Governance in precarious times (not today)

From Murder in the First-Class Carriage: The First Victorian Railway Killing by Kate Colquhoun. Page 163.

“Throughout both Thursday and Friday nights, hackneys, drays, barouches and wagons crammed the approaches to Euston Square Station, clanking hooves and grinding wheels mixing with the shouts rising from the thick crowd of pedestrians. If the behaviour of the public in New York and in Liverpool was anything to go by, vast crowds of spectators, whipped into a frenzy of anticipation by the sensationalist reporting of the mass-circulation weekend newspapers, could be expected wherever a possibility of catching sight of Müller existed. This fact was likely to make both politicians, police and the middle classes extremely uneasy, for mobs were fickle: sometimes loud but peaceable in their craving for public ‘entertainment’ but occasionally rampaging, aggressive and criminal. Windows might be smashed, carriages overturned or children trampled; within the heaving crowds lurked drunks, fraudsters, pickpockets, thieves and worse.

Earlier in Victoria’s reign, as the economic progress of the nation polarised the inequalities between the rich and the poor, riots had become a signal of inflammable class tensions and the working classes’ demands for political reform. During the late 1830s and ‘hungry 40s’, as food prices rose and revolutions broke out in much of Europe, real fear had grown among those in power that a popular revolt was imminent. When the Lords refused to pass a new Reform Act extending the vote to more of the male middle classes in 1831, turmoil broke out. When the Act was finally passed a year later, it did not entirely halt demands both to reform corrupt electoral districts and to allow votes for all men over twenty-one. Anger grew with the passing of a harsh new Poor Law in 1843; demonstrations for better working conditions among the poor and starving became increasingly violent.

The constituency of these crowds was no longer confined, as in the first two decades of the century, to the local or to the working classes: the revolutionary language of the Chartists during the 1840s had, rather, united the discontent of both the lower-middle and the working classes, countrywide. When Friedrich Engels worked at a branch of his father’s Manchester cotton mill between 1842 and 1844 he noted such appalling conditions among the workers and such demoralised … debased … selfishness in the bourgeoisie that he concluded that an uprising was imminent: it is too late for a peaceful solution. The classes are divided more and more sharply, the spirit of resistance penetrates the workers, the bitterness intensifies … As the 1840s drew to a close, fearing the ‘poison’ of the French Revolution, the government struggled with a threat of radicalism that had the potential to burst out of control.