Propaganda and the politics of personality: the case of the Anti-Corn Law League, 1839-1846

Simon Morgan

Historians of the Anti-Corn Law League have questioned the reality of its contribution to the eventual abolition of the Corn Laws by Sir Robert Peel in 1846, arguing that the crucial parliamentary votes were swayed by factors other than external pressure. Nonetheless they have agreed that during the course of its existence the League became a consummate propaganda machine, capable of producing millions of tracts arguing every angle of the free trade question, of mounting sustained lecture tours to every corner of Britain, and of mobilising tens of thousands of men and women to sign petitions and memorials and to collect funds in support of the cause. Emphasis has traditionally been on the League’s published propaganda, contained in pamphlets, handbills, tracts, newspaper articles and printed speeches, many of which have been published in primary source collections such as those edited by Alon Kadish and Cheryl Schonhardt-Bailey. However, less attention has been paid to the League’s use of the politics of personality. In this paper I will demonstrate that this is a crucial omission, for personality became central to the League’s effort to mobilise the nation in favour of repeal, representing just one of the ways in which the League pioneered propaganda techniques that would later become mainstays of British political campaigning after the advent of a mass-electorate.

The mobilisation of personality was essential to the creation of a mass political movement. In its early stages, endorsement of the campaign by existing popular personalities, such as the Irish ‘Liberator’ Daniel O’Connell, helped to bring much-needed publicity, but as the League became more established its propagandists realised that abstract principles of political economy were much more palatable when personified by suitably heroic, masculine figures that had emerged from the agitation itself. Both of these uses of personality politics entailed an engagement with what may be characterised as a form of nascent celebrity culture, closely connected to the metropolitan press and an expanding consumerism. It is argued that this engagement took a variety of forms and that the League borrowed commercial techniques to actively promote the personalities of its leading figures, as well as the more traditional methods of political agitation. These techniques proved highly effective, and there is evidence to suggest that the League’s supporters were quite willing to accept the heroic presentation of their leaders as intended. However, this is by no means the whole story. The reinvention of the League’s leading figures as popular personalities was aided by the response of traditional social and political elites, their reception in the press at critical moments, and commercial opportunism on behalf of the purveyors of a range of consumer goods, who linked their products to the free traders for purely financial reasons. This in turn brought their images to the attention of a wider audience beyond the free trade movement itself, opening up wider possibilities for future political influence for men such as Richard Cobden and John Bright, but also generating unrealistic expectations which they would struggle to fulfil.