Eric Hobsbawm - Age Of Revolution 1789 -1848

THE LABOURING POORthe looms on which men wove. They owed nothing to the rich excepttheir wages. What they had in life was their own collective creation.But this silent process of self-organization was not confined to workersof this older type. It is reflected in the 'union', often based On the localPrimitive Methodist community, in the Northumberland and Durhammines. It is reflected in the dense concentration of workers' mutual andfriendly societies in the new industrial areas, especially Lancashire.*Above all it is reflected in the serried thousands of men, women andchildren who streamed with torches on to the moors for Chartistdemonstrations from the smaller industrial towns of Lancashire, in therapidity with which the new Rochdale co-operative shops spread inthe latter 1840s.VAnd yet, as we look back upon this period, there is a great and evidentdiscrepancy between the force of the labouring poor, which the richfeared, the 'spectre of communism' which haunted them, and theiractual organized force, let alone that of the new industrial proletariat.The public expression of their protest was, in the literal sense, a'movement' rather than an organization. What linked even the mostmassive and comprehensive of their political manifestations—Chartism(1838-48)—together was little more than a handful of traditional andradical slogans, a few powerful orators and journalists who becamethe voices of the poor, like Feargus O'Connor (1794-1855), a fewnewspapers like the Northern Star. It was the common fate of beingagainst the rich and the great which the old militants have recalled:'We had a dog called Rodney. My grandmother disliked the name becauseshe had a curious sort of notion that Admiral Rodney, having been elevatedto the peerage, had been hostile to the people. The old lady, too, was carefulto explain to me that Cobbett and Cobden were two different persons—thatCobbett was the hero, and that Cobden was just a middle class advocate. Oneof the pictures that I longest remember—it stood alongside samplers andstencilled drawings not far from a china statuette of George Washington—was a portrait of John Frost.f A line at the top of the picture indicated thatit belonged to a series called the Portrait Gallery of People's Friends. Abovethe head was a laurel wreath, while below was a representation of Mr Frostappealing to Justice on behalf of ragged and wretched outcasts. ... The most* In 1821 Lancashire had by far the highest proportion of friendly societies' members tototal population in the country (17 per cent); in 1845 almost half the lodges of the Oddfellowswere in Lancashire and Yorkshire.''f Leader of the unsuccessful Chartist insurrection at Newport, 1839.2'5