Liberalism lite?

In June 1885, Benjamin Wilson, once one of the stalwarts of Halifax Chartism, organized a reunion of local former Chartists at Maude's Temperance Hotel. The occasion was the passing of the third Reform Bill, an event that signified to participants that the aims of the Chartist movement had largely been achieved. Speakers praised the social and political progress that had been made since the early Victorian decades. The Halifax Courier noted that during the 1840s, these local radicals "were all poor working men earning low wages" but that, in the intervening period, most had become "men of business and in some cases employers of labour" (qtd. in Vincent 242). The turbulence of the 1840s could now be regarded with a certain amount of equanimity. Wilson had been active in the plug riots in Halifax in 1842 and again in the Chartist revival of 1848. Nevertheless, he later came to subscribe to the local view that Gladstone's first government was the "most radical we have ever had in this country" and even joined a delegation of the Halifax Liberal Club on an excursion to Gladstone's Hawarden Castle in 1879, where they presented an address to the Grand Old Man. As David Vincent recounts, this speech was received by Stephen Gladstone (in his father's absence), and the group was rewarded with a tour of the library (237–42).

I commence with Wilson and the Halifax reunion because the logic of a recent wave of revisionist literature encourages us to see this meeting as an iconic moment representing the fusion that took place between radicalism and liberalism after Chartism. The Halifax radicals believed that liberalism had aided working-class people. We have come to view figures like Wilson as emblematic of the kind of radical and democratic politics that made a strong contribution to popular liberalism in its Gladstonian heyday and worthy of a certain amount of respect. It was not always so. Back in 1960, E. P. Thompson, in his influential article "Homage to Tom Maguire," cited the 1885 reunion as an example of the self-satisfied liberalism that had taken hold in Yorkshire and would shortly be shattered by the rise of the Independent Labour Party with its firm base in working-class communities (281–82). As it happens, Wilson was not impressed by the new party. In 1895, he employed the columns of the Halifax Courier to attack the Independent Labour Party's claim to be the true inheritor of Chartism rather than the liberals (3). Retrieving people like Wilson as iconic liberals can only, however, be a starting point for understanding popular liberalism.

This roundtable exists because any attempt to reappraise the Victorians requires a serious look at the liberal project. In the present time, liberalism (protean concept that it is) constitutes a vital element of interdisciplinary dialogue about the Victorians, spurred on partly by the fact that liberalism, in revised versions, has influenced both British and global politics ever since. We are constantly reviewing the argument that liberalism was the common sense of the nineteenth century even though Victorianists (of all disciplines) have, to their credit, usually stressed the tentative and shifting nature of liberal hegemony. Judging by the recent preoccupations of Victorian specialists, we are very far from moving beyond liberalism as a guiding theme.

I come to this discussion as one who has thought about the culture of popular politics in the middle to late Victorian period and as part of a generation of historians that wanted to rethink popular liberalism, retrieving its radical promise (evident, say, in Wilson's career) while exploring its complexities. Many of us remain concerned with exploring the lives of the Victorian working class yet have wanted to move away from viewing liberalism simply as some kind of middle-class imposition on the proletariat, if only because liberal politics was often generated as much from below as from above. In my own work, I have sought to integrate political history with the history of popular culture: the present article is premised on the argument that current studies of liberalism need to be more sensitive to the often disorderly appropriations...