Strikes and Singing Classes: Chartist Culture, ‘Rational Recreation’ and the Politics of Music after 1842

Abstract

Historians have often debated why so much energy was poured into efforts to reform working-class leisure and cultural pursuits in nineteenth-century Britain. This article uses a case-study of singing classes established in the early 1840s for industrial workers by local employers in the Manchester region to provide fresh answers to this question. It criticises a tendency to cast middle-class reformers as the primary agents of change in working-class leisure activities, arguing instead that many supposed innovations had been developed already by the Chartists, whose extensive transformation of working-class culture is increasingly recognised by scholars. The strike wave of 1842 permitted a dramatic manifestation of these cultural achievements, as the sounds of factory machinery were replaced by highly organised Chartist bands and choirs broadcasting radical messages. The establishment of a network of singing classes in the aftermath of the strikes was thus a belated attempt by the region’s middle classes to counter the dangerous eloquence of Chartist sonic culture. However, the subjective nature of musical experience meant working-class participants could derive quite different meanings from their massed singing than those their middle-class benefactors intended. In short, this article seeks to ascribe the central place to the Chartists, rather than middle-class reformers, in our explanations of why working-class leisure pursuits changed in the way they did, and to contend that the early Victorian singing-class mania, far from representing the reconciliation of middle and working classes in a shared liberal culture, might just as easily have furthered a radical cultural agenda.

‘Shut Up! Sit Down!’: The Politics of Disruption and the 1886 Home Rule Crisis in England*

“…63 Through their tactical deployment of words and mobilisation of noise, disruptors 'expressed dissent, created solidarities, and manifested opposition and resistance'. 64 Through what David Kennerley terms 'sonic disobedience', 65 an audience could test and, to varying degrees, steer 'the performance on the platform', 66 as could those outside a venue, given 'sound's pene-trative quality'. 67 Disruption signalled the rejection of a political appeal, helping control the reception thereof, and could vocalise and disseminate alternative points, making it a form of political communication.…”