THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

conditions of Leicester’s framework knitters had been presented to the Select Committee
of the House of Commons, according to Heyrick, yet the evidence had failed to address
the “root of the mischief.” Instead, Parliament preferred to silence rather than remove the
cause of dissent. According to Heyrick, the depreciation of the value of human labor was
systemic and endangered national health. Providing laborers with an immediate increase
to a living wage would eliminate their need for parish support turning laborers into
supporters of trade. Heyrick called on Parliament to take up the cause of the poor and
enslaved laborer alike, breaking the bonds of all oppressed laborers. Writing within the
context of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, a defining moment in government suppression
of the working class, Heyrick adopted a radical position. 91 In 1825, Heyrick wrote
another tract in support of the framework knitters who were striking after manufacturers
lowered wages yet again. 92
In comparing slaves and the working class, Heyrick engaged an established
rhetorical argument. In the eighteenth century, supporters of the slave trade invoked the
working conditions of British miners and child chimney sweeps to argue that charity
91 Elizabeth Heyrick, Enquiry into the Consequences of the Present Depreciated Value of Human
Labour (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1819). For more on the Peterloo Massacre, see
Donald Read, Peterloo: The “Massacre” and its Background (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1958). The Peterloo Massacre occurred on August 16, 1819 when cavalry charged into a crowd of more
than sixty thousand men, women, and children who had gathered to demand reform of parliamentary
representation. Poor economic conditions after the Napoleonic wars as well as a lack of suffrage in
northern England contributed to the development of working-class radicalism in this period. Robert Poole
calls the Peterloo Massacre “one of the defining events of its age.” Robert Poole, “‘By Law or By Sword’:
Peterloo Revisited,” History 91 (2006), 254-276.
92 Elizabeth Heyrick, A Letter of Remonstrance from an Impartial Public, to the Hosiers of
Leicester (Leicester: A. Cockshaw, 1825); Midgley, Feminism and Empire, 60; Corfield, “Elizabeth
Heyrick,” 58.
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