Cobden, Peel, the Anti-Corn Law League, and the Politics of Feeling in Mid-Victorian Britain

Abstract The repeal of the Corn Laws in June 1846 was a key moment in the consolidation of a political culture that emphasized rationality, restraint and aversion to the politics of passion. Both the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, and the Anti-Corn Law leader, Richard Cobden, laboured to ensure that Corn Law repeal took place in an atmosphere of calmness and control. Cobden and Peel embodied syncretic variants of an ascetic politics which eschewed sentimentalism, elements of which could be found in both the Conservative Party and the Anti-Corn Law League. Although the League sometimes struggled to strike the right balance between these rival forms, by the mid-1840s, thanks in part to Cobden’s leadership, the League’s affective politics had been fine-tuned. Had that fine tuning not taken place, it would have added significantly to Peel’s difficulties in 1846. By drawing on recent work on the history of emotions, this article develops a new approach to the study of political culture which foregrounds the central, albeit contested, role of feeling. It concludes with a discussion of the affective basis of the mid-Victorian ‘age of equipoise’, to which repeal contributed significantly.