1843 and All That: murder and a ‘crooked’ parliament

30 May 2009

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A venal House of Commons, a time of economic dislocation, an unpopular PM: Siân Busby sees eerie resonances in the strange case of Daniel McNaughten

In all this, Peel and the majority of Members were as dangerously out of step with the respectable middle class as any modern-day MP caught ‘flipping’, or urging the hard-pressed taxpayer to cover his moat-cleaning expenses.

The Anti-Corn Law League had garnered mass support from the respectable middle classes by luridly and repeatedly propagandising the equation that the Corn Laws were the cause of all the nation’s troubles. By January 1843, as Daniel McNaughten stepped out from the shadows and levelled his pistol at Mr Drummond a few yards from Downing Street, it was axiomatic to large sections of the great British public that the selfishness of the aristocracy had ensured that the price of bread was rated more than blood and flesh.

To maintain the Corn Laws was to condemn millions to starvation. Small wonder, then, that a modestly successful and ostensibly respectable young wood-turner should decide to take a potshot at a prominent Whitehall gent. Except that there is a great mystery. Daniel McNaughten had a small fortune in his pocket and no proper bullets in his pistol. The real truth about the death of the prime minister’s private secretary is hidden in the dizzying, whirling patterns of a Britain re-inventing its economy and social order.

McNaughten: a novel, by Siân Busby, is published by Short Books, £14.99.

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Mark Adrian Solomon

May 29th, 2009 7:34pm Report this comment

Yet it seems that back then they were cleverer than we are today in that protectionism was clearly seen for what it is - narrow-minded impoverishment of the many - and the radical progressive elements of society were arguing for free trade and globalisation. Would that were the case today!

Anyway, plus ca change.... there is nothing new or unique about the times we live in nor the issues we face, and everyone is vastly better off in every respect than they ever have been before.

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