Six months into the Preston lock-out, the most famous novelist of the day visited the town in search of a story for Household Words and inspiration for his novel-in-progress, Hard Times. After three days at the Bull Hotel Charles Dickens declared Preston a ‘nasty place’ and the whole situation a ‘deplorable calamity’. He returned to London with his suspicions of trade union leaders intact and voiced little sympathy in print for largely female workforce of cotton operatives forced out of work in a bitter battle over pay.

Elizabeth Gaskell drew on the same dispute when writing North and South, later described as ‘the most sympathetic account of trade union action in early Victorian fiction’. Yet her middle-class values meant even she found it impossible to endorse the collective action of the operatives, the only real weapon they possessed in the face of the extremism of the mill owners.

This year marks the 170^th anniversary of the lock-out and strike, which ran from September 1853 through to the summer of 1854 and is remembered today as one of the more famous industrial disputes of the nineteenth century. Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire has now published a special issue to commemorate the anniversary, much of which is available open access online.

At the time, the dispute garnered national attention, creating thousands of column inches in local and national newspapers, and was hailed by Karl Marx, writing for the New York Daily Tribune, as the start of a proletarian revolution. He was, of course, wrong, as the editors of this issue of Transactions note, ‘and not only because the dispute ended in miserable defeat for the operatives. He was also wrong because the dispute was widely remembered as a cautionary tale; an ignominious mistake’.

Indeed, the dispute had largely faded from public memory by the end of the century, and interest in it did not revive until H.I. Dutton and J.E. King published their study, ‘Ten Per Cent and No Surrender’: The Preston Strike, 1853–1854 in 1981. Transactions aims to build on the four decades of scholarship that followed ‘to ask new questions and present new understandings of the dispute and its legacy’.

The current authors accordingly take account of developments in gender and women’s history, and the cultural turn. This new account does not lose sight of the fact that ‘most of the locked-out workers were women and children, that the workers were the moderates and the mill-owners the extremists’ but also that the conduct of the ‘turn-outs’ was less respectable and more violent than has been previously acknowledged.

Although interest in the Preston lock-out and strike has often focused on the work of Dickens and Gaskell, Transactions also includes an analysis of two other fictional treatments of the events in Preston, by the old radical, Samuel Bamford, and an anonymous author, possibly Rev Charles Marriott, a vicar with Christian Socialist sympathies. Though both are more sympathetic than Dickens, neither ultimately finds themselves able to back the workers against the employers.

Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire (173), 2024, Liverpool University Press.

Contents

• Introduction to the Special Issue Commemorating the 170th Anniversary of the 1853–1854 Preston Lock-Out, by Lewis Darwen, Jack Southern, and Andrew Hobbs (Open Access)
• Women and the Preston Lock-Out: Not Just ‘ten per cent’, by Janet Greenlees (Open Access)
• Strikers and ‘Knobsticks’: Intimidation and Violence During the Preston Strike and Lock-Out of 1853–1854, by Lewis Darwen
• The Irish and the Preston Lock-Out, 1853–1854, by Máirtín Ó Catháin (Open Access)
• The Periodicals that Puzzled Dickens: The Weekly Balance Sheets of the Preston Lock-Out, 1853–1854, by Andrew Hobbs (Open Access)
• Ten Per Cent Ballads and the ‘Shodeocracy’: Labour, Violence, and Humour, by Simon Rennie
• The Preston Strike in Literature: Dickens, Gaskell and Bamford, by Robert Poole (Open Access)
• ‘I think you’d strike’: Interpreting Preston in The Strike, by Mike Sanders
• The Narratives and Legacies of the Preston Lock-Out, by Jack Southern (Open Access)
• Reappropriating Cultural Memory of the Preston Lock-Out: Can Animation Be Used to Refocus and Reposition Historical Events Using Historical Visual Archives? by Sarah Ann Kennedy-Parr (Open Access)

Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire (173), 2024, Liverpool University Press.

See also Remembering the Preston lock-out 170 years on, Mike Sanders’ report from a conference and exhibition marking a nine-months-long industrial dispute.