TY - JOUR
AU - Taylor, Antony
AB - Abstract This article re-opens the debate about metropolitan club life in the middle years of the nineteenth century. The traditional view of the clubs matches a historiography of British radicalism which privileges the eighteen-forties and eighties, and is neglectful of the middle years of the century. Addressing recent continuity arguments, this article modifies prevailing views of metropolitan political clubs by scrutiny of those elements that remained outside the Liberal consensus. In so doing it relates the history of radical club life in the capital to the popular politics of the mid nineteenth century, and to debates about Chartist survival. In addition, it re-examines the clubs in line with a new historiography of London which stresses the uniqueness of the capital, and the moral panics that emerged from concerns about the persistence of the radical underground. Club and associational life is usually seen as the mainstay of the Victorian era. The working-men's club movement has come to symbolize the political trajectory of aspirational working-class culture in nineteenth-century Britain. For most authors it represents a culture of conviviality redolent of artisanal customs of self-improvement, temperance and measured political debate. For historians of the Liberal party, clubs rank alongside savings banks, co-operatives and building societies as the cement of mid-century popular Liberalism. Amongst the founders of the Labour party, working-men's clubs demonstrated the taming of the passions of the popular platform and the channeling of radical energies into a constructive engagement with the political and cultural arena of parliamentary politics. Contemporaries saw mid-century clubs as, in essence, both a model and an inspiration that took the political process ‘out of the bar parlours of public houses’.1 They demonstrated the deep-rootedness of the domestic Westminster mode of political discourse, the success of a graduated model of parliamentary reform, and the ability of political parties to integrate critics of the political system into the mainstream of the body politic. The Reverend C. M. Davies mused of debating societies that ‘if other countries had some kindred institutions we should hear of fewer coups d'état and political complications in general’.2 Under the tutelage of the Reverend Henry Solly the Working-Men's Club and Institute Union (C.I.U.) was the epitome of mid-Victorian equipoise in all its civic and community manifestations. He saw it as providing the basis for new socially-mixed local élites in which the clubs furnished young working-class men with the tools that they needed to enter local government. Writing in 1922 B. T. Hall, the historian of the C.I.U., commented: Ich dien might well be the motto of thousands of club officers who, without payment, give every week service upon committees … The readiness, nay, the eager desire, to serve others is bred in the club with extraordinary fecundity. This readiness is a growing necessity of social life, when from every quarter democracy calls for workers and administrators. So it comes about that the town councils, the guardians, the school committees … are steadily supplied by the clubs with representatives of the workmen, ablaze with a desire to do good work for the community, and sufficiently rewarded in the work done, or the effort made.3 In Hall's lavishly illustrated celebration of the C.I.U., the fixtures and fittings of the clubs are central. With their opulent conference facilities, kitchens, games-rooms, baths and ‘old English gardens’ they symbolized the aspirations to respectability of the mid-Victorian artisan, and conveyed an image of the state and citizenry working in peaceful tandem towards the realization of the same political ends. Historians have reiterated the Victorian club movement's view of itself as respectable and enabling. There is, however, a tension in the historiography of working-men's clubs. Whereas for some contemporaries they were to be celebrated for their artisan qualities of rugged self-reliance and independence, for others they were a symbol of the excesses of plebeian political life. The dark underbelly of the political club was a world of conspiracy, discontent and subversive excess. For many, the clubs promoted a world of anti-hierarchical egalitarianism. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, metropolitan political clubs were the inheritors of a proletarianized Enlightenment culture, where mockery and irreverent criticism of government abounded.4 Here the environment of the club overlapped with that of a radical underground involved in blackmail, pornography, illegal printing and subversive political debate. Images of a debased and degraded club-land continued into the middle years of the nineteenth century. In 1848 Chartists conspired in the metropolitan clubs, in the eighteen-sixties reformers and Fenians met together to consider joint action against the government, and in the early eighteen-seventies notorious republican drinking-dens sprang up in traditional radical meeting places.5 Against this background the metropolitan club in particular became the mainstay of alarmist and apocalyptic reporting, which represented such gatherings of working men as potentially corrosive of the bonds uniting state and nation, rulers and ruled. In Henry James's The Princess Casamassima, the Sun and Moon debating club is merely a front, concealing the gathering of an inner core of more extreme anarchists.6 By the late eighteen-eighties popular fears revolved around the anarchist clubs in the capital, which were regularly raided by the police and local vigilantes.7 In short, political clubs could be threatening rather than reassuring, dangerous rather than placid. For many religious and temperance groups they symbolized an aggressive and rogue masculinity that, freed from the restraints of family life, gave vent to dark and secret political passions stirred by socialist and republican orators. This article seeks to re-evaluate the history of radical political clubs in London. It sees the metropolitan clubs as, in part, expressive of an underground and unrespectable radical tradition drawing on memories of Chartism and grounded in the subterranean popular press, ancestral radical loyalties and populist anti-statism. By engaging with recent historiography on continuities within popular politics, it disputes the notion of a purely convivial culture of assembly, in which political views were seldom aired, and that paved the way for a de-politicized social environment open to suasion from a populist Toryism constructed around the symbols of the nation and a capital-centred patriotism.8 In particular, it challenges Gareth Stedman Jones's assertion that the metropolitan clubs were passive and compliant. Drawing on evidence from the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Stedman Jones has argued that the clubs steadily lost their radical political dimension and were finally subdued by a combination of the largesse of wealthy patrons, and the emergence of the easy gratifications of the popular entertainment culture of the eighteen-nineties.9 In this reading the radical clubs are, in effect, made marginal by their retrospective association with the expansion of leisure. This interpretation is influenced by Henry Solly's attempts to diminish the overt political dimension to the clubs in order to attract patrons and benefactors to the C.I.U.10 By endorsing Solly's view, Stedman Jones overlooks the very considerable contribution of the metropolitan clubs to the landscape of popular politics in London in the years following the demise of the Chartist movement nationally, and their importance in perpetuating models of radical political activity independent of both Liberalism and Toryism. There is an element of ‘Golden Ageism’ in the lament for a lost political club-land, echoed by Tory and Liberal, as well as radical politicians, that forces a cautious treatment of the declarations of those who announced the premature death of the club in the eighteen-nineties.11 Stedman Jones's view has been disputed by John Davis, who challenges the notion of a depoliticization of the metropolitan clubs, and makes claims for their importance as a radicalizing influence on metropolitan Liberalism. In his work the clubs are seen as an important reason for the increasing drift of metropolitan Liberalism in a radical direction.12 Through a close examination of metropolitan club-land from the eighteen-fifties to the eighteen-eighties, this article supplements the work of Davis by suggesting a model in which the political clubs provided the mainstay of radical politics, which persisted unchanged in London precisely because the political environment of metropolitan club life resisted those pressures promoting the growth of local Liberal and Tory caucus politics in the regions.13 Moreover, it connects with recent work that emphasizes the survival of radical postures in London around issues of hostility to the poor law, anti-landlordism and anti-police activity.14 In London, far from acting as a social solvent, political clubs were often the repository of popular fears, expressed residual radical energies, and provided a frequent trigger for moral and social panic about the imminence of revolutionary apocalypse in the capital at mid century. What follows is a re-examination of the metropolitan clubs, which, by analyzing reaction to the more extreme forms of radical club life, reclaims the counter-cultural dimension to their activities. It seeks to challenge a Whiggish historiography of clubs in which only permanent premises fulfil the criterion of ‘club’, and to recapture the hinterland of radicalism provided by the debating societies, ‘Judge and Juries’, ‘Tobacco Parliaments’ and the ‘Free and Easies’, all at one time or another equated with radical politics. This article takes issue with recent historiography that depicts the club as an integral part of the project to create an idealized masculine representation of the ‘man at work’, a householder worthy of receipt of the vote and a place in the political nation.15 Drawing on the work of Peter Bailey, it explores the ambiguities of the notion of ‘respectability’ as it pertains to club life in the eighteen-seventies.16 In addition, it uncovers a world that provided a substantial sub-stratum of club society. There were some 130 clubs linked loosely to the metropolitan C.I.U. in the eighteen-seventies and recorded in the George Howell papers. Approximately a dozen or so of these, defined by their names and provenance in the radical press, fell into the bracket of ‘radical’ meeting places and constituted themselves in opposition to the more tamed and domesticated environment provided by the mainstream C.I.U. clubs.17 Their influence was fluid and difficult to quantify. Nevertheless, at times they dominated movements of popular protest in London from the eighteen-fifties, destabilized the internal politics of the C.I.U., and pulled the metropolitan centre of political gravity in a more radical direction away from the ‘official Liberalism … for which they have unbounded contempt’.18 As we shall see, radical club life could erode, as well as strengthen, the case for expansion of the franchise in the eighteen-sixties and eighteen-seventies. In the aftermath of 1867, un-English anarchist clubmen were often the antithesis of the proud Anglo-Saxon worthy of the vote. During the period from the end of Chartism onwards, a popular lore of insurgency and insurrection centred around the radical London clubs. The template for much metropolitan radical activity remained the memory of radical ‘spouters’ and ‘mountebanks’ who haunted the pages of respectable newspapers. In the capital the popular imagination was resistant to the more positive outlook on club life espoused by Solly and others in the regions. In 1871, at the height of the republican agitation of the early eighteen-seventies, the Hole-in-the-Wall republican club at Hatton Garden, Clerkenwell became notorious, crystallizing many of these popular fears and anxieties.19 Like the Chartists before them, the republicans were interpreted as a cultural threat. The trappings of revolution that they adopted, their colonization of public space, and the long lineages of physical-force radicalism in this part of London gave them a notoriety that made them instantly recognizable in the sensationalist press and allowed them to assume the status of folk-devils, synonymous with riotous and disorderly conduct. Clerkenwell presented a spectacle of democratic pleasure clustered around the Green, which Thomas Beames described as the ‘refuge of the destitute, the sanctuary of the disorderly’.20 During the Reform League campaign of 1866–7 the ‘Men of Clerkenwell’ both celebrated and embraced the antecedence of radical Clerkenwell from the time of John Wilkes onwards.21 Even the leaders of the League commented on their militancy. George Howell was dismissive of the ‘Clerkenwell Green, Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park vapourings’ that ‘will do more to retard the process of true democracy than we shall be able to get over for years’.22 Throughout the eighteen-sixties the Clerkenwellians made themselves conspicuous by their use of radical iconography, and by their threatening posture. In their perambulations around London they wore tricolour cockades, and carried flags and crosses of liberty. Torchlit meetings and red flags flown from the ornamental lamppost at the centre of the Green were commonplace.23 Comprising a number of radical veterans of 1866–7, the Hole-in-the-Wall Club at Clerkenwell was housed originally in a pub, but moved to more permanent premises following an appeal for funds. Benefactors included the notorious republicans Sir Charles Dilke and G. W. M. Reynolds. Like many of the republican clubs of this period it was closely monitored by the police. Neighbours complained about the noisy and unruly proceedings that spilled over into the nearby streets.24 In addition, events at the club proved a draw for sensationalist journalists seeking copy. Most framed the Hole-in-the-Wall Club in the traditional terms of London low-life, as a tawdry and villainous drinking den where the proprieties of order and cleanliness were overlooked. An apostate radical, Robert Coningsby, writing in The Times, described it as ‘a dingy, sawdusty, dimly-lit tavern, which the unlearned might easily mistake for a beershop and wonder how the deuce the blinds became so faded’.25 Some journalists were disappointed and frankly bored by the set-piece debates in an environment described with irony as ‘that awful den of republicanism, that lair in which the democratic lion mangles his prey’.26 Elsewhere in the country, the regional press portrayed the club members as cynical opportunists, guilty of propagating atheistical and anti-government views. G. H. Rowe, editor of the Carmarthen Journal, described the members of the Hole-in-the-Wall Club as typical of republican culture more generally, ‘groveling in urban slums, unknown except when a demonstration is “got up” enabling certain demagogues to win cheap notoriety by vociferating their stale and cantankerous sedition’.27 Even after the club lost its drinking licence in 1872 and moved to more permanent premises, it remained a focus of press attention and curiosity for many years. Douglas Jerrold spoke of ‘patriots’ who performed ‘a melancholy odyssey among London public houses’ to record examples of revolutionary activity used to titillate their readers.28 In the late eighteen-eighties the metropolitan radical clubs still had a fearsome reputation, rooted in memories of the Hole-in-the-Wall, as places where immorality, brawling and drunken behaviour abounded.29 The controversies about the Hole-in-the-Wall Club were expressive of the ambiguities surrounding metropolitan radical clubs more generally. In the eighteen-seventies the make-up of these clubs conformed with prevailing visions of a dark and deadly London where the poor, European exiles and radicals moved in the shadows. George Augustus Sala wrote of the streets and slums where ‘are swept together the dried leaves, the rotten branches, the withered fruits from the tree of European liberty’.30 The press habitually portrayed the clubs as dens of noxious vice where a radical saturnalia sought to overturn the existing moral order. The name ‘Hole-in-the-Wall’ itself carried a sense of the unrespectable. It commonly occurred as a pub name in districts adjacent to debtors' prisons.31 Most radical clubs were peripatetic, changing location many times, and thus re-affirming the connection between vagabondage and the ephemeral street-culture of London.32 In line with this tendency towards impermanence the Hole-in-the-Wall Club changed its headquarters three times, becoming a symbol of roving depravity in the process. Indeed, the early eighteen-seventies saw a purge of radical premises in London. Police spies monitored meetings and debates, and J.P.s refused to renew the licences of those pubs where radical clubs traditionally assembled.33 This police pressure was inflammatory, often provoking comment from radical orators and clubmen themselves.34 In such attempts to undermine the reform community there was an acknowledgement of the close connection between drink, radical reform groups and insurrectionary activity in London. This was part of a long tradition. In 1848, following the Chartist conspiracies at the Orange Tree Tavern, the resumption of secret meetings enabled reform groups to survive clandestinely in defiance of the authorities.35 Reformers themselves were divided about the implications of closed indoor meetings. Some saw them as magnets for agents provocateurs, and suggested that ‘hole-in-the-corner’ gatherings implied subterfuge, encouraging the view that radicals were ashamed of ideas that should more properly be propagated from the public platform.36 From the Regency period onwards radicalism in the capital perpetuated itself through the network of clubs and debating societies that mapped out the radical geography of London, and brought reformers into conflict with the authorities. Iain McCalman has emphasized the importance of such clubs to the transmission of radical ideology, and in maintaining a core of committed political activists who were a catalyst to movements like Chartism and the Reform League. This pattern, which McCalman has noted for the eighteen-twenties, repeated itself in the eighteen-fifties.37 Following the contraction of Chartism, radical club associations acted as a bridge into the politics of popular reformism in the eighteen-sixties, and into republicanism after 1871. Pubs were important in this process, and many radical clubs continued to meet there. In addition, radical ideas also found expression in London's long-established debating clubs. The debating clubs clustered around Fleet Street symbolized an ungovernable strain of popular politics, in part inspired by their proximity to the organs of the national press, but also constituting a physical survival of the post-Restoration imperative to hold the executive to account. Cogers Club, for example, near St. Bride's church, could trace its origins back to 1755, while the Green Dragon in Fleet Street had links with the radical whiggery of the sixteen-fifties. Both John Wilkes and Henry Hunt had been patrons of Cogers. In central London William Carpenter, the veteran Chartist and newspaper editor, was the proprietor of the Temple Forum, Fleet Street from 1853.38 In the late eighteen-fifties the debating clubs of London proved so central to radical culture in the metropolis that Ernest Jones saw in them a possible salvation for organized Chartism in London, choosing to report their proceedings alongside other reform activity in his newspaper the London News.39 There were eight major debating clubs functioning in London during these years that kept a body of ideas together from earlier movements, provided a point of contact with traditional radical culture, and nurtured a new generation of young radicals achieving prominence in the early eighteen-sixties. George Howell recalled their formative influence on him after his move to London in the mid eighteen-fifties: ‘Some of the leading Chartists of 1848 I did not know, they had either died, left the movement, or migrated elsewhere before I came to London. But for years I heard all they had to say, and was conversant with their writings … Few of them now remain, but they have a green place in my memory.’40 A network of coffee houses provided a further outlet for political debate in more informally organized radical clubs. Unlike taverns they stocked newspapers and books, but were also free from the coercion of landlords, brewers and J.P.s. Howell himself was instrumental in the formation of one such association, the Milton Club, which met at the old Chartist den of Mills' Coffee House to discuss the politics of John Milton. Howell commented on the high tone of the debate which he saw as ‘equal, if not superior, to the more set debates at the more established halls’.41 The origin of the negative view of the metropolitan clubs can be traced back to their role in sustaining the popular protest movements of nineteenth-century London. In the capital, movements like the temperance campaign never really succeeded in overturning the centrality of the public house in London's commercial, recreational and political life. Indeed, the strongest resistance to attempts by Solly and others to tame the London clubs was galvanized by campaigns to protect the sale of alcohol on club premises.42 This confirmed the link between unrespectability, drink and subversive doctrines. The sheer size of London meant that protest could only be orchestrated through committees established in local pubs. Election committees campaigned from public houses, workmen were paid there and trades unionists used them both as ports of call and as centres for discussion, organization and strike action. The Bell Inn, Old Bailey fulfilled this role from the eighteen-forties through to the early eighteen-sixties and became the recognized headquarters of trades union activity in London.43 So intimate were the ties between the metropolitan trades and the public house that individual branch societies like the Silver Cup Society of Carpenters and Joiners took the title of their organization from the pub in which they assembled.44 In the eighteen-fifties, attempts to relocate trade society branches in club house accommodation were far less successful in the capital than in the regions. The dependency of movements of political reform upon the public house remained very marked in all the major metropolitan political agitations from the days of Jacobin radicalism onwards. In a retrospective account of radical gathering places, Mark Starr recalled that: ‘The Crown and Anchor Tavern, and the Ship at Charing Cross, were the rendezvous of all the radical reformers of the early nineteenth century.’45 In 1848 Samuel Kydd appealed: ‘Men of London … will Chartism never have a local habitation and a name among you? Will it never step out from the dark rooms of beer shops, and the corrupting influences of gin palaces?’46 In the absence of any alternative, Chartists were heavily reliant on this method of mobilization, and despite Ernest Jones's attempt to wean Chartist branches away from the public house in the early eighteen-fifties, they remained firmly rooted in pub culture.47 As with trade societies, local branches continued to identify themselves with a particular pub and incorporated the name in their title, long after the practice had died out elsewhere. In some areas of London, trade and Chartist organization continued to overlap, as it had in the past. The central London locality of the National Charter Association met at the Hand and Shears, Smithfield, which had historical connections with the tailoring trade and acted as the focal point for the Bartholomew Cloth Fair until 1855.48 Many metropolitan Chartists were themselves publicans, notably the engineers' leader William Newton and the veteran radical William Morgan. William Newton's public house, the Phoenix Tavern at Ratcliffe Cross, Limehouse, was a regular venue for Chartist meetings between 1849 and 1858, and served as the headquarters for radical associations in Tower Hamlets until the end of the eighteen-fifties.49 Like the earlier Chartist movement, the Reform League executive recommended that its local branches organize along ‘class lines’ on the model of the metropolitan Chartist branches.50 The class system of small, interlocking groups transplanted easily into the environment of the club and debating house culture of the capital. From the League's foundation, its London branches were locked into the pub-based cultural patterns that had helped to preserve the unity of the Chartist splinter groups in the eighteen-fifties. Indeed, they stood a better chance of long-term survival if they had roots in older associations. The political reform associations provided an easy blend of conviviality and informal political debate. Discussion and arguments were interspersed with songs and recitations. Singers like John Lowry and J. B. Leno created an agitprop performance genre to fit in with this environment.51 This dependence upon the riotous traditions of the public house made the Reform League vulnerable to anti-reform propaganda. A hostile account of a Reform League meeting on Clerkenwell Green in 1867 depicted the reformers in the traditional guise of low ‘pothouse politician[s]’: ‘They were not of the brave, sturdy, and artisan kind, but of that peculiar kind which may be best described as habitués of the pothouse, of which samples can always be seen lounging round the doors of low gin palaces.’52 Radical pub culture, however, exalted the lineages of the radical movement and marked out a cultural territory defined by certain well-known public houses which had established radical associations, and sometimes names. The first incarnation of the Patriotic Club in Clerkenwell was as the appropriately named Robin Hood Debating Society which drew on memories of the famous eighteenth-century debating club of the same name in the Strand, where the freethinker Peter Annet pursued a ‘fanatical crusade against the Bible’.53 When the landlord of the Hole-in-the-Wall Club gave in to police pressure and expelled the reformers, the pub was re-named the Crown and Constitution to cleanse itself of its former radical links and to appease a non-radical clientele. There was a lived reform environment inside the clubs that stamped a radical imprint on the surroundings. Douglas Jerrold recorded of the Patriotic Club: One saw on the walls … the bluff effigy of Dan O'Connell, the faces of Julian Harney and Cuffay, Ernest Jones's incisive features, Joseph Arch's business-like front, Tom Duncombe, Feargus O'Connor, and in the place of honour, a portrait in oils of Sir Charles Dilke, executed by George Odger's son with a fair fidelity to life.54 In 1868 The Bee-Hive reported that police pressure had forced the landlord to tear down images of radical saints like Gladstone, Mill, Bright and Beales.55 Recreating the atmosphere of the radical clubs in the nineteen-twenties, F. G. Bettany emphasized their conviviality, fuelled by alcohol, camaraderie, the public house ethos and political debate: You must imagine the hall, a fairly large room with a raised platform, at one end of which were seats for the chairman … and the lecturer. Behind there was an old-fashioned gas bracket with a naked flaring light, while in front sat the audience in pew-shaped seats, which had ledges for their mugs of beer, and as the men puffed at their pipes and swigged their beer an attendant passed up and down asking for orders.56 The sudden and dramatic growth of the Reform League between 1865 and 1867 placed unparalleled pressure on London's radical accommodation in public houses. These constraints continued with the proliferation of Land and Labour League and republican branches after 1871. Reform League branches could only afford the hire of commercial halls when they were offered at a reduced rate. The prohibitively expensive cost of hiring metropolitan civic halls like the Agricultural Hall, Islington occasioned special pleading on behalf of meetings in the capital's open spaces at the time of the Hyde Park riots in 1866.57 George Howell commented at a meeting of the League executive in 1865: ‘No-one went to the public house for preference, but temperance halls as a rule were not open to us, and large halls were too expensive.’58 In the eighteen-seventies, some reformers found that a combination of police and landlord pressure meant that the only venues open to them were London's civic spaces. The organizers of a republican demonstration in Trafalgar Square in February 1872 recorded: ‘applications had been made for the use of other halls, but in every case a refusal of its use had been given, police interference being in some cases put forward as a reason.’59 In the absence of any alternative, and with renewed governmental pressure on the open ground, the Reform League's local associations were forced back on the secularist halls and the metropolitan debating club circuit. Older debating clubs, particularly Cogers in Fleet Street (singled out for special mention in the Reform League newspaper, The Commonwealth), supplemented more recent radical accommodation.60 In addition, London's coffee houses continued to fulfil their traditional function and hosted large numbers of Reform League branch meetings at the height of the 1866–7 campaign. Notable were the Reformers' Coffee House, White Cross Street and the Reform Coffee House, High Holborn, the headquarters of the John Bull branch of the League. The East London Stores, Crisp Street, meeting place of the Poplar branch and of a lodge of the operative bricklayers, provided the sole example in London of a co-operative society's premises pressed into service as a radical meeting-room. Where no such alternatives were available, shortage of accommodation compelled reformers to negotiate for the use of local schools and other public buildings.61 In contrast, in the regions the eighteen-forties saw the stabilization of the Chartist movement around permanent club and meeting house facilities. These never prospered to the same degree in London, where high property prices precluded the construction of permanent premises for radical meetings. In 1854 the Metropolitan Delegate Council of the N.C.A. admitted that ‘there is not a hall in London we can depend upon obtaining when required’.62 The absence of purpose-built halls prevented the use of ticketing, removing an important revenue stream from metropolitan radicalism. This, in turn, retarded the release of funds, realized in the regions through the sale of tickets, for investment in new places of public assembly. In the eighteen-fifties metropolitan Chartists undertook a programme of hall-building in line with Chartist activity elsewhere, but only one major meeting place, the Doctors' Commons, Printing House Square, Blackfriars, was constructed. In the middle of the decade George Howell still described it as ‘scarcely built’.63 Three makeshift halls that the movement acquired in south London and Somers Town also passed rapidly out of Chartist control. Chartists did make use of the longer-established secularist halls, but despite this activity, metropolitan Chartism remained more dependent upon the public house than did its provincial offshoots. In the early eighteen-seventies fear of Communard influences in the London clubs encouraged the authorities to take action against them, pushing metropolitan democrats into more exclusive forms of organization. Increasingly apparent was the degree to which radicals were forced to improvise and make do with ad hoc and sometimes semi-derelict premises. Suggestions that the exteriors of purpose-built radical halls should be lavishly decorated with incidents from the lives of reform leaders like Ernest Jones were quite simply beyond the financial means of most metropolitan radical groups.64 Lack of fixed premises for radical clubs in London drove them into an underground labyrinth of impoverished accommodation that accentuated their ‘outlaw’ status. In the eighteen-seventies the Progressive Club, Kingsland Road was reliant upon the use of an old skating rink ‘which had failed in its original purpose’, although it came in useful for balls.65 Most of the more makeshift clubs were housed in less permanent and less salubrious premises than their regional counterparts. G. R. Sims and other metropolitan writers noted a penumbra of reform clubs housed in ‘shops or private houses that have been converted from their original purposes, or in small halls of their own making’.66 Absence of funds often forced radical clubs into the arms of wealthy patrons. In 1855 metropolitan Chartists complained of ‘miserable cliques calling themselves “Hall Committees”, or … sordid tricksters who have wormed themselves into sole possession of halls meant for the many’.67 Charles Bradlaugh recalled that property speculators were rife on the club circuit. In the mid eighteen-fifties he was prominent in a campaign to secure reimbursement for reformers in Hackney, swindled into erecting a hall on freehold land without the permission of the freeholder: in effect building a hall free for an entrepreneur without reimbursement. The men contacted me, and finding that under the Statute of Frauds they had no remedy, I recommended them to offer a penalty rent of twenty pounds a year. This being refused, I constituted myself into a law court, and without any riot or breach of the peace, I, with the assistance of a hundred stout men, took every brick of the building bodily down, and divided the materials, as far as was possible, amongst the proper owners.68 Hostility to such irregularities by patrons and financial backers set in train the many schisms, secessions and re-constitutions of club premises by radical purists that were such a marked feature of metropolitan club-land. Most reformers felt that patrons smothered free political debate. The initial dynamic towards the formation of the Reform League came from attempts by its radical predecessor, the Universal League for the Material Elevation of the Industrious Classes, to free itself from the influence of its patron, the marquis of Townshend, who held sway over the association at No. 18, Greek Street, Soho. Once freed from his control, the premises became the headquarters of the International Working Men's Association.69 Many political clubs were fiercely opposed to patronage and remained reliant upon ‘penny collections’ for their hand-to-mouth existence. The Eleusis Club in Chelsea boasted that they had declined ‘all assistance from the middle and upper classes … They therefore had no clerical or other individual to act as a drag on their wheels or to dictate to them in any way’.70 Trades unionists also felt aggrieved that patronage in the C.I.U. clubs might provide an opportunity for the exercise of employer influences.71 Metropolitan radicals frequently interpreted club patronage as an extension of aristocratic and landlord pressures in London. The radical view of the capital emphasized unaccountable aristocratic excess, showy opulence and a rapacious, uncontrolled landlordism. The Georgeite newspaper The Single Tax announced that ‘nearly every one of the principal London landlords is now a peer. No other metropolis is to such an extent in aristocratic hands’.72 Wealthy aristocratic developers and ground rent proprietors were widely seen as a threat, profiting from over-priced development. The struggle faced by many clubs to keep going was portrayed as a consequence of a landlord squeeze to extract surplus value from the slum properties and warrens of the East End where radicals traditionally congregated. For this reason, Henry George's ideas for opposing monopolistic landownership were widely embraced by the clubs in the eighteen-eighties.73 In The Nether World, George Gissing's fictional radical John Hewett rails against landlord influences at meetings on Clerkenwell Green: ‘What would happen to the landlords of Clerkenwell if they got their due? Ay, what shall happen my boys, and that before long?’74 The desire for autonomy on the part of the clubs in London, and the wish to free themselves from external patronage, accounts for the pressures driving them in the direction of the commercial entertainment market which helped to erode their significance. When liberated from paternalistic influences, the political clubs extended the boundaries of the radical community. Lasting friendships and alliances were forged through involvement with them. Robert Applegarth remembered a chance meeting with J. B. Leno at the Cogers Club in 1861 as providing the basis for their future collaboration.75 Moreover, the clubs' role as centres of debate created an established speaking circuit where former Chartists like Thomas Cooper and Bronterre O'Brien found employment as lecturers.76 As part of this culture, a professional tier of orators emerged who were conspicuous in London club-land for their regular orations, speeches, songs and co-ordination of set-piece debates. Such radical impresarios were the cornerstone of the makeshift club circuit. The mainstay of the Patriotic Club on Clerkenwell Green, successor to the Hole-in-the-Wall Club, was Samuel Brighty, who was described in his obituary as ‘a strong, sturdy fighter for reform’ and credited with starting ‘the Patriotic Club and gain[ing] the assistance of John Stuart Mill, Samuel Morley, Charles Dilke to hold political meetings away from public houses’.77 John Hales, who inspired George Lansbury in his youth, was a founder member of the Borough of Hackney Working Men's Club, the first secretary of the International Working Men's Association, and co-founder of the Bethnal Green Democratic Club and Institute dedicated to the promulgation of ‘socialistic and democratic principles’. The colourful chair of the Commonwealth Club in Bethnal Green, C. E. Mermod, was similarly a radical and former Chartist who kept a whip hanging outside his premises in Long Lane, Smithfield to deal with the enemies of the people.78 Although at the turn of the twentieth century the heyday of the professional radical orators was over, they were still a feature of London's public places, where they were described by contemporaries as ‘a sort of denunciatory loafer’, striking poses in opposition to the government and the privileged classes.79 Such continuities of personnel and organization were very apparent in the informal circles of metropolitan radicalism sustained by the reform groups that survived the demise of the Chartist movement. From the eighteen-sixties the metropolitan Reform League and Manhood Suffrage groups formed a coalition, a patchwork quilt of the different reform associations, sects, groups and trades union militants that flourished in the capital around single issue trades union and reform campaigns. These organizations were grounded in the network of meeting places and assembly points that formed the infrastructure of London radicalism. Indoor meeting places were central to this experience. In London a number of surrogate Chartist associations kept radicalism in the capital alive after the N.C.A. disbanded in 1858. The meeting places used by these organizations remained much the same as those employed by their radical predecesors. A labyrinth of acknowledged assembly places bound the movement together, and served as the spaces for political gatherings and assemblies. Frequently short-lived, under the auspices of such organizations offshoot branches were established that survived the collapse of the last major Chartist petitioning campaign intact. In most cases they continued to thrive, and took on a distinct life of their own in the early eighteen-sixties. This was a kaleidoscopic world of shifting political fragments and organizations. Once this is acknowledged, the confusions about exactly when the Reform League was established, whether in 1864, 1865 or even 1863, become immaterial. Most reformers portrayed the sub-sects of surviving Chartist organization in London as the germ of the manhood suffrage campaign of 1866–7. J. B. Leno recalled his role in keeping a cell of Chartist activists together who formed the nucleus of the Manhood Suffrage Association based at the Windsor Castle, Holborn: With this small band of self-sacrificing young men I assisted to keep the old flag flying till at length they formed the nucleus from which sprang the Reform League to the council of which I was almost unanimously elected a member. It was chiefly officered by men I had kept together, by those who took leading parts in the discussions held weekly in the Windsor Castle.80 Thereafter they provided a further entrée into the ersatz-Chartist groupings that replaced the Reform League. Subsequently, groups like the Hole-in-the-Wall Club were a conduit into the republican agitation of the eighteen-seventies. Many clubs acknowledged their position within the wreckage of broader organizations (talks on ‘Why has Chartism failed?’ were commonplace) and most adopted either lapel pins, rosettes or banners illustrative of their local loyalties.81 The counter-cultural aspect of the clubs was reinforced by these emblems and banners. The labels used to describe the club-based groups that functioned in a semi-autonomous capacity from broader umbrella associations like the League reflected their sense of detachment and semi-devolved status. At their own meetings, the radicals who assembled at the Hole-in-the-Wall Club described themselves not as Leaguers, nor as republicans, but rather as the ‘Hole-in-the-Wall Party’.82 In many cases the groups and sub-sects that merged in the Reform League had a long history. Most had spent many years in acts of self-definition. The environment in which they operated was saturated with notions of artisanal independence, the political commonweal, brotherly harmony, and in musings on the historical injustices of governmental tyranny.83 These were congregations of the converted. During the period from the eighteen-fifties onwards they were noted by contemporaries for their ultra-radical zeal. As with alcohol, this element in the metropolitan clubs was never quite tamed by Solly and his allies. Throughout the reform campaign of 1866–7 the club-based branch organization of the Reform League in London was conspicuously more militant on political issues than the League's executive. At the centre of the Reform League machine, radical zeal was tempered by patronage and the restraining hand of middle-class Liberal M.P.s. Nevertheless, the League's structure was essentially a devolved one, tolerant of the radical sub-sects that flourished in the capital. Most, like the Clerkenwell branch, retained their local roots and the debating club ‘Events of the Week’ format that betrayed their origins in the metropolitan ‘Tobacco Parliaments’.84 Many were willing to go their own way. The Chelsea branch of the League promised the ‘political annihilation’ of the middle classes if reform was not granted, and the Kensal Road branch almost fragmented after arguments about the rights and wrongs of political assassination.85 In April 1867 the Clerkenwell branch staged a dramatic occupation of the church of St. Alban the Martyr, disrupting the sermon. The move reflected the shortage of space in London for political demonstrations, but was also in the manner of earlier Chartist-inspired occupations of Anglican churches in the eighteen-forties to protest against pew rents.86 Again, the local autonomy of these associations was very marked in such occurrences. Republicanism, with its rejection of hierarchy and the royal ceremonial of the capital, was deeply rooted in this milieu and had a strong purchase on the organization and leadership of metropolitan radicalism. Against the background of permissive radical culture in the clubs, republican ideas flourished even before the massed anti-royal campaign of 1870–1, and provided a bridge into the more stable club organization of the eighteen-eighties. The anti-Jubilee sentiment of the clubs noted by historians in 1887 was already in a long tradition and harmonized with the clubs' view of themselves as agents of democratization and ultra-liberal principles.87 In this sense, the marked republicanism of the Hole-in-the-Wall Club was not untypical.88 Indeed Christopher Rumsey demonstrates that the national organization of republicanism was relatively ineffective in comparison to the thriving club culture that it generated.89 As some contemporaries observed, such locally-based organization had provided the catalyst for the Paris Commune, and was the starting point in the eyes of the radical press for a republican regeneration of society. Charles C. Cattell hoped that a republican educative experiment, which perceived the clubs as a tool for channeling public opinion, would rectify the problem encountered by Cromwell of a republican government that could not command the hearts and minds of the people.90 In the post-Chartist years republican ideas were frequently discussed at Cogers and in the other debating clubs where Chartist attitudes lingered.91 For the authorities, the halls and open ground of London were contaminated with such notions. The close association between republicanism and the insurgent radicalism of the Clerkenwellians made them objects of suspicion on the part of the police and the local authorities in London. A police spy, observing the regular Sunday morning meetings on Clerkenwell Green, spoke of ‘scoundrels like Osborne and Finlen who regularly bawl themselves hoarse in denouncing the Queen in terms that would befit a brothel. The addresses delivered at the ordinary Sunday meetings at the Green invariably seem to be of this character’.92 Despite the contraction of the republican movement of 1870–2, in the eighteen-eighties republican views remained commonplace on the club circuit. The Eleusis Club, Chelsea discussed ‘Has royalty been a credit to the nation?’, the Peckham Rye Debating Club debated ‘Royalty or republic – which?’, and the King's Cross Radical Club heard a lecture from Moncure D. Conway on ‘The American republic’.93 Republican lectures were such a stand-by of radical orators in the clubs that at the Lambeth Democratic Association Mr. Woods gave a talk ‘on the spur of the moment’ on ‘Royal bastards and court favourites’ in which ‘he dwelt upon the pensions enjoyed by the Dukes of Grafton, Richmond and Marlborough’.94 In the mid eighteen-eighties the strongest strains imposed on the C.I.U. in London arose from attempts by a faction within the metropolitan clubs to co-opt the notorious republican Charles Bradlaugh onto the list of vice-presidents of the Union. This forced the secession of the Kent clubs and their patrons under the leadership of Lord Harris and the ‘gallant squires of Kent’.95 In the interim between the large public campaigns pursued by metropolitan reformers the clubs found their justification in the traditional causes that shaped the politics of radical London. Following the 1867 Reform Act some transferred their energies into campaigns to mobilize the capital's electors. The Clerkenwell branch of the Reform League turned its headquarters at the Nag's Head, Leather Lane, off Clerkenwell Green (the precursor of the Hole-in-the-Wall), into a registration agency for new voters that enrolled the drifting and unenfranchised lodger population of the capital.96 More solidly-constituted radical clubs at Chelsea and Southwark remained at the heart of radical activity in these boroughs. The Eleusis Club in Chelsea was the headquarters of the Chelsea Working Men's Electoral Association, responsible for bringing forward George Odger's abortive candidature for the borough in 1868, and later instrumental in providing a platform for Sir Charles Dilke.97 Such activity at the fringes of metropolitan Liberalism fractured the Liberal vote around Liberal and independent radical positions, led to a ceding of ground to the Tories, and hastened the Liberal retreat from London in the eighteen-sixties and seventies.98 The unruly hubbub of the clubs spilled over into the cacophony of competing causes that occupied the open ground. The agitation to maintain the autonomy of the capital's clubs was seen as an outgrowth of a broader campaign to resist encroachments by the state on public places of assembly and recreation. The clubs found their most vigorous cause in the freedom of speech campaigns centred on this re-occupation of London's unenclosed open land. A network of open-air orators, amongst them Charles Bradlaugh, overlapping with the circuit of the indoor club agitators, ‘measured swords with the government’ on these occasions.99 Robust defences were mounted of Clerkenwell Green, Peckham Rye, Hampstead Heath, Wimbledon Common and Clapham Common. The defence of Epping and Hainault Forests was also co-ordinated from London club premises.100 Trips to threatened spots outside London reinforced the camaraderie of the clubs and associations involved in the defence of Londoners' places of popular recreation. Often recreational trips were organized that combined an educative, as well as a political, function. A visit by a combined group of Hackney secularists and republicans to Hampton Court learnt of ‘the wife-murdering Henry VIII, the cruel tiger cub Edward VI, the bigoted Mary, the treacherous bloodthirsty Elizabeth, the cowardly James I and the dissimulating Charles I’. On a trip to Rye House, Hertfordshire, where the plot to overthrow James II was organized in 1685, revellers from Tower Hamlets Radical Club and Institute were serenaded with the Marseillaise.101 For many radicals these activities ran concurrently with the agitation for nationalization of the land, and merged with campaigns for the curtailment of pensions to office-holders, courtiers and placemen, and to elect representatives to the London School Board.102 Charles Bradlaugh's Land Law Reform Union was an attempt to combine the activities of the clubs around this common platform.103 In 1879 reformers were able to sign his petition against office-holders and sinecurists at the Patriotic Club, Clerkenwell, the successor to the Hole-in-the-Wall group.104 A retrospective account of metropolitan political clubs, unduly influenced by their declining years in the eighteen-nineties, diminishes their centrality and marginalizes the vigour and vitality of their contribution to mid-nineteenth-century radicalism in London. The institutionalization of club life under Henry Solly accentuated this view, leading to an acceptance of the political club outside the C.I.U. as somehow eccentric or aberrant. The C.I.U. enshrined older radical imperatives but veiled them beneath a more sober exterior, while apparently screening out the unacceptable excesses of popular politics. The increasingly marginal nature of the clubs was emphasized by a literature that portrayed them as part of a sunless and subterranean world outside the accepted conventions of metropolitan life. The metropolitan political clubs were not, however, simply a ghettoized sub-culture. In contrast to this traditional view, at the highpoint of their existence, the metropolitan clubs provided the focus for a healthy political culture of opposition that preserved intact the conventions of the Chartist movement, while bequeathing a legacy of personnel and political beliefs to a new generation of reformers in the eighteen-sixties. Clubs, then, were pivotal to the reform process in London in the mid nineteenth century, were a vector for radical ideas, and towards the end of the century pushed metropolitan Liberalism in a more radical direction. At their height, the political clubs formalized political dissent in London and were conspicuous in agitations to resist governmental trespass on either the geography, cultural space or radical inheritance of the capital. Their unrespectable image clung to them for many years, but they should be judged not in terms of their demise, but rather as a salient feature of metropolitan politics in its heyday. Footnotes 1 See a speech by Mr. H. Woods M.P., at the opening of the first permanent Liberal club in Wigan in the Wigan Observer, 4 Feb. 1871, p. 7. 2 The Revd. C. M. Davies, Heterodox London, or Phases of Free Thought in the Metropolis (2 vols., 1874), ii. 272. 3 B. T. Hall, Our 60 Years: the Story of the Working Men's Club and Institute Union (1922), p. 289. 4 For the ‘proletarianization’ of Enlightenment values and their popular manifestations, see P. Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580–1800: the Origins of an Associational World (Oxford, 2000), chs. 2, 3 and 4; and M. Thrale, ‘Deists, Papists and Methodists at London debating societies, 1749–99’ , History , lxxxvi ( 2001 ), 328 – 47 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 5 D. Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–48 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 71–95; J. B. Leno, The Aftermath (1892), p. 71; and A. D. Taylor, ‘Modes of political expression and working-class radicalism 1848–74: the London and Manchester examples’ (unpublished University of Manchester Ph.D. thesis, 1992), ch. 7. 6 Henry James, The Princess Casamassima (1st edn., 1886; 1977), ch. 21; and L. Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1st edn., New York, 1950; 1964), pp. 58–92. 7 Freedom, 1 Apr. 1889, p. 20, 1 March 1894, p. 12. 8 This view of metropolitan politics as essentially conservative is developed in J. Schneer, London 1900: the Imperial Metropolis (1999), chs. 7 and 10. 9 The classic statement of this view is G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), ch. 4. It is reiterated in T. G. Ashplant, ‘London working men's clubs, 1875–1914’, in Popular Culture and Class Conflict 1590–1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure, ed. E. Yeo and S. Yeo (Brighton, 1981), pp. 241–70. 10 O. R. Ashton and P. A. Pickering, Friends of the People: Uneasy Radicals in the Age of the Chartists (Woodbridge, 2002), pp. 29–53. 11 C. Stevens, ‘The Conservative club movement in the industrial West Riding, 1880–1914’ , Northern Hist. , xxxviii ( 2001 ), 121 – 43 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 12 J. Davis, ‘Radical clubs and London politics, 1870–1900’, in Metropolis: London Histories and Representations since 1800, ed. D. M. Feldman and G. Stedman Jones (1989), pp. 103–28. 13 See M. Ostrogorski, Democracy and the Organisation of Political Parties (2 vols., 1902), i. 311–12. 14 A. August, ‘A culture of consolation? Rethinking politics in working-class London, 1870–1914’ , Historical Research , lxxiv ( 2001 ), 193 – 219 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 15 C. Hall, K. McClelland and J. Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000), ch. 2. 16 P. Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control 1830–85 (1978), ch. 5. 17 London, Bishopsgate Institute, Howell Collection (hereafter Howell Collection), ‘List of the Workmen's Clubs and Institutes in England known to the Working Men's Club and Institute Union, London’. The London entry is reproduced in S. Shipley, Club Life and Socialism in Mid-Victorian London (1983 edn.), pp. 77–80. The estimate of the number of London clubs affiliated to the C.I.U. in London in the mid 1870s is slightly lower in Davis, ‘Radical clubs and London politics’, p. 104. There were ‘tens of thousands of club members’ on the radical club circuit according to Ostrogorski, i. 311. 18 Ostrogorski, i. 430. 19 For a full history of the Hole-in-the-Wall Club, Clerkenwell, see A. Rothstein, A House on Clerkenwell Green (1966), pp. 30–49. 20 T. Beames, The Rookeries of London: Past, Present and Prospective (1850), p. 49. 21 John Wilkes, who remained a totem of metropolitan radicalism into the 1880s, was born in Clerkenwell (see P. D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes: a Friend to Liberty (Oxford, 1996), p. 1). 22 Howell Collection, Howell to Beales, 10 Apr. 1871. 23 See The Commonwealth, 30 June 1866, p. 5, 6 Oct. 1866, p. 5; Reynolds's Newspaper, 1 July 1866, p. 5; Daily News, 10 Apr. 1871. 24 Reynolds's Newspaper, 17 March 1872, p. 6. 25 The Times, 25 Nov. 1871, p. 6. 26 Illustrated London News, 9 Dec. 1871, p. 547. 27 Quoted in the National Reformer, 11 Aug. 1872, pp. 81–2. 28 See D. Jerrold, ‘Red London: the London Patriotic Society’, Weekly Dispatch, 6 July 1879, p. 12. 29 Following a verdict of misadventure on a man who fell and was killed in a drunken stupor outside the United Radical Club in Hackney, the foreman of the jury described the radical clubs as ‘dens of infamy’ (The Labour Elector, 15 Nov. 1888, p. 15). 30 G. A. Sala, Gaslight and Daylight, with some London Scenes They Shine Upon (1859), p. 173. 31 See J. Larwood and J. C. Hotten, English Inn Signs (1951 edn.), p. 303. 32 See, on this theme, S. Shesgreen, Images of the Outcast: the Urban Poor in the Cries of London (Manchester, 2002), chs. 5, 6, 7; and J. Greenwood, The Wilds of London (1866). 33 National Reformer, 9 Apr. 1871, p. 239; The Bee-Hive, 8 Apr. 1871, p. 1; and D. Mares, Auf Der Suche Nach Dem ‘Wahren’ Liberalismus: Demokratische Bewegung und Liberale Politik im Viktorianischen England (Berlin, 2002), pp. 210–13. 34 See an account of a meeting of the Republican League at the Wellington Tavern in Reynolds's Newspaper, 9 Apr. 1871. 35 Northern Star, 9 Sept. 1848, p. 6. 36 See discussion in The Lancashire Beacon (2 vols., 1849), i. 19–21. 37 I. McCalman, ‘Ultra-radicalism and convivial debating-clubs in London, 1795–1838’ , Eng. Hist. Rev. , cii ( 1987 ), 309 – 33 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close ; I. McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge, 1988), ch. 6. 38 For personal experience of the debating club circuit, see W. E. Adams, Memoirs of a Social Atom (2 vols., 1903), ii. 314–17. 39 London News, 11 Sept. 1858, p. 1. 40 Howell Collection, George Howell, ‘Autobiography of a toiler’ (MS. autobiography, 2 vols., 1896–1907) (hereafter Howell, ‘Autobiography’), ii. 44. 41 Howell, ‘Autobiography’, vol. B, sect. 5, p. 58. There is a description of the Milton Club in the London News, 24 Sept. 1858, p. 4. 42 Hall, pp. 224–35. 43 B. Harrison, ‘Pubs’, in The Victorian City: Images and Realities, ed. H. J. Dyos and M. Wolff (2 vols., 1973), i. 161–90. 44 For the role of this club as a focus of trade society radicalism, see The Bee-Hive, 25 Oct. 1862. 45 M. Starr, ‘A visit to London’, Lansbury's Labour Weekly, 5 Sept. 1925, p. 6. 46 Northern Star, 23 Dec. 1848. 47 See E. C. Jones, ‘Raise Chartism from the pothouse’, in Notes to the People, ed. E. C. Jones (2 vols., 1851–2), i. 3. 48 People's Paper, 7 Nov. 1857, 6 Feb. 1858; Larwood and Hotten, pp. 211–12. 49 For William Morgan, see Shipley, pp. 51–3; for William Newton's public house, see the East London Observer, 3 Apr. 1858, p. 3. 50 The Commonwealth, 10 March 1866, p. 8. 51 For examples of performances by Lowry and Leno, see the National Reformer, 31 May 1874, p. 349, 15 Oct. 1876, p. 252, 3 Feb. 1878, p. 958. 52 The British Monarchy, 17 Aug. 1867, p. 65. In an earlier edition this newspaper made the claim that debauched metropolitan radicals preferred to gather in public houses to slake their cravings for alcohol (see The British Monarchy, 3 Aug. 1867, p. 49). 53 J. Timbs, Club Life of London (2 vols., 1866), i. 196–8. 54 Jerrold, p. 12; and for the change of name of the Hole-in-the-Wall to the Crown and Constitution, see Rothstein, p. 38. 55 The Bee-Hive, 25 Jan. 1868, p. 1. 56 F. G. Bettany, Stewart Headlam: a Biography (1926), p. 41. 57 A. D. Taylor, ‘“Commons-stealers”, “land-grabbers” and “jerry-builders”: space, popular radicalism and the politics of public access in London, 1848–80’ , Rev. Soc. Hist. , xl ( 1995 ), 383 – 407 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 58 Howell Collection, ‘Minutes of the Executive Committee of the Reform League, 25 Aug. 1865’. 59 Reynolds's Newspaper, 28 Jan. 1872, p. 5. 60 The Commonwealth, 20 Oct. 1866, p. 1, 19 Jan. 1867, p. 4. 61 For Reform League coffee houses, see The Commonwealth, 19 Jan. 1867, p. 5, 16 March 1867, p. 5; for the Poplar branch, see Howell Collection, George Howell, ‘List of the Departments and Branches of the National Reform League’; for League meetings in schools, see The Commonwealth, 26 Jan. 1867, p. 5, 13 Apr. 1867, p. 4. 62 People's Paper, 29 July 1854, p. 5. 63 Howell, ‘Autobiography’, ii. ch. 4, p. 44; and for attempts at the construction of a Chartist hall in London in the 1850s, see the People's Paper, 13 Jan. 1855, p. 1. 64 National Reformer, 4 Oct. 1874, p. 220. 65 F. Rogers, Labour, Life and Literature: Some Memories of 60 Years (1913), p. 71. 66 G. R. Sims, Living London (3 vols., 1901–3), iii. 199. 67 People's Paper, 13 Jan. 1855, p. 1. 68 See details in a biographical sketch of Bradlaugh in the National Refomer, 31 Aug. 1873, p. 131. 69 The Bee-Hive, 19 Dec. 1863, p. 1, 30 July 1864, p. 1; and for the I.W.M.A. at Greek Street, see F. M. Leventhal, Respectable Radical: George Howell and Victorian Working Class Politics (1971), pp. 50–1. 70 National Reformer, 27 Nov. 1870, p. 349. 71 Bailey, p. 116. 72 The Single Tax, 1 Oct. 1899, p. 67. 73 A. Toynbee, Progress and Poverty: a Criticism of Mr. Henry George (1883), p. 34. 74 G. Gissing, The Nether World, ed. S. Gill (Oxford, 1992), p. 182. 75 Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 11 Apr. 1896. 76 For Thomas Cooper as a regular turn on the metropolitan club circuit, see S. Roberts, ‘Thomas Cooper: radical and poet c.1830–1860’ (unpublished University of Birmingham M.Litt. thesis, 1986), pp. 169–74; and for Bronterre O'Brien as a professional chair, see Adams, ii. 316–17. 77 Club and Institute Journal, 13 Feb. 1892, p. 52. 78 For John Hales, see B. Burke and K. Worpole, Hackney Propaganda: Working Class Club Life and Politics in Hackney 1870–1906 (1980), p. 8; and G. Lansbury, My Life (1928), p. 31. For the Democratic Club and Institute at Hackney, see the National Reformer, 6 March 1870, p. 157; and for C. E. Mermod, chairperson of the Bethnal Green Commonwealth Club, see J. Taylor, From Self-Help to Glamour: the Working Man's Club, 1860–1972 (Oxford, 1972), pp. 23, 46. 79 Sims, i. 362. 80 Leno, p. 55. 81 For a debate on the failure of Chartism at Wylde's Coffee House, see the London News, 18 Sept. 1858, p. 5. For radical club paraphernalia, see Rogers, p. 69; and G. Tremlett, Clubmen: the History of the Working Men's Club and Institute Union (1987), pp. 72–3. 82 National Reformer, 19 May 1872, p. 317. 83 I. J. Prothero, Radical Artisans in England and France, 1830–70 (Cambridge, 1997), ch. 11. 84 The Bee-Hive, 3 Nov. 1866, p. 1. 85 For reports of meetings, see The Commonwealth, 10 Nov. 1866; and The Bee-Hive, 17 Nov. 1866. 86 See The Bee-Hive, 28 Apr. 1867, p. 1. A similar incident at the Congregational Church, Plaistow the previous year is reported in The Bee-Hive, 19 May 1866, p. 1. 87 See Stedman Jones, p. 211. 88 Dan Chatterton claimed that the campaign in protest against a parliamentary dowry for the marriage of Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Louise, in 1871, was planned from the Hole-in-the-Wall (see D. Chatterton, Biography of Dan Chatterton, Atheist and Communist, by Chat (1891), pp. 3–4). 89 See C. Rumsey, The Rise and Fall of British Republican Clubs 1871–4 (Oswestry, 2000), ch. 4; and for further information on the republican clubs in London, see A. D. Taylor, ‘Down with the Crown’: British Anti-Monarchism and Debates about Royalty since 1790 (1999), chs. 2–3. 90 Republican Chronicle, 1 Apr. 1875, pp. 1–2; The Radical, 5 March 1881, p. 2. 91 At the Discussion Hall in Shoe Lane in 1858 a motion on ‘Was it right to put Charles I to death?’ was carried after a vigorous debate (the London News, 11 Sept. 1858, p. 4). For a similar debate at the Belvidere, see the London News, 18 Sept. 1858, p. 5. 92 British Library, Gladstone Papers, Additional MS. 44617 fos. 95–105, ‘Summary of police report registered in the Home Office, with reference to political meetings held in the metropolis, during the years 1867 to 1870’. The author thanks Detlev Mares for this reference. 93 The Radical, 18 Dec. 1880, p. 6, 25 Dec. 1880, p. 6, 22 Jan. 1881, p. 2. 94 The Radical, 5 Feb. 1881, p. 2. 95 Hall, pp. 89–91. 96 The Bee-Hive, 8 Aug. 1868, p. 4. 97 See the Weekly Dispatch, 16 Feb. 1879, p. 12. For both the Eleusis and Southwark clubs, see L. Marlow, ‘The working-men's club movement 1862–1912’ (unpublished University of Warwick Ph.D. thesis, 1980), pp. 213–86. 98 An intervention by George Shipton as an independent candidate with radical club support in a by-election in Southwark in 1879 resulted in the loss of the seat to the Tories. For Liberal weakness in London, see D. Brooks, ‘Gladstone and Midlothian: the background to the first campaign’ , Scottish Hist. Rev. , lxiv ( 1985 ), 42 – 67 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close . 99 The phrase is Bradlaugh's in the National Reformer, 31 Aug. 1873, p. 131. 100 For examples of the centrality of anti-enclosure protests to the clubs, see the London News, 11 Sept. 1858, p. 5; the National Reformer, 11 Aug. 1878, p. 94; and details of a meeting at the Tower Hamlets Radical Club and Institute which resolved to support the campaign against the enclosure of Epping Forest in the National Reformer, 3 Feb. 1878, p. 958. 101 National Reformer, 20 July 1873, p. 44, 25 July 1875, p. 59. 102 The former Chartist, Benjamin Lucraft, was elected for Finsbury with the support of the Hole-in-the-Wall Club (Manchester Examiner and Times, 4 Jan. 1871, p. 2); Mrs. Fenwick Miller, an early female representative on the London School Board, was supported by the Commonwealth Club, Bethnal Green (National Reformer, 23 Feb. 1879, p. 126). 103 National Reformer, 19 Oct. 1879, pp. 673–4; F. W. Soutter, Recollections of a Labour Pioneer (1st edn., 1923; 1984), pp. 84–92; and P. R. Thompson, Socialists, Liberals and Labour: the Struggle for London 1885–1914 (1967), ch. 5. 104 National Reformer, 14 Nov. 1880, p. 366. © The Author(s) 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Institute of Historical Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Institute of Historical Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - ‘A melancholy odyssey among London public houses’: radical club life and the unrespectable in mid-nineteenth-century London
JF - Historical Research
DO - 10.1111/j.1468-2281.2005.00229.x
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