ABSTRACT
Francis Wrigley Hirst was undoubtedly one of the most influential figures
in what we know as the Manchester School of Economics. He provided this
‘school’ with a coherent intellectual and doctrinal content and, above all, he
constructed a history to go along with it. However, as T. S. Ashton made
clear many years ago, credit for first using the term the Manchester School
should probably go to Benjamin Disraeli who, in a speech in Parliament in
February 1846 mentioned ‘the school of Manchester’ and ‘the disciples of
the school of Manchester’.2 Shortly afterwards this label became
increasingly used in popular language. Hence, in May 1851 John Bright
in a speech made it clear that he was proud of belonging to the ‘Manchester
party’ and for his contribution to the making of a specific ‘Manchester
School’.3 Moreover, in a series for the Plymouth Mail in 1857 ‘the
Manchester Party’ was used to describe a core group of political reformers
within the Anti-Corn Law League, including such contemporaries as
Richard Cobden, John Bright, William Huskisson, John Bowring, John
Arthur Roebuck and Charles Pelham Villiers.4 To give a last example, in
1870 one Frederick Cortzazzi – who wrote in favour of fair instead of free
trade – used the ‘Manchester School’ in the title of a pamphlet.5 However,
it is noteworthy that such early nineteenth-century historians of the
Anti-Corn League as Archibald Prentice – also an important activist for
the League – and Henry Ashworth never used the term ‘Manchester
School’.6 The reason why neither they nor, for example, Cobden’s first
biographer John Morley7 did so is probably quite simple: contemporaries
knew very well that the League included men of different views and
doctrines which it would be futile to try to squeeze in to a coherent school
of thought. It is also worth noticing that the term ‘Manchester School of
Political Economy’ was hardly used at all during this time, although
Ashton provides us with an early example from 1850, in the form of a
periodical (only three issues are known to exist) with this title, published
and edited by Alexander Somerville.8 Somerville is mostly known for his
Autobiography of a Working Man (1848), in which he developed radical
views on the land question and his plea for the abolishment of such
‘unjust privileges’ as the Game Law. Hence, in his view, the Manchester
men – with Cobden and Bright at the forefront – were mainly radical
reformers who spoke in favour of the rights of tenants and against the
landed interest (a one-sided view but not totally unjust, of course). In The
Plymouth Mail (1857) it is stated quite frankly that ‘The Manchester party
. . . told their workpeople that all their sufferings were caused by the
landowners’.9
