Wanting and Having: Popular Politics and Liberal Consumerism in England, 1830–70 by Peter Gurney (review)

Peter Gurney’s excellent new book analyzes how nineteenth-century political movements mobilized the image of the poor as consumers. While the figure of the consumer has been central to discussions of citizenship in later periods, Gurney’s work is the first to demonstrate that the construction of the consumer was also an important political device from the early nineteenth century. The book focuses on how ideas of the poor consumer were used by the Chartist Movement, the Anti-Corn Law League, the architects of the New Poor Law, and middle-class philanthropists and shows how Gladstone and the Liberal party came to see themselves as acting in the interests of working-class consumers. Thoroughly researched and well argued, this book should be on the reading list of everyone with an interest in the history of consumption as well as politics and the poor in Victorian Britain.

The book explores the use of the idea of poor consumers by different groups in a variety of media. Chapter two, “Rejoicing in Potatoes,” considers how both Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law League mobilized the rhetoric of consumerism. Both drew heavily on themes of hunger and starvation and played on the image of cannibalism—stressing that the poor had been reduced to savagery and that poverty constituted a failure of civilization. Yet there were key differences in their arguments. This became particularly evident in the 1840s, with the League arguing that free trade would help consumers and Chartists contending that it would do them further harm. The third chapter deals with the New Poor Law, exploring how the act effectively eroded the idea that the poor were entitled to a basic level of comfort. Chapter four looks at the emergence of democracy in Chartist discourse, arguing that this concept was used to unify the movement. Radical consumer strategies and organizations are the subject of chapter five, which shows how practical tactics such as “exclusive dealing” (the boycotting of shops with owners who supported the opposition) and the organization of joint-cooperative stores marshaled consumer activities for political ends. But they were also part of a new, broader wave of criticism aimed at the impact of competition on the poor consumer. Chapter four offers a focused case study of understandings of the consumer in the works of Dickens, charting a shift in Dickens’s critique of poverty and a move away from a belief in the ability of charitable endeavor to solve the problems of the poor. Gurney then examines the way the Anti-Corn Law League used emerging consumption ideas and practices to bolster itself as an institution, focusing on the National Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar of 1845. The Bazaar raised funds for the League, but it also offered a broader endorsement of a consumer society. As the final chapter shows, there were major problems with this approach. In the 1860s, the Lancashire cotton famine saw workers, who had previously been able to make a good living, laid off and reduced to poverty. While middle-class humanitarian responses drew on the idea of the depleted working-class domestic interior to gain support for the workers, the charitable effort also sought to downplay their entitlements, ultimately trying to reduce expectations and workers’ stake in a consumer society.

The third chapter is particularly satisfying. It maps out how the New Poor Law damaged the material expectations and morale of the poor through government action, institutional provision, and ultimately, starvation. As Gurney points out, recent revisionist approaches to the New Poor Law have stressed local variation and practical limitations, to a certain extent obscuring the bigger picture. In a powerful new argument, Gurney demonstrates that one of the fundamental effects of the law was to “radically transform popular entitlements and redefine the expectations of poor consumers.” Gurney reveals how proposals for reform were based on a critique of working-class consumption and improvident paupers who threw away money...