This book looks like a model for what temperance historians may attempt in 
their specialization.  Among other things, I was interested in the concept 
of political theater.


>Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 08:25:07 -0400
>From: Richard Gorrie <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: REV: Chase on Pickering and Tyrrell, _The People's Bread..._
>Sender: H-Net List for British and Irish History <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Reply-to: H-Net List for British and Irish History <[log in to unmask]>
>Original-recipient: rfc822;[log in to unmask]
>
>Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 09:54:07 +0100
>From: "Dr David Nash" <[log in to unmask]>
>
>H-NET BOOK REVIEW
>Published by [log in to unmask] (June 2000)
>
>Paul A.  Pickering and Alex Tyrrell. _The People's Bread: A
>History of the Anti-Corn Law League_.  London and New York:
>Leicester University Press, 2000. x + 304 pp.  Map,
>illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography and index.  £50
>(hardback). ISBN 0 7185 0218 3.
>
>Reviewed for H-Albion by Malcolm Chase <[log in to unmask]>,
>School of Continuing Education, University of Leeds
>
>Rescuing the Anti-Corn Law League from the condescension of posterity
>
>This is an important and significant book, of interest not only
>to historians of mid-nineteenth politics but also of pressure
>groups, religion, the theatre, women and society generally.  It
>represents a considerable advance on existing knowledge of the
>Anti-Corn Law League (ACLL).  The League was an
>extra-parliamentary agitation to repeal those laws which, from
>1815 until 1846, taxed imported grain on a sliding scale in
>inverse proportion to the cost of domestic wheat.  Along with
>Chartism the ACLL dominated domestic politics in the late 1830s
>and the first half of the 1840s and the two have been subject to
>frequent comparison.  Yet oddly, as the authors point out in the
>introduction to this book, the historiography of Chartism has
>outstripped in size, scope and imagination that of the ACLL.
>Norman McCord's path-breaking study of 1958 [1] has remained the
>standard account.  Slightly amended in 1968, it has been largely
>unchallenged by either monograph or journal literature.
>Pickering and Tyrrell are well-placed to reverse this, given
>their reputation as historians of Chartism and early Victorian
>moral radicalism.[2]
>
>So, what remains of McCord's account now that Pickering and
>Tyrrell have completed their work?  The answer is a great deal.
>The present authors do not attempt to replace the narrative
>account McCord deftly constructed of the League's origins,
>development and end.  Nor do they really subvert the implication
>of his concluding chapter that, within and upon 'the decisive
>theatre' of parliamentary politics, the ACLL was a limited
>force.  On the other hand, even in 1958, the limitations of
>McCord's approach to the League and its history were recognised,
>notably in a review by Geoffrey Best that lamented the author
>bustled his readers past 'many open doorways'.[3] Pickering and
>Tyrrell lead us through and beyond these doorways in a vivid and
>skilful exploration of the cultural and political baggage of
>ACLL supporters.  The result is a volume that extends and
>challenges our knowledge of the League and its times.
>
>The stock image of the ACLL (encapsulated in exam questions
>along the lines of 'Chartism failed and the League succeeded.
>Discuss') is of a tight, cohesive and somewhat sober
>organisation, dominated by Mancunian manufacturers.  One reason
>why modern histories of this body have been so thin on the
>ground has probably derived from an abiding perception that it
>was worthy but dull.  The authors of the present volume
>gleefully demolish this cliché.  The book opens with an
>electrifying lecture in 1842 by James Massie, an Anglican
>clergyman and one of the League's star platform orators.  Massie
>drew a direct comparison between the League and the early German
>reformation and, reaching his climax, imitated Luther's
>celebrated treatment of one papal bull by setting fire to a copy
>of a Corn Bill that had recently been placed before parliament.
>Then, as the audience ground the ashes underfoot, he declaimed,
>'So perish all the laws that would interfere with the food of
>the people!' (p. 1)  The account of this episode sets the scene
>for much that follows, for at the heart of the book lies a vivid
>account of the ACLL as political theatre, which skilfully
>explores the iconography and rituals of its lectures, dinners,
>bazaars and conferences.  Not for nothing did the League erect
>in 1840 a vast Free Trade Pavilion on the site of the epochal
>Peterloo meeting of 1819.  Pickering and Tyrrell also show how
>the ACLL promoted itself as the vanguard of the struggle to
>throw off the Norman Yoke, and how committed its active
>supporters had been to political causes that ranged from the
>Queen Caroline agitation of 1820 to opposing the sale of
>Manchester's municipal gas undertaking in 1834.
>
>The main vehicle for this political analysis is a detailed
>collective biography of the 105 councilmen of the Manchester
>Anti-Corn Law Association (ACLA) in 1839-40.  This throws up a
>number of interesting insights.  They ranged in age from 65 down
>to 21, but at 46 their average age was a full decade older than
>Pickering's sample of Manchester and Salford Chartists in
>1840.[4] Thirty per cent were Unitarians (who numbered only 2
>per cent of the church-going population of Manchester at the
>religious census of 1851).  Another 15 per cent were Quakers.
>No more than a half were native to Lancashire, but the authors
>are able to show that overwhelmingly councilmen were long-term
>Manchester residents.  No surprises there then; but the ACLA
>Council was very far from being merely a forum for the major
>cotton manufacturers.  There was a broad balance of commercial
>and manufacturing interests, leavened by the professions.  It
>also included linen drapers, grocers and a baker, for example,
>'a substantial minority...hard-working men, not of the "first
>station", who have dropped out of the history of the League' (p.
>228).  The book is also attentive to the support received by the
>ACLL from wage-earners.  Sensibly, it does not seek to make more
>of this than the evidence will sustain.  In particular, the
>authors find 'little evidence' of working-class women's
>involvement (p. 133); but they show that the League cannot be
>marginalised or dismissed by historians of labour.  It is
>regrettable, therefore, that they glide over the issue of the
>League's alleged complicity in the 1842 mass strike wave in a
>few lines.
>
>Of the fifty-four men in the Manchester ACLA sample whose
>marital status can be confirmed, fifty-two were married, six of
>them to the sisters or daughters of fellow councilmen.  Of those
>fifty-two, no less than twenty-nine had wives who were
>themselves active supporters of the ACLL.  In its treatment of
>women this book constitutes a massive advance on existing
>knowledge, though it should be read in conjunction with an
>illuminating essay recently published by Simon Morgan.[5] McCord
>had only four references to women (all of them citations of
>Harriet Martineau's _History of England during the Thirty Years'
>Peace_).  Pickering and Tyrrell point out Martineau donated a
>novel about the civilising effects of free trade to the ACLL,
>but they also do very much more than that.  The result is a
>rounded appraisal of the League as a forum in which women played
>an important part, ancillary it is true to its internal
>governance but central to the cultural life that the authors are
>at pains to reclaim from obscurity.
>
>Similarly revisionist is their attempt to establish the
>geographical scope of the League. A separate chapter deals with
>Wales and Ireland; and their survey of the English provinces and
>Scotland identifies 223 anti-corn law associations, from Perth
>southwards to Truro.  The League, in the authors' view, 'worked
>hard to create a nationwide public opinion based on its version
>of Britishness' (p.  197).  It's their belief that it succeeded,
>creating along the way a culture that accelerated the
>development of political parties and the idea of representative
>politics.  Within Westminster, they also argue that the ACLL
>provided a template for subsequent 'guerrilla warfare' from the
>back benches, though this claim is less convincing, despite an
>appendix detailing members of parliament who voted for total and
>immediate repeal of the Corn Laws on each of the five occasions
>this was presented to the Commons, 1842-45.  The real strength
>of this study lies in its extensive research into the provinces,
>to conjure some original and profound insights into the internal
>life and 'the ways and means' of the ACLL.  In their concluding
>paragraph, Paul Pickering and Alex Tyrrell invoke E.P.Thompson's
>oft-quoted trope concerning the enormous condescension of
>posterity.  The ACLL, they argue, has similarly been victim of
>posterity's condescension. 'The League we have sought to present
>was a much more varied, vital, robust and even radical
>organisation.  Our League upheld an inclusive definition of the
>British nation in terms of nationality, gender and class that
>challenged the existing order in a number of fundamental ways'.
>Their rescue operation does not render McCord's study redundant,
>but this was never their purpose.  Pickering and Tyrrell open up
>new ways of seeing not just the ACLL but also the cultural
>milieu of the early Victorian middle class.
>
>[1]. Norman McCord. _The Anti-Corn Law League, 1838-1846_.
>London: George Allen & Unwin, 1958.
>
>[2]. See especially Paul A. Pickering. _Chartism and the
>Chartists in Manchester and Salford_.  London:  Macmillan, 1995;
>and Alex Tyrrell, _Joseph Sturge and the Moral Radical Party in
>Early Victorian Britain_.  Bromley:  Helm, 1987.
>
>[3]. Review in _Historical Journal_ 2 (1959), pp.  89-93.
>
>[4]. Pickering, _Chartism_, p. 140.
>
>[5]. Simon Morgan, 'Domestic economy and political agitation:
>women and the Anti-Corn Law League, 1839-46', in Kathryn Gleadle
>and Sarah Richardson (eds), _Women in British Politics,
>1760-1860:  The Power of the Petticoat_.  London: Macmillan,
>2000.
>
>         Copyright 2001 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the
>         redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit,
>         educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the
>         author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and
>         H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses
>         contact the Reviews editorial staff: [log in to unmask]