The Rise of the Public Meeting in Great Britain, 17581834

Charles Tilly

Social Science History, Volume 34, Number 3, Fall 2010, pp. 291-299 (Article) Published by Duke University Press

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Special Section: History and the Social Sciences: Taking Stock and Moving Ahead

Charles Tilly

The Rise of the Public Meeting in Great Britain, 17581834

This article conducts an analysis of public meetings in Great Britain between 1758 and 1834. The profound changes in frequency and character, the enormous increase of public meetings and the sharp decline in the relative frequency of violent gatherings, serve as an indicator of the expansion of the public sphere and its capacity to shape the social process. The article explains the rise of the public meeting and why it became so central to British political life during the nineteenth century through four intertwined changes: the development of British capitalism, the growing importance of Parliament, the multiplied opportunities for political entrepreneurs, and the effect of public contention itself.

Gentleman farmer Henry Hunt radicalized during the Napoleonic Wars. He became Englands most visibly vigorous radical by 1820 and remained a gadfly even as he served in Parliament during the 1830s. More so than any other radical leader of his time, he embodied the mass platform: the appeal by
Social Science History 34:3 (Fall 2010) DOI 10.1215/01455532-2010-002 2010 by Social Science History Association

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the English people at large for parliamentary reform, including manhood suffrage. He preached popular sovereignty. Mass public meetings and stirring speeches marked Hunts way. In a speech to a gathering of about 10,000 people at Londons Spa Fields (November 1816), Hunt warned against premature popular resort to insurrection in an eighteenth-century style but assured his listeners that he would not run from a battle if it came to that. According to reports of the meeting: He well knew what ought to be done in such a crisis. He knew the superiority of mental over physical force; nor would he counsel any resort to the latter till the former had been found ineffectual. Before physical force was applied to, it was their duty to petition, to remonstrate, to call aloud for timely reformation. . . . Those who resisted the just demands of the people were the real friends of confusion and bloodshed; but if the fatal day should be destined to arrive, he assured them that, if he knew anything of himself, he would not be found concealed behind a counter, or sheltering himself in the rear. (Belchem 1985: 60) Hunt and his fellow radicals were establishing the peaceful public display of worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment as a way of telling king and Parliament that they must heed the peoples voice. Radicals called for expansion of the public sphere. To an important degree, they got their wish. No one has so far developed crisp measures of the public spheres expansion and consolidation in one regime or another. In that regard, comparativehistorical research faces gigantic conceptual, technical, and empirical challenges. But surely one indicator worth tracing is change in the frequency and character of gatherings in which people make collective claims on others, including public authorities. Evidence of this sort from Great Britain between the 1750s and the 1830s signals an enormous increase and transformation of popular participation in national public life. My collaborators and I gathered the evidence to examine how the development of British capitalism, transformation of the British state, and popular political struggle itself shaped changes in the ways that ordinary Britons made collective claimschanges in their repertoires of contention. Evidence gathered for this purpose necessarily sheds light on more general alterations in public politics. To the extent that we can agree on the meaning of the public sphere, it provides a gauge of expansion, contraction, or mutation of that sphere.

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700

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0 1758 1759 1768 1769 1780 1781 1789 1795 1801 1807 1811 1819 1820 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 Year

Figure 1Contentious gatherings in the London region, 17581834

The data presented here come from a machine-readable catalog of contentious gatherings (CGs): occasions on which ten or more people gathered in publicly accessible places and made collective claims that, if realized, would affect the interests of at least one person outside their own number (Tilly 1995). My collaborators and I drew accounts of CGs from systematic day by day reading of seven national periodicals. Altogether we identified 4,271 CGs from the London regionKent, Middlesex, Surrey, and Sussexover 13 scattered years from 1758 to 1820 plus the 7 continuous years from 1828 to 1834. We identified an additional 3,817 CGs from the rest of Great BritainEngland, Wales, and Scotlandbetween 1828 and 1834. For the sake of comparability, the analyses in this article concentrate on the CGs we cataloged in the London region. Figure 1 displays the number of CGs for each of the studys 20 years. The series reveals a remarkable increase in frequency of the London regions contention after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Some of the increase resulted from expanded reporting: mass media multiplied, and (as we will see) a qualitative shift in claim making from local to national issues increased the likelihood that the media would pay attention. But so far as I can tell, the bulk of the rise in reported CGs resulted from a vast expansion

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Figure 2Types of contentious gatherings in the London region, 17581834

of popular participation in collective making of claims concerning national issues, institutions, and personalities. As the state relaxed its wartime repression, claimants who had been organizing in the shadows asserted themselves as never before. Figure 2 clarifies what was happening. It adopts a drastically simplified classification of CGs: ceremonial events, such as parades, delegations, and authorized celebrations strikes and turnouts violent confrontations of all kinds other forms of contention, such as the shaming routines by which local people stigmatized errant workers and moral pariahs meetings

The data reveal a sharp decline in the relative frequency of violent CGs, such as grain seizures and gamekeeper-hunter shoot-outs. (The temporary revival of violence in 1830 records the famous Swing rebellion of agricultural workers in the Southeast, especially Kent.) The graph makes the big news obvious: an extraordinary rise of public meetings from a handful per year during the 1750s to hundreds every year

1834

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during the 1830s. Meetings went from an elite privilege to a mass political right. The upward movement began during the 1780s and accelerated somewhat during the less repressive moments of the French wars. But the wars end pushed the public meeting to by far the most frequent occasion on which people of the London region gathered and made collective claims on others. Those others were increasingly Parliament and individual members of Parliament. More and more often, organizers announced a public meeting with a distinguished chair and designated speakers; from dozens to thousands of people gathered in a coffeehouse, a public hall, or an open field; speakers proposed resolutions on pending parliamentary bills and other great affairs of the day; the chair took voice votes; and at the end someone read a previously drafted petition to Parliament, calling for the signatures of everyone present. People were abandoning two categories of action that had prevailed in the 1750s: direct claims, often violent, on local figures and appeals to intermediaries, such as landlords and parsons, for intervention with higher authorities. They were giving up performances that had a reasonable chance of getting results in the short run in favor of performances that could only produce significant effects slowly, cumulatively, and with a great deal of preparation. The transformation of popular contention entailed not only a large shift in the occasions on which people made collective claims but also a deep alteration in what people did when they made claims. A look at the verbs in our detailed accounts of CGs clarifies what was going on. The machine-readable description of a CG identifies each distinguishable action taken by any of the participants and places it in chronological order within the episode. Among other features, the action description includes a verb (usually taken directly from the source of the account) characterizing the action, the name of the actions performer(s), and (in the roughly half of all verbs that have objects) the name of the actions target. The transcriptions involve 1,584 verbs. I regrouped those varied verbs into 46 major categories and for some purposes into 8 very large categories: End, Move, Negotiate, Support, Other, Attack, Control, and Meet. Let me omit End, which simply indicates that the accounts at hand reported the main actions but neglected to say how participants dispersed or ceased interacting. Figure 3 presents trends for the seven other categories from 1758 through 1834. Rather than the share of all verbs, it reports the number of CGs in which any verb of a given category appeared. In the tangle

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Figure 3Verb categories in London contentious gatherings, 17581834 (number of CGs in which verbs of the category appear)

we can see more important news. The broad category Other includes narrower sets, such as Celebrate, Die, Dine, Hunt, Smuggle, and Turnout, all attached to local interactions of the eighteenth-century variety. Notice how the frequency for Other simply creeps along at a low level, which means of course that it sank precipitously as a share of the total. The all-purpose actions Move and Negotiate rise at more or less the pace of all CGs; hence they define no trend as proportions of the whole. The graph also shows the significant correlation between Attack and Control verbs, the two sides of openly aggressive encounters between ordinary people (e.g., workers) and repressive forces (e.g., constables). As we might now expect, by far the largest increase occurs among Meet verbs: Adjourn, Delegate, Hear Petition, Petition, Resolve, Thank, Vote, Chair, and of course Meet itself. For a closer look at trends, figure 4 singles out the three verb categories Attack, Meet, and Support. As we might infer from the trend in violent events, Attack verbs prevail during the early years and surge again in the Swing rebellion of 1830, but they generally remain at a low level after the 1780s. Support verbs in the style of Cheer, Receive, and Address rise significantly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, as collective expressions of soli-

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Figure 4Attack, Meet, and Support verbs in the London region, 17581834

darity with members of Parliament and political leaders become more frequent. But Meet rises from insignificance to tower over the rest, with a peak appearance in 1831: 558 of the 656 CGs during the years massive mobilization around parliamentary reform. How and why did the public meeting become so central to British contention during the nineteenth century? Four deep changes intertwined. First, the development of British capitalism greatly strengthened connections between center and periphery, as it produced much more extensive participation in national markets; generated migration to London and major industrial centers; expanded the class of wage workers in agriculture, manufacturing, and services; and sharpened visible divisions on a national scale between workers and capitalists. All of these changes enhanced opportunities for political organizations and coalitions far beyond any particular locality. They thus promoted the expansion of local and regional meetings as sites for popular voice. Second, Parliament became much more central to national political life. Increasingly expensive eighteenth-century wars played an important part, as Parliaments tax power gave it leverage even greater than it had enjoyed during Britains massive political struggles of the seventeenth century. The Crown and ministers lost a significant share of the power they had deployed through patronage and connection with local magnates during the eigh-

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teenth century. Regional representation through Parliament came to matter far more than ever before, both because members of Parliament provided links between localities and the central government and because parliamentary elections became the occasions for masses who lacked the vote to meet, march, and voice support for candidates who took up popular causes, such as expansion of the electorate. Contested elections in turn validated public meetings as occasions for raising issues beyond the particular virtues and vices of parliamentary candidates. Third, the first two changes multiplied opportunities for political entrepreneurs such as Hunt, who got his own start in national politics by running unsuccessfully for a Bristol parliamentary seat. In pursuit of a cause, it became crucial to coordinate political activity among multiple localities and groups. Petitions to Parliament went from a means of voicing individual pleas and grievances to one of expressing widespread support for proposed parliamentary actions. It took skilled organizers, speakers, negotiators, and publicists to create connected campaigns on the national scale. Public meetings became a favorite device for publicizing and advancing campaigns, not to mention getting petitions signed. Fourth, struggle itself transformed repertoires of contention. Seizures of food, sanctions of renegade craft workers, interruptions of public punishments, and other such relatively parochial claim-making performances visibly lost effectiveness as aggrieved people who banded together in associations, coalitions, and social movements even more visibly made advances. Step by step, activists battled out the rights of assembly, speech, and association despite the determined resistance of authorities to each expansion of political rights. Public meetings served thrice: to mobilize local people into national causes, to publicize those causes, and to coordinate direct appeals to Parliament. Perhaps we can conclude that the rise of Great Britains public meeting epitomized expansion of its public sphere. We can certainly conclude that it played a crucial part in British democratization.

Note
Charles Tilly completed this article on July 18, 2007, for the SSHA 2007 panel The Public Sphere and Comparative-Historical Research, which resulted in this special issue of Social Science History. He planned to extend it substantially for this special issue, but his untimely death prevented him from doing so.

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References
Belchem, John (1985) Orator Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working-Class Radicalism. Oxford: Clarendon. Tilly, Charles (1995) Popular Contention in Great Britain, 17581834. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.