Robert Southey and the ‘Manufacturing System’

Philip Connell, University of Cambridge

MONTESINOS.

The ordinary and natural consequences of commerce are every way beneficial; they are humanizing, civilizing, liberalizing; if it be for the purpose of gain that it compasses sea and land, it carries with it industry, activity, and improvement: these are its effects abroad, while it brings wealth to us at home. Whereas the immediate and home effect of the manufacturing system, carried on as it now is upon the great scale, is to produce physical and moral evil, in proportion to the wealth which it creates. Here is our danger, our sore and spreading evil... here, I had almost said, is

‘the harm
That never shall recover healthfulness!’

At such a price national prosperity would be dearly purchased, even if any prosperity which is so purchased were, or could be, stable. Alas! wherefore is it that communities and individuals so seldom keep the even line, though it appears to be plain and straight before them!

SIR THOMAS MORE.

Because they walk sometimes in mist and darkness, and sometimes giddily and precipitately when the way is clear. But the way is not always plain, nor, when plain, is it always easy. […] Society has its critical periods, and its climacterics; no change, no developement can take place at such seasons without inducing some peculiar and accompanying danger; and at all seasons it is liable to its influenzas and its plagues. This is one of its grand climacterics. A new principle,… a novum organum has been introduced,… the most powerful that has ever yet been wielded by man. If it was first Mitrum that governed the world, and then Nitrum, both have had their day,… gunpowder as well as the triple crown. Steam will govern the world next,… and shake it too before its empire is established.

Robert Southey, Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (London: Murray, 1829), vol. 1, 197–99

Robert Southey’s Sir Thomas More: or, Colloquies on the Progress and Prospects of Society (1829) is a strikingly original—not to say peculiar—work. Composed in an age of experiment and innovation in prose forms, Southey’s text displays a remarkable resistance to generic classification. It is, in part, a thinly disguised portrait of Southey’s quiet domestic life in the Lake District, where he combined the duties of poet laureate with prolific book reviewing and what we might now describe as ‘cultural commentary’. True to this latter vocation, the Colloquies offers an extended, historically informed analysis of the social, economic, and religious condition of England. It’s also a ghost story, of sorts. For Southey’s diagnosis of the ‘progress and prospects of society’ is presented in the form of an imagined dialogue between Southey (in the character of Montesinos) and the reanimated spectre of the Tudor humanist, Sir Thomas More.

As this summary might suggest, the Colloquies is in many ways a rather disconcerting work. But one of the most unsettling aspect of the book is the apparent incongruity between the bucolic setting of Southey’s text and his dour jeremiads on the material and spiritual afflictions of nineteenth-century society. The Colloquies is illustrated with a series of engravings based on drawings by Southey’s friend William Westall, which depict picturesque scenes of the Lakeland countryside. Yet the dialogues between Montesinos and More are characterised by far more saturnine reflections including, not least, on the ‘sore and spreading evil’ of the factory system.

William Westall, engraved by W. R. Smith, Crosthwaite Church and Skiddaw, frontispiece to vol. 2 of Southey's Colloquies

This was a subject which had preoccupied Southey for many years. As early as 1807 the narrator of his fictional travelogue, Letters from England, described with horrified fascination the child workers in a Manchester cotton mill, and, as he describes it, ‘the unnatural dexterity with which the fingers of these little creatures were playing in the machinery, half giddy myself with the noise and the endless motion’. There is a vivid immediacy to this description that is missing from the Colloquies and, perhaps not unrelatedly, a humanitarian concern that owes something to Southey’s youthful political radicalism. Even at this point, however, the author was moving towards a more paternalistic (or perhaps rather disciplinarian) attitude, registered in 1807 in his complaints about factory workers ‘utterly uninstructed in the commonest principles of religion and morality’.

Those tendencies gradually moved to the forefront of Southey’s concerns, and eventually gave rise to a plan, in 1816, for a sustained work on what he called the ‘Moral & Political state of England’. The project would eventually issue in the Colloquies of 1829, but Southey’s settled position really took shape during the years after Waterloo, in a series of tremendously influential long essays which he composed for the conservative Quarterly Review in the late 1810s. This period of post-war economic depression and mounting political discontent provides the context for one of the most striking features of the passage from the Colloquies quoted above, its insistence that Britain is going through a crisis, a ‘climacteric’, radically incommensurable with anything that has gone before: ‘A new principle,… a novum organum has been introduced’ into the nation’s social and economic fabric.

Edward Nash, Robert Southey (1820). National Portrait Gallery.

Whatever the disagreements of modern economic historians concerning its descriptive appropriateness, the phrase ‘industrial revolution’ is usually traced back to French writers and politicians of the 1820s, who contrasted the political revolutions of contemporary France with the ‘révolution industrielle’ unfolding in England. Although Southey does not use the phrase, his claims in the Colloquies certainly seem to anticipate it. But there is also an important sense in which Southey’s critique of the manufacturing system should itself be read politically, as part a larger counter-revolutionary discourse and, more specifically, as a reaction to the widespread popular disaffection of the later 1810s.

From this perspective, the Colloquies’ critique of the factory system might be understood as an attempt to defuse the threat posed by working-class radicalism by a kind of strategic discursive reframing. Part of what made the revival of radical argument in this period so dangerous was, in large part, its willingness to couch its demands in terms of the familiar, constitutionalist idiom of mainstream English political argument. Southey, however, offered a very different account, which stressed the republican, Francophile, and irreligious tendencies of the popular reformist leaders (or ‘apostles of anarchy’, as Southey described them). He was able to conclude, as a result, that ‘If we compare the present disaffection with that of any former age, it will be apparent that the danger differs as much in kind as in degree’.

There’s a deeply symbiotic relationship between this analysis of popular radicalism and Southey’s attitude to industrialization. Both these phenomena are historically unprecedented but, according to the Colloquies, they are also causally interrelated. It is precisely the morally and spiritually degrading effects of industrial labour which have created an urbanized labouring class receptive to the sedition and blasphemy of the radical press. Southey’s position is in this respect very close to that of Richard Yates’s influential pamphlet, The Church in Danger (1815). The titular phrase had once been used to attack the schismatic tendency of protestant nonconformity. ‘But,’ Yates urged, ‘the age of prevailing Fanaticism is passed’. The residual danger of ‘Sectaries’ now appeared secondary to the rise of ‘profligate infidelity, and rash insubordination’ among the ‘dense and concentrated Population’ of expanding urban and manufacturing districts.

For both Southey and Yates, the spiritual regeneration of the industrial working class was not simply a moral imperative. It was also a means of heading off a plebeian assault on the governing institutions of the Hanoverian state. There is a powerful sense, then, in which early nineteenth-century fears of political revolution enabled the very idea of an ‘industrial revolution’.

Further reading