Democratic Passions: The Politics of Feeling in British Popular Radicalism, 1809–48, by Matthew Roberts

If anyone thinks that the history of nineteenth-century British popular radicalism is an exhausted mine, incapable of producing new interpretations, they should check out Matthew Roberts’s new book. In an innovative monograph, Roberts rethinks popular politics through the history of the emotions. The book is structured around a series of case-studies of key radical figures such as William Cobbett and Feargus O’Connor. Yet, although this is a study of leaders rather than the led, it helps explain why radicalism was the site of such passionate engagement. Popular politics in this interpretation was not a rational, post-Enlightenment deliberation over policy and democracy; rather, it was an outgrowth of Romanticism with a strong emphasis on the passions and feelings. Tellingly, Roberts quotes the feminist scholar Sara Ahmed, who argues that ‘emotions do things … they align individuals with communities … through the very intensity of their attachments’ (p. 116). This shapes the approach which offers a persuasive way of understanding the movement culture of radicalism. For example, the book’s introduction looks at the Queen Caroline agitation of 1820, which was notable for the surge in popular emotions that drew many radicals in. At the same time, Roberts notes that it was the attachment to unruly feelings (and the worship of demagogues) that was often employed in the nineteenth century as a reason why the working classes should not get the vote.

While it is inevitable that Roberts deals with the emotional blunderbuss that was Cobbett (who, like Burke, believed that feeling, rather than reason, should guide action), some may be surprised that he also examines figures such as Richard Carlile and Robert Owen, who were not noted for their passionate qualities. The study makes the distinction between sentimental and ascetic radicalism but acknowledges that the differences between the two are not clear-cut. Indeed, Roberts boldly rethinks the ostensibly rational Carlile and Owen. Carlile was anti-sentimental but not anti-sentiment. He thought deeply about love as a passion (although he does seem to have reduced it to the desire to reproduce). The category of ‘happiness’ was extremely important to Owen (as it was to the Enlightenment), but he argued that it needed to be defined in social rather than individual terms. Carlile similarly saw his project as generating happiness through removing fear (especially that engendered by religion), which produced personal misery.

Perhaps the strongest chapters deal with Richard Oastler and the Reverend J.R. Stephens. Both have sometimes been described as Tory radicals (although Roberts clearly feels this description reduces their complexity). Roberts argues that feeling provided the plane on which Oastler was drawn into an engagement with radicalism. The Factory Reformer was, among other things, noted for his tears and for noting the tears of society’s victims. The mainspring of his political thought was the affective bond created by landed society, something that had been disrupted by the industrial revolution. Roberts interprets Oastler in terms of his deployment of the gothic mode. Both the country estate and the workhouse were reconfigured through the gothic imagination in his speeches; significantly, he also spoke of the ‘factory monster’. Elsewhere, Oastler claimed he was ‘always fond of church yard thoughts’ (p. 129). This helped determine the emotional register of his radicalism. It is less surprising to think about Stephens in terms of emotions. His Chartist sermons were notable for their histrionic style, encouraging supporters to burn down factories and attack Poor Law Guardians (explaining why he was imprisoned in 1838). Roberts shows how he was shaped by German Romanticism and pietism (as well as the prophetic tradition in the Bible), which produced an investment in intense feeling. The open-air spaces that Stephens employed for preaching constituted an emotional refuge for supporters that contrasted with many churches which were structured around class hierarchies. In Stephens’s sermons, hunger was something that ate at the heart rather than just the belly (hence his belief that Chartism was a ‘knife and fork question’ as well as ‘bread and cheese question’). The failure of the propertied classes was that they lacked sympathy. Yet Roberts qualifies this by noting that Stephens also presented himself through his refined character. Rather than simply encouraging violence, the thrust of Stephens’s argument was that the working class should live more respectable lives.

Roberts, in the latter part of the book, considers how the Chartists politicised feeling. By looking at William Lovett, he produces a persuasive interpretation of moral force Chartism as something more than a strategy that focused on peaceful means of political struggle. In this mindset, human beings needed to control their passions through rational will. Lovett criticised physical force Chartists for the promotion of passion over the intellect. Figures like him were averse to the world of the open-air mass platform; rather, they were drawn to spaces such as the coffee shop and the reading room. Politeness was key to their discourse. In the final chapter, Roberts considers Daniel O’Connell and Feargus O’Connor. Their very similarity meant that relations between their supporters were punctuated by feelings of anger and betrayal.

Roberts does not argue that radicalism failed by being too emotional (although he argues that the politics of Oastler were hampered by their shrill quality). Instead, he argues that radicals succeeded when they got the balance right between sentimental and ascetic radicalism. Clearly, the management of feeling was an important part of the promotion of popular demands. When the working classes started to get the vote in 1867 it was in part because policy makers were impressed by the refined and respectable personality that many workers deployed. One can see this kind of analysis being employed to understand radicalism in other periods. For example, it could be employed to explain the struggle between Hugh Gaitskell and Aneurin Bevan in the 1950s, and (who knows?) one day we may get a comparable study of Jeremy Corbyn and Keir Starmer.