I

The dominant account of Chartism's attitude to morality, sexuality, and gender relations remains Anna Clark's Struggle for the breeches, in which Chartist speakers and propagandists, drawing from the rhetoric of the anti-Poor Law campaign, rejected the sexual libertarianism of the 1820s in favour of a discourse that presented virtuous working-class domestic life under threat from the privileged and decadent upper classes.Footnote ⁷ Jutta Schwarzkopf's Women in the Chartist movement similarly highlights women's auxiliary political position, as well as the patriarchal but orderly and respectable sexual relationships amongst married Chartists.Footnote ⁸ Michael Mason has argued that Chartists advanced the anti-sensualist cause, with a strict sexual morality going hand in hand with abstinence from drink.Footnote ⁹

The idea of an abrupt breach between the 1820s and 1830s is also present in the literature on satire. Richard Hendrix's claim in 1976 that radicalism's post-war satire was not an aspect of Chartism was more recently reiterated in Vic Gatrell's study of Georgian satire that suggests it declined in the 1820s.Footnote ¹⁰ The interest in Chartism's increasingly melodramatic literary output has further presented the movement's culture as a sober, often melancholic one, representing sexual deviancy as an aristocratic vice rather than something worthy of exploration amongst workers.Footnote ¹¹ This is a wider problem, as research on Victorian humour generally has tended to avoid ‘newspaper jokes – the most pervasive and commercially successful form of humour in the country’.Footnote ¹² Vincent's case, however, suggests a continuation within Chartism of the libertarian, irreverent, and sometimes obscene culture of late Georgian and Regency London outlined by Iain McCalman.Footnote ¹³ McCalman's research underlined the rise and then gradual decline within radicalism of sexual deviancy and obscene and satirical literature from the 1790s to the 1830s.Footnote ¹⁴ His account ends in 1840, suggesting that although resilient the libertarian practices and ribald literature of the radical underworld were largely eclipsed and marginalized by the Chartist period. The cases of Cleave, Hetherington, and Vincent suggest that in private and public the culture of the underworld was still vibrant and relevant to the movement, embraced and redeveloped by certain Chartists, and clearly well received by radicals far outside London.Footnote ¹⁵

Henry Vincent was born in London but moved to Hull following his goldsmith and silversmith father's bankruptcy in 1821. He returned in 1833, now a trained compositor, to work at Spottiswoode's, one of the capital's prestigious publishers.Footnote ¹⁶ Following a trade dispute in 1836 in which Andrew Spottiswoode refused to acknowledge the London Union of Compositors, of which Vincent was a member, he left his work and was soon inducted into the London Working Men's Association, the moderate radical organization agitating for political reform and moral improvement. Vincent's youthful enthusiasm, sociable nature, and skill at speaking came to the fore over this period, and by 1837 he was paired with the successful radical publisher John Cleave on his first lecture tour. The purpose of this tour was not to spread the Charter, which would be finished and distributed a year later, but instead to expound the Association's model of organizing across the country. The organization's Address and Rules became the blueprint for these new associations, the gender and sexual politics of which are clear from the first pages:

Good sexual and domestic behaviour was secured through education and declining drunkenness, and ‘apart from its exclusively working-class membership, the L.W.M.A.'s aims resembled those of the early teetotallers'.Footnote ¹⁸ The LWMA's chief aspiration was for well-behaved, well-educated husbands with wives who raised intelligent and responsible children, and these principles, taken at face value, have propelled the organization's presentation in the historiography of Chartism as a moralistic, elitist, and largely politically ineffectual one.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet, inference from documents such as the Address and rules of a consistent culture across the organization's members overlooks a more complex picture revealed by Vincent's private correspondence.

It is clear from Vincent's letters to Minikin (Minikin's replies have not survived) that almost immediately upon his first tour he turned to sensual enjoyments. In his third letter, from Huddersfield, he told his friend: ‘Tell the girls there is a profusion of bright eyed Yorkshire radical lasses.’Footnote ²⁰ By the second tour in the summer of 1838, this time to spread the Charter, he was clearly becoming the object of affections. One Sunday in Huddersfield, the day Vincent tended to write his letters to Minikin, his letter abruptly ends. It restarts:

This passage, distinct from his evaluation of Miss Douglas's intelligence two months earlier, sexualizes his partner through reference to physical attributes and mentioning of a walk in the countryside, one venue of sexual liaisons.Footnote ²² Although incongruous with the Association's moralism or the purpose of his tours, Vincent's fascination with the ‘fairest flowers of creation’ was not an affectation developed after he first left London. At first, these reports home seem like empty boasting or deliberate provocation on Vincent's part, designed to tease his friend and inflate the sense of adventure. However, Vincent also shared with Minikin a sexual topography of the West End that undermines any suggestion of innocence in these passages. In one exchange shortly after his arrest, Vincent bemoans that he will no longer have opportunity to visit a particular woman in Regent's Park, not far from Minikin's home on Great Russell Street or Vincent's near Euston Station:

Whoever this woman was, Vincent joked that Minikin's wife would not mind if he did kiss her. The joking continued into the next exchange of letters, and both John and Mary Ann Minikin replied with their own jokes:

In response to organized police forces and organized efforts to clear the streets of prostitutes, some in the West End responded by advertising their services more subtly and dressing more genteelly.Footnote ²⁵ In areas like Regent's Park streetwalkers could receive upwards of a pound from well-heeled customers, and Vincent's description is similar to one given by A. J. Munby describing a prostitute on nearby Regent Street in the 1850s, ‘arrayed in gorgeous apparel’.Footnote ²⁶ Clearly Vincent and Minikin were engaged in urban exploration, and the prominent innuendo and talk of late evening walks through the park suggests they at least fantasized about using her services.Footnote ²⁷

This is supported by further allusions to a sexual history in the West End. Vincent seems to have conducted a relatively serious, potentially illicit relationship with a woman dubbed ‘Mrs. V.’ (possibly to elude censors) that was disrupted by Vincent's travelling and ended by his imprisonment. The first mention of her came in September 1837, when Vincent requested Minikin ‘remember me’ to her, amongst other friends in London.Footnote ²⁸ Later, when on tour he wrote: ‘You'll give my love to Mrs. V. tell her, though absent, my affections are as strong as ever. Tell her although my body is in Yorkshire my heart is somewhere under her apron-strings.’Footnote ²⁹ After his arrest, he told Minikin: ‘Tell Mrs. V. of Kentish Town that I cannot Sweetheart her now.’Footnote ³⁰ At the very least, these letters suggest a tone of friendly flirting. However, the letter that most strongly suggests a sexual relationship was from October 1838, when he told Minikin to tell Mrs. V. that ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’, before adding: ‘asking you that I bear in mind your favourite motto Discretion is the better part of valour’.Footnote ³¹

More than just a private matter, Vincent's sexuality bled into his public appearances and his relationship with female Chartists. Robert Gammage, an active Chartist who became the first historian of the movement, suggested this when he described Vincent's famed abilities as an orator and noted that they elicited a sexual response:

Dorothy Thompson glosses over the sexual content of these letters when briefly discussing the ‘interest and enthusiasm of women’ evident in them.Footnote ³³ Jutta Schwarzkopf also dismisses Gammage's attitude as insinuating that women's involvement hinged ‘on male personality’.Footnote ³⁴ Rather than as being at all sexual, Schwarzkopf argues that the public interaction between Vincent and female Chartists frequently used the template of an extended family, with Vincent cast as a brother and the activists as sisters. However, when read in the context of the bawdier and more honest passages of the correspondence between Vincent and Minikin, the sexual aspect of Chartist inter-gender interaction that Gammage hints at seems more justified. Women were responding to an activist who took them seriously as a constituency and saw their work as a vital part of the movement, yet simultaneously it is clear that sexual interaction, ranging from flirting at meetings to more substantial dalliances, was acceptable amongst activists and even between leaders and the grassroots of the movement.Footnote ³⁵ A report from Vincent to Minikin of a respectable tea party in Bath in October 1838, and packed with seminal and bodily humour, allows an insight into how this sexual culture was conducted:

The naming of children after leaders was a recurring and solemnly held aspect of Chartist culture, and Vincent's allusions to producing these children through affairs with both single and married women is a particularly ribald joke that is overlooked in Thompson's discussion of the same passage.Footnote ³⁷ Yet the women joking that there will not be ‘a bit’ of him left seems innuendo equal to Vincent's own.

Vincent's sexual availability was even written into pageantry by female activists. On a visit to Trowbridge the previous month, Vincent was greeted in the streets by flags and a crowd of 10,000. Later:

The act is comparable to other acts of symbolic practice noted in the historiography of Chartism.Footnote ³⁹ In this case, the silk represented the women's roles as labourers within the declining weaving industry, the green represented radicalism, and their selection as single women represented the sexuality of youth, and the evident eligibility of Vincent, creating a sort of symbolic version of the artisan's courtship process.Footnote ⁴⁰ It also bears some relation to Peter Bailey's work on parasexuality, Bailey's example being the Victorian barmaid, a sexual object even when not participating in overt sexual relationships or activities.Footnote ⁴¹ The girl and the single women are presented in terms of their radicalism, class, and availability, but in being the object of the presentation, so too was Vincent's attractiveness, youth, and status as a well-known politician being celebrated and implicitly sexualized.

The respectable and polite rhetoric that Schwarzkopf highlights was certainly something Vincent encouraged along with his general encouragement of female activism. His public addresses on women's activity in the movement closely followed the outlook of the LWMA in advocating the political, yet auxiliary, engagement of an intelligent and radical female population. In March 1839, for instance, Vincent rhapsodized in the pages of the Western Vindicator:

Yet, acts of solidarity from those female activists could be rather crudely sexualized by Vincent. Three months later in June 1839, while awaiting trial, he wrote of the gifts he had received from his admirers, and facetiously invited Minikin to come visit him to see him wearing them:

The gifts of clothing formed a material complement to the addresses women regularly wrote to prisoners.Footnote ⁴⁴ This visit likely buoyed his spirits, since one of his first assumptions upon being put in gaol was that he would have little opportunity to interact with women. Two weeks prior to the visit of the ‘pretty little lassie’, he told Minikin:

In the event, Vincent had little reading material, and by February 1840, after nearly a year of imprisonment and increasingly depressed, Vincent was complaining to Minikin that he missed the women of Bath.Footnote ⁴⁶ His attitude to these women was twofold: they were both siblings in the struggle and a crucial auxiliary for the movement, a position politically necessary to keep the movement functioning, but simultaneously they were doting, sexually available, and attracted to him.

In his political pose, Vincent was therefore aligned with that which has been outlined by Clark and Schwarzkopf, in which women's activism was seen as auxiliary and therefore largely confined to the home.Footnote ⁴⁷ Vincent never discusses with Minikin women's sexuality in terms of political liberation, and in this regard he correlates with the chronology of Clark's argument that sees Chartists abandoning sexual experimentation, such as Richard Carlile and the Owenites' advocacy in the 1820s of free love and relatively progressive attitudes towards women.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, his writings to Minikin do indicate a sexually open culture within Chartism, with titillation rather than liberation its object. Sexual interactions were unremarkable, not only as a personal affair between activists but even to the extent that sexuality could be written into Chartist pageantry.Footnote ⁴⁹ Vincent indicates that in the very first years of the Victorian period, aspects of the underworld culture that McCalman argued was becoming marginal in London were in fact flourishing on the route of Vincent's tour and in his letters home. The innovative sexual culture of the 1820s still existed, but for Vincent it was depoliticized, less about free thought and more about sensual pleasure. To understand this in more depth, it is necessary to investigate the culture that Vincent joined in 1836.

II

The letters bear comparison to the Gregory Watt/William Creighton correspondence analysed by Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob. In these intensely scatological letters from the 1790s, the pair experimented with sexual and gender roles ‘for the sheer pleasure of it’, spurred on by their radicalism, Romanticism, and the context of the French Revolution.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Vincent/Minikin correspondence was by no means as scatological as the Watt/Creighton letters, or even as experimental; but at the same time it is clear that Vincent's early boasts to Minikin were an attempt to establish a sexual identity which was further utilized as a homosocial bond. His later writings from prison, often far darker than his earlier letters, suggest Minikin as something of a vicarious sexual outlet. Vincent's ‘affective style’, to use Hunt and Jacob's phrase, rested on a triad of sexuality, bawdy humour, and boasting.

The correspondence is important not just as evidence of the sexual courtships and exhibitions of a young itinerant speaker, but also as a means of appraising the cultures that he had grown up in. The culture of humour and innuendo that Vincent and Minikin enjoyed was clearly also the culture of the London compositors. Practical jokes and bawdy, alcohol-fuelled parties that centred on clever speeches exhibiting puns and ‘filthy and disgusting’ ideas were reported in literature on the culture of printing offices during the years Vincent worked in one.Footnote ⁵¹ Alongside this, his affective style was also clearly drawn from the culture of Vincent's political incubation in London; the nature of his radical milieu meant that this was also a sexual initiation. In their analysis of the Watt/Creighton letters, Hunt and Jacob point out that although lived vicariously, ‘the French Revolution did have a somatic effect that resonated outward into many of life's domains'.Footnote ⁵² Similarly, the excitement of the Chartist period, and Vincent's central position within it, allowed him a great deal of experimentation with his sexual and political self-presentation, and it is clear from his social and literary life in London that he drew on a culture that remained sexually libertarian. His boasting of both sexual and political successes seems to have been a conscious construction on Vincent's part of a Byronic hero, and it gave him intense pleasure when he was received as such.Footnote ⁵³ Immediately after describing the presentation of the scarf to Minikin, Vincent quoted Byron:

The quote is a slight paraphrasing of a line in Canto vi of Don Juan, in a stanza advocating sexual love as a humanist virtue.Footnote ⁵⁵ It is significant that Vincent memorized this line, albeit incorrectly, since Canto vi was the most controversial of the epic poem. Byron wrote the entire poem between 1818 and 1823, and delays between the publishing of the cantos were largely due to accusations that they were immoral.Footnote ⁵⁶ Byron was important as both a political and erotic writer. For mid-Victorians, ‘the introduction of anything from the corpus of Byronic material could be counted on automatically to release an erotic response’.Footnote ⁵⁷ The Chartist Thomas Frost, an associate of the pornographer and publisher William Dugdale, testified that during the period radicals still toasted, read, and aped Byron, and the influence of Byron in the work of Chartist poet Thomas Cooper has been studied.Footnote ⁵⁸ More than an author, men of Vincent's generation saw his work as influencing ‘not only the novel, poetry and drama, but fashion, social manners, erotic experience, and gender roles’.Footnote ⁵⁹ He also unites the early and later Chartist periods, since the Northern Star began printing a regular ‘Beauties of Byron’ column in 1845, attesting to his continuing popularity and his status as a master that the small army of amateur working-class poets would do well to emulate.Footnote ⁶⁰Don Juan is evidently one of the frameworks that Vincent applied to his own life, imagining himself as a man, like Juan, both appealing to women and easily seduced by them.Footnote ⁶¹ The Chartist Byron may have figured ‘primarily as a champion of liberty at all costs’, but evidently a complimentary reading of him as a sexual champion was still allowed.Footnote ⁶²

The importance of pirated texts to earlier radicals has been outlined by McCalman, and with Byron it continued into the Chartist period.Footnote ⁶³ A work of similar importance amongst radicals was Shelley's Queen Mab, which possessed a notorious endnote on free love, ‘Even Love is Sold.’ In the work, the fairy Queen Mab comes to earth, showing Ianthe a past of oppression and the utopia to come in the future, brought about by the virtues progress would grant humanity.Footnote ⁶⁴ The book was first pirated in 1821, and the security of the pirated editions was ensured by Shelley's inability to prevent its distribution since it was deemed obscene and therefore ineligible for copyright.Footnote ⁶⁵ This was still the case by the late 1830s, as Queen Mab was published by Henry Hetherington once in 1839 and fellow LWMA member John Watson five times between 1839 and 1851. George Bernard Shaw referred to it as the ‘Bible’ of Chartism, but as well as outlining a general theory of humanity's progress ‘Even Love is Sold’ pleaded for love to be freed from the tyranny of marriage and for women to be allowed to pursue the natural appetites of sexual passion.Footnote ⁶⁶ Vincent's reference to the woman in Regent's Park holding a copy suggests that it was closely linked to female sexuality in his mind. Don Juan and Queen Mab both provided touchstones with which Vincent structured a self-identity as a sexualized and political hero, which he conveyed to Minikin in his letters and his followers in his papers.

There is much more to suggest that the tone of Vincent's letters was a reflection of his wider milieu. Cleave and Hetherington were ambivalent towards free love and contraception despite their open hostility towards Richard Carlile's popular book of sex theory and practical contraceptive advice, Every woman's book. Carlile's belief in free love and divorce, drawn from ‘Even Love is Sold’ as well as his own experience and justification of the open sexual culture of London's artisans, was opposed by Cleave and Hetherington because of his support for Malthusianism.Footnote ⁶⁷ The two were also opposed to Carlile's second ‘moral marriage’ to Eliza Sharples in 1830, a speaker at Carlile's Rotunda theatre.Footnote ⁶⁸ However, Carlile's estranged sons, both pornographers who pirated his book in the late 1830s, defended themselves by saying that they did so to pre-empt Cleave and Hetherington, who were prepared to pirate it themselves.Footnote ⁶⁹ Cleave and Hetherington did continue to publish birth control literature throughout the Chartist period, and despite his criticism of Carlile's second marriage, in 1840 Cleave moved his mistress into his family home while his wife was still alive. The wife had a nervous breakdown soon after.Footnote ⁷⁰

Cleave's infidelity had minimal repercussions for his moral politics. In 1841, Cleave, along with a number of moral improvement Chartists including Hetherington and Lovett, sent a draft of the first address of their new organization, the National Association of the United Kingdom for promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People, to Francis Place, the influential, wealthy self-made tailor and key Westminster radical who was aligned with the LWMA. Upon receiving this, and angry to see Cleave's signature on such a document, Place wrote to William Lovett that Cleave was ‘[c]ruel in the extreme towards his wife whom he always boasts of as his delight, his friend, his companion and his helpmate’ and that his ‘conduct was disgraceful beyond expression towards his daughters’, concluding that his ‘name is a blur upon the paper, a name to make men doubt its sincerity, and to consider it as a cunningly devised piece of hypocracy [sic].’ Yet, he added that ‘[i]n a mere trading concern I should say nothing about him, but in a case like this, anything can surely be more out of place, nor more incongruous’.Footnote ⁷¹

This concession illustrates a disjunction between private conduct, public moralism, and the requirements of business that seems a common attitude amongst these radicals. Place's clear distinction between trade and morality suggests that these men held morality to be a multifaceted affair, and notably other activists were still happy to work with him. Cleave remained an ally of Lovett, who described him in his autobiography as being ‘rude and bluff in his manner at times, but [with] a warm and generous heart; always ready to aid the good cause, and to lend a helping hand to the extent of his means’.Footnote ⁷² Hetherington and even Vincent, who in January 1841 married Cleave's daughter Lucy, still worked with him. Despite the familial rupture, Vincent would remain a key partner of Cleave's throughout the 1840s.

This pragmatic attitude is further indicated by Cleave's and Hetherington's roots in London's pornographic underworld, as surveyed by McCalman towards the end of his study. William Benbow, a pornographer and pirate in the 1820s and later Chartist prisoner, was a close associate of Cleave between 1830 and 1835. ‘Bawdy, bon ton, anti-establishment and “crim. Con”’ publications of the sort produced by the suppliers of pornography and obscene literature were being advertised in Hetherington's Poor Man's Guardian in 1834, and during this time Cleave was also a close associate of William Strange, to whom McCalman attributes the obscene anti-clerical publication The confessional unmasked, printed in 1836.Footnote ⁷³ As McCalman speculates, it is clear that these men illustrate the conduit between the culture of the Regency underworld and the mass culture of Chartism propagated by Vincent's and Minikin's generation.Footnote ⁷⁴ This, coupled with Vincent's evident regard for the pirated literature of Byron and Shelley and his admiration for their models of masculinity, suggests that the traditions of bawdiness, free love, and sensuality had not faded by the Chartist period. Hetherington, Cleave, and their protégé Vincent were all steeped in the culture of the underworld in the 1830s, and were morally malleable in their interactions with it. The significance of this was not just complexity or turpitude in their business or sexual lives, but also the way they redeveloped the culture of the underworld into a viable popular literature that expounded moral and political reform while also purveying satire and near-obscenity.

III

By 1839, Vincent was spending most of his time in Bath, and with several friends from the city and Bristol he began producing his own newspaper, The Western Vindicator. Its satirical passages make it clear that Vincent's irreverence and bawdy sense of humour were carried over into his new career as an editor. It is also significant not only as illustration of the longevity of satirical forms inspired by the acerbic Georgian tradition, but also as evidence that Chartism found a receptive audience for such a style in the cities and countryside of the west. Just as Vincent was a popular agitator, the Vindicator was a popular newspaper, often selling almost all of its weekly print-run of 3,400 copies. As Owen Ashton has suggested, thanks to the practice of literate workers reading newspapers to audiences, it was probably consumed by around or above 60,000 people weekly.Footnote ⁷⁵

Just as Vincent's private letters reflected the print culture surrounding the LWMA, so too did his own publication. Vincent's debt to Cleave and Hetherington was not total; in the Vindicator, Vincent was far more directly and aggressively satirical, and unlike Cleave neglected satirical woodcuts, which were too expensive to print regularly, especially outside of London. Nevertheless, Vincent adopted the basics of their style. Cleave's and Hetherington's standout contribution to the radical movement was the seamless splicing of moral and intellectual instruction and political material with muck-raking journalism, humour, and popular culture. It was this format and structure that Vincent would adopt with the Vindicator, creating a consciously moralistic but also humorous and smutty publication.

Cleave's Weekly Police Gazette, published between 1834 and 1836, had a circulation of 40,000 copies and like Hetherington's work combined sensational crime reporting with political news and commentary.Footnote ⁷⁶ Throughout the 1830s, both men knew that sex and violence sold, and both consequently were successful businessmen. Hetherington's The Destructive and Poor Man's Conservative, founded in 1833, was a more sensational complement to his crusading Poor Man's Guardian. Although articles on police and court news were present from the first issues, by June 1833 Hetherington was receiving letters from readers demanding a greater number of more exciting stories. On 15 June, he inserted a note acknowledging these requests, and in the same issue reported extensively on William John Bankes, the Tory MP for Dorset, who had been discovered late at night in a churchyard near parliament with a soldier, the panels of both men's trousers being open.Footnote ⁷⁷ Criminal reports were present and prominent in almost every issue from that point on, and space was found for them only at the expense of useful knowledge and parliamentary reports.

In 1834, The Destructive came to an end, but Hetherington replaced it with the broadsheet Two Penny Dispatch. Having learned what people wanted, he bluntly stated that the new paper ‘shall abound in … Murders, Rapes, Suicides, Burnings, Maimings, Theatricals, Races, Pugilism … it will be stuffed with every sort of devilment that will make it sell’.Footnote ⁷⁸ The paper was a crucial chronicler of the early Chartist movement after being merged with Cleave's Police Gazette and renamed the London Dispatch and Social Reformer in 1836, but it still maintained regular articles on murders, suicides, and coroner's reports, alongside columns on moral improvement and political reports.

Cleave's London Satirist and Gazette of Variety (later Penny Gazette of Variety, Gazette of Variety, and finally Penny Gazette of Variety and Amusement) was founded in 1837, a year after the merger of the Police Gazette with the Two-Penny Dispatch. The lessons Cleave had learned about page layout from the Police Gazette came in useful for the new paper, which like its antecedent had a satirical print below the banner on the front page every week. An explicitly political editorial would be included on the inside pages, often on the same topic as the front page's satirical woodcut. This served a dual purpose: the image on the front attracted potential customers' attention, but the editorial hidden on the internal pages allowed Cleave to avoid paying stamp duty for political commentary.Footnote ⁷⁹ The Police Gazette employed Richard Seymour, the illustrator of The Pickwick Papers, and C. J. Grant for these prints. By the point of the Satirist's founding, Seymour had shot himself but Grant was retained and became its illustrator. Grant's retention of the older grotesque style of drawing was acknowledged by Thackeray in his attack on the popular literature of the working class, ‘Half-a-Crown's Worth of Cheap Knowledge’: ‘Rude woodcuts adorn all these publications, and seem to be almost all from the hand of the same artist – Grant by name. They are outrageous caricatures; all squinting eyes, wooden legs, and pimpled noses, forming the chief points of fun.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Miles Taylor has noted that Cleave's and Grant's recurring depiction of John Bull as a ‘victimized taxpayer’ is firmly in the Hanoverian tradition.Footnote ⁸¹ This satirical form set Cleave apart from the Northern Star's imagery which instead published portraits of prominent radicals in an effort to equate itself with respectability and prominent aristocratic politicians.Footnote ⁸²

Hetherington's and Cleave's experimentation and innovation in the period immediately after the relaxation of the stamp duty went a long way towards defining the modern press, but this development was clearly based on the bedrock of the underworld's salacious content and irreverent style. The Police Gazette, argues Virginia Berridge, was an important point in the development of the hugely popular working-class Sunday papers of later decades, and Hetherington's and Cleave's innovation in combining satire, sensation, and politics commercialized the radical press.Footnote ⁸³ However, as Ian Haywood has argued, in the short term, and like Hetherington's The Destructive and later Dispatch, the Police Gazette's merger of festivity and radicalism created a hybridized discourse of populist radicalism.Footnote ⁸⁴ At the same time, the Police Gazette clearly wanted to be taken seriously, adopting the broadsheet format more common to stamped papers like The Times.Footnote ⁸⁵ As with Peter Bailey's assessment of respectability as calculated and situational, the LWMA's aloof moralism seems context specific, not held by these men as a universalism.Footnote ⁸⁶ The bawdy and sensational press allowed access to a wide audience and complemented rather than contradicted moral and political comment, and was therefore a legitimate tone for radical politics. Far from ending by the end of the 1830s, the traditions of the underworld were in fact freshened and re-invigorated.

Like Cleave's papers, the Vindicator exploited the same loopholes in the Stamp Acts, avoiding printing ‘news and occurrences’ by printing tracts by Tom Paine and others, news in the form of letters, poetry, satire, and even dream sequences.Footnote ⁸⁷ The Vindicator, like the Gazette and Satirist series, was priced at 2d and used the more expensive broadsheet format.Footnote ⁸⁸ However, the Vindicator was above all a local paper, designed to cater for the working class of Somerset, Wiltshire, Herefordshire, Gloucestershire, and south Wales, and so disregarded the London-centric tales of corruption Cleave and Hetherington emphasized in favour of parochial satire that relentlessly attacked local politicians. One particular target was Thomas Phillips, the mayor of Newport. Phillips was scatologically re-imagined as Thomas Philpotts, who in turn was regularly lampooned in the Vindicator for his simian appearance, mental defects, and womanizing. A spoof report of a trial was included, where Philpotts – or the ‘Chimpanzee’ as the Vindicator called him – brought a libel suit against Vincent.

Later, a witness who was present at his birth was sworn in to provide evidence for Philpotts. She insisted that Philpotts's father referred to him as a ‘baboon’ upon first seeing him. In the cross-examination, Vincent indulged his talent for wordplay and enjoyment of bodily humour, with the Vindicator reporting that she told Philpott she was: ‘sure the word baboon was used; knows the difference between a baboon and a monkey; the former has no tail, the latter has; there appeared a slight protuberance in plaintiff, though exceedingly minute’. At the end of the trial, the jury returned and announced that: ‘We find the plaintiff to be a real Chimpanzee; in fact, a complete Baboon; and we earnestly recommend him as an invaluable acquisition to any Zoological Society.’ Following this, ‘the plaintiff fell into an hysterical fit, foamed and grinned horribly, and bit and scratched the policemen’.

Melodrama was also spoofed, and served as the basis for the on-going satirical saga of the Chimpanzee. Two weeks after the trial report, the Vindicator reported the Chimpanzee's suicide and the resulting coroner's inquest. Here, the Chimpanzee's sexuality was mocked, through invocation of the fallen woman motif:

Vincent's talent as a satirist came, in part, from the verisimilitude of his writing; the report of the Chimpanzee's death is suitably melodramatic to conform to the conventions of cheap literature and the sensational elements of papers such as Hetherington's and Cleave's, which reported on real rapes, affairs, and pregnancies. The trial report follows the steps of a real trial, while the joke is only pushed to its limits when the Chimpanzee returned as a ghost ‘fighting in the tap-room of the Castle Inn’. In one column of fake correspondence, Phillips supposedly wrote to Vincent demanding to know whether or not Vincent had threatened to ‘pull my nose’. Vincent published the following apology: ‘I, the undersigned, solemnly declare, that, having the most ineffable contempt for Thomas Phillips, jun., I never will soil my fingers by pulling his nose; nor degrade my foot by kicking him.’Footnote ⁹¹ Like some of the jokes that Vincent crafted when writing to Minikin, this fake correspondence was carefully structured to give maximum impact to the punchline. It is only obvious that the correspondence is satire towards the end of the piece.

This was also the case with the Vindicator's spoof report on the ball of Lord Powerscourt, the Tory MP for Bath. As with his treatment of Phillips, Vincent was keen to encourage rumour and innuendo to present Powerscourt as a debauched simpleton. Powerscourt was a favourite target of Bath's radicals since J. A. Roebuck, the city's radical MP, lost the ‘Drunken Election’ to him in 1837, when the Tories bribed the electorate with alcohol, leading to drunken disorder. The enmity between the two men grew, and in March 1839, Roebuck and Powerscourt fought a duel after Roebuck claimed Powerscourt had insulted him during ‘some drunken exhibition’.Footnote ⁹² It was this reputation that the Vindicator was clearly playing off with its reports on the ball. The article opened by noting Powerscourt's abilities as a politician: ‘As an orator he possesses extraordinary powers – he never wearies members of “the house”, for he never speaks; and he seldom votes incorrectly, for he never votes at all!’Footnote ⁹³ After the first dance, refreshments were brought over, consisting of ‘glasses of gin, wine, rum, cake, and a few pots of half-and-half’. In a notable invocation of a recurring image of Georgian satire, as the two disguised radicals telling the story observed Powerscourt, ‘we could not help pitying his lordship, for he had two such fat girls on his knees’. After a dance, the crowd once again ‘partook of heavy, gin, wine, &c.’. This drinking led to sexual immorality and physical violence amongst a group described in the imagery of Georgian grotesque humour:

When the man returned, he demanded instant satisfaction, the Colonel replied coolly: ‘Sir, I know not who you are. But mark me, I consider every lady in a ballroom … is public property.’ The Colonel was promptly punched in the mouth, leading to a large brawl that the two disguised radicals watched, laughing. The night eventually ended with Powerscourt ‘so gloriously drunk that several of the ladies were laying him gently on the floor at one end of the room, after which they carried him out’.Footnote ⁹⁴

These ‘festive distortions of almost every element of a respectable newspaper’ were a core element in the work of T. J. Wooler and the content of his Black Dwarf, a Regency-era paper that Vincent read and which was likely a strong influence.Footnote ⁹⁵ As with Vincent's spoofs, this style granted verisimilitude to satirical articles by closely copying the language and structure of court reports and society or correspondence pages in local newspapers, utilizing the discourse of the establishment as a means to attack it. A similar effect was brought about by the Vindicator's inclusion of entirely respectable, non-satirical material. Just as Vincent's merger of the serious and the humorous in the satirical articles sharpened the critical impact of both forms, the proximity of satire to the Vindicator's variety of serious content juxtaposed an immoral upper class with an intellectual and moral working class. Recurring columns in the Vindicator outlined scientific principles with the clear intention that these were to be used by families to teach one another. These columns often included instructions for basic household scientific experiments, but reprints of a series of dialogues went one further by giving parents a script to read to their children as they conducted these experiments.Footnote ⁹⁶ Paine's ‘Dissertation on the First Principles of Government’ ran through the early issues of the paper, while essays on Washington, Franklin, or Cicero were common. Frequently editorials advocated the virtues of education:

These articles on science, history, and philosophy and extensive adverts from bookshops such as Cleave's formed a core part of radicalism's ideology of men and women using the family to create a politically aware and active generation of radicals. This content was also contrasted with the stupidity, naivety, and excessive drunkenness of the ruling class. The result was the Vindicator possessing a double nature as both a satirical journal that appealed directly to the bawdy, ribald humour illustrated in Vincent's and Minikin's exchanges, while using that humour to impart political and moralistic messages. Far from hindering these messages, the satire, sexual tales, and bodily humour of the bawdy press of the 1820s was retooled to advance Chartism's moralism and intellectualism.

IV

Vincent's popularity outside London, the centrality of jokes to his relationship with Minikin, and the clear influence on his life of the radical underworld suggests that Chartist humour can elucidate not just how politics was made appealing to the working class but also the continuities of popular culture across the period. Chartism's archival legacy, in the form of speeches, newspaper columns, and personal correspondence, could become a fertile means of understanding the more festive and ribald aspects of early Victorian life and political culture. Newspapers such as the Vindicator provide opportunity to move such study away from the focus on Punch, as well as into communities outside London.Footnote ⁹⁸ On the quotidian level, Vincent's letters and his humorous output in the Vindicator correlates with Peter Bailey's arguments that Victorian respectability was ‘situational’ and context-specific.Footnote ⁹⁹ The simultaneously moralistic but also transgressive activities of men like Vincent and Cleave suggest that a clear practical division between respectable and unrespectable behaviour did not exist even in the mid-nineteenth century.

This study also undermines several aspects of the concept of a clear breach between the culture of the Chartist era and that of its precedents. McCalman suggests that by 1840, the underworld had demised but shown ‘great resilience … in the face of powerful countervailing forces’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In fact, Hetherington's, Vincent's, and Cleave's hybridization of unrespectable politics with the new, high-minded moralistic politics shared by both the LWMA and the rival O'Connorite wing of the Chartists indicates not mere resilience but instead overt and successful continuation and redevelopment of several core aspects of the underworld. This challenges Mason's and Clark's notion that Chartism ushered in outright hostility towards sexual libertarianism since it is clear that these three men, amongst the most closely associated with the politics of moral reform, were also the most keenly populist; Vincent and Cleave in particular are far from anti-sensualist in their attitude to sexuality. Furthermore, their popularity suggests that they have to be considered more than a subculture adrift of the Chartist mainstream, as with Steven Marcus's ‘other’ Victorians, but instead, as Malcolm Chase says of Cleave, ‘closer to grass-roots opinion than historians have allowed’.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Beyond the literary and political, the valuable evidence Vincent has left on sexuality suggests continuity in the sexual practices of young, skilled working-class Londoners. The breadth of the topics discussed in his correspondence is remarkable, indicating that even by the late 1830s an unmarried man in his twenties still saw the world in very similar sexual terms to men of previous generations. Vincent's lifestyle and his status as a well-educated compositor suggest that Francis Place's belief that the relaxed sexual culture of his youth had largely disappeared amongst middling-class Londoners was incorrect.Footnote ¹⁰² This is also the case with Cleave and Hetherington, two decades older than Vincent, yet still publishing the contraceptive advice and Romantic poems consumed by people of his generation just as it had been consumed by theirs.

Although further study of other Chartist activists is necessary, Vincent's private life and the print culture of the London radicals suggests that far from a breach with the marginal counter-culture of an earlier radical tradition, certain aspects of the underworld – its irreverent treatment of authority, its risqué humour, and its fascination with smut, the body, and sexuality – were not eclipsed by the Chartist period, but rather retooled as integral parts of the culture of a mass movement that extended across the country. In this respect, Chartism ended the underworld by bringing it above ground, exposing it to the nation, and expanding it.