Eliza Flower’s and Harriet Martineau’s The Gathering of the Unions: From the radical salon to the monster meeting

Abstract

The composer Eliza Flower (1803-1846) was a central figure in progressive preacher and radical orator W. J. Fox’s intellectual coterie subsequently known as the Monthly Repository Circle. Her musical talent and unconventional artistic personality were much admired by leading figures from the arts and politics including Robert Browning and leading radical W. J. Linton, and she developed close friendships with many in Fox’s circle including Harriet Martineau, Mary Howitt and J. S. Mill. In many cases these relationships produced original musical settings of poetry by these individuals. With a particular focus on one product of Flower’s artistic collaboration with Martineau, the song Gathering of the Unions written for the 1832 Reform Bill, this article will look at the ways that this song, produced within the private sphere of Fox’s circle as a result of a very particular kind of middle-class sociability, crossed over into the public sphere of radical politics where it was instrumental in creating another form of sociability. I argue that these discrete cultural products can be understood as a form of political engagement, albeit indirect, by middle-class women that effectively bridged, and thereby further complicated, the lines between the separate spheres long understood to delineate gendered roles in nineteenth-century British society.