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Protest and Punishment in Nineteenth-Century Britain*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2017

George Rudé
George Rudé*
Affiliation:
Sir George Williams University in Montreal
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Extract

What is “protest”? Who is a protester and who is not? This is a problem that has bothered me ever since I began, about ten years ago, to try to sort out the social and political protesters from the rest of the convicts transported to Australia from the late 18th century to the 1860s. To some this is no particular problem at all. Criminologists and writers on crime and punishment - such as Leon Radzinowicz, J. J. Tobias and Nigel Walker (to cite the most recent) - have tended to place protest, when they have dealth with it at all, under such omnibus labels as crimes against property and crimes against persons. Others have eluded such refinements altogether and have argued that if protest is a social phenomenon, so is crime, and how can one sensibly draw a distinction between the rebel against society and the man whom society drives, or appears to drive, to crime? So it has been claimed that all convicts, whether they were transported or hot, were the victims of a society that left them out in the cold; and there is some justice in the claim (was it made by the Hammonds?) that in a society like Britain's in the early nineteenth century there was a large measure of culpability in common between the cattle-maimer or urban thief and the magistrate or High Court judge who sent them to a penitentiary at home or to the convict-jails of Van Diemen's Land or Sydney Cove.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 5 , Issue 1: Special Issue: Violence and Social Control , Spring 1973 , pp. 1 - 23
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1973

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Footnotes

*

Read before the joint session of the Conference on British Studies and the American Historical Association, New Orleans, December 28, 1972.

References

1 Engels, F., The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (London, 1952), pp. 130-32Google Scholar.

2 Hobsbawm, E. J. and Rudé, G., Captain Swing (London and New York, 1969), pp. 80–81 Google Scholar.

3 Rostow, W. W., British Economy of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1948), p. 124 Google Scholar.

4 For the little I know of Scottish protest I am indebted to my former student, Mr. Peter Holt, of the University of Stirling, Scotland, and to Dr. Eric Richards, now of the Flinders University, South Australia.

5 I am obliged to Mr. J. D. Storch of the History Department, the University of Wisconsin at Janesville, for allowing me to refer to his unpublished paper “The Plague of the Blue Locusts, Anti-Police Riots and Popular Resistance in Early Victorian England,” of which he kindly sent me a copy.

6 In Crowd in History. A Study of Popular Disturbance in France and England, 1730-1848 (New York, 1964).

7 Wheat prices for 1805 to 1830 are from Hoyle, William, Crime in England and Wales. An Historical and Critical Retrospect (London, n. d. [1876]), pp. 14,25Google Scholar.

8 Chevalier, L., Classes laborieuses el classes dangereuses a Paris clans la premiere moitie du dix-neuvieme siecle (Paris, 1958)Google Scholar. An English edition has now appeared (New York. Howard Fertig, 1973).

9 In various papers, int. al. in “Urbanisation and Political Disturbances in 19th Century France,” unpublished paper presented to the Society for French Historical Studies, Ann Arbor, Michigan, in April 1960.

10 In “The Growth of Cities and Popular Revolt, 1750-1850; with Particular Reference to Paris,” in French Government and Society, J. H. Bosher, ed., (London, 1973).

11 Figures from Hoyle, pp. 14,25.

12 Figures in Columns (1) - (2) and (4) from Hoyle, pp. 25, 29, 37, 41, 47.

13 Hoyle, pp. 43, 53-4. These figures-and others cited in this paper-may well require to he amended in (he light of the new evidence brought forward by Gatrell, V.A.C. and Hadden, T.B. in their “Criminal Statistics and their Interpretation,” in Wrigley, K.A., ed., Nineteenth-Century Society (Cambridge, England, 1972), pp. 336-96CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14 Radzinowicz, L., A History of English Criminal Law and its Administration from 1750, 4 vols. (London, 1968), IV:232 Google Scholar.

15 Rostow, pp. 124-5.

16 Gentleman's Magazine, new series XVII (1842): 567, 674; XVIII (1843): III.

17 Parliamentary Papers, 1878-9, LXV, 438.

18 Richard Hawkins, reviewing Captain Swing in The Historical Journal (1969): 717.

19 For the above, see Crowd in History, pp. 255-58; Mather, F. C., Public Order in the Age of the Chartists (Manchester, 1959), pp. 154-58Google Scholar.

20 Evans, L. and Pledger, P. J., Contemporary Sources and Opinions in Modern British History, 2 vols. (Melbourne, 1966-67), II:90 Google Scholar; Shaw, A.G.L.. Convicts and the Colonies (London, 1966), p. 150 Google Scholar.

21 Shaw, pp. 152-3.

22 Shaw favours the higher proportion (pp. 182-3).

23 Mather, pp. 96-181.

24 Radzinowicz, IV:33O.

25 Shaw, pp. 147-8; Tobias, J. J., Crime and Industrial Society in the 19ih Century (London, 1967), pp. 217-19Google Scholar.

26 Based on table in Evans and Pledger, 11:90.

27 Evans and Pledger, II:97-8.

28 Tobias, pp. 199-200.

29 Hobsbawm and Rudé, pp. 101, 258-63.

30 Radzinowicz, IV:320.

31 See also Hoyle, p. 56.