In 1934, There appeared in the Saturday Review of Literature a poem entitled, “Audenspender.”

Indeed, the two Oxford poets, W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, became acknowledged leaders of a “movement” in English poetry in the 1930's. Other writers associated with the “movement” were Michael Roberts, John Lehmann, Rex Warner, Julian Symons, William Empson, William Plomer, Julian Bell, Charles Madge, Cecil Day Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Edward Upward, and Christopher Isherwood. The “movement,” whose members were variously appelled the “Thirties poets,” the “new poets,” the “Oxford Group,” and the “New Signatures poets,” was not an organized, formal movement and its so-called members did not consider themselves a “school” of poets and not all of them went to Oxford.

For at least two thousand years the metallic mineral wealth of Britain—its tin, copper, lead, iron, silver and gold—has been diligently, if intermittently, sought by merchant and manufacturer, by statesman and speculator, yet only in the last two centuries have soundly-based conceptions of the origin of metalliferous deposits been clearly postulated and widely accepted. Systematic prospecting, surveying and exploitation of the major deposits has been the work of an even shorter period of time. In the immediately preceding centuries practice and theory alike were curious concoctions of practical commonsense, specious medieval theory and spurious alchemical notions—in the words of an eminent modern authority:

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries important and wide-reaching changes took place in the geographical distribution and the intensity of metalliferous mining in the British Isles. From a predominantly surface operation at the beginning of the Tudor Age, metalliferous mining had become a largely subterranean activity by the end of the Stuart era. This led, in virtually all parts of the two islands, to a modified, if not completely transformed, mining technology. During a century of transition, between approximately 1540 and 1640, much of the art of underground mining was learned by the miners of Cornwall and Devon, the High Peak, Alston Moor and other mining districts, an art which was to come to full flower in the nineteenth century and lead to the exodus of the “Cousin Jacks” to Michigan and Nevada, Broken Hill, Iron Knob and a hundred other mining districts in the Americas, Africa and Australasia, where experienced hard rock miners were in high demand.

The hunger riots which spread across most of southern England in the summer and autumn of 1766 were the most extensive rural disorders in a century when food riots became chronic. More serious in their threat to the social order than the violent protests against the high cost of “necessaries” and the new Militia Act in 1756-57, the disturbances of 1766 placed a heavy strain upon the forces of order. They foreshadowed the more serious agrarian riots of the next century.

While the War Office in September, 1766 moved its detachments across the countryside in a vain effort to parry the rapidly-shifting threats from militant labourers, colliers, tinners, weavers, and others of the provincial dispossessed, the rioters becamer bolder and seized control of large tracts of the countryside almost in the manner of an occupying army. As the crisis developed, demands for military protection from market towns and isolated country estates poured into the War Office. By late September the pattern of events had unfolded to the point where Lord Barrington, the Secretary-at-War, apprehended a threat of general insurrection. Striving to mobilise his limited resources, he ordered the commanders of both active troops and “invalides” to assist the civil magistrates “upon requisition,” while at the same time he urged the leaders of rural society, the aristocracy and the gentry to abandon their lethargy and use initiative in arming their servants to suppress less serious disturbances.

The middle classes, seduced by the gospels of growth and of laissezfaire, abandoned the older areas of London to the artisans and laborers, to the thousands of migrants from rural England, Scotland, and Ireland, and to Jewish immigrants from Russia. By 1880 the middle classes in the suburbs were isolated from the working classes and ignorant of their poverty. Then “The Bitter Cry of Outcast London” by Andrew Mearns, the Pall Mall Gazette edited by W. T. Stead, and the writings of others exposing the squalor of the laboring classes led to a rediscovery of poverty. Many observers thought that charity would solve the problem, ome went slumming or joined the settlement movement begun at Toynbee Hall. Others, like Octavia Hill, were determined to improve the lives of the poor through the proper management and gradual upgrading of their living quarters. The philanthropic and semi-philanthropic dwellings companies such as the Peabody Trust, Guinness Trust, Improved Industrial Dwellings. East End Dwellings, and Four Percent Industrial Dwellings constructed new housing suitable for the working classes. All these efforts were limited because of the attitudes of the affluent classes toward the poor. Many believed that improvidence, intemperance, and licentiousness caused poverty and failed to realize that crowded living conditions and underemployment encouraged these vices. Beatrice Webb, who recognized this problem, wrote in her diary: “The Drink demon…undermines the constitution of a family.…There are times when one loses all faith in laisser faire [and] would suppress this poison at all hazards, before it eats the life of the nation.”

In recent years, historians have departed from narrative histories to seek new approaches to the Chartist movement. Professor Asa Briggs has opened up an important avenue in emphasizing local studies of the movement. He has been concerned to place the Chartists in the perspective of local politics and class relations. Chartist Studies was the first result of his approach, and several other short essays have appeared subsequently. In the next few years, we can look for some substantial analyses of the movement from a local perspective. David Goodway is working on Chartism in London and Professor William Maehl is working on the Newcastle area in the Northeast. I have done a study of class relations and Chartism in Brighton, and James Epstein is working on Feargus O'Connor's relations with three Chartist communities. Epstein's work involves comparative area studies and points the way toward broadening local studies with the possibility of some very illuminating results. However, we must be careful that we do not get so caught up in local studies that they totally dominate our thinking.

Nothing was more abrasive to the popularity of the British monarchy than the civil list during the reign of Queen Victoria. The repeated requests to parliament for annuities and dowries for her children brought accusations against the sovereign of evading the responsibility to take care of her own family. The chief critics were the Radical M.P.s, a sort of left wing in the Liberal party. A few were theoretical republicans but tempered their views by an acknowledgement that the constitutional monarchy was in reality a veiled republic capable of yielding the most advanced political and social reforms. Their twin interests would seem to have been 1) to complete the Gladstonian principle of fiscal economy by its extension to the royal family and 2) to make court life a model of simplicity in harmony with the nineteenth-century goal of human dignity.

What brought the matter to a climax was the prospective requests in the eighteen-eighties for the children of the Prince of Wales. As the Radical M.P.s saw the issue, parliament was about to be asked to take care of the Queen's grandchildren numbering more than a score. What seemed imperative was the appointment of a select committee to determine both the extent of the legal obligation of parliament and the ability of Queen Victoria to find the money from her available funds. Sir Charles Dilke, Chelsea, whose outbursts against civil list expenditures had aroused the anger of the Queen in 1871-72, had been suggesting such a body. But he agreed that the children of the Prince of Wales (whom he met frequently at social events) merited grants as they were in the line of succession but not those of the Queen's younger sons and daughters. Dilke was more specific on May 27, 1883 (or as Lee states May 7), when he dined at Marlborough House. The Prince of Wales raised anew the needs of his children. Dilke assured him of support and favored a lump sum to be distributed by the Prince of Wales rather than piecemeal legislation as had been the case with the Queen's own children.

It has been remarked that the dissolution of the monasteries amounted to an infinite series of adjustments. This could hardly be more true than it is in the case of what happened to the lands of the dissolved abbey of St. Werburgh in Chester—a city about one hundred and seventy miles northwest of London, situated in a section of the country that was, at least compared with much of the south, uncouth and backward. Here the process of adjustment was so protracted, and in the end productive of so much acrimony, that the intervention of the highest authority in the land—that of the queen herself—was directly necessary for its successful completion, and, even with that intervention, a final concord was scarcely achieved before the 16th century gave way to the seventeenth. In Cheshire, the upheaval caused by the sudden disappearance of the regular Church was long in settling down. Settlement there was, eventually, but it was so slow in coming that one might consider amending the definition of the dissolution mentioned above to read: an infinite series of adjustments, almost infinitely prolonged.

What happened in Cheshire can be seen from at least two viewpoints. It can be viewed as providing spectacular evidence as to who benefited the most from Henry VIII's attack upon the ecclesiastical institution; or it can be cited as a case study of just how the central government exercised its control over local affairs during the latter sixteenth century. Here I am concerned with both.