Free trade and cheap theatre: sources of politics for the nineteenth-century London poor

The very poor and unskilled workers of mid-nineteenth-century London – often termed the ‘casual poor’ due to their irregularity of employment – have been generally portrayed as entirely apolitical, and to have exhibited purely mob responses to the issues of the day. This article suggests that we have not properly understood or ‘read’ the evidence we have of the attitudes towards politics of these people, and that we have assessed their actions purely within the framework of our own understandings. In particular, their views about Chartism, the major working-class political movement of the period, have been a key to how they have been perceived. But our understanding of these views has been distorted by what appeared to be their lack of knowledge of the ‘real’ aims of the movement. Instead, if we look at other types of evidence, such as from the theatre, we can find clues as to how their understandings of such conflicts may simply have been different, and so be able to explain in much more rational terms the actions and beliefs of this historically inarticulate group.