles around the Prince Regent symbolized the corruption of the governing class, made painfully evident by the madness and withdrawal of the king whose domesticated lifestyle had contrasted so sharply with his son's debauchery.

The provincial middle class took shape during the turbulent decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was the crises of these decades which brought out common interests and drew its disparate membership together; the vicissitudes of war and trade cycles, the near breakdown of the old Poor Law, the pressure from the growing body of wage labourers. Although the eighteenth-century middling groups had many affinities with aristocracy and gentry, the basis of their property and their value system and, not least the nonconformity of many in their ranks, set them apart. 10 These differences coalesced in the growing desire for independence from the clientage of landed wealth and power.

If we are to understand middle-class culture in this period, we cannot rest content with Luckcock the reformer, the Radical, the prominent Uni-tarian, the entrepreneur. We must go behind the public man to discover the private labours on which new forms of capitalist enterprise were built, new patterns of social life established. We need to watch Luckcock and his wife struggling in the early days to set up a business on a shoestring; he always trusting her to economize at home, to make the clothes and darn the stockings, to provide cheap meals and keep the house clean. We must trace the sources of Luckcock's powerful investment in domestic harmony as the crown of the enterprise as well as the basis of public virtue. We must uncover the beliefs and activities of the silent Mrs Luckcock and the thousands like her, so essential to their men and yet so unable to speak on their own behalf. Families like the Luckcocks were the very pivot of middle-class society. In order to understand the dynamics of their lives, however, it is first necessary to place the English middle class in the general context of the period.

Conventional economic and political histories would stop at this point. Much attention has been paid to middle-class men as captains of industry, protagonists of reform, active members of voluntary associations contribu-ting to the formation of their class through the exercise of social power. Luckcock's own language, however, points to the central importance of another, less well documented aspect: the family and the dynamics of sexual difference. For Luckcock, the purpose of business was not the avid pursuit of profit, but the provision of a 'modest competency' so that his family could live in a simple but comfortable way.

Luckcock's view of what constituted manliness (masculinity), rested on deeper foundations than dress or behaviour. His connections with Unitari-anism and the Birmingham Book Club were expressive of his radicalism. In the 1790s he was associated with the reforming group in the town which managed to survive the reaction following the Priestley Riots. In 1810, he wrote a pamphlet on the folly of war and following the re-emergence of radical organizations after the French wars in 1815, he joined the public call for reform and in 1819, became treasurer of the Birmingham Peter loo fund. He espoused in some ways impeccably radical views: he was-attached to Tom Paine and hostile to Malthus, for liberty and against the replacement of labour by machinery, critical of corrupt government, suspicious of taxation, hostile to self-seeking aristocracy. He had a horror of debt and pawning, was committed to anti-slavery and to defence of the weak and of animals, and to representation of the people. Not surprisingly, he won the title of 'the Father of Birmingham Reform' from Thomas Attwood himself (one architect of 1832 Reform). His portrait, appropriately, hangs today in the corridors of Birmingham's Corporation building.