John Wade

Artist Info

John WadeLondon, 1788 - 1875

Wade, John (1788–1875), radical author, was born in London, where he wrote his way out of obscurity. Nothing is known about his parents. Indeed, the only ascertainable fact about his early life was that he worked for over a decade as a journeyman wool-sorter.

Wade embarked on a career in journalism with the encouragement of metropolitan radicals such as Francis Place. He started out by editing the short-lived, one-penny Gorgon (1818–19), but is chiefly notable for his compilation of several versions of The Black Book, or, Corruption Unmasked! (first published in cheap instalments in 1819, in book form the following year, then in a supplement in 1823, and in revised editions in 1831, 1832, and 1835), of which over 50,000 copies were sold. Its pages formed a far more accessible utilitarian critique of élite parasitism than anything to be found in the writings of his hero, Jeremy Bentham. The point behind this thick compendium was to draw attention to every conceivable abuse within the ‘borough-mongering system’. Singling out the alleged depredations of church pluralists, government sinecurists, aristocratic pensioners, and virtually anyone else connected to the political power structure through money or interest, Wade sought to convince his readers that the only way to transform the central administration from a tax-plundering instrument of the well connected to an instrument of the people's will was through radical parliamentary reform.

At first glance Wade seems to bear little resemblance to the greatest spokesmen for ‘plebeian’ radicalism in the years after Waterloo, William Cobbett and Henry Hunt. Indeed, he castigated them as demagogues. For their part, Cobbett and Hunt certainly did not share Wade's commitment to political economy, his Malthusianism, or his faith in the political virtue of the industrial middle classes. But all three were fixated on the ways in which a tax structure which had evolved over a quarter-century of virtually uninterrupted warfare had allegedly transferred vast sums of money from the pockets of the people to those of state parasites, and all three tended to exaggerate their plain-spoken allegations. Thus while there was a good deal of truth in Wade's charges of corruption, he often relied on outdated information in order to convey the impression that official ‘abuses’ cost the British taxpayer far more than they actually did. He simply ignored recent Pittite reforms of the administrative system, such as the reduction of sinecure offices and unmerited pensions, in order to cast the Pittites and their ilk in the worst possible light.

While Wade's portrayal of the governing élite was not especially accurate, it was certainly influential; for it was strictly as a chronicler of war-related corruption that Wade was known to a truly broad audience. Thus one Durham observer lamented that the instalments of the Black Book had an ‘almost unlimited circulation’ thanks to ‘their cheapness, and the familiar style in which they are written’. Indeed, they were ‘to be found’, along with copies of T. J. Wooler's Black Dwarf, ‘in the hat band of almost every pitman you meet’ (J. Buddle to H. Philpotts, 25 Oct 1819, TNA: PRO, HO42/197, fol. 682). The legal authorities were concerned enough about the popularity of the cheap numbers of the Black Book to briefly contemplate prosecuting some of them for seditious libel (Sir Robert Gifford and Sir John Singleton Copley to Lord Sidmouth, 31 July 1820, TNA: PRO, Treasury Solicitor's MSS, 11/155/473).

Wade steered an easier course for the rest of his career because the political tide had moved in his direction. In his subsequent books and pamphlets, most notably the History of the Middle and Working Classes (1833), British History, Chronologically Arranged (1839), and Glances at the Times, and Reform Government (1840), as well as in his leader writing for Robert Stephen Rintoul's Spectator, Wade advocated ideas which found a comfortable home below the gangway in the early Victorian House of Commons: gradual constitutional reform, free trade, and an informal alliance of the ‘productive’ classes against aristocratic drones. Indeed, the advocacy of such ideas became so inoffensive that in 1862 they won for the impecunious Wade, erstwhile assailant of the civil list, a £50 pension. He died at 5 Hans Terrace, Chelsea, on 29 September 1875, and was buried in Kensal Green cemetery on 2 October.

Philip Harling

Sources DNB · P. Harling, ‘Rethinking “old corruption”’, Past and Present, 147 (1995), 127–58 · R. E. Zegger, ‘Wade, John’, BDMBR, vol. 1 · The Times (28 Oct 1875) · The Athenaeum (23 Oct 1875), 544 · K. Gilmartin, Print politics: the press and radical opposition in early nineteenth-century England (1996), 16–17, 152–3 · E. P. Thompson, The making of the English working class (1963), 769–74 · W. D. Rubinstein, ‘The end of “old corruption” in Britain, 1780–1860’, Past and Present, 101 (1983), 55–86 · d. cert.

Archives BL, Francis Place collection

Philip Harling, ‘Wade, John (1788–1875)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28378, accessed 29 July 2013]

John Wade (1788–1875): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/28378