The nineteenth-century world was far larger, more productive, more dynamic, and at times more unstable in Britain than in most countries. As Eugene C. Black has written, the Britain that emerged after the Napoleonic Wars “demanded imagination and found uncertainty. Industrialists were not certain of their own values or even of the proper use of their own machinery. The farmers of England were ambivalent about machine breaking and public order. Population growth and urban concentration outstripped the capacity of man to cope. An assertive, self-defining middle class was making itself heard and felt but lacked certainty about direction” (pp. 2–3).
As a consequence of this dynamism, “more has probably been written about Britain in the nineteenth century than about any other period in history” (Nicholls, p. 345). Students of the nineteenth century are often required to utilize lengthy reading lists, none of which present the primary source record. The British Politics and Society archive of Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) is packed with primary source documentation that enhances a greater understanding and analysis of the development of urban centers and of the major restructuring of society that took place during the Industrial Revolution. The archive is...
The nineteenth-century world was far larger, more productive, more dynamic, and at times more unstable in Britain than in most countries. As Eugene C. Black has written, the Britain that emerged after the Napoleonic Wars “demanded imagination and found uncertainty. Industrialists were not certain of their own values or even of the proper use of their own machinery. The farmers of England were ambivalent about machine breaking and public order. Population growth and urban concentration outstripped the capacity of man to cope. An assertive, self-defining middle class was making itself heard and felt but lacked certainty about direction” (pp. 2–3).
As a consequence of this dynamism, “more has probably been written about Britain in the nineteenth century than about any other period in history” (Nicholls, p. 345). Students of the nineteenth century are often required to utilize lengthy reading lists, none of which present the primary source record. The British Politics and Society archive of Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) is packed with primary source documentation that enhances a greater understanding and analysis of the development of urban centers and of the major restructuring of society that took place during the Industrial Revolution. The archive is composed of a number of individual collections, drawn together from a variety of sources.
The content selection rationale for British Politics and Society was to present materials that enable in-depth examination and analysis of the growing calls for political reform that were met with state resistance and marked a crisis of legitimacy for both the government and the reform movements themselves.
Political issues and reform derive from economic, social, ideological, even psychological elements, none of which should be assessed in a vacuum. The documents in this archive consider these political issues in the form of personalities, events, and institutions.
Personalities in the collections range from political leaders and officials—including the British government's inner circle, the Cabinet—to social reformers. A wealth of source materials including correspondence, journal and diary entries, speeches, official papers, and press cuttings offer insight into the views and attitudes of these leading figures. These collections offer an understanding of key events such as the Chartist agitation, the Anti-Corn Law disturbances, and tensions underlying policy formation and the nature of Victorian government.
In the words of Paul Carter, principal modern records specialist at the National Archives (UK), the following Home Office records reflect “the heroic age of popular radicalism covering the Corresponding Societies of the 1790s; trade union and Luddite disturbances of the 1800s and 1810s; the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Hampden Club movement; Spa Fields; the suspension of habeas corpus; the ‘March of the Blanketeers’; the Pentrich insurrectionists' march on Nottingham; a revival in trade unionism and popular petitioning; the Peterloo Massacre, the Cato Street Conspiracy and the Queen Caroline Affair … [as well as] the Swing Riots and the Reform Crisis of 1832.”
These records reflect the varied responsibilities of the home secretary's office, including addresses and petitions to the Crown, appointments to public offices and ecclesiastical dignities, disturbances and sedition, honors and orders of chivalry, inventions, poor relief, prison administration, public health, public order, and the universities. Among matters covered extensively are Chartism, agricultural distress, labor unrest, and the introduction of power looms and other industrial machinery. Some papers are grouped according to subjects of particular importance, among them information received at the police offices, descriptions of criminals, and lists of deserters; socialist periodicals and pamphlets, 1838–1840; letters and reports from judges on cases and criminals, with petitions for commutation of sentence and/or free pardon; and membership of the Poor Knights of Windsor.
The largest grouping of collections in this archive revolves around the evolution of the urban working class and the growth of radical and militant politics.
During this time period, a host of radical and anti-radical societies, trade unions, workingmen's associations, and other political action groups attempted either to subvert or defend the “ancient constitution.” These collections cover many aspects of working-class life and experience and provide a vivid picture of working-class conflict and struggle throughout England in these formative years of the Industrial Revolution.
A number of these collections comprise official documents that highlight the activities of the inner mechanisms of the domestic government, particularly the Home Office, and provide excellent insight into the reactions of the governing elite toward urban and working-class discontent and the effort to maintain peace, stability, and order in a turbulent country.
The collections contain a mass of material on many aspects of working-class political theory, particularly Owenism, Chartism, unionism, socialism, and communism. Topics found in these manuscript and printed sources include the Trades Union Congress, Poor Law reform, workingmen's societies, collective action, the Great Reform Bill, the Bristol Riots, the National Political Union, trade unionism, the Corn Laws, distress riots, Parliamentary reform, the Westminster Committee of Association, the General Convention of the Industrial Classes, philanthropy, workhouses, and more.
These collections will enable students and scholars to examine the effects of early industrialization and social deprivation and offer a detailed picture of cities and towns in the nineteenth century. In addition, these collections set the stage for an understanding of the religious zeal that would reach its ascendancy by the end of the century.
Crime amongst the poor and working class was tempered by the expansion of philanthropy in the late nineteenth century. But there were incidents that reflected the continued animosity between the classes, such as the press sensationalism around the possibility that a nobleman was the infamous “Jack the Ripper” preying on working girls in the East End. Letters from the general public to the London police in the Whitechapel Murders Papers collection bring to the forefront the fears and concerns that the general public had toward crime allegedly perpetrated by the ruling class.
British Politics and Society also includes a unique and neglected cartographic source for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—a repository of original topographical information. The original manuscript maps of the first Ordnance Survey present the only accurate and comprehensive cartographic record of Britain before the changes in land use and land tenure that followed the General Enclosure Acts.
Among these collections are the early papers of the Manchester Statistical Society, which was the first statistical society in Britain and the pioneer of the modern social survey. The society was one of the first organizations in the world to carry out economic and social investigations on a large scale.
The main subjects of its reports are industry, labor, the economy, transport, health, education, and law. The society was founded in 1833, and its early records and transactions reflect a paramount concern with the effects of industrialization and, in particular, social deprivation. At this time, Manchester was in the middle of a transformation from an important northern cotton town into a vast industrialized city, and the problems of housing and welfare were immense. Attempts of the society to quantify the factors involved had a great influence on corporate and national policies and provide historians with one of the most extensively detailed pictures of any modern industrial town.
All of these collections offer an opportunity to undertake in-depth research of important and influential nineteenth-century issues using a wealth of original documents, ranging from memoranda to committee minutes, personal correspondence of key historical figures to diaries, government reports to personal narratives. At hand is a broad spectrum of material to facilitate study of the major political, industrial, social, and economic events during this period.
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