The Culture War before Peterloo
In 2024 we are of course familiar with the concept of a culture war. A focus on what people look like, how they dress, what they say, what they eat. The possibilities are endless but the underlying aim is to point to political undesirability.
They are however nothing new.
If we look at the period before Peterloo in1819 we can find a culture war in progress which ended up on Monday 16th August 1819 in central Manchester with deadly consequences.
In the Making of the English Working Class Thompson puts the events and implications of Peterloo at the centre of the book. The original hardback dust cover from 1963 depicted a scene from Peterloo.
In the preparations for Peterloo Samuel Bamford noted ‘we had frequently been taunted in the press with our dirty, ragged appearance… with the confusion of our proceedings and the mob-like crowds in which our members were mustered’
The aim was to paint protesters for the vote as a potentially violent rabble.
To counter this the committee focused on several key areas: cleanliness, sobriety, order to which Henry Hunt added ‘peace’.
The distinction later came to be codified as the difference between moral and physical force Chartism. However the distinction was never that clear cut. It is perhaps better summed up by ‘peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must’.
Thompson was very likely making a slightly different point however.
He did not avoid the reality of an armed force tradition in working class politics in the early decades of the nineteenth century. His politics via the Communist Party to 1956 and then the new left however saw mass democratic mobilisation as the way to achieve change.
The Culture War before Peterloo sought to suggest that those mobilised to campaign for change were a disorderly and potentially violent mob. The point of Bamford and of Hunt was that they were an organised and orderly movement determined to achieve progress..
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