Vic Clarke reports on the conference ‘Organise! Organise! Organise! Collective Action, Associational Culture and the Politics of Organisation in Britain and Ireland, c1790-1914’
A rainy July day greeted us at Durham for the triumphant start of the Organise! conference, the first dedicated completely to political organisation in Britain and Ireland over the long nineteenth century. Papers ranged the chronological length and geographic breadth of the theme, offering a truly holistic exploration of the rich variety of political activity of the period. Bringing together this community of delegates with expertise across this range of topics, made clear not only of the different intellectual traditions that that underpin political history, but the innovative range of methodologies, evoking material culture, digital humanities, mapping, as well as language and linguistic approaches to four-nations politics.
Kicking us off on day one was Professor Katrina Navickas’ keynote, ‘Practical representation and battles over locality: the importance of place in British popular politics in the long nineteenth century.’ Navickas emphasised that the concept of ‘free speech’, an issue that remains contested, referred in the early nineteenth century simply to the right to occupy space, meet, and talk. Following the ‘Six Acts’ of 1819 political spaces had to become more exclusive, more indoors, and more ‘respectable’; ignoring the fact that politics is inherently ‘messy’, comprised of patchworks of individuals and cultures. Indeed, this keynote showed how current the issues of political politics from the nineteenth century remain: from papers exploring petitioning to the occupation of space in Parliament to transnational political movements, the twenty-first century relevance of these issues rendered this conference extremely timely.
The panel ‘politics and emotions’ was a highlight, exploring the role of emotion and interpersonal connection between politicians and people in nineteenth-century Britain. While Nicholas Barone noted the lack of ‘political feeling’ in his paper on ‘Apathy in radical British politics from 1790-1840’, Matthew Roberts explored the relationship between masculinity and emotion, or ‘feeling rules’ in Anti-Corn Law League agitation in ‘Cobden, Peel, the Anti-Corn Law League and the politics of feeling in Mid-Victorian England’. These ‘feeling rules’ relied on agitators to couch their activism and rhetorical powers within suitably gentlemanly, measured expressions of emotion. Similarly, Laura C. Forster’s paper ‘The political lecture tour in nineteenth-century Britain: activism, hospitality and intimacy on the road’ emphasised the importance of serendipitous, everyday, ‘mundane’ connections in building political allegiances and identities in working-class political communities.
The importance of community and space was continued in my own panel on ‘political writing’, joining Marion Loeffler and Martin Wright who respectively discussed radical literary and publishing networks in Wales. In ‘Dissenters, poets and dangerous translations: undercover radicals in 1790s Wales’, Loeffler emphasised the importance of ‘Generation 1789’, a collective of Welsh radical publishers whose activism was revived after 1848 and who were integral to creating a Radical Welsh-language print culture, including collecting copies of Hog’s Wash, and publishing the ‘Welsh Marseillaise’ in Yr Ymofnyd [The Enquirer]. Martin Wright took us to the end of the century in his ‘Print culture, language and radical networks in Welsh socialism before the Great War’, situating the claim that ‘the language of socialism was English (or Esperanto)’ within the challenge that the language of Welsh politics was Welsh. Both papers brought important attention to the use of translation in four-nations radical politics.
Day two opened with a panel on material and visual cultures. Henry Miller took us behind the scenes of his recent monograph on petitioning cultures, acquainting us with the reams and reams of paper such activity needed in ‘Petitions and the material culture of political organisation’. James Thompson likewise explored the use of banners and imagery in socialist demonstrations at the fin de siècle in ‘The visual culture of demonstrations, c.1880-1914’. Chloe Ward’s ‘Art and action: Victorian painting as a call to arms’, offered an innovative, wide-ranging, and nuanced exploration of the ‘starving seamstress’ genre of painting as a means of political agitation which challenged middle- and upper-class viewers in galleries, challenging our notions of ‘radical’ spaces. A fantastic panel on women’s and suffragette activism and organisation followed, including parliamentary archivist Mari Takayanagi’s microstudy of ‘Suffragette activism in the Palace of Westminster’. Joining her were Erin Geraghty’s thesis findings on the paternalistic attitudes of English suffragists towards Irish communities in the Irish suffrage movement, which was already thriving and intrinsically bound up with issues of national identity and republicanism. Complementing this was Kate Connelly’s exploration of resistance to police violence against East End suffragettes thanks to the East End People’s Army, formed through an alliance between working-class suffragettes and dockworkers in the area.
A panel on crowds and space offered the opportunity to compare political meeting sites, headed by Mary O’Connor’s exploration of ‘Forum selection in the anti-corn law campaign of the 1820s’, which emphasised that choosing political meeting places relied on manipulation of legal loopholes and community memory. Likewise, Caitlin Kitchener’s archaeology-informed ‘Political palimpsests’ explored the creation of a people’s heritage on procession routes and platform meetings whereby ‘layers’ of memory from different protests and processions might be built up and up in post-Peterloo Manchester and Yorkshire. Dave Steele offered us an alternative type of ‘political feeling’ in ‘The Power of the Crowd’, exploring the practical considerations of outdoor meetings; from sore feet to hunger and thirst. Perhaps the most obvious but least discussed consideration in histories of people and processions is the necessity of toilets: fortunately female attendees attending radical processions were in the habit of carrying ‘bourdaloues’, or able to relieve themselves in nearby pubs.
What was striking about this particular event was not only the broad range of fascinating topics, but the conviviality of speakers and attendees. While regular events exist for scholars of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the regular Chartism Day event for my own corner of the 1840s, this conference on 19th century British and Irish politics brought together a true community of enthusiastic and exciting thinkers from all stages of academic career, from first-year doctoral students to eminent professors. Delegates were lucky to have been part of such a fantastic feat of ‘Organise!’-ation from Dr Naomi Lloyd-Jones, and the support of sponsors including the Society for the Study of Labour History. A selection of articles deriving from the conference will be published in a forthcoming issue of the journal Parliamentary History.
Dr Vic Clarke is teaching fellow in modern British history at the University of Warwick, having previously lectured at Durham University and the University of York.
Discover more from Society for the Study of Labour History
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Society for the Study of Labour History 