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Victorian Studies 45.1 (2002) 178-179



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The People's Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League, by Paul A. Pickering and Alex Tyrrell; pp. x + 304. London and New York: Leicester University Press, 2000, £45.00, $99.95.

It is almost a half century since Norman McCord made the sort of archival find of which most PhD students can only dream: the complete records of the Anti-Corn Law League. So armed, McCord was able to produce one of the finest accounts of a Victorian pressure group at work, and his researches paved the way for similar studies of the Liberation Society, the temperance reformers, the anti-sabbatarian movement, and a whole host of other early Victorian campaigns. It is probably fair to say, however, that McCord's 1958 book, although a classic, left a lot unsaid about the Anti-Corn Law League. McCord's was an exercise in deflating the reputation of Richard Cobden, John Bright, and their many lieutenants: he criticised the League's tactics and minimised its influence. Over the years it has required the more sympathetic approach of Donald Read (on Cobden and Bright), John Prest (on the League's electoral politics), and Tony Howe (on free trade ideology), to name only the most important contributors, to sweeten the sour verdict on the League left by McCord. So a new history of the League is to be welcomed, especially when it has been undertaken by two experienced social historians of the early Victorian age.

Paul Pickering and Alex Tyrrell's The People's Bread is a compendious and wide- ranging account of the League's personnel and operations inside and outside Parliament, and of the political culture and spectacle that the League engendered in the nation at large. First and foremost, it is four nations history, following and filling out existing research on the League in Wales and in Scotland, but branching off onto newer pathways of its own on Ireland and on the English provinces. The authors are particularly good at picking out the differences between Manchester, the home of the League, and London, where its packed meetings and bazaars in 1845 served to maintain pressure on prudent Peelites and wobbling Whigs in Parliament. The discussion of the convergence and divergence between the repeal of the Corn Laws and the repeal of the Union is interesting, [End Page 178] although perhaps it should have gone beyond 1846, given how Bright went on to make Ireland a cornerstone of his post-League agitation, whilst Cobden and other Leaguers were never more than ambivalent about the place of Ireland in the free trade United Kingdom. Secondly, the book is a study of the mechanics of pressure from without in early Victorian Britain. Whilst McCord provided a breakdown of the formal structure and operational hierarchy of the League, Pickering and Tyrrell flesh out the picture of the limitless capacity of the League to churn out petitions and other memorials, addresses and circulars, newspapers and periodicals, and above all, an endless supply of itinerant lecturers, who seem to have ventured into every corner of the land almost as soon as railway track had been laid down. Thirdly, the authors are most revisionist in the emphasis they place on the League being far more than the tribune of a group of northern Gradgrinds. The connections between the League and organised religion— Anglican and non-conformist—is emphasised, and a whole chapter is devoted to the role of women in the movement. The thorny issue of working-class attitudes towards and membership of the League is given another chapter, and there are some fascinating thumbnail sketches of "operative" Leaguers in the north-west, although perhaps too little on the rise and fall of Chartist antipathy towards the League. Overall, the membership of the League is revealed as a cross-section of mid-nineteenth-century British society. Assorted aristocrats, manufacturers large and small, tenant-farmers, and a range of urban tradesmen, artisans, and shopkeepers comprised the uneasy classes who kept the League going for the best...

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