Postscript

Summary

The Bristol riots hit the news. Detailed reports of the riots were blazoned in the press, in London, Dublin, Edinburgh, and in many provincial towns in England. As part of the reform crisis a lot was at stake in how the riots were interpreted. They became something of a litmus test of reform. For Blackwood's Magazine, an ultra-Tory monthly, the Bristol riots gave the public a ‘foretaste of democracy’. Extending the franchise would only result in more scenes of appalling degeneracy, scenes of deluded mobs and manipulative demagogues, whose real intent was revolution. For reformist newspapers, the lesson learned from the riots was the decadent state of local government in Bristol, emblematic of Old Corruption, a portrait of self-selected politicians irresponsibly clinging onto power and privilege in the face of public mistrust and resentment, allowing a turbulent but manageable crisis to spiral out of control. As we have seen, this opinion gathered force after the trial of Mayor Charles Pinney in November 1832, leading the Examiner to declare ‘let us set about municipal improvement with all the speed we may’. As the Reading Mercury opined a year earlier: ‘The great bulk of the inhabitants, including sensible persons of all parties, are sick of the self-elected system and anxious it should be abolished.’

For radical commentators the riots were regrettable because they would be used as a pretext for denying the vote to the bulk of the male population, keeping ‘all their fellow labourers in their present tyrannical subjection’. The real culprit, said the Poor Man's Guardian, was the local oligarchy, which had reduced offenders ‘to such a state of mental ignorance and degradation’. Francis Place believed the Bristol riots underscored the benumbing influences of religious prejudice and class on political consciousness. Church-and-King bigotry and ‘the contempt of all who are able to live without working for all who do work’ had rendered life brutish and miserable for the majority. Until there was some relief from the daily struggle for survival, which cramped people materially and intellectually, the degradations of a Bristol riot would continue.

In the larger scheme of things, the Bristol riots do pose some interesting questions for historians from below, if only because of the range of action they generated, from demonstrations for reform to scenes of spectacular vandalism and drunkenness.