11 Political Economy and Popular Education: Thomas Hodgskin and the London Mechanics’ Institute, 1823–8 1 Gregory Claeys Mechanics’ institutes were developed in the first half of the nine- teenth century to further technical and adult education in Britain. Beginning in the early 1820s in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Leeds and London, there were about 700 mechanics’ institutes and similar asso- ciations in Britain by 1850, with a membership of some 120,000. Such figures are misleading, however, for while many of these institutions have not yet been carefully studied, they have often been accounted a failure, since they never taught factory operatives skills directly related to their work, nor even attracted an audience composed primarily of mechanics. The reasons for this are varied, but some historians have detected a relationship between efforts to teach political economy in the institutes and their inability to fulfil their original intentions. For while they did develop teaching on a larger scale than similar organi- zations in this period, the teaching of political economy in particular remained controversial, and often contested by working-class radicals. These hypotheses have given rise to a debate about the ‘social control’ versus the ‘social mobility’ functions of the institutes in early Victorian Britain: were mechanics’ institutes intended to enforce an ‘orthodox’ view of political economy? Did they, in fact, primarily serve as a means of self-improvement for the upper level of the artisanate, clerks and others? This chapter explores these questions by examining one of the few well-documented controversies of this type, that which surrounded the first set of lectures on political economy offered at the London Mechanics’ Institute, founded in 1823. Here the political implications of teaching political economy to artisans and operatives (though there were comparatively few of the latter in London) were greatly in evidence when the radical writer and journalist, Thomas Hodgskin, was blocked 157 M. T. Davis (ed.), Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848 © Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited 2000