Historian and poet John Seed (1950-2025) played a vital role in the development of Social History, joining the Editorial Board in 1982 and serving as Reviews Editor (1982-94) and as an Associate Editor (2010-13) following the death of his friend Keith Nield (founding editor with Janet Blackman). John was also a regular contributor to Social History as an author over many years – on religious dissenters and liberal ideology and, through his collaborations with Keith Nield, on the continued salience of Marxism for the practice of a politically engaged social history.
In this reflection, the first of two tributes, historian Simon Gunn reflects on John’s contributions to the journal and to social history more broadly. You can read the tributes together with some of John’s poetry in Social History 50, 4.
In January 1982 Social History published an article by a young historian, John Seed. Entitled, in a manner at once intriguing and intimidating, ‘Unitarianism, political economy and the antinomies of liberal culture in Manchester, c.1830-1850’, it was his first research article and immediately attracted the attention of the small but influential group of social historians working on nineteenth-century Britain.[1] As a student just embarking on a PhD on the formation of the Manchester middle class in the mid-Victorian period, I was simultaneously dazzled by the sophistication of the piece and daunted by its theoretical and critical apparatus. In retrospect, the article not only represented an important moment in my own intellectual development; it also announced many of the themes and concerns of John’s work over the next forty years. This was a startling debut by a singular man, a historian with a distinctive signature and a powerful, wide-ranging intellect.
To begin with, the matter of the title. ‘Antinomy’ was a characteristically Seedian term, used here precisely to identify contradictions between ideas or principles, in this case the tensions and contradictions John uncovered within the ideological framework of Manchester’s liberal elite in the 1830s and 1840s. The article itself fixed on a small group of Unitarian men, including the large cotton spinners McConnel and Kennedy, bankers like Benjamin Heywood, journalists like J.E. Taylor, first editor of the Manchester Guardian, and ministers like William Gaskell, husband of Mrs Gaskell, the novelist, all members of Manchester’s two principal Unitarian chapels at Cross Street and Mosley Street. Since the 1780s Unitarians had played a leading part in Manchester’s public life, including the foundation of the Literary and Philosophical Society and the Mechanics Institute, and this continued with the later generation of the 1830s and 1840s. Three Manchester Unitarians became Whig MPs in 1831/2, taking county as well as borough seats; the eclipse of the Tory Anglican clique which had dominated the old institutions of local government, such as the Court Leet, meant that ascendancy in Manchester passed to the liberal cause in general and the Unitarian elite in particular.
These Unitarians were – or appeared to be – the very type of the liberal dissenting ‘Manchester man’, so often identified at the time and subsequently with a rigid adherence to Benthamite utilitarianism, classical political economy and a highly moralised attitude to poverty. But John’s purpose in the article was not to describe the rise to power of this liberal elite, nor the hegemony of utilitarian ideology. Quite the reverse: ‘Antinomies’ sought to show the conflicted character of the cottonocracy, even in its home base, Manchester, and the unstable foundations of its rule in the 1830s and early 1840s. Not only were the Unitarians challenged by their Tory Anglican rivals whose mouthpiece was the Manchester Courier newspaper, they were simultaneously threatened with removal from their chapels by rival Dissenting groups in the Lady Hewley dispute, only settled legally in 1844. Nor did the Unitarians conform to the Gradgrindian stereotype of the free-marketeering, utilitarian zealot. Under competition from small capitalists in the cotton industry, larger employers like the Gregs and Henry McConnell began to support governmental intervention in regulating factory conditions and working hours from the early 1830s. Above all, confronted by the unemployment and hardship among workers in the harsh depression of 1839 to 1842, the view of poverty as a moral problem of the individual began to weaken. Testimony from missionaries employed by the Manchester Domestic Mission, another Unitarian initiative, revealed to wealthy sponsors like Benjamin Heywood that poverty was a structural rather than an individual condition and would not be alleviated simply by reform of workers’ behaviour. Such views were reinforced by the preaching of Unitarian ministers like William Gaskell and J.G. Robberds, promoting an idea of social relations as based on the hierarchical model of the patriarchal family rather than the cash nexus. Far from being a clear-cut, uniform expression of capitalist interest, liberal middle-class ideology in early Victorian Manchester was shot through with contradictions and complexities.
In pursuing this argument, John was not engaging in a species of conservative revisionism designed to exculpate Manchester’s liberal bourgeoisie from the charge of narrow capitalist self-interest. Far from it: the article was framed within the conceptual and linguistic terms of Marxism – of Raymond Williams, Althusser and Marx himself – as well as its 1970s offshoots in the structuralist guise of Bourdieu and Foucault. In fact, John took an idiosyncratic approach to social history. Brought up in Co. Durham, the son of a nurse and a merchant seaman, he was told by a doyen of ‘history from below’ that the subject of his PhD thesis should be coal miners, but John characteristically preferred to concentrate on the history of capital and capitalists which he considered to have been largely ignored by social history. In a review entitled ‘Waiting for Gramsci’, written with the then co-editor of Social History, Keith Nield, in 1981, the pair mounted a scathing critique of the subject – including ‘history from below’ – as it had been practised over the previous decade.
We have no coherent analysis of the British state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a seriously undernourished historiography of religion, few accounts of British culture that go beyond the history of ideas or literary criticism, and scarcely the beginnings of a history of the English middle class.[2]
It is hard not to see John’s hand here, the verdict serving as a harbinger of the ‘Antinomies’ piece that would appear less than a year later and address directly at least three of the four absences mentioned.
Much of the originality of ‘Antinomies’ lies in the way in which John conceived ‘culture’, including religion, and its relationship to class and the capitalist economy. Religion in the form of Unitarianism was treated as a way into understanding how discourses of the market, of rationality and the social order, worked among liberal sections of Manchester’s capitalist elite. Just as capitalist ideology was inconsistent and contradictory, so Unitarian ministers were not ‘merely the “ventriloquist’s dummy” of the industrial interest’.[3] Liberal ideology was complex and multi-layered, requiring to be deciphered in specific social locations – the counting-house, the chapel, the home – rather than assumed from straightforward economic situation. Above all, John insisted, ideology is material, not simply a matter of abstract ideas and beliefs. ‘Bluntly, a church is as real as a factory and the system of ideological production requires an analysis no less material and no less social than economic production’.[4] This was a demanding mode of historical enquiry. It rested on the investigation of detailed sets of sources, chapel records, mission reports, subscription lists and more, carefully piecing together a picture of ‘the highly localised network of practices, institutions and social relations’ among the early Victorian Manchester bourgeoisie.[5] It required close linguistic analysis and an equally precise use of language to unpick meanings; as a published poet John had an unusually developed ear for the apt turn of phrase, the exact expression. His technique as an historian was to a make a small-scale incision in the historical record – in this case Unitarian culture in early Victorian Manchester – and deftly use it to illuminate much larger issues of class, culture and the exercise of power. Early in my doctoral studies I outlined the proposed contents of the thesis to him in writing. I received a gentle, laconic reply soon after to the effect that if I had 20 years and a large private income, he would look forward to the multi-volume study that would surely result. I took the hint and cut my cloth accordingly.
In later years John’s historical work ranged widely, including the arts in the 1960s and the Chinese community in London’s docklands in the early twentieth century.[6] While he initially drew a sharp distinction between his poetic and his historical output, the two became increasingly enmeshed in his poetry, in published collections on Mayhew, Peterloo and the London blitz.[7] It is probably fair to say that he never fulfilled the ambitious historical agenda laid out in the early articles, ‘Antinomies’ and ‘Waiting for Gramsci’. Given his meticulous manner of researching and writing, it would have been a herculean if not impossible task. But many of the themes elaborated in those articles would resonate throughout his work as a historian, from the essays collected as The Culture of Capital, co-edited with the art historian Janet Wolff, to his book Dissenting Histories on the politics and writing of eighteenth-century religious Dissent.[8]
Historians do not bother much with the scholarly history of their own subject, preferring to pursue the debates of the day, such as they are, and to limit historiography, where required, to a selective canon of exemplary predecessors. But John Seed’s work stands out as having enduring relevance: few historians in recent times engaged so consistently and critically with the cultural, the social (and the economic). In the early 1980s his pleas for a new Marxist-inflected history and a materialist attention to language and ideology were overtaken by the linguistic turn; it would be little more than a year before Gareth Stedman Jones’ Languages of Class, and specifically his essay ‘Rethinking Chartism’, would direct social historians of nineteenth-century Britain (and many others) away from the kind of Gramscian analysis favoured by John in the direction of a post-structuralist inflected history of ideas.[9] Likewise, the attention to what John termed ‘that most important and yet most elusive class: the owners of capital’ has not been forthcoming to the extent that David Edgerton could recently characterise modern British history as a ‘history without capitalists’.[10] But any student of history – especially a student of modern British history – would do well to attend carefully to the guidelines John provided, as long ago as 1982, for a new kind of social history, a history that is at once empirically precise, theoretically literate and above all, radical.
Simon Gunn is Emeritus Professor of Urban History, University of Leicester, (sg201@leicester.ac.uk).
References
[1] J. Seed, ‘Unitarianism, political economy and the antinomies of liberal culture in Manchester, c.1830-1850’, Social History, 7, 1 (1982), 1-25.
[2] K. Nield and J. Seed, ‘Waiting for Gramsci’, Social History, 6, 2 (1981), 209-10. The article is a review of recent work on Gramsci’s political thought by Anne Showstack Sassoon, Chantal Mouffe and others.
[3] Seed, ‘Unitarianism, political economy and the antinomies of liberal culture’, op. cit., 23.
[4] ibid., 2.
[5] ibid., 3.
[6] B. Moore-Gilbert and J. Seed (eds) Cultural Revolution? The challenge of the arts in the 1960s (London, 1992); J. Seed, ‘Limehouse blues: looking for ‘Chinatown’ in the London docks, 1900-1940’, History Workshop Journal, 62 (autumn 2006), 58-85.
[7] They include two volumes based on Mayhew: J. Seed, Pictures from Mayhew: London 1850 (Exeter, 2005) and J. Seed, That Barrikins (Exeter, 2007); J. Seed, Manchester: August 16th and 17th 1819 (Colchester, 2013) based on witness statements in the aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre; and J. Seed, Smoke Rising: London 1940-41 (Exeter, 2015), described as a ‘documentary poem’ drawing on oral accounts of the London blitz.
[8] J. Wolff and J. Seed (eds), The Culture of Capital: Art, power and the nineteenth-century middle class (Manchester, 1988); J. Seed, Dissenting Histories: Religious division and the politics of memory in eighteenth-century England (Edinburgh, 2008).
[9] G.S. Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English working class history, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1983).
[10] Seed, ‘Unitarianism, political economy and the antinomies of liberal culture’, op. cit., 2; D. Edgerton, The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A twentieth-century history (London, 2019), 594.