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

Abstract

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.