Chartism

«Чартизм» — это не просто работа выдающегося английского философа XIXв.
Томаса Карлейля, посвященная одноименному движению. Это глубинный анализ
как имеющихся, так и грядущих проблем Европы, входящей в XX в.: эмиграция
и иммиграция, ужасающее положение рабочего класса, отмирание церкви, разложение правящей элиты и набирающий силу парламентский демократизм. На них Карлейль нападает с присущей ему силой и предлагает свои, подчас очень неоднозначные решения.

There were times in the 19th century when disestablishment of the Church of England seemed inevitable. Dissenters had become a sizeable portion of the worshipping community, with a growing number of Roman Catholics. The privileges enjoyed by the Established Church were under attack from outside and occasionally from within.
The main aim of this paper is to explore why disestablishment of the Church did not happen in that century, when it was a popular political issue and there were passionate advocates for disestablishment. There were also passionate defenders of the establishment, but part of the task is to judge whether the Church’s survival as an established church was more to do with indifference than defence.
General arguments about church-state relationships are considered only in passing. The aim is not to argue the case for or against disestablishment, but to analyse why antidisestablishmentarianism triumphed.  The emphasis is on original material, rather than iteration of already published histories and arguments.
The paper begins with an overview of the Church’s condition at the start of the 19th century. Detail consideration is given to the creation of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, attitudes to the Church within the Chartist movement at a time of great discontent with government, the influence of the Liberation Society, and the role of Gladstone.
By the end of the 19th century, the Church of England was much less “established” than it had been at the start. This might be seen either as a consequence of the battles over disestablishment, or as one of the reasons why disestablishment was never achieved, for the supposed benefits of establishment had been whittled away until the Church of England was seen as just one Christian denomination among many, with far fewer privileges to attack.
The final part of the paper looks at our present time and secularised society, and asks whether a decisive alteration in the relationship between Church and State is any more likely now than over a hundred years ago. This part includes some speculation about whether past debates and arguments could have a bearing on the situation now, and about what future crises might provoke Church or Parliament to change the relationship.

Often criticised for its escapist ending, Maurice is surprisingly radical if viewed in the tradition of nineteenth-century political writings. The Chartist writers of the 1840s did not have a solution for the Condition of England question so their radical short stories portrayed characters that were denied equal rights by the state as either dying or leaving England for good. Far from being a radical writer, Forster nevertheless faced a similar dilemma: how to create a positive literary homosexual identity and what to do with a cross-class same-sex couple for which ostracism seemed inevitable. Forster wrote Maurice after his first journey to India, yet instead of giving Maurice and Alec a happily-ever-after in the colonies or Argentina, he allowed them to settle in the English greenwood – fairytale-esque and pastoral yet seditiously subversive by virtue of its very existence. By doing so, he kept the socially seditious element firmly on the edges of English society as he denied it the easiest solution to this specific aspect of the Condition of England question. Maurice is a product of English society, yet despite being Cambridge-educated and upper-middle-class, Maurice finds his happy ending with Scudder, not Clive. Lytton Strachey was one of many readers who, despite knowing that Forster’s novel was inspired by Edward Carpenter’s cross-class relationship with George Merrill, considered the ending unrealistic and implausible, the class chasm between Maurice and Alec being considered too wide for a happy relationship. Yet it was Forster’s decision to give his protagonist a happy ending against all odds that makes Maurice different from most other contemporary gay fiction. Therefore, this paper concerns itself with the hypothesis that Forster’s choice of ending the novel is more radical and subversive than has frequently been argued in the past.

Στην εργασία γίνεται μια προσπάθεια να εξεταστεί η εξέλιξη του όρου και οι διαφορετικές προσεγγίσεις πάνω στο φαινόμενο της “εργατικής αριστοκρατίας”. Θα διερευνηθεί αν μπορούμε να μιλάμε, μέχρι τα τέλη του 19ου αιώνα, για ένα τέτοιο στρώμα στην αγγλική κοινωνία και κάτω από ποιες προϋποθέσεις. Η εργασία ασχολείται με το ζήτημα παίρνοντας υπόψη παράλληλα τις ραγδαίες οικονομικές εξελίξεις και μετασχηματισμούς της περιόδου. Σκιαγραφεί την αντανάκλαση του φαινομένου στην καθημερινή ζωή και στην πολιτική και συνδικαλιστική δράση.

In this thesis, I investigated why and how the Chartist papers used Romantic poetry in their propagation of the Chartist cause. The main question this thesis will try to answer is what is the function of Romantic poetry in the Chartist public sphere?

Drama played an important but under-recognized role in the dynamic counterculture of Chartism, the working-class protest movement for political rights. Making use of a wide range of theatrical genres, the Chartists staged amateur productions in their own associations and held frequent benefits in many of London’s largest working-class theaters. They recontextualized an array of published plays and produced such original works as John Watkins’s John Frost, a Chartist Play (1841) and reenactments of the Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet’s 1803 trial. Within Chartism, drama exemplified a form of collaborative labor that advanced claims about the capacity of working-class people to imagine and create alternative social formations. It also functioned as a means of debating the most pressing issues that the Chartists faced, including the potential and limits of political violence. Whereas Chartist poetry commonly shied away from endorsing “physical force,” on stage Chartists instantiated revolutionary crowds and enacted the threat of governmental reprisal.

This article engages with Raymond Williams's theories of cultural traditions in order to challenge the critical commonplace that Percy Bysshe Shelley's poetry exerted a dogmatic influence on Chartism and Owenite socialism. After reviewing the terms of this orthodoxy, the article goes on to focus on a period between December 1838 and July 1839, in which the movements' periodical cultures developed 'Shelleys' with quite different characters in response to a specific political context. I situate the appearance of poems such as The Revolt of Islam and 'Song: To the Men of England' in Owenite periodicals and Chartist newspapers in terms of major events in Chartism's history. When these audiences' relationships with Shelley's poetry are viewed in terms of active engagement with the text, rather than acceptance of a dogmatic influence, a more complex picture emerges. Such usage, I suggest, bears out arguments in Marxism and Literature on the political valency of emotion in the formation of structures of feeling. To focus on the use of 'residual' culture in the formation of particular 'emergent' structures is also to be concerned with historical rather than epochal questions. Williams's own comments in Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review on working-class use of Shelley's poetry in this period, however, suggest that he did not believe that such creative use by working-class movements was possible in this period. In those interviews, Williams described the presence of Shelley's phrases in working-class culture as 'approximations or substitutions' for a genuinely working-class structure of feeling. I conclude the article by arguing that 'approximations' recognises cultural change and is closer to the truth of the formations' relationships with Shelley.

Another newspaper account of the London-based Chartist poet, the focus of my 2014 book, 'The Poetry and the Politics. Radical Reform in Victorian England', this has been recently discovered in the British provincial press, through a correspondent's letter with extensive reprinting of a missing issue of 'The Divinearian', Duncan's radical periodical.

The concepts of the public sphere and public space have gained increasing purchase within social history. This paper contributes to this literature by theoretically developing a critical approach to both concepts. By drawing upon the insights of the Bakhtin circle, as well as Marxism and Poststructuralism, the paper suggests that public spheres under capitalism are structured through the basic contradiction between capital and labour. Each public sphere may then be seen as a refracted dialogic and spatial form of this basic contradiction, and is then best viewed as a contradictory spatial entity that obtains its unique identity through different ''accents'' and ''word signs''. The capitalist state must aim to regulate, through governance and law, dialogue within a public sphere. By focusing on the Chartist demonstration at Hyde Park, London in 1855, I show how these theories can be employed to explore how a radical social movement appropriated space by developing a working class public sphere.

How does the literature and culture of early Victorian Britain look different if viewed from below? Exploring the interplay between canonical social problem novels and the journalism and fiction appearing in the periodical press associated with working-class protest movements, Gregory Vargo challenges long-held assumptions about the cultural separation between the “two nations” of rich and poor in the Victorian era. The flourishing radical press was home to daring literary experiments that embraced themes including empire and economic inequality, helping to shape mainstream literature. Reconstructing social and institutional networks that connected middle-class writers to the world of working-class politics, this book reveals for the first time acknowledged and unacknowledged debts to the radical canon in the work of such authors as Charles Dickens, Thomas Carlyle, Harriet Martineau, and Elizabeth Gaskell. What emerges is a new vision of Victorian social life, in which fierce debates and surprising exchanges spanned the class divide.

Lecturing activity was central to the ambitions of the Chart& movement for universal suffrage in early Victorian Britain, not merely because it was an effective means of political proselytism, but also because it was emblematic of Chartist political aims. Political lecturing followed a long radical tradition, but Chartism was able to systematize and to professionalize it on an unprecedented scale, binding together local and regional initiatives within a genuinely national politics. The article describes this organizational geography. An awareness of the symbolic and organizational commitment within Chartism to a national system of communication also prompts a reassessment of the significance of political media, however. It is argued here that the formal geography of political lecturing should be taken to be consistent and complementary, rather than merely instrumental, to Chartism's broader political culture. " Go on, glorious spirit of intelligence! In a little time every village will have its galaxy of lecturers who will mutually visit their adjacent localities, pleasing their hearers by variety, improving themselves by emulation, and diffusing the light of liberty around them. " t'r As the most important manifestation of popular politics in early-Victorian Britain, Chartism has received a considerable amount of attention from historians and historical geographers. There has been some concern for instance from the latter about the degree to which Chartism's " complex topography " was marked by regional rather than national contours, and the extent to which the movement was politically fragmented as well as geographically differentiated. t2] Moreover historical geographers are able to draw upon studies of the dynamics of political co;munication in the radical protests to which Chartism was indebted. " ] As a result, the geography of Chartism is demonstrably important to our understanding of the movement. t41 However, where historians have increasingly asserted the need to understand Chartism in terms of its wider " cultural experience " rather than in its " straightforward political organisation " , historical geography on the whole largely concerned with the latter rather than the former-has had little to add.t't This essay therefore attempts to focus on one form of activity within Chartism's political culture-political lecturing-in both an organizational and a cultural sense. The geography of Chartist lecturing, it is argued here, was more than a matter of organizational coherence, mappable by static geographical distributions; nor can it be described by diffusion models. Its fullest significance stems from the fact that it was a part of a political culture that was itself suffused with geographical considerations. That

The extension of the franchise to urban householders, twenty years after Kennington Common, represented only a very limited concession to Chartist aims. However, Chartism loomed large over the discussions about the merits and pitfalls of reform. On one hand, the ideology of Chartism represented one of the facets of democracy in the context of which measures of reform were proposed and opposed. On the other, former Chartists entered wholeheartedly into the key national debates of this period: from the immediate question of franchise extension, to associated controversies such as the implications of the American Civil War for popular government.

To understand Chartism in its longer context, this paper examines the evolution of the reform debate in the large, diverse and influential county of Yorkshire, between the abortive Conservative bill of 1859 and the successful Conservative bill of 1867. It explores the involvement of former Chartists, from major figures like Sheffield’s Isaac Ironside, through Barnsley’s Frank Mirfield, to minor figures like the emigrant Joe Kay, and their contributions to the debate. It further considers the way that Chartism specifically, and democracy more generally, contextualised and informed the debate over franchise extension, and their use by both supporters and opponents of reform. It concludes by broadening its consideration of working-class culture to the Working Men’s Conservative Associations which formed in the late 1860s, understanding these as both a continuation of the earlier Tory Radical movement and an implicit response to some Chartist critiques.

This paper was originally entitled ‘Working Class Heroes’ and was presented at the G.W.M. Reynolds: Popular Culture, Literature & Radicalism in the Nineteenth Century Conference, held at the University of Birmingham in July 2000. Some of this material subsequently found its way into a biographical entry on Reynolds published in The Literary Encyclopedia in 2004 while the full text was finally published on Ainsworth & Friends.

This is a biographical sketch of Reynolds, beginning with his early life at Sandhurst, his time in Paris, and his first journalistic experience (on The London and Paris Courier). The paper also covers the animosity between Reynolds and Dickens, which had grown out of their political differences, and its origins in Reynolds’ plagiarisms of Dickens in the 1830s and 40s.  Reynolds’ politics are covered in detail, in particular his involvement with Chartism, and there is also an analysis of The Mysteries of London (1844 – 1856), focusing upon the first two volumes and Reynolds’ apparent empowerment of working class men and women in parallel with a sensational gothic narrative. The piece concludes that Reynolds’s contribution to Victorian literature, in particular London writing, is as significant as that of Dickens and Henry Mayhew.

In The Origins of Collective Decision Making, Andy Blunden identifies three paradigms of collective decision making – Counsel, Majority and Consensus, discovers their origins in traditional, medieval and modern times, and traces their evolution over centuries up to the present. The study reveals that these three paradigms have an ethical foundation, deeply rooted in historical experiences. The narrative takes the reader into the very moments when individual leaders and organisers made the crucial developments in white heat of critical moments in history, such as the English Revolution of the 1640s, the Chartist Movement of the 1840s and the early Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. This history provides a valuable resource for resolving current social movement conflict over decision making. -- to be released in hardback 17th April 2016

The book’s introduction provides a capsule history of working-class social movements from the 1830s to the 1850s, a period Thomas Carlyle referred to as “our French Revolution.” These years saw the mass mobilization of working-class people in Britain around an array of issues, including factory reform, a free press, a broadened franchise, and the maintenance of the poor laws. These agitations coalesced in Chartism, which sought the expansion of democratic rights as a way to redress social and economic wrongs. But Chartism was never exclusively focused on political reform; it was also a cultural force which nourished an array of artistic, educational, and literary activity. In the introduction, I analyze the treatment of middle-class social problem fiction in the literature column of the Northern Star, the preeminent radical publication of the late 1830s and 1840s. Even as Carlyle and others characterized the working classes as essentially mute, this radical publication actively engaged with the work of Jerrold, Gaskell, Disraeli, Dickens, Frances Trollope and Carlyle himself. At times, the Star sought to conscript middle-class novelists’ prestige into the Chartist program for reform, enlisting them, if unwillingly, as fellow travelers on the march towards democracy. The introduction concludes with an examination of the way Frances Trollope’s encounters with working-class radicals in the Manchester region informed her early industrial novels, which helped establish the genre of “Condition of England” fiction.

Abstract: Although the Chartist movement is often seen as focused on domestic reforms, Chartist newspapers and journals of the 1830s and 1840s extensively commented upon various aspects of the expanding British empire, including slavery and abolition, Christian missionary activity, emigration policy, and the colonial wars of the era. This essay argues that the Chartist  press developed wide-ranging criticism of several facets of the colonial system, describing the empire as “the outworks of the
citadel of corruption,” an integral part of the hierarchical structures which disenfranchised and impoverished the working classes in Britain. The Chartist press appropriated Orientalist discourse as a way to characterize metropolitan elites and colonial administrators, rejected the notion that missionaries offered moral and social uplift to indigenous populations, and celebrated foreign resistance to British aggression. This radical working-class archive can help us better understand the extent to which imperial expansion was contested in Victorian Britain.

Scholars have illustrated the complex relationships between New York's early 19th c. Workingman's movement and the tenant revolts of the Anti-Rent movement, yet few have recognized that these movements were both part of a broader transatlantic trend of social and political radicalism.  "An Electricity of Mind" seeks to remedy this deficiency through examination of the life of Thomas Ainge Devyr - Irish republican, Chartist militant, National Reform Association organizer, and Anti-Rent leader.  Through an examination of Devyr's ideology and tactics, I argue that the impact of radical labor ideologies was decisively shaped by the specific social and political contexts of Chartist Britain, early Jacksonian New York City, and the Anti-Rent era in the Hudson Valley.

In 1848, Europe was experiencing the greatest upheaval since Napoleon. The year had begun with a revolution in the Two Sicilies; by February, the French had declared another republic and Marx and Engels had published the Communist Manifesto. By March, there were barricades in Berlin, riots in Sweden, and the Hapsburgs were looking decidedly insecure. The Danes were demanding a constitutional monarchy, and there were nationalist uprisings in the Romanian Principalities, Poland, and Ireland, now three years into the Great Famine. In England, the new industrial labouring class had organised into the Chartist movement ten years before, calling loudly for electoral reform. Now, the Chartists once more seized the moment to lobby parliament with huge outdoor gatherings across the country prefacing the presentation of a third petition. The Duke of Wellington, then 79, was tasked with defending London. Like the climax of an epic novel, societal tensions could no longer be contained; oppositional forces were moving towards inevitable collision.

This was also the year that Chapman & Hall, at the recommendation of Dickens’ friend and agent, John Forster, published the debut novel of an anonymous female author entitled Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life. Astute reviewers quickly grasped the connection. ‘When people on Turkey carpets with their three meat meals a day are wondering why working men are turning Chartist and Communist,’ wrote Charles Kingsley in Fraser’s Magazine, ‘then let them read Mary Barton.’ And he didn’t stop there. If, he continued, the rich wanted to know why men grew to hate them and turn their backs on God, why mothers gave their babies opium to assuage the pains of hunger, and what a human being looks like when he starves to death in a filthy cellar, ‘then let them read Mary Barton.’ (Kingsley would go on to write his own ‘Condition of England’ novel, Alton Locke, in 1850, which was sympathetic to the Chartist cause.) Although his readers were by then no strangers to religious tracts, government reports and earnest social investigations into the living conditions of the new urban working class, there was clearly nothing like a good novel to really raise awareness. As George Eliot would later write: ‘The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.’ There was something in the air, and Mary Barton had clearly caught it.

Then, as now, old orders were rapidly changing for which there was no precedent. Britain was the first industrial nation; and as farm labourers, redundant artisans and economic migrants poured into the cities looking for work, by the middle of the century the urban population exceeded the rural for the first time in any country in history. No British city exemplified this change more than Manchester, which had turned traditional handloom weavers into cotton mill workers, while entrepreneurs, factory owners and their financiers amassed vast fortunes.

For some commentators, intoxicated by dynamic economic growth, Manchester was a symbol of national pride, heralding a new era of innovation and prosperity. As the hero of Disraeli’s Coningsby (1844) enters Manchester, he declares:

What Art was to the ancient world, Science is to the modern; the distinctive faculty. In the minds of men the useful has succeeded to the beautiful. Instead of the city of the Violet Crown, a Lancashire village has expanded into a mighty region of factories and warehouses. Yet rightly understood, Manchester is as great a human exploit as Athens.

But Disraeli didn’t live there. The author of Mary Barton did. As W.R. Greg noted in the Edinburgh Review, she (because he was certain the author was a woman) should not be confused with the type of writer who ‘get up the needful information, and then prepare a story as a solicitor might prepare a case.’ Instead, ‘She has evidently lived much among the people she describes, made herself intimate at their firesides, and feels a sincere, though sometimes too exclusive and undiscriminating, sympathy with them.’ Greg, who was a friend of the Gaskells, found much to like in the novel’s execution. His criticism, however, was representative of that of many outright negative reviewers, who simply couldn’t comprehend the world Mary Barton depicted. If only the doomed factory worker John Barton had saved his money in periods of economic boom, they said, constantly retrained to keep up with emergent technology, and tried to understand better the financial risks that manufacturers and venture capitalists took, then he would have been fine. And this ‘self-help’ argument is still wheeled out today, in defense of the brutal Darwinism of our own ‘gig’ economy, making the novel as relevant now as it was when it was written.

An account of the origins of the Eight-Hour-Day movement in Australia in the 1850s amongst stonemasons, and the Chartist influence. This article was subsequently republished in 'Recorder', newsletter of the Melbourne Branch of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History, Issue 253, March 2007, pp. 1, 5, 6.

"In 1836, American actor Thomas D. Rice first arrived in Great Britain to tour the creation that had made him famous in the United States, Jim Crow. This blackface depiction of a raggedy,
runaway slave, with his infectious songs, eccentric dancing, and demotic appeal soon took London by storm. The Jim Crow craze lasted for three years, with Rice finding fame, fortune and success and his imitators becoming ubiquitous in the capital’s theatres and on its streets. Although the act and its character have been acknowledged as a precursor to the evolution of British minstrelsy and blackface traditions throughout the Victorian period, the craze itself has not been substantially studied in its British context. This essay will look beyond Rice’s act and the performance of Jim Crow in the theatres to look instead at Jim Crow’s appropriation in print satire and street performance. It will argue that these requisitions of Jim Crow illustrate how Georgian traditions of carnival and grotesque humour were redeveloped for the early Victorian context. In print, Jim Crow was widely utilized in caustic bodily humour that attacked insincere politicians. On the streets, this same humour was seen as obscene and was repressed and contained, paving the way for the respectable, mainstream Victorian blackface act. However, integral to both appropriations of Jim Crow was the figure of the black buffoon, and the act rapidly provided an archetype for the belittling and persecution of London’s black population."

Bu çalışmada, sanayi devriminin başlangıç merkezi olan ve işçi sınıfı tabirinin ilk kez kullanıldığı İngiltere’nin zaman içerisinde değişen sosyal yapısı, işçi sınıfının tarihsel süreçteki deneyim ve kazanımlarını aktarılmaya çalışılmıştır.
Zamanla gelişen sanayi kentleri sermaye sahipleri için büyük bir zenginleşme sağladı.      Ancak bu zenginleşmeden kendileri içinde pay isteyen işçi sınıfı beklediği payı hiçbir zaman sermaye sahiplerinden alamadı.
Çareyi kendi çabası ve bilinciyle yaratmaya koyulan işçiler, zaman içerisinde güçlendiler.
  Zamanla  bilinçlenen işçi sınıfı, sermaye sahipleri ile olan mücadelesini uzun süren ve zorlu deneyimler sonucunda sınıfsal bir karaktere büründürmeyi başardı.

In March 1848, the radical writer and editor G. W. M. Reynolds came face-to-face with some of the very people he hoped were his readers, when he took a step out of the editor’s office and onto the speaker’s platform. Reynolds stood up in front of a protest meeting in Trafalgar Square, and turned the issue of the day away from taxation and towards revolution. In that critical year of Europe-wide revolutions, Reynolds praised the recent French uprising and declared solidarity with the French republicans. Reynolds’s actions on that spring afternoon earned him immediate prominence in the Chartist movement, a place on the platform at the ‘monster meeting’ at Kennington Common on 10 April, the status of a radical celebrity, and a government file. The disorder after the meeting continued on and off over several days. This article considers Reynolds’s accounts of his own speech as printed in the pages of his best-selling serial narrative, The Mysteries of London (1844–48). Reynolds’s sprawling tale mixed melodrama with radical polemics in the belief that fiction was a legitimate means of promoting radical politics. This article argues that the insertions of his 1848 speeches attempted to connect imagined readers of urban fiction to real protestors on London’s streets, by linking the printed page of urban fiction to oratory within urban space. Reynolds’s speech-making on that March afternoon projected his outbursts in his London fiction out onto the London streets; he hoped that the combined work of both would push forward his political agenda. His experience of writing The Mysteries of London gave melodramatic wings to his oratory on the platform. Setting Reynolds’s speech within the context of his debt to popular melodrama and its roots in oral culture, and the oral effects within The Mysteries of London as a whole, this article argues that Reynolds’s actions declared printed matter to be indelibly linked with the street theatre of political demonstrations. Trafalgar Square offered Reynolds the possibility that urban space could present the continuation and implementation of radical demands made in print, and could bring radical print vocally to life.

Abstract

From 1838 until the end of the European Revolutions in 1852, the French Revolution provided Chartists with a repertoire of symbolism that Chartists would deploy in their activism, histories, and literature to foster a sense of collective consciousness, define a democratic world-view, and encourage internationalist sentiment. Challenging conservative notions of the revolution as a bloody and anarchic affair, Chartists constructed histories of 1789 that posed the era as a romantic struggle for freedom and nationhood analogous to their own, and one that was deeply entwined with British history and national identity. During the 1830s, Chartist opposition to the New Poor Law drew from the gothic repertoire of the Bastille to frame inequality in Britain. The workhouse ‘bastile’ was not viewed simply as an illegitimate imposition upon Britain, but came to symbolise the character of class rule. Meanwhile, Chartist newspapers also printed fictions based on the French Revolution, inserting Chartist concerns into the narratives, and their histories of 1789 stressed the similarity between France on the eve of revolution and Britain on the eve of the Charter. During the 1840s Chartist internationalism was contextualised by a framework of thinking about international politics constructed around the Revolutions of 1789 and 1830, while the convulsions of Continental Europe during 1848 were interpreted as both a confirmation of Chartist historical discourse and as the opening of a new era of international struggle. In the Democratic Review (1849-1850), the Red Republican (1850), and The Friend of the People (1850-1852), Chartists like George Julian Harney, Helen Macfarlane, William James Linton, and Gerald Massey, along with leading figures of the radical émigrés of 1848, characterised ‘democracy’ as a spirit of action and a system of belief. For them, the democratic heritage was populated by a diverse array of figures, including the Apostles of Jesus, Martin Luther, the romantic poets, and the Jacobins of 1793. The ‘Red Republicanism’ that flourished during 1848-1852 was sustained by the historical viewpoints arrived at during the Chartist period generally. Attempts to define a ‘science’ of socialism was as much about correcting the misadventures of past ages as it was a means to realise the promise announced by the ‘Springtime of the Peoples’.

Popular virtue is the first in-depth study of the changing nature of moral politics within working-class Radicalism between 1820 and 1870. Through study of the lives, activism and intellectual influences of a number of key leaders of working-class Radicalism, this book highlights how Radicalism's attitudes to morality and everyday life shifted from a festive and libertarian culture that advocated sexual liberty and gender equality in the 1820s-30s to a more austere and ascetic politics that emphasized moral improvement, temperance and frugality after the 1840s. Despite the fracturing of this culture with the decline of Chartism in the 1850s, Popular virtue highlights how the moral politics of the 1840s possessed important legacies in not only the politics of Popular Liberalism and the Reform League but also in heterodox medicine and self-help.

This essay argues that Ernest Jones and Feargus O’Connor’s Chartist periodical the Labourer utilizes strategies of poetic repetition in order to reinvent the battle of Waterloo as a symbol of worldwide armed resistance to class oppression. The Labourer’s prose and verse contributions make repeated references to the violence of Waterloo, merging this poetic technique of repetition with the miscellaneous format of the periodical. In so doing, the Labourer counters representations in the mainstream press that depicted Waterloo as a triumph of the hereditary order, showing instead how standing armies might work in the service of an internationalist vision of united laborers.

This study of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native (1878) examines the context of the 1840s when the narrative is set, when the celebration of November Fifth had become an annual occasion of radical violence. Through the symbol of the bonfire The Return of the Native examines contemporary fears of violence in England in the wake of the French Revolution against an indigenous, age-old culture of economic unrest and rebellion. This division between political and economic radicalism is figured in the distinction between Eustacia Vye’s association with bonfires and Paris and the Egdon laborers whose bonfire burning is an age-old act of rebellion that, in the 1840s, had associations with radical violence on account of economic grievances. Bonfire Night in The Return of the Native thus gives expression to the political and economic issues that underlie the narrative and the economic issues that remain unresolved, thus reflecting the complex and divided radical climate of England in the wake of the French Revolution. This reading of the significance of the 1840s as a setting for the narrative provides a coherent framework for understanding the seemingly disparate elements in the novel, namely bonfires as a structural motif, Clym’s return from Paris and his educational program, the breakdown of the Yeobrights’ marriage, the death of Eustacia, and Hardy’s addition of the epilogue, “Aftercourses,” as a revised ending.

Jack Vincent used to be famous, part of a rising generation of literary celebrities that included Dickens, Lytton, Ainsworth and Thackeray. Now he’s a nobody, scratching a living as a freelance journalist writing for a penny a line. Worse, the only job he can get is on a troopship bound for the frontier wars of colonial Africa. Outed as a friend of Dickens at the captain’s table, Jack recounts the events that have brought him to this fallen state. It is a journey that begins in the Marshalsea debtor’s prison and ends in the shark infested waters of the Western Cape and his berth on the HMS Birkenhead, the Victorian Titanic.

Lost for over a century, Jack Vincent’s memoirs offer a history of the English novel that they don’t teach you in school, from his apprenticeship with the original Bill and Nancy to the boudoirs and brothels of Victorian London, while all the time the ship draws ever closer to Shark Alley…

Chartist Fiction Online is a website for scholars, students and others interested in Chartist fiction, the Chartist periodical press, or Victorian popular literature. It contains a database of the fiction – novels and extracts from novels, short stories, and literary reviews – printed in newspapers and journals associated with the movement for working-class political rights known as Chartism. The database includes over 900 entries from nearly 35 papers, both by professed Chartists such as Ernest Jones and Thomas Cooper and by non-Chartists who nonetheless saw their work in Chartist papers, including Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Sand, and Douglas Jerrold.