‘The Most Portentous Event in Modern History’: Ireland Before and After the Peterloo Massacre

This chapter looks at Irish responses to Peterloo. It looks at the relations between radical reformers and the movement for Catholic Emancipation. The kind of political repression that was enacted in Manchester in August of that year was more common in Ireland, and reformers made common cause with Irish Catholics, many of whom were beginning to migrate to the industrial towns of Northern England. Ireland gave English reformers a cautionary example of tyrannical government, while Irish writers and politicians saw in Peterloo an illustration of the English establishment's true coercive colours. There was however a deeper sense in which Peterloo and the Irish Question were imbricated in early nineteenth-century culture. The role of public speaking, the control of potentially subversive speech, and the challenge of radical politics to traditional standards of rhetoric and oratory were all brought into focus in the years leading to the massacre.

Responses to Peterloo in Scotland, 1819–1822

This essay traces the rapid agitated reception of Peterloo in Scotland, especially in the lowland west among the skilled working class. It also looks at the responses of Scottish Tory writers, in the reactionary mindsets of Walter Scott and William Motherwell and in the more nuanced treatment by John Galt. The emotion and wider political issues surrounding the release of Henry Hunt from jail are particularly focused upon via the proceedings of a convivial meeting at the Saracen Head inn in Paisley in 1822. As part of the detail of the network of Scottish public response to Peterloo, other events including especially the so-called 'Radical War' in Scotland of 1820 and its subsequent commemoration are sketched.

The Church and Peterloo

This Chapter examines the involvement of Clerical Magistrates, William Hay and Charles Wicksted Ethelston, in the Peterloo Massacre. It finds a public consciousness, evidenced in newspapers, squibs, poems and illustrations that members of the Church acted for the Government against political reform. Contemporary texts also show suspicion that religious leaders acted as spies. This chapter provides concrete evidence from the National Archives. Mistrust of church figures increased after Peterloo, leading to publications focussing on church vice, corruption, and hypocrisy on issues like homosexuality with the Archbishop of Clogher scandal. After the post-Peterloo Six Acts, the Church provided a soft underbelly for continuing radicalism against the State.

Staging Protest and Repression: Guy Fawkes in Post-Peterloo Performance

In the aftermath of Peterloo many plays were performed that featured violent military repression directed against a gathering of the downtrodden. None of these plays could directly identify the stage representation with the events at Manchester on 16 August 1819. The representation of Peterloo was possible only under disguise. In order to avoid censorship, the playwright must claim a setting in some other place or time. A convenient disguise was Guy Fawkes, who had been transformed from a villainous conspirator into a hero of the oppressed. The historical transformation was strikingly evident in the rowdy festivities of Guy Fawkes Night (November 5). What was originally intended as a celebration of the salvation of James I had become a celebration of Guy Fawkes as the rebel against tyranny. Stage versions of Guy Fawkes; or, The Gunpowder Treason gained popularity as plays of post-Peterloo protest.

Peterloo, Ambivalence and Commemorative Culture

This chapter demonstrates that material culture responses to Peterloo (prints, textiles, ceramics, metalwork) were far more ambivalent about the consequences for civil and institutional reform than were most conventional print responses, which often advocated violent retaliation. Close examination of several examples reveals deep pessimism about the relative ineffectiveness of individual or even collective action and resistance to the superior and often deadly forces of physical, social, legal and institutional oppression wielded against even peaceful reformers. Caricature prints by Marks, Cruikshank and others, like other commemorative objects produced after Peterloo, emphasize the grotesquely disproportionate violence inflicted on orderly reformist citizens and leaders. These artifacts collectively imply that present active resistance, whether militant or non-violent, is largely futile and that the only genuinely tenable option lies in resigned but hopeful optimism about the prospect of a more enlightened future redress of social and political oppression.

Introduction

This Introduction provides an overview of the events that came to be known as the 'Peterloo Massacre' and of assessments that try to account for the violent reaction it received. Drawing on theories by Chandler, Tilly, Butler, Žižek and Nixon, it categorizes the attitudes toward physical force and toward the claims of 'the people' on government evident in the historical record into narratives of 'diminishing' and 'dispersing' violence. Looking at how these narratives were developed in Romantic-era literature, it offers a new interpretation of the conflict in St Peter's Field as indicative of a change in attitudes toward violence as a 'normal' occurrence. It finds that a decreasing pattern of direct confrontation facilitated the Parliamentary Reform that Peterloo protesters sought while a pattern of subtle repression limited the extent to which popular claim-making would be heard.

‘Reform or Convulsion’: Jeremy Bentham and the Peterloo Massacre

By 1819, Jeremy Bentham was fully aware that the law courts' entrenched practices, perverting and denying justice, were countenanced by parliamentary inaction and required not only law reform but reform of parliament itself - pushing the nation's choice to one between 'reform or convulsion'. This chapter demonstrates Bentham's understanding that, despite all the attention given to popular resistance and uprising, several sorts of violence dominated the British judicial and parliamentary system: violence-promoting language such as legal fictions, 'sinister interest' motivating corruption, as well as legalized violence through punishment. Bentham showed that, those with authority pursued sinister interests by taking the opportunities afforded by natural desires and the situations created by the system. The chapter argues that, through application of his utility principle and through ridicule (his rhetorical counter-violence), Bentham revealed systemic violence, undercut the fallacious and fiction-dependent arguments upholding the system, and challenged legal and parliamentary authority.

Political Suicide: Castlereagh, Rebellion and Self-Directed Violence

Attention to the violence of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 usually focuses on that of the soldiers who attacked the peaceful protesters gathered to demand equal representation and workers' rights. However, this chapter demonstrates that the event and its aftermath brought into sharp focus the intense concern with, and conflicting attitudes towards, self-directed violence and its ultimate expression, suicide, in Romantic-era Britain. Self-directed violence met with a variety of legal and cultural responses in the long eighteenth-century, but it was often presented sympathetically as a courageous political act that asserted individual autonomy in the face of implacable tyranny in Romantic literature. This theme was threatened, however, when Viscount Castlereagh - Conservative defender in the House of Commons of the government's attack at Peterloo, and the very figure of despotism in the period - slit his own throat with a pen knife in 1822.

Shelley’s Poetry and Suffering

After Peterloo in 1819-20, P. B. Shelley was thinking through poetry-by metaphors, myths, associations, and symbolic connections-for alternatives to authoritarian politics; he explored how the mind functioned in political conflict and imagined how society might function nonviolently within a just order. His poetic thinking relied on figures of the feminine and the maternal for alternative resolutions: feminine-centred and maternal myths avoided the injustice of patriarchal structures. The poetic process, which he describes as 'inspired', and 'not subject to the control of the active powers of the mind', drew upon Oedipal energies and other unconscious conflicts. He fully developed this project in Prometheus Unbound and The Mask of Anarchy.

Wordsworth after Peterloo: The Persistence of War in The River Duddon … and other Poems

This chapter discusses William Wordsworth's The River Duddon, A Series of Sonnets, published in April 1820, just prior to the poet's visit to the site of the Peterloo Massacre. As the Duddon sonnets and their accompanying poems reveal, aspects of civil discord are manifest throughout the volume, consuming not merely the city but also nature. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm (2015), the chapter argues that Wordsworth's engagement with Horace and Virgil evokes classical anxieties about the politicization of nature and the impossibility of establishing a society that is not always already at war with itself.