The Augustan poet William Cowper’s (1731–1800) poem ‘The Winter Evening’, part of the long poem The Task (1784), offers a meditation on the pleasures of staying at home. The man in the crowded theatre auditorium acts out to his fellow spectators, more strenuous in his indignation than the paid actor, yet he behaves within the conventions of this paradigmatic site, jostling for space and simultaneously aware of struggles in the auditorium and onstage. Likewise, the citizen listening to the politician attends vigilantly to a lengthy speech though his feet ache, and the poet leaves it ambiguous as to who is ‘bursting with heroic rage’: the listener, the speaker, or perhaps both. So too, the placemen – the poet’s term for sycophantic yes-men – exhibit ‘all tranquility and smiles’ yet may have quite a different inner life of scheming discontent. Cowper’s point is that performance is something regularly undertaken in the public realm (whether at a theatrical entertainment, a political meeting, or one’s everyday job), that the ostensible performer will not be the only performer, and that cultivating the insight required to recognise and interpret these situations is constitutive of public life. Quietly, at home, one can reflect upon the variety and vicissitudes.

This accords with a foundational principle of performance studies, namely that performance is not exceptional but rather is as integral and constitutive of routine interactions, ritual celebrations, and social existence as it is of the theatrical stage.¹ In the theatre, but not only there, contrivances obscure or highlight how performance is invoked, made perceptible and eligible for critique. In no realm of human communication is this reducible to what is merely spoken, for performance calibrates mimetic acts and slippages of many kinds. This is sustained by speakers’ and listeners’ use of citational circularity – or, to use Judith Butler’s most often repeated term, performativity – from refreshable cultural repertoires.² Performativity may surface into awareness or remain a subconscious borrowing; in either case, it consolidates as repertoires constitutive of social experience as well as theatrical performance, and it includes not only facets of presentation such as plot and character but also, in potentia, a full array of corporeal, proximal, vestimentary, scenographic, sonic, sociolinguistic, and figurative meanings in combination.³ The permutations are endless yet in practise are codified into recognisable forms and genres: no one would mistake a transaction in a grocer’s shop for grand opera, any more than a funeral would be confused with a funfair.

Without performance, and performance literacy, human experience would be utterly chaotic: we would not know what diverges from the usual, when to differentiate a person who shows their vulnerability and makes us worry from another who makes us exult, how to resist intimidation, whom to believe about what, where we cross a threshold from the arenas of public life to the differently fraught realms of domesticity, or why the characteristics of one culture’s social field can be differentiated from another’s. Without an understanding of repertoires we would not differentiate the stage actor from the scold, the politician from the citizen, or the placeman from the sincere advocate, whether in the midst of action or from a place of quiet contemplation such as Cowper’s sofa. Cultural mediation happens in all cases, for assessment is integral to the ‘busy life’. As a set, the scenarios are recognisable as many variants of performance (only one of which is theatre), chained together as spectatorship and action in the panorama of public and private life.

To locate these acts in history, however, engages knowledge of dramaturgy, which James Ball describes as ‘the labor of connecting form and content’ and thus that which ‘makes an urgent question of the relationship of spectacle and its spectators’. This is both the topic and the methodology of this book. Ball’s focus on twenty-first-century diplomacy is equally apt for nineteenth-century liberal advocacy: ‘Dramaturgy arranges bodies, assigns them roles, authorises their speech, and directs them to act in particular styles, using certain gestures but not others.’ Liberal Lives and Activist Repertoires: Political Performance and Victorian Social Reform explicates how rhetoric (aimed at persuasion) allies with elements of dramaturgy (which amplify a situation’s intentionality) to arrange ‘the contexts in which power’s performance emerges and the ways it makes meaning’. For such situations to have efficacy there must be spectators to complete the scene, for ‘without them the spectacle cannot signify’ with its rhetoric.⁴

Finding which factors were perceptible – and particularly, the chaotic consequences of imperceptibility or misperception – is the quest for dramaturgical analysis. It is a practice familiar from theatregoing. There, we pay to see interhuman understanding attempted, codified into genres according to the various ways it is likely to go wrong. In Nicholas Ridout’s terms, this is what is involved with learning the habitus of spectating.⁵ In and out of the theatre, keen perception of when these kinds of social intelligence are invoked by various sorts of contrivance makes the code-switching of everyday performative modes a constitutive facet of both performativity and theatricality.⁶ Utilising a host of linguistic and non-linguistic means, through performance we learn to calibrate empathy, as well as distanced standing aside, to negotiate our lives, contrived representations of lives like ours, and our responsibilities within communities. Performance, in other words, makes cultures ‘go’.

Nevertheless, to broach a history based on these principles is challenging: which performative act can be delimited as a focus, how can the overlap between performers’ and witnesses’ repertoires (constituting mutual intelligibility) be recovered, and when can the circumstances be understood with reliable specificity so meaning can be attributed to an instance, or with sufficient generalisability so a trend can be established? When does aesthetic experience matter – and why – in historical accounts? Given that performance is contingent on many kinds of circulating knowledge in its formation and interpretation, and given that its combinatorial possibilities are so vast, how does it factor into cultural change and thus history? Derrick R. Spires asks a similar question in The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States, focusing on how the repertoire of Black writers’ ‘thoughts, events, and proceedings’ circulated as repertoire in ‘an ongoing performance’.⁷ Instead of conceiving performance as ephemerality – irrecoverably gone in the moment of its execution – we must ask how it leaves traces, both of itself and its effects. How, in other words, is it legible in its own time and to posterity?

This book is about lives spent in advocacy and judgement, and the interdependency of these functions within a performative framework. Performance is the arena in which the people who were engaged in advocacy and judgement assessed one another: their assessments filtered into subsequent performance choices in order for people to become more effective advocates and thereby effect change within national and transnational nineteenth-century politics. Performance knowledge, in these cases and likely countless others, is what inheres to enhance understandings. But how is performance knowledge developed, where does it manifest, and how can a historian recognise it? To borrow Gary Alan Fine’s terms, performance knowledge is the ‘sticky culture’ that unites people into a community with specific orders of interaction, links cultural knowledge to a domain via interaction protocols, and produces the persistent ‘sticky memory’ of its heroes’ feats.⁸ Likewise, in Sara Ahmed’s terms, stickiness ‘involves a transference of affect’ as signs adhere to meanings, belying something’s history, and accruing people’s ‘support and allegiance’.⁹ Performance is the means to communicate, its repertoires delimit the contours of communities of circulating knowledge, and its trace is what historians need to recognise the filaments linking advocacy, judgement, behaviour, and variation over time. Far from being ephemeral – disappearing in the instant of its creation – performance is the sticky residue that perpetuates memory as ongoing transmission through repertoires. Thus, looking for the traces of performance in the past draws a historian’s attention to how and what people in a given culture understood from one another’s acts, and what adhered over time despite continuous change.

Theatre was one domain in which assessment and judgement occurred. In nineteenth-century Britain, theatre grew into a mass medium, serving people from all walks of life, and though increasing differentiation of performance products stratified the marketplace there was always a great deal of permeation of repertoires across genres, venues, and cities. Theatre was not only an institution unto itself but also a cultural technique by which artists filtered current events and evolving tastes into entertainment that refracted Britons’ views of themselves, and of other times and cultures, into aesthetic forms. Though its primary purpose was to entertain, the theatre of this period also reflected a zeitgeist of cultural products widely seen and appreciated. Within the growing medium of newspapers, a cadre of professional critics arose to filter facets of this experience for readers, who consumed this and other types of performance. Given that theatre venues were pluralistically the sites for hosting other performative cultural techniques associated with the period – including trade fairs, fundraising bazaars, and evangelical religious services – this period is marked off from earlier times both by a degree of comfort about theatrical performance and by its contiguity with liberal as well as conservative trends. This helped consciousness about theatre – its diversity and appraisal – filter more fully through the nineteenth-century sensibilities. At the same time, venues emerged that were dedicated to musical performance but also used for political gatherings, such as London’s Rotunda, Exeter Hall, and St James’s Hall, as well as comparable spaces across the British nation and empire like the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. Their size, heterogenous fare, and scale of attendance suggest that there was a great deal of activity to leave sticky residues, and thus much for historians to trace.

This book focuses on three people who practised assessment of educational, religious, political, and artistic performance yet to whom credentialization as arbiters of excellence was not automatically granted because of their backgrounds. They accrued expertise, repeatedly demonstrated their abilities, and earned recognition through their deeds, overt agential acts that constitute and promote circulation: describing, evaluating, and facilitating performance, and advocating for opportunities to create more performance. In one case, what adheres is a reputation for delivering inspiring oratory; despite periods of withdrawal from public life, the lasting impression is of a man who held fast to his principles and helped bring about two momentous emancipation movements affecting Britain’s Caribbean colonies and the United States as well as setting in motion the stirrings of independence in India. He garnered a great reputation in his heyday but is misapprehended in history. In the second case, what adheres is a man’s reputation for exemplary service to liberal causes through administrative doggedness and an exceptional ability to work with people across ideological lines. This is a smaller reputation, known to his confederates but now lost to ongoing memory. In addition to the acknowledged labours, and a heavy correspondence load with interlocutors around the world, he made his living as a journalist, publishing upward of seven million unsigned words.¹⁰ This provides ways to trace his impact on a huge variety of domestic and foreign issues, though he is hitherto but a footnote to history. Finally, a woman who was the daughter of the first figure and wife of the second has her name lightly etched in history only for once having accompanied the Black freedom-seekers William Wells Brown, William Craft, and Ellen Craft to London’s Great Exhibition of 1851.¹¹ The life that preceded and followed this moment – meritorious of sticky memory not just by her proximity to the beating heart of the British, transatlantic, and global abolition movements – was both conventionally bound by gender and motivated to serve the great liberal causes that gave a pulse to her parents’ and her marital homes. Her thorough obscurity as an advocate and judge of performance, contributor to the political life of Great Britain, and communicant in global networks is largely a consequence of her gender.

Against the recondite nature of the man with a ‘small’ reputation, and his wife with none, their parent seems comparatively easy to trace. Yet from the copious manuscripts and journalistic evidence of all three figures’ acts emerges a history constituted by multiple kinds of performance, adopting existing forms and helping evolve these forms into new, more efficacious ones as part of a repertoire that, many decades later, would gain the name of ‘activism’. Specifically, these figures reveal how a repertoire of liberals’ tactics (resistance, confrontation, networking, naming, listening, or persuading) was incrementally and better calibrated through acuity in performance to garner desired results (shifting opinion, creating legislation, manumitting the enslaved, or rupturing complacency). What would one day be called activism was for the time being known by the names of various agential forms all fully permitted by English law – letter-writing, lobbying, debate, negotiation, petitions, billboarding, leafletting, boycotts, pledging, marching, rallies, hartal, and occupation – yet also scaling up to forms of illegal protest including revolt, blockade, mutiny, uprising, mobbing, riot, and strikes. Somehow a tacit understanding emerged about what was activist (such as electioneering) and what was illegal and malevolently destabilising (such as anything on a pathway to revolution).¹² Across this spectrum, the intelligibility of lives consolidates through performance, in conjunction with print culture, into legible patterns that are both individual and emblematic. In this respect, forms (and formalist readings) significantly augment historical understanding of their dramaturgy.

Meetings as Cultural Form

At some point before 1830, Thomas Thompson (1777–1832), ‘a man of polished manners, cultivated intellect and extensive reading’ who worked for the London publishing and bookselling firm of Longman,¹³ wrote in his commonplace book using beautiful Spencerian cursive script:

Though listened to in silence like the counsel of Job, lectures and even sermons were subject to performative evaluation, as Thompson indicated by writing another passage into his commonplace book a few pages later. It refers to Hugh Worthington (1752–1813), a dissenting minister little noted for what he said but much admired for the imposing way he delivered impassioned perorations:

It was not Worthington’s innate gifts that made him so preferred: according to the Christian Reformer his voice was ‘hard and dry, pungent and caustic’.¹⁶ Instead, it was his performance that suited him to his task. Thompson may have authored this passage himself, based on an observation from life, or he may have seen it elsewhere, thought it astute, and copied it. In either case, its presence in his commonplace book indicates its worthiness to be remembered, capturing the excellence of a speaker, the specificity of his technique, and the experience of his auditors.

If these passages were sufficiently on Thomas Thompson’s mind that he recorded them in his commonplace book it is reasonable to surmise that he also espoused the principles of oratory – and the practice of critique – in his home. And if that is true, his third son, George Donisthorpe Thompson (1804–78), took the lessons to heart. He built upon a scant education – as he stipulated in 1847, ‘I never had a quarter’s schooling in my life’ – and at age twelve became a city clerk.¹⁷ He was encouraged by the prominent theologian Rev. Richard Watson (1781–1833) to pursue the Wesleyan ministry, but pivoted to train himself up to be an able debater in secular matters through lectures and classes at the London Mechanics’ Institute (patronised by Lord Brougham [1778–1868] and Dr George Birkbeck [1776–1841]) and the City of London Literary and Scientific Institution (created by Lord Denman [1779–1854] and George Grote [1794–1871]), both founded in the mid-1820s.¹⁸ He gave extemporaneous orations on behalf of electoral reform and worked to overthrow a Middlesex Tory in 1829, haranguing listeners from the top of a beer barrel on Clerkenwell Green. He spoke on behalf of the Reform Bill at St James’s Church, Clerkenwell, in 1830 and ‘perfectly electrified his audience’, who hoisted him on their shoulders and carried him triumphantly into the street.¹⁹ He was a Radical whose origins mitigated against fame yet who, in his twenties, cultivated a talent and overcame the odds.

Though he believed in ‘perfect liberty of conscience’, George Thompson responded to the ‘vulgar ribaldry’ with which Rev. Robert Taylor (1784–1844) preached at Hugh Worthington’s old church (Salters’ Hall Chapel, Cannon Street). Thompson would attract notice as a speaker by taking up Taylor’s debate challenge and besting him before an audience. A former Church of England clergyman whose turn to apostatic deism led him to be dubbed ‘the Devil’s Chaplain’, Taylor was imprisoned for blasphemy from October 1827 until February 1829. Afterward he toured the North, unsuccessfully trying to goad clergymen into debates. Essentially, in his transitions from clergyman to heretic, and from cleric to felon, Taylor went from being a preacher giving sermons to a platform speaker giving lectures. In May 1830 he presided at the London Rotunda in full clerical regalia, mocking Church of England rites. This is the most likely period when Taylor’s challenge to debaters was taken up by the young layman George Thompson.²⁰ It was a terrific opportunity for an upstart to be noticed by pitching a performance calculated to carry a crowd.

During the waning years of English merchants’ participation in the transatlantic slave trade, Thomas Thompson had been a captain’s clerk on a slave-trading vessel. On his second journey, a British naval vessel stopped his ship and Thompson took the chance to be conscripted. Later, he told his son George about the conditions below decks on the slaver, the cruelty and abuse, and the sharks that dogged its wake.²¹ Hearing about the slaves’ suffering was one of George Thompson’s earliest memories.²² Thomas Thompson’s commonplace book – likely compiled over decades – includes few direct references to slavery, though this passage stands out: ‘The two greatest contrarieties of Government in the civilized world are to be found in the republic of North America and the absolute monarchy of Persia.’ On the same page, he quotes the last two lines of this chapter’s epigraph and another section of Cowper’s The Task, one that calls for England to emancipate its colonies’ enslaved, referring to Lord Mansfield’s decision in Somerset v. Stewart (1772).

Possibly buoyed by the Liverpool abolitionist William Roscoe (1753–1831), whom he served as cashier, Thomas may have guided George toward Cowper’s challenge.²⁴ Meanwhile, needing an income, George sought a clerkship in a London attorney’s office at eighteen shillings a week, and subsequently opened a small coffee shop in Ray Street, Clerkenwell, which he operated until his speeches at a ratepayers’ meeting offended the local authorities.²⁵ He married Anne Erskine Lorrain Spry (1807–78), the daughter of a Methodist minister in the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion, when they were respectively twenty-six and twenty-three years of age. She immediately became pregnant, and thus securing a livelihood was urgent.

Editions of Cowper, Milton, and Shakespeare were among George Thompson’s first possessions, and they played a part in making him a committed Radical.²⁶ In September 1831, on his wife’s urging and with Lord Brougham’s endorsement, the young man secured a trial as lecturer for the London Anti-Slavery Society, with the charge to develop connections in Kent and stir up support that would eventually carry the bill ending slavery in the Caribbean sugar-producing colonies through Parliament.²⁷ Thompson claimed to know nothing of the topic, but on his reputation of distinction in ‘parochial discussions’, he borrowed a pile of books and pamphlets, swotted up on the subject, and was given the opportunity to prove his mettle at the podium. After a trial, he was taken on at £200 per annum. Through ‘arduous, meritorious, and most successful’ labours, ‘he excited attention wherever he went, and worked up Antislavery feeling with a power of tongue that, under such circumstances, was perhaps unprecedented’.²⁸ Six weeks into the job, during a period of anxious separation from his wife, George Thompson became a father. Within less than a year, he had graduated from the Kent circuit to the national scene, lecturing for hours at a time at meetings with three thousand auditors. He must have developed his voice appropriately for it to carry in the large halls and for such long periods, or he had this capacity beforehand, along with the power of charismatic leadership. In any case, he was a paid platform speaker and organiser and never returned to his life in either clerkship or trade.²⁹ Meanwhile, his father passed away, unremarked in surviving letters.

In making the transition from sparring orator to mouth-for-hire, George Thompson was launched as a professional lecturer. This was in no way a cynical or merely opportunistic move: he believed fully in his cause, taking what the oratorical guru Hugh Blair calls ‘the right and true side’ because it was the one to which he was most inclined.³⁰ Later in his career, Thompson delivered one-off and serial lectures, expounding on areas of his expertise. For example, in 1861 he gave an illustrated lecture on Hindus at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, and on other occasions he lectured at various halls on the causes of the American Civil War, the Crimean War, the ‘cotton question’, and of course the antislavery cause.³¹ Inbetween campaigns, this enabled him to earn a modest living. But he was a political speaker, and meetings were his milieu: hold enough successful meetings and movements can accrue, linking like-minded people to increase the size and power of a cause. This happened over and over in nineteenth-century Britain: the Chartists who extended the franchise and the ACLL that established free trade as a core liberal principle may be the best-known cases, but probably every cause that came to prominence in Britain began – and was perpetuated – in this way. Britons’ freedom to assemble in private or in public, especially in this era of revolutions, ensured that meetings were charged not only with political importance but also with performative frisson.

Promoting ideas through discussion and persuasion required emotional restraint and oratorical skill. At meetings, eloquence could be measured against classical precedents, style honed to be vigorous, cogent, yet austere (like Demosthenes) or gentle, agreeable, and insinuating (like Cicero). Likewise, the characteristics of auditors were gauged so that the concise eloquence that sufficed in Athens sometimes gave way to the more flowery declamation requisite for the less acute Romans, even though Demosthenes made his appeals to the common citizens and Cicero to men of the highest rank and education.³² Thus, any meeting in Parliament, a provincial hall, or outdoors could be understood as part of a great elocutionary tradition, and any speech assessed on a continuum of extensive precedent even when seeming to flow spontaneously. Dramaturgy and rhetoric were evaluated by all present. To participate in this tradition was to exercise civil liberties and conjure the democratic polis.³³

Many kinds of assembly have rules of order sufficiently cohesive to constitute a performative form, including weddings and funerals, festive processions, strikes and boycotts, and sporting contests. Meetings are another such cultural form, utilising a repertoire of codified actions drawing upon the affordances of public gatherings to accrue and mobilise political power.³⁴ Among the social practices of democratic struggle, meetings make their mark gradually. In Thompson’s initial role with the London Anti-Slavery Society, and later as agent for the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS) and Glasgow Anti-Slavery Society, he was deployed to towns to try to enthuse residents into creating local branches. Branch organisations functioned as nodal points for the networks through which speakers travelled and correspondence circulated. The effects of meetings were amplified in social settings and through coverage in local newspapers. Local newspaper reports were often reprinted elsewhere, reinforcing the effect through an existing or potential network of towns and cities. At whatever social stratum, meetings were the backbone of movements. Their performances are rarely as exhilarating as a Pentecostal revival or as galvanising as a riot, but they make change nevertheless. Though historiography favours revolutionary acts – theatres erupting into uproar, tumult in the streets, or upheaval of ruling orders – the humble meeting is a potent political instrument for building social change, weathering setbacks from importune developments, and keeping an issue in the public’s eye.

Repertoires are drawn upon by artists, speakers, and politicians to make performance; audiences, likewise, have repertoires based on earlier experiences. What overlaps in a given performance are ‘the associational, polytextual, intertheatrically citational, recombinant patterns that sustain intelligibility’.³⁵ To make a new, enduring, theatrical style or performance form, the constitutive repertoires of both makers and receivers must be adjusted. Likewise, to intelligibly convey new theory or political ideas to the public, repertoires of advocates and their addressees must evolve until there is overlap in intelligibility. Only where there is intelligibility can there be persuasion; only when there is persuasion can political speech grow into a social movement. Under conditions of relatively free discourse, as occurred in Great Britain from the early nineteenth century, meetings evolved a repertoire of characteristics that enabled opinions to be expressed and responded to; the single authoritative voice of the sermon or the declaration gave way to widespread dialogic free play. This is the atmosphere in which the two great principles of British liberalism (the universality of human rights and the beneficial effects of free trade) were forged.

George Thompson, among others, brought liberal principles into mainstream thought through career-long efforts to apply these principles to matters of consequence. The performative increment by which positions were advanced, changes advocated, and reform achieved was the meeting. Meetings are a form; to understand them, formalist analysis must be done; the fruits of that analysis reveal empirical experience; empirical experience shows the stickiness of performance to culture; and this results in nuanced historical understanding of social movements and their ideological bases. Only by recognising meetings and the work of their formation, perpetuation, and repetitive replications-with-difference can we see the increments of performance, labour, argumentation, and evaluation and thereby appreciate their cumulative impact over time. As a performance form, meetings establish links between lived experience, protocols for advocacy, habits of social gathering, and the levers for political transformation that rely citationally on repertoires across times and places.³⁶ This marks performance as constitutive of culture and makes social formations an incremental consequence of performance.

Meetings and their sub-forms (lectures, debates, conventions, breakfasts, dinners, and soirées) were where George Thompson endeavoured to turn minds and hearts to the abolition of slavery, forge communities in common cause, and hone his own and other activists’ rhetorical abilities as speakers, writers, lobbyists, and organisers so they could more skilfully impress their convictions upon those with legislative power. Newspaper accounts document meetings, turning face-to-face performances into narrated stories (or, in some cases, verbatim transcripts), their circulation proportionately amplifying the resonance of meetings’ content beyond those who were present. Whereas newspapers report on meetings, manuscript letters, and diaries reveal how participants in meetings reflexively strove to become effective in their political goals by manipulating mises-en-scène to the best of their ability in service of others’ liberation. In parallel to this historicising discourse, manuscripts privately document how meetings were understood as a structured yet malleable form. In his correspondence, George Thompson habitually critiqued what he saw and heard others do at meetings, and in paying attention not only to the orators but also to the mises-en-scène he treated these events as multifaceted consequential performances replete with interpersonal conflict, disagreement, deference, struggle, anxiety, and ascendance. Thompson paid attention to others’ strategies and choices in making meetings and applied his observations to improve subsequent performances. The sociologist James M. Jasper calls such practices ‘cultural learning because the results are changes in shared ways of thinking and acting’, enabling adaptation in approaches.³⁷ A conscious dramaturgical process emerges from the evidence. This applies equally to routine facets of meetings, usually not warranting comment in letters or the press, including the specific casting of roles, which carried local consequence and gave less-experienced orators practice, and attendees’ responses, which were recorded in (slightly edited) newspaper accounts and functioned like the stage directions in play texts.³⁸ Together, this gives a greater sense of orators’ timing, affective facets of listeners’ responses, and the details that stood out from the mundane to distinguish any given meeting.

To study meetings, a communication theorist would typically focus on rhetorical devices that were utilised, and a historian would likely view the gatherings as building blocks toward the success (or failure) of a political cause. Performance scholarship additionally emphasises how participants utilised dramaturgy: as innumerable examples will show, activists carefully calculated the implications of where meetings were held, who chaired, who else was visible on the platform, where dignitaries and women were seated, who was selected to speak on issues of heightened importance, how topics and speeches were ordered, and when and how auditors could respond.³⁹ Activists drew upon precedents and were conscious of the next steps in the struggle. This is a significant historiographic adjustment both to the history of rhetoric as not merely a set of formalised rules – implemented better by some, worse by others – and to the history of abolition as a moral imperative and humanitarian political struggle that peaked at certain moments but was never fully concluded. Furthermore, instead of just incidents of declamation and examples of argumentation leading to legislative change, a dramaturgical perspective reveals meetings as key to the ongoing transnational performative undertaking that connected the metropole of London to other British cities, and Britain to its colonies, trading partners, allies, and enemies. Abolition might be achieved by the stroke of a pen signing a bill into law, but the perspective offered here is that abolition movements’ typical multidecade transcontinental series of meetings makes ideology evident as cultural form and shows how cultural form was legible across sectors of society and various nationalities or locations.⁴⁰ Far from emancipation being an existential rupture – chattel slavery one day, unimpeded freedom the next – the practices of abolitionism were ongoing, incremental, and discursively agonistic. Even changes in policy and practice that were effected overnight took years of preparation, implementation, and uptake. For example, the demand for an immediate, not gradual, end to slavery in British colonies first gained traction in 1824 in the West Country, the Midlands, and Ireland, spurred by a pamphlet from Elizabeth Heyrich (1769–1831).⁴¹ The idea gained wider traction after being mentioned in Parliament in 1829, and in January 1831 the London Anti-Slavery Society hired agents (including George Thompson) to spread the word in other counties.⁴² As pacifists who advocated immediate unconditional abolition, Thompson and his associates were acutely aware of the social contracts that constrained belief or produced agreement, and thus what was needed to rally support, exert influence, achieve abolition, and then organise anew to assist the next cause. Newspaper circulation – which amplified meetings by stabilising or challenging hegemonic politics – plays a huge part in this, but face-to-face events constitute the substance of newspapers’ incremental focus on the cause.⁴³

Content filled form, and even at the outset of his career George Thompson could speak for several hours without notes (Figure 1.1). The format of meetings dictated that this was never a solo act. Even when there was a headliner like Thompson, meetings included speeches to introduce speakers, other speakers proposed and seconded resolutions (sometimes with protracted speeches), and speeches were made to thank the meeting’s chairman. Thus, meetings epitomise Kirk Fuoss’ concept of ‘performance chaining’, whereby one participant’s performance leads to another participant’s, then another’s.⁴⁴ This is a process with identifiable links. Thus, as James Ball puts it, performance chaining situates individuals ‘in space and time as a constituent part of the historical drama of world politics’.⁴⁵

Figure 1.1 ‘In person Mr. Thompson is tall, of a full and manly, though not robust form; the features handsome, and, when discoursing on any subject of interest, express with peculiar animation and force the various emotions of his mind. … The position and expression are both characteristic.’ (Biographical Sketch and Portrait, 19–20). George Thompson (by Charles Turner after George Evans), mezzotint, 1842. NPG D4367

National Portrait Gallery, London.

In the earliest extant transcript of one of Thompson’s speeches (from Salford in 1832), Thompson is the only lecturer and yet is merely the focal point of several other men’s constant activity:

Utilising parliamentary reports, pamphlets, and possibly a transcript of an antecedent debate, Thompson quoted at length to refute and discredit arguments for retaining slavery in Britain’s West Indian colonies. This was part of a series of clamorously attended debates with the Conservative upstart Peter Borthwick (1804–52).⁴⁷ Here, Thompson gave a point-by-point rebuttal of his challenger, inspiring the assembly to make frequent outbursts, as when he riffed sarcastically on one of Borthwick’s comments about the purported comforts of enslaved Caribbeans’ lifestyle:⁴⁸

Thus, Thompson chained his lecture to an earlier debate, and everyone present – those on the platform, James Everett, who passed up the requisite props, and the audience – took their part. Likewise, referring to the Maroon Rebellion in 1794, Thompson chained his parodic remarks to the actions of the enslaved and Borthwick’s mischaracterisation of them:

With Borthwick seated at his feet, Thompson effectively turned his opponent into an exhibit that verified the ill-considered turns of phrase that he quoted, indifference to enslaved people’s plight, and thorough misapprehension of the issues, standing in for all remaining opponents to abolition. The direction of Thompson’s gestures and eyeline – toward or around Borthwick and his party – and modulations of voice drew a connection this night to Borthwick’s earlier speech, and this locale to Jamaica’s plantation houses, slave quarters, and rebels’ refuge.

Anti-slavery advocates successfully pushed through legislation but without all the provisions they desired. The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 provided for a gradual transition from slavery to freedom through an ‘apprenticeship system’. While those under six years old were freed, the enslaved over the age of six years were subjected to slavery by another name, working for low wages for up to six years while supposedly being educated (as ‘apprentices’) to manage future freedom. This scheme quickly proved to be a failure. By 1836, abolitionists worked to hasten the act’s demise with a new bill demanding immediate liberty, which had been the preference of radicals all along. After a meeting on behalf of this effort in Birmingham Town Hall, Thompson wrote to his wife that ‘It was a brilliant sight to gaze upon the magnificent Hall of this vast town (illuminated beyond the light of day, if possible) crowded with a breathless audience’ of men and women.⁵¹ The scenography was strategic: Birmingham’s high bailiff (William Scholefield, 1809–67) took the chair, ‘surrounded by a number of Clergymen, Dissenting Ministers of all denominations, Gentlemen, and the higher class of merchants and tradesmen’. The first resolution, citing the degeneracy caused by the apprenticeship system, unanimously carried. Joseph Sturge (1793–1859), recently returned from a fact-finding tour of the West Indies, rose to explain how complete emancipation actually served the economic interests of planters. The audience cheered his arguments for immediate emancipation and expressed strong umbrage when he cited injustices.⁵² Thompson spoke in support of the third resolution, urging the Colonial Office to act against abusive planters in ‘indignant terms’ and appealing to Christians and the new queen ‘to use their best endeavours to forward the accomplishment of so desirable a result’. He then ‘sat down amidst loud and long continued cheers’.⁵³

Meetings are performative formats that regulate and channel dissent. The rhetorical building blocks of meetings are speeches, but it is resolutions – and the ensuing votes on resolutions – that measure the increments of persuasion and political advances.⁵⁴ For example, during the American Civil War, while preparing to lecture in Manchester on the Southern Confederacy, Thompson arranged with the meeting’s chairman, George Wilson (1808–70), to write a resolution that would be advanced by someone, with a short speech, then seconded by someone else, with another short speech. This was engineered to give Thompson some time to rest while also determining the attitude of the assembled listeners to the topic, showing Thompson their disposition toward tension or concord so he could calibrate his approach before he resumed.⁵⁵ Unanimous outcomes of resolutions showed the persuasiveness of speakers and the gathering’s likelihood of achieving unanimity in final, actionable, decisions. Approved resolutions helped determine the contours of subsequent meetings, thus giving the auditors direct input into the evolving dramaturgy as chained increments of advancing causes. As meetings begat meetings, resolutions facilitated interactive performances discursively linked to the goals and contests of other meetings (past and future) in ways that astute participants might recognise, testing the degrees of enthusiasm and filaments of allegiance.⁵⁶

In 1831, as a novice speaker only a month into his trial with the London Anti-Slavery Society, Thompson was already attuned to the nuances of meetings’ dramaturgy. He went to hear the popular preacher Rev. James Sherman (1779–1862) speak at a Bible meeting in Wye. Sherman was allied with the same Methodist splinter group as Thompson’s father-in-law (the Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion), and Thompson wrote recommending this preacher to his wife. ‘I was greatly delighted …. He is one of E. Parson’s sort – winning – persuasive. His eloquence like soft and heavenly music, captivates you and the tear starts into your eye before you are conscious of the effect produced.’⁵⁷ This emphasises the preacher’s performance acumen, his resemblance to another practitioner, and the affective outcome of his rhetoric, but Thompson also explained the casting of the paradigmatic elements of the meeting, starting with Mr Wildman taking the chair at the head of a large room in the Kings Head Inn:

Thompson’s letter emphasises the ecumenical nature of the gathering’s leaders: clergymen from the Church of England, at least two types of Methodists, and Baptists. He implicitly tells his wife that the gentlemen knew how to conduct a meeting, what to do to make speeches admirable, and who to call upon to show solidarity on issues across different Protestant groups. Successive resolutions built up the sense of a contest, and speakers’ skill as well as the merit of the cause were always under evaluation. While speakers might be supremely skilled at manipulation, the auditors’ role was to remain discerning.

Divided votes could result in more speeches, whether or not they were prompted by questions from the floor. In 1836, after speaking for three hours at Rev. Dr James Peddie’s (1759–1845) Chapel in Edinburgh, Thompson wrote: ‘Mr. Fraser an American Clergyman rose & endeavoured to soften down some thing I had said. This led to intensely interesting debates which kept us till nearly 1/2 past 11.’ Thompson found the exchange exhilarating, ‘however killing work’.⁵⁹ Several years later, after full emancipation had been secured for the enslaved in the British West Indies, Thompson turned his talents to advocating a complex set of arguments about the need to develop India, which (for a liberal) meant exploiting its agricultural potential, in particular massively increasing cotton production to undo the British textile industry’s dependence on the fibre coming from forced labour camps (slave plantations) in the US South. Thompson explained that at a meeting in Doncaster a clergyman stood from the floor ‘with the Edinburgh Review in his hand’ and ‘called upon me to defend myself & the [British India] Society from the charges brought against us. All went off triumphantly, my opponent confessing himself satisfied’.⁶⁰ The latest issue of the Edinburgh Review had cast Thompson in the centre of a misunderstanding blown up into a controversy; the opportunity to set it right in a public place was a manifestation of gentlemanly discourse adopted through the format of meetings to involve a wide swathe of social strata, chaining speech acts of meetings and quotations in newspapers to citation in the quarterly reviews.

A meeting includes speeches as well as ‘business’ to be decided, hence the resolutions. A soirée was a related kind of event, by invitation, less agonistic in nature, which was also chaired and featured speeches. At one such event in the Lever Street Chapel, Manchester, in 1853, Thompson gave a ‘long, eloquent address’ emphasising what Britons could do to overthrow US slavery, utilising both their moral institutions and commercial leverage. He then opened the floor to questions, ‘and his replies gave much satisfaction, and elicited enthusiastic applause’ on the comparative expense of free and enslaved labour, the choice between gradualist and immediate emancipation (the latter being the course Thompson always espoused), the agricultural development of India, the United States’ Fugitive Slave Law (which mandated people in the Northern States to cooperate in the seizure of freedom-seekers), and the United States’ reasons for ending the slave trade with Africa. At some point, the Quakers gathered at the meeting were shown examples of African cotton, an illustration of a cotton-cleaning process, and an African loom. A visiting clergyman gave an address, and Thompson’s future son-in-law proposed a vote of thanks, which carried by acclamation.⁶¹

Sometimes meetings were strictly private affairs. Anything branded a ‘dinner’ was likely to be an advertised yet ticketed event, usually catering to propertied men. Its heyday was the 1830s.⁶² In October 1839, Thompson attended a large dinner party of wealthy Mancunian manufacturers and spinners, where he was invited to speak ‘for the special and specified purpose of talking over our subject’ of India, an overlooked facet of English responsibility that, according to Thompson, required education on the home front and reformed administration abroad. The meal was served at 2:00 p.m., and until 7:00 p.m. he held forth among a cordially disposed company. Thompson wrote that George Hadfield (1787–1879), the radical politician and Congregationalist, ‘called upon his townsmen around him most solemnly to come forward & advocate my cause’, whereupon Thompson ‘took the opportunity offered … of urging home the subject’ in another speech.⁶³ Private meetings such as this could be especially useful for securing the allegiance of wealthy patrons and laid the groundwork for public meetings where local branches of a national organisation could be forged. Local branches facilitated lecture tours as well as the dissemination of information, gathering of petitions, and sponsorship of regional events.

Another facet of performance chaining occurred with the presentation of a petition. As Janette Lisa Martin writes, ‘formulating a petition expressing political grievances was perceived to be an unalienable constitutional right and one of the few avenues for redress open to the un-enfranchised’.⁶⁴ In November 1837, Thompson spoke to an overflowing house at Dr Wardlaw’s Chapel in Edinburgh. In the midst of a ninety-minute speech, ‘the Address to the queen with 135,000 signatures, an immense roll was brought up the platform and placed upon a table by my side. It was a glorious sight’.⁶⁵ The petition connected this meeting to many individual acts of affixing signatures to the petition, in countless previous meetings, and to the later presentation of the petition to Parliament. The roll served as a prop but also a potent speech act in all three settings, emphasising how any one meeting resists definitive closure yet makes resistant incremental engagements with political power on behalf of individuals, and individuals aggregated into movements.⁶⁶ The act of signing a petition (often at meetings) represented the aggregated effect of presence within the system of courtly redress, connected to other modes of civic engagement – such as voting, parades, and conventions – more eligible to some people than others.⁶⁷

Meetings with Mobbings

Resolutions periodically registered convictions of an assembly, but throughout meetings audiences were expected to vocalise disapproval, amusement, and anything else that registered how they followed the ins and outs of the speeches: heckles, jeers, and shouts were all ‘taken as evidence of a robust, democratic spirit’ (Figure 1.2). Speakers were always to be given a fair hearing, and to this end ‘the chair, the speakers, and the audience were collectively responsible for enforcing fair play’.⁶⁸ Generally, this all went quite well. Published protocols for how to conduct meetings were widely available, and special variants for debates were displayed on placards in advance of events.⁶⁹ It is notable, though perhaps not definitive, that illustrations of large meetings of anti-slavery, Chartist, and free trade advocates show the attendees almost universally attentive to the speaker, in contrast with illustrations of theatre audiences of the same period, which tend to show playgoers’ attention on one another, and only occasionally on the stage.⁷⁰

Figure 1.2 A meeting at Exeter Hall on the abolition of the slave trade, engraving by H. Melville after T. H. Shepherd, ca. 1841. 578856i.

Wellcome Collection.

Dissent about rather than within a meeting entailed a separate, parallel form. For example, very rarely Chartist speakers reported being ‘threatened with fire arms, assailed with brick-bats and on one occasion a dead cat’, and one was even attacked by a gang.⁷¹ This is mobbing: ‘violent, riotous, or intimidatory action, in association with others, with a particular end in mind’ (OED). Mobbings attempt to disrupt the efficacy of meetings by staging contra-performances – not merely exhibitions of disagreement within the performative parameters of a meeting – chained to the meetings themselves.⁷²

In 1834, Thompson was sponsored by the Glasgow Emancipation Committee, BFASS, and New England Anti-Slavery Society to give a lecture tour in the Northeastern United States.⁷³ The goals were to enhance international links between abolitionists and call attention to the Presbyterian Synod’s disapproval of slaveholding ministers in the US South. To many of his US supporters, Thompson was a young Lafayette, come to help liberate the enslaved. Instead of military tactics he deployed oratory and moral argument, but his heroic status was augmented by his willingness, like the Marquis de Lafayette (1757–1834), to come from abroad and face the brick-bats and tar pots of those who opposed liberty.⁷⁴ The basic protocols for meetings were observed on both sides of the Atlantic – and Thompson’s trademarked blend of erudition, impressive command of facts, use of statistics, occasional sarcasm, and biblical exegeses in a tour de force performance of memory and argumentation was likewise novel on both sides of the ocean. On one side of the Atlantic, he exhorted his countrymen to recognise their ongoing complicity in the slave trade when buying goods made by oppressed bondsmen, and on the other side he enjoined US citizens to recognise the contradiction of a nation founded on liberty and freedom for all whilst millions were still in literal chains. For his opponents in the United States, this made him more than merely an unwelcome interloper: ‘Thompson is sneeringly published here as a “foreign emissary” – an “intermeddler in matters with which he has no personal concern”, “a foreign disturber of the peace”’.⁷⁵

Some US abolitionists hailed Thompson as a ‘young Demosthenes’, ‘tall, graceful and agile, his countenance fine and attractive, his voice mellifluent’, with ‘eloquence … of the most commanding and winning kind … a scholar, an orator and a gentleman’.⁷⁶ His passions seemed to ‘come and go at his bidding’, while he carried his hearers ‘along with him, sometimes into the solemn and sublime, then relaxing them into boisterous laughter’. His rhetoric was complemented by tremendous ‘command of language, a voice of extraordinary compass, flexibility and power, [and] strong yet graceful gesticulation’.⁷⁷ Nevertheless, he had a preponderance of detractors. The kindest of them observed that Thompson’s looks were marred by ‘a lurking devil about the eye and mouth, that acts as a very good index to the impudence and self-sufficiency within’. It was conceded that he was a powerful speaker, in the way that ‘a trip hammer [is] a most powerful mawler of pig iron’. According to others, he had a club-room style: practised posture accompanied mere rant and a vehement sawing of the air, as he knocked ‘his fist at “circumbient objects”’ and intermittently ‘blows his cheeks into a rotundity that would do credit to a swell fish’.⁷⁸

There had been minor outbreaks of violence in preceding years, but during the US congressional election season of 1834 a pattern of civil unrest coalesced.⁷⁹ Thompson arrived to a nation in turmoil. During the months immediately prior to his arrival, race riots broke out from New Orleans to Philadelphia, and Boston to Cincinnati; Irish labourers building canals and railways rioted in Maryland, New York State, and outside Washington, DC; and anti-Catholic, anti-foreign tensions erupted into riots in New York City and Boston. William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), and John Quincy Adams (1767–1848) thought the nation was on the verge of collapse.⁸⁰ David Grimsted, who has looked at the longer pattern of discontent, sees the problem as ‘ethnic hatreds; religious animosities; class tensions; racial prejudice; economic grievances; moral fears over drinking, gaming, and prostitution; political struggles’ and perennially ‘the albatross of slavery’.⁸¹ The following year, out of 147 such incidents, 41 per cent were either proslavery (46) or racial (15) riots.⁸²

As Harriet Martineau (1802–76) observed, merchants and ship owners of the North were ‘exasperated into panic’ fearing that the abolitionists would get between them and Southern suppliers, and ‘the panic was generously shared by those who had no ships and conducted no commerce’.⁸³ Crowds assembled to break up abolition meetings, sacked the home of the abolitionist benefactor Lewis Tappan (1788–1873) and several Black churches, and went door to door looking for homes where residents had failed to obey their instruction to light a candle and stand in the window, as in the book of Exodus: dwellings with Black faces or empty windows were attacked.⁸⁴ Many of these acts were planned and executed with the knowledge and guidance of civic leaders, ‘gentlemen of property and standing’, a phrase that Thompson and his supporters acerbically cited ever after.⁸⁵ Anti-abolitionists, frustrated that they could not stop all abolitionist publishers or prosecute their wealthy benefactors, were in many ways a proletarian force; the Boston Chronicle, for example, regarded mobbing as the ‘property of the people’.⁸⁶ Nevertheless, mobbers were often the agents for better-heeled sponsors with direct commercial interests in perpetuating the South’s economic basis. The press was complicit in inflaming unrest and blamed the targets for scaring the public ‘with the sight of their burning property and demolished churches’.⁸⁷ Playing it down, Thompson wrote from Liverpool a few days before embarking: ‘The riots prove nothing but the dispositions of a few thieves and ruffians to make the question of abolition a pretext for disorder that they may with impunity plunder of their property a few citizens and at the same time gratify their malicious prejudice against the colored population.’⁸⁸

The Southern press expressed a widespread sentiment about Thompson before US auditors had heard a word from his mouth: ‘The impudence, ignorance, and recklessness of such characters, deserve a severe and summary rebuke.’⁸⁹ After Thompson’s arrival in New York on 20 September 1834, a gathering of nearly 100 ‘gentlemen’ successfully urged their lodging-keeper to turn him out, along with his wife and baby daughters, who had accompanied him on the trip.

Whereas within Britain abolitionists and proslavery advocates met on the debate floor, engaged in pamphlet wars, or wrestled with one another in the press, US citizens’ form of expressing dissent over slavery was not so polite. Fearing that any abolitionist advocacy would foment the enslaved to rebel, Southerners effectively intimidated Northerners into complicity. Journalists and speakers were special targets, and though violence ranged from lynchings to destruction of presses to intimidation, the most brutal and the only fatal incidents occurred in the slave states. In the North, mobs widely brought about the disruption of abolitionist meetings – escalating from unrestrained vocalisations and brute force to persecution and kidnapping – and George Thompson became an obtrusive pretext for these activities, whether they were chained as performance prequels, coincident acts, or postscripts of his meetings. An early incident, in November 1834, was mild in retrospect: Thompson’s address to a meeting of women ‘was disturbed by groans, hisses, and other noises, throwing candles, &c’.⁹⁰ Over the course of fourteen months he was often hidden by his colleagues, and even ran for his life, but when he could attend meetings neither disruptions nor direct intimidation kept him from striking at the heart of republican identity, citing both the US Constitution and the Christian Bible as contrary to the US slave system.⁹¹ This foreign advocacy by a ‘Wandering Insurrectionist’ and ‘vagabond’ was considered a grievous affront, and mobbings as well as newspaper invectives intensified.⁹² While abolitionists regarded Thompson’s delivery at meetings as ‘glorious’ and heaven-sent,⁹³ the proslavery mobbers sought to ‘drive [out] that audacious foreigner … who is grossly abusing the rights of hospitality, to throw our country into confusion’.⁹⁴

Thompson was a flint against which nativist mobs violently struck. He toured extensively throughout the northeastern states; lectured at and addressed over 130 meetings, soirées, and conventions; and networked with other abolitionists.⁹⁵ Even so, he was sometimes persuaded to remain silent. For example, in September 1835 he delivered three successful lectures in Plymouth, Massachusetts, and was announced for Concord. During the afternoon, ‘runners were dispatched into the back parts of the town, to scour the habitations of the depraved and desperate, and stir them up to the work of outrage’. Knowing this, Thompson’s sponsors cancelled the lecture, but ‘excited by RUM and ready to do the deeds their more respectable employers were ashamed to do’, mobbers crowded into the village and stoned a group of abolitionists on their way to the courthouse. Thompson was not present, yet the mob persisted ‘with drums beating and clamorous shouts’, degrading ‘the honor of the town by yells and bonfires and the firing of cannon’.⁹⁶ In Lynn, a rather inept mob of drunken ‘noisy and turbulent boys’ paraded in the vicinity of the lecture hall and cried out ‘fire’, which produced only a brief alarm. As the meeting’s closing prayers were uttered the mob rushed in, throwing eggs, even though many of the intruders were so drunk they hardly knew where they were.⁹⁷ A similar mob of 150 gathered in Abingdon in the same month, and ‘At the close … as Mr. Thompson was retiring from the meeting, they cried out, “Lynch him!” “out with him!” “Hustle him out!” “Down with him!” &c. &c. and followed after him like a troop of hungry wolves – but he escaped without injury, although he was struck by a stone upon the side of his face.’⁹⁸ In Boston, a mob disrupting a women’s anti-slavery meeting pretended to attack Thompson (who was elsewhere), seized William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79, his greatest US ally), and prepared to tar and feather him in Thompson’s stead, while other mobs simultaneously attacked abolitionists Henry B. Stanton (1805–87) in Newport, Connecticut, and Samuel J. May (1797–1871) in Montpelier, Vermont.⁹⁹

Garrison reflected to his wife that if Thompson ‘were a murderer, or a parricide, he could not be treated more shamefully than he has been. To think of his being in danger of assassination, even in broad daylight – nay, even in the streets of Boston! Shame – infamy upon the city!’¹⁰⁰ Indeed, one morning Garrison and his houseguest Thompson awoke to find that a pair of gallows had been erected across the street, each rigged with a halter and the inscription ‘By order of Judge Lynch’ sported on the crossbar.¹⁰¹ It was inconceivable that Thompson would go to the South; in Charleston $20,000 was offered for his abduction.¹⁰² The violence in New England was neither as unchecked nor as deadly as in the slave states, but in an atmosphere where a North Carolina congressman’s gift of a rope to Arthur Tappan (1786–1865) was considered hilarious – and where two Cincinnati newspapers openly recommended that the public lynch Tappan – abolitionists everywhere needed to be vigilant and even devious.¹⁰³

Thompson stayed in the United States for over a year, but eventually he was on the run more than he was in halls addressing crowds. An October 1835 poster from Salem, Massachusetts, decrying Thompson as a fanatical ‘foreign pest’ expresses the openness of consensus about what Thompson represented (Figure 1.3). Less than two months later, the re-elected President Andrew Jackson ‘applauded the “strong and impressive” response of Northerners “against … emissaries from foreign parts who have dared to interfere in this matter”’ of slavery.¹⁰⁴

Figure 1.3 George Thompson encountered this 1835 poster during his first tour of the United States and affixed it in his scrapbook.

Thompson Extract Books, LC 3449.S43. Library of Congress.

From such a perspective, Thompson was a foreigner who had no right to speak, and to oppose him was to assert democracy and preserve the republic. By fall 1835, mobbings of abolitionists proved that Northerners were prepared to offer more than verbal assurance that they sided with the South on abolition.¹⁰⁵ Thompson was characterised in the Northern press as committing crimes against the nation, ‘going about from place to place, denouncing the constitution of the United States, as at war with the rights of nature and the laws of God, thus striking at the roots of all our social relations’.¹⁰⁶ Preservation of pervasive racism and racist institutions was at the core of the foment, as one newspaper stated: ‘[we] are not disposed to yield the rights of American citizens to an army of Jim Crows and their white associates’.¹⁰⁷ Even opponents who would not endorse violence felt they could counter Thompson with his own weapon (rhetoric) in his trademark forum (the meeting). One wrote: ‘We can make this apostle of a Black Crusade against the White population, feel and understand, that however he may gather around him crowds of foolish men and silly women, the voice of New England can speak in tones which will rival the deepest peals of thunder, in total repudiation of the slightest sympathy with his pernicious principles and worse than pernicious practice.’¹⁰⁸ Thompson’s opponents felt that the stakes were as high as they could be.¹⁰⁹

Thompson’s view that as a Christian he must speak against human bondage, and that as a Briton he could give credence to US abolitionists’ cause through international ties, was flatly denied by mobbers, who took the position that all politics are national. By mobbing abolitionists, including Thompson, they sought to bring all US citizens, especially Northerners, into compliance. They were substantially successful in doing this for another three decades. From a performance perspective, what is also evident is that mobbings made ideology and social processes evident through cultural form: misrule cohered across significant variants (in action and pretext) to strengthen the social movement that preserved slavery even while its opponents continued to organise meetings and conventions to abolish it.

Reflecting on the ‘mobocracy’, Thompson framed the virulence and persistence of the opposition as showing how far his side had progressed in influencing the national scene and advancing the cause of abolition. He wrote to Garrison: ‘yesterday the [US] abolitionists were esteemed few, mean, silly, and contemptible’, but ‘now they are of sufficient importance to arouse and fix the attention of the entire country, and earth and hell are ransacked for weapons and recruits, with which to fight the ignorant, imbecile, superannuated and besotted believers in the doctrines of immediate emancipation [such as himself]. This is a good sign’.¹¹⁰ Garrison published this letter in his newspaper, and no wonder: it offered encouragement to abolitionists by showing how their anti-slavery meetings were chained to the nationwide foment of mobbing. In the United States, mobbing was a violent reaction to mediated critique (especially speeches and newspapers), not so much protesting liberal resistance but persistently, performatively, and forcefully intimidating opponents in forms ranging from charivari and rioting to arson and lynching. These contra-performances were not part of a counter-movement, but rather a belligerent assertion of the status quo.

Setting aside the circumstances of personal peril, Thompson deployed his rhetorical skill to name the silver lining to his travails. Even so, he brought his journey to a premature end. On 8 November 1835, his friends put him in a covered carriage and took him to a New York quay. He slunk out of port in a rowing boat and boarded a ship owned by Henry G. Chapman (1804–42, husband of abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman, 1806–85), bound for St John, New Brunswick, where he caught a British ship to Liverpool.¹¹¹ He dared not make the crossing on a US vessel. Nevertheless, abolitionism not only registered but grew: by the end of 1834 auxiliary anti-slavery societies had more than tripled in the North, even though members and their children were denied trade and turned away from schools, colleges, pulpits, and the bar.¹¹² Progressive advocacy and reactionary performances were, for the time being, chained.

This account of the formal characteristics and historicist interpretation of meetings and mobbings demonstrates that both forms have multiple variants yet each coheres as an epistemology with political impact.¹¹³ Their logics were opposed rhetorically though both swelled their respective political movements performatively in consequential and durable ways, citationally referencing each other’s actions; and both movements’ advocacy was amplified historically by coverage in the press. Both performances and counter-performances were integral to political life and the elicitation of sympathies, and as chained events they both constituted a meaningful pattern within democracy. Knowledge economies – on which meetings were predicated – were performance opportunities for addressing and including the nation and its people. Although mobbings collided rhetorically they enmeshed with meetings performatively: as with an episodic play their locations and component parts formed a more complete impression of related episodes and opposed perspectives.

In historiography, meetings and mobbings reveal complex mappings of the challenges facing US abolitionists and their transatlantic allies. These forms were bound to and yet also repelled by each other’s ideology. Not to diminish the danger experienced by the targets of some mobbings, this reveals instances of the micropolitics of reception.

In Judgement at Meetings

Whereas Thompson’s generation laboured to transform Britain’s political landscape into a broad-based liberal democracy by expanding the male franchise and linking emancipation to implementation of Christian ethics at home and abroad, the next generation focused on a set of issues aimed to make the British Empire into a more economically rational system, urging a broad agenda of liberal reforms. Both sought to shift what society deemed honourable.¹¹⁴ Both experienced the consciousness that Christina Sharpe characterises as being ‘in the wake’ of ‘Black exclusion from social, political, and cultural belonging’ manifest as denial of humanity.¹¹⁵ Thompson’s son-in-law Frederick William Chesson (1833–88) carried on the work of the elder generation while also advancing the agenda of the next, utilising his own generation’s tactics (Figure 1.4). Starting in the early 1850s, Chesson organised thousands of large and small meetings, lobbied the Foreign Office on countless cases of human trafficking, and wrote about these issues for the press. Whereas Thompson was twice involved in journalism as a proprietor and occasionally as an author, Chesson worked for one of Thompson’s ventures – the weekly Empire (1855–56) – and there found his footing. For the remainder of his life journalism was the employment that enabled him to engage so broadly in his avocations.

Figure 1.4 Frederick Chesson, Portraits of US Abolitionists, 81.137, Massachusetts Historical Society, 81.

The eldest child and only son of a bootmaker who became a partner in an oil distillery, Frederick Chesson grew up in Gillingham, Kent. His father was killed in a manufacturing accident, and at the age of thirteen Frederick was sent to earn his living in a London office.¹¹⁶ Three years later, in 1849, his mother remarried and the family relocated to Massachusetts.¹¹⁷ Chesson later referred to this as ‘a period of revolution, when the forces of freedom and slavery were being organised for the final struggle. It was really the beginning of the end of slavery, although it seemed, at the moment, that slavery was established on a throne that was likely to endure for ever’. He was in the United States when the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 came into effect, and attended a meeting with 3,000 Black protestors.¹¹⁸ Chesson witnessed a man being turned over to those who hunted him, and recalled a quarter century later:

Nothing else is recorded about the ensuing years, until Chesson began a diary in June 1854, at age twenty-one. By this point he was enmeshed in George Thompson’s networks, working in Manchester as secretary for the Peace Conference Committee (opposing the Crimean War), participating in the North of England Anti-Slavery Society and India Reform League, and writing freelance articles for the Nonconformist.¹²⁰ Almost certainly, Chesson met Thompson in the United States in 1850–1, when the orator was on his second US tour. In any case, they became sufficiently well acquainted that while in Manchester Chesson pined for his ‘dear girl’ – Thompson’s second daughter, Amelia Ann Everard Thompson (1833–1902), then residing in London – whom he married in May 1855.

While in his early twenties, Chesson actively pursued self-improvement through reading as well as by attending a wide variety of lectures and political meetings. By doing so he was, in many ways, the consummate liberal subject, for he valued and sought to become the kind of person that John Stuart Mill (1806–73) advocated for in On Liberty (1859): someone who would ‘use observation to see, reasoning and judgement to foresee, activity to gather materials for discussion, discrimination to decide, and when he has decided, firmness and self-control to hold to his deliberate decision’. Mill argued that to the extent that individuals cultivate themselves, life is enriched, diversified, and animated for all people. And just as all people – across classes, regions, and occupations – seek to improve themselves, ‘politicians increasingly know they cannot resist popular will’, for even as people ‘now read the same things, listen to the same things, see the same things, go to the same places, have their hopes and fears directed to the same objects, have the same rights and liberties, and the same means of asserting them’ they also seek differentiation from one another.¹²¹ Most of what can be understood of Chesson’s Bildung comes from his diary, where he describes reading historic speeches and appraising live addresses to test the resilience of arguments.¹²²

Chesson’s diaries show that in pursuit of self-improvement, he identified a sensorium of things seen, heard, and apprehended across the performance spectrum, explicitly engaged visual, auditory, gestural, proxemic, and aesthetic criteria, practised notating mises-en-scène, and utilised his daily diary-writing practice as aide-mémoire. Pragmatically, it helped him remember what he wrote for publication so he could ensure freelance payments; developmentally, it helped him find his unique direction amid a myriad of possibilities. For example, in September 1856 he noted purchasing an edition of Cowper’s poems and throughout 1865 he read Cowper’s letters and Robert Southey’s biography of the poet.¹²³ He was interested in events that attracted large audiences, perhaps because they held the greatest capacity to influence thought yet also the greatest danger to homogenise thinkers. He was also interested in how, at small meetings, dinners, and parties, notable people conducted themselves, crafted an anecdote, and revealed their inner lives, and then what other people did in reaction. A few examples suffice to show how the parameters and criteria of his inquiry were clear from the outset yet also how he became a more astute – and concise – critic over time. This is consonant with what Jacques Rancière calls an ‘emplotment of temporality’: an individual seeks and finds aesthetic self-education, gives this descriptive language, and then frames ‘a new collective ethos’ whereby ‘art and life can exchange their properties’, utilising their ‘polemical configuration of the common world’.¹²⁴ Bridging the thought of Mill and Rancière, Chesson exemplifies modernity and modern subjecthood-in-the-making, a proto-example of what Rosi Braidotti identifies in early twenty-first-century Europe as change, actualisation, and flux: a nomadic ‘experiment in becoming’ that extends creatively toward forms of public service equally connected to art and politics (though with unequal ethical impact).¹²⁵

The first performance mentioned in Chesson’s diaries took place in Manchester in 1854, while he worked for the North of England Anti-Slavery Society:

In Romantic poetics, according to Rancière, the artist ‘becomes a kind of symptomatologist, delving into the dark underside or the unconscious of a society to decipher the messages engraved in the very flesh of ordinary things … making society conscious of its own secrets, by leaving the noisy stage of political claims and doctrines and delving to the depths of the social, to disclose the enigmas and fantasies hidden in the intimate realities of everyday life’. This, surely, is part of the appeal of great stories, especially when their equally great passions are acted out. Rancière argues that in the paradigm of art becoming life, ‘both industrial production and artistic creation are committed to doing something on top of what they do – to creating not only objects but a sensorium, a new partition of the perceptible’.¹²⁷ For Chesson, the sensorium includes Brooke’s magnificent costumes, his flawed voice, and his natural presentation of extreme emotions. Even so, at this early point, Chesson struggled to find evocative language to convey his judgement: Brooke is ‘ably supported’, ‘his acting is good’, and his passions – defined with a negative – ‘did not appear to me to rise into rant’. Despite these merits, and the obvious clamour to see Brooke act, Chesson concludes ‘I am still unable to tell how it is that he has won so high a position’. Chesson consistently sought to correlate performers’ skill – and their singularity – to their reputation, whether he examined a great actor such as Brooke, a great political orator such as Lord Brougham, or a fashionable preacher such as Charles Spurgeon (1834–92). At this early date, in 1854, he could not reconcile his observations to the performer’s reputation, nor could he very precisely differentiate why this was so.

A few months later, still only twenty-one, Chesson ventured out to hear George Holyoake (1817–1906) give an account of his 1842 trial and imprisonment for atheism. Chesson was curious about Holyoake’s advocacy of secularism, yet it was not just the content of the lecture that captured his attention. The diary states that Holyoake

In this commentary about Holyoake’s looks, vocalisation, lexicon, reasoning, and ability to handle his audience, Chesson stresses the categories laid out in Holyoake’s own much-reprinted 1849 treatise Public Speaking and Debate, a didactic and anecdotal handbook that guides novices through Aristotle and Quintilian’s basics of rhetoric, applied to the contemporaneous exigencies of platform, pulpit, juridical, and parliamentary oratory. The other great instructional text for British and US orators of this period – whether or not (like Thompson and Chesson) they lacked the advantage of university education – is Hugh Blair’s 1785 treatise Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, assembled from addresses he gave at the University of Edinburgh over the previous quarter century. Blair stipulates three kinds of eloquence (to please, instruct and convince, and interest and advocate) and the types of speech that typically exemplify them, in ascending order of importance and sophistication (addresses to great men by great men, the bar, and the pulpit).¹²⁹ Chesson embraced them all as an avid listener.

In 1862, a large and fashionable gathering of Eton College alumni assembled to view a silver horde worth £2,200 and to hear testimonials to the recipient, Shakespearean actor Charles Kean (1811–68).¹³⁰ The Duke of Newcastle (1811–64, secretary of state for the Colonies in Lord Palmerston’s Liberal government, who had presided at a celebration of Kean a couple of years before) was meant to present the gift but was called away to Windsor by the queen. William Ewart Gladstone (1809–98), a schoolmate of Kean’s, filled in for him at short notice. At the time, Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer and firm ally to most liberal and radical causes; the nation’s preeminent parliamentarian, he was considered worth listening to even when debating the budget.¹³¹ Charles Kean – then the most respected actor on the British stage – received the silver engraved with Shakespearean scenes as a token of his schoolmates’, friends’, fellow actors’, and public’s esteem (Figure 1.5).

Figure 1.5 Presentation of testimonial plate to Charles Kean at St James’s Hall, London.

Illustrated London News, 29 March 1862, 319.

At this event, Chesson found an occasion to hear the most lauded of all living orators deliver an address (not a political speech but an encomium), then hear the British stage’s most-celebrated actor deliver a speech (not a dramatic monologue but one of his own composition addressed from the oratorical platform). It was a great occasion at which to critique and to learn.¹³² At this point, in 1862, Chesson had been practising this kind of evaluation in his diary for nearly a decade and was able to concisely describe the two orators’ performances and their effectiveness as rhetoricians, linking his praise to the implicit commendation from the ‘very numerous & brilliant assembly’ gathered for the occasion. Chesson wrote two concise comments about the testimonials in his diary. The first is this: ‘Mr. Gladstone … made a very graceful & appropriate speech in which he remarked on the fact that the drama was interwoven with the history of every country & every age, & did justice to Kean’s efforts to elevate the stage.’¹³³ What Chesson refers to as ‘graceful and appropriate’ in Gladstone’s speech, the Era’s correspondent called ‘one of the brightest pages in the history of modern Drama’. Chesson caught the essence of individuated performance in a phrase that both characterised and evaluated the moment without pompous amplification. The Era, by contrast, deployed the broad stroke of cliché.¹³⁴ Gladstone endorsed Kean’s efforts to elevate the stage by producing the work of the national poet, but it was not just Gladstone’s gracious words that impressed. The emotional display that these words elicited from Kean and the assembled audience was just as notable.

Upon rising to respond, Kean was so overcome that he needed several moments before he could master his mingled emotions of pride and gratitude. Chesson simply observed in his diary: ‘Charles Kean’s speech in reply was very happily expressed, poetical without grotesqueness of imagery.’¹³⁵ According to the Era, he succeeded through his performance of modesty amidst the recapitulation of his intentions. Kean stated:

Here, the Era notes, there was ‘Great cheering’. The newspapers document how the audience first cheered themselves (a ‘brilliant and distinguished company’); then Shakespeare, a poet who, ironically, had not yet made it onto Eton’s curriculum; and ultimately the public’s capacity to understand Shakespeare through Kean, marking these productions as the supreme mid-Victorian interpretations. Kean then gave special notice of his boyhood friends, the sight of whom in the auditory recalled him to ‘those loved fields, “Where once my careless childhood strayed, / A stranger yet to pain”’, quoting Thomas Gray.¹³⁷ The Era notes: ‘Here Mr. Kean was much overcome, but, after giving vent to his tears, his manly spirit soon recovered itself, while the applause and cheering lasted some minutes.’¹³⁸ Transitioning abruptly to what Blair calls ‘the pathetic part’ (the penultimate section of a speech), Kean credited his wife, Ellen Kean (née Tree, 1805–80), with whom he toiled side by side, a flourish that, in his review for the Star, Chesson annotates with ‘Loud cheers’ and the Era punctuates with ‘Great applause, during which every eye was turned to the gallery, where Mrs. Kean was seated, who evidently experienced great difficulty to restrain her feelings.’¹³⁹ Finally, in a succinct peroration, Kean paraphrased from Twelfth Night (III:3),

Whereupon ‘immense applause continued for some time, and as Mr Kean retired three cheers were given for him, and then for Mrs Kean, the band playing Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March”’.¹⁴⁰

Oratory was Gladstone’s natural element, just as emotional dramaturgy – acting allied with scenography to form a mise-en-scène – was Kean’s.¹⁴¹ For Chesson, Gladstone and Kean succeeded in individuating themselves through language that reflected their respective stations in life, despite this extra-professional setting: Gladstone as a statesman and Kean as a producer of Shakespeare. They came across as neither eccentric nor common, but calibrated to their stations. Gladstone’s cultural ranking is shown to be appropriately calibrated to the public’s esteem for Kean, just as Kean’s gracious servitude to Shakespeare is rewarded proportionately by the expensive and beautiful silver.

Through constant practise over the years, Chesson learned to be succinct when he noted the dissonance between occasion, location, text, and performance. For example, he often dropped in on churches and commented upon the sermons. On holiday in Kent in 1863, he visited the garrison church within Dover Castle (St Mary in Castro), a Saxon structure whose thorough refurbishment was completed the previous year. On this occasion, he wrote in his diary: ‘We went to the Gothic Church (near the heights) [re]built by [George] Gilbert Scott [1839–97]. The clergyman read the service very indifferently and preached a sermon on temptation that was scarcely removed from commonplace.’¹⁴² To be ‘commonplace’ was absolute anathema. It is an obsolete term for a sermon or discourse yet also, in contemporaneous parlance, something trite. Chesson’s point is that to expend the opportunity of a sermon on the trivial is to squander the opportunity to persuade the laity. To Chesson, a commonplace sermon on temptation was a dissonance between content and manner, substance and occasion. It was a performance faux pas, neither showing a suitable commitment to the subject nor aiding the auditors’ moral improvement.

In his work on early modern Mexican spectacles, Leo Cabranes-Grant notes that performances are ‘engines of emergence (sites for new positions, bodies, and voices) and deconstructive gestures’.¹⁴³ In other words, performances enable new constructs to emerge while also evincing the lag, or counter-pulls, within cultures; in the reception of art, the senses (perception) and sense (intelligence) confronting this lag fulfil Rancière’s definition of the ‘new dramaturgy of the intelligible’.¹⁴⁴ Together, therefore, performance and philosophy not only verify the known – such as ‘tensions still at work within cultures’ – but also expand on the known by encouraging intellectual, affective, and sensory perceptions conducive to new insights.¹⁴⁵ For example, in 1857, when Frederick and Amelia Chesson went for the first time to hear Charles Spurgeon, the Baptist preacher who had built a huge reputation since he burst upon London in 1853, they expected a lot. England spawned preaching stars from the mid-eighteenth-century, but until the 1850s there was no one like Charles Spurgeon. He became a Baptist pastor at the age of eighteen, and at a succession of venues his auditors grew to over 23,500 people at a time (Figure 1.6).¹⁴⁶ Everyone agreed that ‘his voice and elocution … are wonderful’, ‘very flexible and various’; but as George Eliot put it, his doctrine was a ‘libel … the most superficial grocer’s-back-parlor view of Calvinistic Christianity; and I was shocked to find how low the mental pitch of our society must be, judged by [the] standard of this man’s celebrity’.¹⁴⁷

Figure 1.6 Charles Spurgeon preaching at Surrey Music Hall, Kennington

(Spurgeon, Sermons Preached and Revised, frontispiece, 1859), University of Virginia Library.

When Frederick Chesson first heard Spurgeon he was ‘sermon-tasting’: exposing himself to a spectrum of theology, trying out local notables, and judging the celebrated.¹⁴⁸ Spurgeon’s manner made a positive impression on Chesson, as did his appearance: ‘the boldness of his look conveyed the idea of natural audacity’. He gave ‘exceedingly lucid, intelligent, and sometimes even eloquent’ commentary on the 111th Psalm, and then

Hugh Blair wrote that a preacher’s purpose is not to inform auditors, for they have invariably heard the message before, but rather to ‘make them better’ people by giving ‘clear views and persuasive impressions of a religious truth’.¹⁵⁰ To accomplish this, Spurgeon coupled a seemingly improvised style with gravity and warmth, suited to the homiletic form. However, according to Chesson, his pleasing manner was countermanded by an unyielding perspective on predestination for ‘the elect’, who ‘might commit any sin, no matter what its magnitude, but having been fore-ordained they must be saved. Great comfort this to the sinner who believes himself to be predestined to eternal life; and poor inducement to the unfortunate reprobate to endeavour to lead a purer, and better life’.¹⁵¹ For an anti-slavery advocate such as Chesson, Spurgeon’s view was untenable: it gave no moral impetus for slaveholders to reform, no spiritual compass or social conscience. For Chesson, like Mill, how one chose to exercise free will was a crucial tenet of liberal subjecthood.¹⁵² Neither Chesson nor Mill relied on religion to induce ethical action – Mill was notoriously agnostic, and Chesson, though raised a Methodist, did not join a congregation until 1864 – but the preacher’s role was to guide those whose beliefs made them susceptible to the theistic checks.¹⁵³ In this first encounter with Spurgeon, Chesson approved of the performance but not the message.

Spurgeon’s reputation grew steadily, as did the numbers of his followers and the size of the curious throngs who attended sermons to see for themselves what constituted the Baptist superstar’s appeal. Chesson set out numerous times to attend, and was sometimes turned away from overflowing halls. As his reputation grew, Spurgeon graduated from the church at Bromley-by-Bow to Exeter Hall (3,000 seats, the chief and largest venue for liberal political gatherings, synonymous with anti-slavery agitation in London), Surrey Music Hall (10,000 seats), and finally the Crystal Palace in Sydenham (where up to 15,000 would gather to hear his addresses). Four years after his first encounter, Chesson heard Spurgeon at the Metropolitan Tabernacle (5,500 seats).¹⁵⁴

Spurgeon’s antinomianism was not calculated to please an anti-slavery activist, for he argued that eventually, in judgement as in earthly governance, rebellion, revelry, mirth, and ungodliness will receive their dire rewards. As a Garrisonian abolitionist, Chesson worked against exactly this sort of idea: US clergy, for example, who owned enslaved people – or even countenanced slaveholding among parishioners – were a constant sore point between British and US churches. The time until punishment on the Day of Destruction was longer than Garrisonians (including Chesson and Thompson) were prepared to wait. They advocated righteous living in the here and now – doing unto others as they would have done unto them – as the Christian’s path.¹⁵⁶ In concert with Mill, with whom he collaborated on several campaigns, Chesson sought to put liberal culture on a moral foundation, and individual autonomy was a central tenet.¹⁵⁷ While they often found common cause with evangelicals, Chesson’s political arguments were invariably rooted in secular thought.

Chesson’s attention was not always turned to the highbrow or ennobling manifestations of performance. In October 1858, he and his father-in-law took the formerly enslaved John S. Jacobs, a friend of the family and brother of Harriet Jacobs (1813?–97),¹⁵⁸ to London’s infamous Judge and Jury Club, across the street from Exeter Hall.¹⁵⁹ It was what one did with male guests from out of town. By 1858 the Judge and Jury Club had ‘long been a favourite resort of country cousins, who, whilst imbibing the good things from the Chief Baron’s cellar, laugh heartily at his racy and never-failing humour from the bench’.¹⁶⁰ The genial landlord of the Garrick’s Head Hotel, ‘Baron’ Renton Nicholson (1809–61), decked out in silk and long peruke, ruled on cases that were tried by actors, in imitation of famous barristers, who brought forth the ‘protean witness’ H. G. Brooks, cross-dressed when necessary.¹⁶¹ According to Joseph S. Meisel, ‘Nicholson’s own legal training consisted of several trials for insolvency and a few turns in jail’, yet his mock courtroom entertainment lasted throughout the 1840s and 1850s.¹⁶² J. Ewing Richie proclaimed, bluntly: ‘I do not believe the audience could have stood this if it had not been for the drink …. This side [of] Pandemonium there is nothing more debasing or debased.’¹⁶³ Notwithstanding what Chesson acknowledged as ‘the foulest obscenities’, he still admired the defence lawyer’s ‘really eloquent and pathetic vindication of the prostitute class’ and Nicholson’s ‘fine elocutionary performance’ in summing up. This nocturnal resort of masculine revelry thus hosted ad hoc performances of mock debate where standards of elocution were as exacting – and as catholic – as anywhere that Chesson ventured.

Nicholson’s court capitalised on the attention that courtroom argumentation had garnered in England after an 1854 law created more opportunities for counsel to give opening and closing speeches in jury trials, heightening the sense of agonistic drama.¹⁶⁴ From 1857, when the Matrimonial Causes Act made divorce more widely available, the Divorce Court assumed this jurisdiction from the ecclesiastical court and was invariably packed with spectators.¹⁶⁵ Nicholson’s parody meta-juridically replicated the way that barristers played off their tripartite audience of judge, jury, and gallery: Nicholson was the judge, some of the audience were the jury, and others were more conventionally positioned as spectators. Whereas the consequentiality of an Old Bailey trial could mean life or death, the topics chosen for Nicholson’s court – such as re-enactments of scandalous breach of promise or divorce cases, or, on the evening that Chesson attended, ‘The Great Social Evil’ (whether prostitution should be illegal) – skirted the boundaries of taste by utilising flamboyant rhetoric within the discipline of courtroom protocol.¹⁶⁶ The open secret of prostitution reached the heart of the cultural paradox so that even country bumpkins – or, in the case of Chesson’s party, a grand seigneur of the abolitionist movement, an emancipated formerly enslaved person seasoned by experience on the abolitionist lecture circuit and the merchant marine, and a man of twenty-five who aspired to make a mark on public affairs – were entertained by what Rancière points to as something that makes ‘society conscious of its own secrets, by … delving to the depths of the social, to disclose the enigmas and fantasies hidden in the intimate realities of everyday life’.¹⁶⁷ They were also edified by the enactors’ technique. Opposing counsel at Nicholson’s could utilise markedly contrasting styles, one reliant on facts and the other appealing to the emotions, but as Thompson’s experience as a platform speaker showed, this would not be a problem for audiences.

Chesson was interested in what made a speaker celebrated, whatever the person’s path in life. In March 1863, at a ‘great meeting of the Trades Unions at St. James’s hall’ in support of the Union side of the American Civil War, he judged the crowded meeting ‘one of the most effective I ever attended’, with several speeches by working men including Messrs Howell (bricklayer), Mantz (compositor), Cremer and Petheridge (joiners), Connolly (mason), Heap (engineer), Tracey (painter), and Butler (tinplate worker) being ‘admirable for their manner and their matter. Better expositions of the question I never heard, and the audience, which included such men as John Stuart Mill, Professor Goldwin Smith [1823–1910, Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford] and Mr Stansfield [1820–98, radical MP for Halifax], was delighted’. All were there by ticket, the hall was crammed in every part, and women (including Amelia Chesson) also attended.¹⁶⁸ Whereas the seasoned MP John Bright (1811–89) appealed to economic arguments, the shoemaker and secretary of the London Trades Council George Odger (1813–77), in seconding the first resolution, appealed to his listeners’ sense of justice as family men:

The juxtaposition of the Quaker John Bright – a self-taught Radical, in and out of Parliament since 1843, at this time fifty-two years old and still one of the most acclaimed orators of his generation – with the working-class men is sanguine. To Chesson, ‘manner and matter’ are the hallmarks of a speaker, especially in a gathering such as this, where extempore skills were warranted and the community was so illustrious.

Likewise, in November 1854, Chesson critiqued a lecture on ‘America in relation to Christianity’ by the African American rhetoric scholar Professor William G. Allen (1820–88) because he ‘evidently does not understand extemporaneous speaking’.¹⁷⁰ The ability to give a peroration flowingly, and with the conviction that comes from speaking one’s thoughts (not merely one’s text) was highly valued: a peroration was the opportunity not only to sum up the case but also to appeal to auditors’ emotions. But it was not just in classical rhetoric that Chesson sought his models. At a presentation by William Howard Russell (1820–1907), the Crimean War correspondent who reported from the front and was published in the Times with record speed (thanks to overland telegraphy), Chesson noted, ‘Russell has practiced conversation with great advantage’. Russell’s poise before Sir George de Lacy Evans (1787–1870) – a general present at Crimea who had commenced his venerable career in campaigns against Napoleon – served him well in his description of the Battle of Balaklava, a blot on the British consciousness for the manifest incompetence of the Army.¹⁷¹

Well into his career, Chesson demonstrated his full maturity of observation, evaluation, and expression in a description of a House of Commons debate. On 23 February 1866, Members were set to vote on two compelling bills. The sovereign commanded that Parliament grant annuities to Princess Helena (1846–1923, third daughter to the queen) and Prince Alfred (1844–1900, second son to the queen), and additionally Members were to vote on the creation of a national memorial to the late Lord Palmerston (1784–1865, prime minister in the late 1850s) in Westminster Abbey. This caused ‘a great muster of all parties’. Chesson’s report in the Sheffield and Rotherham Independent notes: ‘Every seat was filled; every vacant place was occupied; members clustered round the door; members sat upon the raised steps of the floor between the rows of benches; members squatted on the soft cushions of the galleries. The Ministerial bench was packed with old ministers as well as new …. [Meanwhile] the ladies, whose eyes glistened through the gilded lattices behind which they are ungallantly compelled to sit’, gathered in the upper reaches of the chamber. Strikingly, the report relays almost none of the speakers’ words, emphasising instead their manner and impact. Gladstone, Chancellor of the Exchequer, called a motion on the question of royal annuities. From the other side of the House, Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81) seconded Gladstone’s motion ‘in a sepulchral voice, and with an inanimate manner’. Just as the question was to be put for a vote, Edward Playdell-Bouverie (1818–99) nit-picked from the back ministerial benches over an ambiguity in Gladstone’s speech, and insisted that the House should ‘settle the matter once for all’ of whether the prince was to receive ‘the pension for life; or provide for its extinction when, in the course of nature … [he] was elevated to the Dukedom of Saxe-Coburg Gotha’. Others then tried to speak but were inaudible in the ensuing din.¹⁷²

The vote was called, ‘the “Ayes” had it’, and the House turned to the second matter. Again, Gladstone took the lead, and Chesson’s report accounted for his performance and how it reflected the man whom he honoured and the impact on the chamber.

Disraeli rose amidst loud cheers, yet ‘he made no attempt to cope with his rival or to share his laurels – still less to bear away the palm. His words were few, his manner listless, his voice feeble and hesitating’. This was not the Disraeli who had recently bestowed ‘splendid and unequalled panegyrics’ on Richard Cobden (1804–65) or Abraham Lincoln (1809–65). ‘The fire was gone; there only remained its smouldering embers.’ The politically unpredictable Alexander Beresford Hope (1820–87), a vocal critic of architecture, followed: ‘he gesticulated and raved and ranted. As he rolled about like a three-decker [ship] in a storm, one wondered what it was all about’. At last he issued aesthetic objections to ‘the sculptured monstrosities’ of other politicians that filled Westminster Abbey. Again, the vote was called, and as soon as this business was concluded and the topic turned to a new Constitution for Jamaica, ‘the House at once thinned, and the benches became half empty’. A Scottish Member delivered a speech with an accent so thick no English person could understand him, and the matter rested. Chesson’s account draws a picture of the assembly, renders the sounds and gestures of the chief speakers of both government and opposition, and enlivens descriptions of each episode with agonistic precision. This article shows his mastery of performative critique in full measure.¹⁷³

A final example of Chesson as evaluator is drawn from the legitimate stage. In 1863, he and Amelia attended the Haymarket Theatre to see a new production, Silken Fetters, adapted by Leicester Buckingham (1825–67) from Une Chaîne, a piece by Eugène Scribe (1791–1861) seen in Paris twenty years earlier.¹⁷⁴ Chesson judged it

Chesson’s comments on Charles James Mathews (1803–78) are perfunctory, but he had rendered his judgement on this actor twice before.¹⁷⁶ In 1863 the attention was on the rest of the company. The anecdote about Mrs Mathews correcting the royal party is particularly interesting. A good orator knows how to compel the attention of their audience, not just by the force of personality or powerful ideas but also by the full arsenal of rhetorical devices, including veiled sarcasm. Chesson was consistently interested in audience behaviour, and here is a noteworthy instance of an actress offering a successful check on rudeness. The fact that these spectators were in the royal box is an important and economical turn in the story. They are not necessarily royalty, possibly guests of royalty, but more likely just playgoers with deep pockets, perhaps thoughtless and conspicuous in proportion. This fact makes Mrs Mathews’ check on their behaviour a significant intervention whereby she asserted and was ceded her power.

Perceptible Dramaturgies

The idea that revolutions arose from aesthetic realisations became explicit during the 1920s; however, this has a longer history of experimentation in socialist and, before that, liberal thought. Frederick Chesson exemplifies this experimentation, for his attention to art and rhetoric contributed to his political education and acumen. While this book diligently surfaces a great deal of Chesson’s writing to corroborate this claim, Chesson is also a stand-in for how reception worked more broadly during his lifetime. Politics are served by better understandings of the mimetic and logistical challenges of performance (utilising rhetorical effects of the voice, body, and affect; commanding one’s material; and managing spectatorial response). In Chesson’s ‘experiment in becoming’, considerations of performance preoccupy him, personally and politically, across domestic, social, political, and artistic realms.¹⁷⁷ Thus, sensory experience leads to aesthetic awareness and political astuteness when the politics of aesthetics – a meta-politics – finds ways of ‘proposing to politics rearrangements of its space, reconfiguring art as a political issue or asserting itself as true politics’.¹⁷⁸ Art does not exile Chesson from his chosen forms of activism but helps him do activism.¹⁷⁹

The space (geographic site) and place (identificatory meanings of space) for politics are both important to this story. Typically, the middle-class Victorian home is thought of as a refuge from the cares and strife of the world of commerce and politics. Atypically or not, the Chessons’ home fell short of this mark. Frederick often wrote at home, and early in his marriage it was where he executed many of his duties as secretary to the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS): issuing correspondence, preparing for meetings, and editing the Colonial Intelligencer, or Aborigines’ Friend, a compendium of information and reports for members of the society. For his wife, Amelia Chesson (née Thompson), their home was the locus of private life yet also where she kept herself in busy leisure (otium privatum) by sewing and maintaining the family’s clothing, working alongside maidservants to clean and cook, and reading. Whether reading was truly free time spent as she wished (otium negotiosum) or instead leisure spent in service (otium cum seritio) is debatable, as for a woman of her station the obligations to a household and to herself were coterminous: the guineas she earned writing book reviews brought comforts, but certainly not luxuries, into the household. According to the one extant year of her diary, her labour and daily business (negotium) were complicated by the on-again-off-again presence of servants, the need to tend to two infants, and visits to her mother’s and grandmother Thompson’s households in different parts of London, yet pleasantly punctuated by the visits of her sisters, the safe return of her father from India, and the comings and goings of female friends. Neither she nor Frederick appears to have had any wasted free time (otium otiosum), except when they were ill. While he had clear public responsibilities – both to the daily Star newspaper for which he wrote and supervised preparation of the morning editions and to the APS – at this period of her life activities centred on the home. Nevertheless, home was a place of public-oriented work: for freelance payments she wrote book reviews and compiled short notices about magazines for the Star, and she also took dictation for her father and laboured unremunerated (without Frederick’s presence) preparing issues of the Colonial Intelligencer.

Just as meetings were shot through with performance chaining, connecting incidents across events, the Chessons’ lives were chained by separately and conjointly experienced events. For example, on 27 October 1858 Frederick’s diary notes that in the evening he went to work at the Star, left in time to attend the APS meeting, then returned to the Star office to finish preparing the morning edition. Ten days prior, he had worked on the Colonial Intelligencer in preparation for the APS meeting. Yet on 5 and 6 October, while Frederick consulted with a colleague about the Newfoundland Fisheries and worked into the small hours at the Star, Amelia was busy at home, assisting with the same APS reports. The concise entries in her diaries stipulate:

After ongoing turmoil, Amelia had engaged a young servant girl less than three weeks before, so while keeping one eye on the washing she was largely focused on the written materials. On 10 October Frederick collected more texts from Dr Thomas Hodgkin (1798–1866, the APS’ honorary secretary), and on 13 October he made the final insertions. On 17 October, while the couple and their children enjoyed a Sunday at the Thompsons’ home, Frederick corrected the proofs. Without Amelia’s timely involvement, competently performing certain chained duties in lieu of Frederick, deadlines would not have been met.

In their study Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders, Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray describe how attendance at lectures involves complex ‘social logistics’: extending invitations, exchanging tickets, planning the outing, and engaging in other micro-coordination by which ‘attendees acquired a communally influenced understanding’.¹⁸¹ When the Chessons attended the Anti-Slavery Meeting at the Freemason’s Tavern on 29 May 1858, they did so in concert with James Dailey, a Black Virginian who settled in Liberia as a merchant, was imprisoned when he attempted to flee his creditors, and, by 1857, had escaped and brought a case against corrupt Sierra Leone officials to the House of Lords;¹⁸² and Alexander Isbister (1822–83), a Canadian Métis who distinguished himself in London as an educator. Hearing Lord Brougham speak for the first time in his life, Frederick (as usual) inserted an evaluative comment in his diary: ‘The old man spoke with much of his old fire & energy, but was somewhat prolix. The other portion of the proceedings was not of special importance save & except Mr. Richard’s manly protest against the American Churches.’¹⁸³ Dailey came home with the Chessons for tea, then joined Frederick and Isbister at the Olympic Theatre to see Frederick Robson (1821–64) perform in Old Daddy Hardacre followed by the farce Ticklish Times. What Frederick and Amelia note in their diaries about this day does not encompass performance chaining; rather, it includes the implied communication that enabled the convergence at the meeting, the hospitality at home half a mile away in Bloomsbury, and then the reconvergence of the men at the theatre, a little south of their earlier meeting.

These kinds of social logistics are instrumental to what Gary Alan Fine calls the ‘specific orders of interaction’ that link ‘cultural knowledge to a domain via interaction protocols’, resulting in sticky cultures. For example, on 24 June 1858, Frederick walked to Knightsbridge to attend a demonstration by John Solomon Rarey (1827–66), a US horse tamer whose gentle methods brought him international fame. In the afternoon Chesson listened to a Bow Street trial of ‘Barrowes the great imposter’, who was charged with bigamy. The first performance inspired a full notice in the Star; the second received a perfunctory mention in Chesson’s diary: ‘He looked very well, but rather more delicate in complexion.’ During the day, Amelia was called upon by the wife of a Star colleague, Mrs Baxter Langley (1829–88), as well as another friend, Mrs Moore. The Chessons both sat down to tea with Mr Abington, from South Africa, and Mr Dailey. Both diaries note Abington’s rendition of ‘painful details’ of Dutch settlers’ conduct toward Kaffirs in the 1846 war. This is another instance where private life is inseparable from Frederick’s daily labour (negotium), for over time he developed considerable expertise on South African affairs – as did Amelia, whose obituary notes that as a widow she wrote for the Athenaeum on this topic.¹⁸⁴ More than that, though, this episode shows how office colleagues’ families were integrated into the Chessons’ social lives, and how the Chessons’ busy leisure (otium privatum) let them converge in wakeful conversation for a few moments of the day.

Thus, meetings could be proving grounds, flashpoints for mobbings, or steady-as-she-goes points on a long plot toward social justice. But they could also bleed across the ostensible domains of political activity and social life, sociability and domesticity, friendship and family, and even the responsibilities of a marital couple incorporating their social relationships, obligations, and pursuits. At every juncture there is performance, opportunity to gather and evaluate information, and variation that nonetheless coheres into recognisable forms.

Advocacy, Judgement, and Play

To a large degree, the relationship between British aesthetics and politics in the mid-nineteenth century is understood through the alignment of decorative arts and poetry, for example emphasising the syncretism of William Morris (1834–96) and Jane Morris (1839–1914) in the Arts and Crafts movement or, slightly later, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) and aestheticism. The end of the century heralds the full merging of form and function into political art, with oppositions reconciled in a series of continental experiments including symbolism, expressionism, and Bauhaus. The politics of these movements are contrasted to the totalitarian leanings of Futurism and the anarchism of Dada; in making this distinction, socialism is the measure of progressivism as well as the means to improve lives through aesthetic mediations in human development and self-actualisation (George Bernard Shaw, 1856–1950) and empowerment to choose (Bertolt Brecht, 1898–1956).

This historiography renders liberalism – the mainstream and globalised form also encompassing nineteenth-century British radicalism – largely out of the aesthetic equation.¹⁸⁵ Essentially, with the exception of the Great Exhibition of 1851, the formative period in the discourse of human rights is left without a theory of performative manifestations, either for individuals or for their culture. As political partisans whose multifarious engagement with performativity demonstrates how late Georgian and mid-Victorian culture was made to ‘go’, George Thompson and Frederick Chesson epitomise how politically active men stirred the cauldron of liberalism at its hottest moments and kept it going when public attention cooled. Aesthetic criteria were constitutive of the generative meta-politics that made things political and made art ‘true politics’.¹⁸⁶ For Thompson and Chesson, the commonplaceness of art, exhibition, and spectacle made performance a ready-at-hand tool. Art was not something to harness to a movement redemptive of artisanship (as William Morris sought it, resistant of factory-alienated labour) or a purposeful move to put vernacular expressivity into built form (as John Ruskin [1819–1900] and George Gilbert Scott [1811–78] advocated for neo-Gothicism). Instead, performance facilitated syntheses of logos, object, and Gestus in forms encompassing concert music, theatre and opera, political speech and debate, applied art demonstrations, and civic ceremony, as well as a host of playful and improving activities including sport, museum-going, and the observation of natural science, and was an efficacious way to align the art of doing politics (through speaking, writing, and meeting) with its desired end.

For Amelia Chesson, performance ‘stuck’ differently, and so did liberal politics. The work she did in her private life (domestic, nurturing, and reproductive) was contiguous with many of the ways she engaged with public issues – editing and compiling publications, maintaining files and aiding with correspondence, and engaging socially with politically active male and female liberals in and out of her home – which demonstrates a more comprehensive aspect of liberalism and a wider dramaturgy of its enactment. Her journalism breached several gendered zones – reading and writing about books at home, seeing plays and concerts in theatres and halls, and writing about performance at the newspaper office to meet the early morning filing deadline – and extended her evaluative work in multiple vectors across the cityscape. She served on the executive committee of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage in the 1870s, alongside nearly fifty MPs and feminist icons such as the interior designers Rhoda Garrett (1841–82) and Agnes Garrett (1845–1935), and the former superintendent of the Working Women’s College Sarah Amos (née Bunting, 1840/41–1908). These forms of presence, meetings, and contributions to the engine of intellectual and artistic life had implications for civic, national, and transnational liberal politics that were not only on a par with her father and husband but mutually indispensable to one another’s functions and success.

For Rancière, dissensus resides at the heart of politics: constantly redrawing the frame within common objects breaks a ‘natural’ order of ruling and being ruled, which makes the imperceptible perceptible as ‘a new scenery of the visible and a new dramaturgy of the intelligible’. For Rancière, a rupture of disenchantment is necessary to dissociate ‘what is seen and what is thought, and between what is thought and what is felt’ in response to art, shuttling between the polarities of art and social practice. In contrast, what I find in the practices of Thompson and the Chessons, committed radicals, is a more syncretic view of art and artistry in conjunction with politics, showing how individuals, families, and communities are ordered through their protocols of interaction. Rancière’s ‘sensory fabric of the common’ converges with the concept of performances’ recognisable recombinant repertoires where ‘the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics’ are ‘continually criss-crossed’.¹⁸⁷ The practice of performance enjoyment and evaluation helped British liberals selectively advocate and actively contribute toward the advancement of political agendas.

One of Rancière’s framing texts is the fifteenth letter of Friedrich Schiller’s (1759–1805) Über die äesthetische Erziehung des Menschen [The Aesthetic Education of Man, 1794], in which the central argument is that ‘man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays’. The play impulse – which Schiller calls a ‘communion between the formal impulse and the material impulse’ – completes one’s humanity by welding a passive state of receptivity with freedom, manifest as recognisable forms. Schiller writes: ‘The formal impulse and the material impulse are equally earnest in their demands, because one relates in its cognition to things in their reality and the other to their necessity; because in action the first is directed to the preservation of life, the second to the preservation of dignity, and therefore both to truth and perfection.’¹⁸⁸ For Thompson, the stakes of rhetoric were high – his success as an orator could result in others’ emancipation from slavery, ability to vote, or ability to secure affordable bread – and so to the degree that he became effective the freedoms of others could be actualised. Frederick Chesson more explicitly played – his experience of art (attending performances, analysing performers’ techniques, and evaluating their impact) was education on a par with the moral uplift from religion and didactic learning or the satisfaction of watching cricket – and he pursued these kinds of play in order to do his life’s work better. Rancière states, ‘the “aesthetic revolution” produced a new idea of political revolution: the material realisation of a common humanity still only existing as an idea’. This ‘idea’ is accessed – and honed, over time – through play.¹⁸⁹ During the 1850s, Ruskin advocated something similar, and William Morris put it into effect in the aesthetics of Pre-Raphaelitism implemented through artisanship, creating an aesthetic of politics and a politics of aesthetics.¹⁹⁰ If we take Thompson’s practices of witnessing, reflecting upon, and adopting the skills of able political performers as play, Frederick Chesson’s practice of witnessing, evaluating, and critiquing the efficacy of performance, and Amelia Chesson’s critical practice of witnessing and giving judgement along with her otherwise unheralded participation in the stickiness of politics or culture, these three figures demonstrate ways to revise the historiography of political advocacy – as oratory, organisation, and journalism – diversified into the key late Georgian and Victorian forms of mass mediation.

The Thompson-Chesson family demonstrates, in other words, ways that a culture with a plethora of performance and performative forms coheres as a performance ecology actively recognised, evaluated, and utilised by liberal men and women who were self-made rather than born to the manor. The political movements they helped forge could not be naïve about the efficacy of performance, nor could the movements cohere without performance chaining. Countless citational acts show a consciousness that performance was a grammar that enabled cogent expression, evaluation, and perpetuation of political understanding; measured persuasion; and amplified effects negotiated further afield through print and letters, both facilitated by postal and telegraph systems that took giant leaps forward during the Victorian period. The public sphere of debate and influence, commerce and exchange, and national and international networks of communication registered and built upon this. Advocacy, self-advancement, and cultural change were, quite simply, impossible without it, at least in the liberal mould. Whereas Walter Ong shows that, with the advance of literacy during the nineteenth century, orality gave way to reading, Joseph Meisel counters that speech remained the means by which ‘political, religious, and legal practice’ flourished, for ‘as never before, legislating, saving souls, obtaining a verdict … getting elected, filling pews, [and] acquiring briefs necessitated speaking well’.¹⁹¹ In other words, governance, politics, spirituality, and the law remained the purview of oral expression, while gains made by liberals, including an expanded male franchise and a global emancipation movement, operated through the combination of meetings with speeches and the circulation of correspondence and print. The following chapters document how this happened, bringing obscure figures to the fore as exemplars of a general system of possibilities, and shifting the background forward to show how organisational and familial politics were integral to networks and circuits that advanced political causes and cohered a repertoire of how to advocate.