A false dawn

Rumours were rife in Melbourne. The goldfield was said to be in rebel hands and people became uncomfortably aware that the diggers could form an army tens of thousands strong and be on their way to pillage their defenceless town. A citizens’ rifle brigade was formed and Hotham was applauded when he announced that special constables would be sworn in to meet the emergency. In Ballarat, some more radical diggers met at the Star Hotel where Alfred Black drew up a ‘Declaration of Independence’ but they were a small minority and Lalor, who favoured force only in defence, played no part in it. Vern did and Lalor felt sufficiently insecure in his leadership to offer his resignation on Friday 1 December in order to maintain unity within the movement. However, he was dissuaded from doing so largely because Vern and others recognised that, without him the movement would fall apart. [1] Vern had promised to raise 500 armed German diggers and sought the position of second-in-command but contented himself with enlarging the Stockade. [2] Carboni thought this absurd as there was no possibility of defending the original space let alone an extended one. [3] Vern may have promised the best hope for military leadership but largely from accounts written by Carboni who detested him, he appears vague and contradictory in his military organisation. [4] He did, however, approach the task of forming a rebel army with some energy but he is best remembered for fleeing the subsequent battle though not, as some suggested, at its outset but when a large number of the defenders fled ten minutes into the battle.

 

Few diggers slept in the Stockade on Friday night returning early on Saturday morning, 2 December. Drilling recommenced at 8.00 am and the blacksmith inside the stockade continued to make pikes for the diggers who had no firearms. Drilling stopped around midday when Father Smyth arrived to tend to the needs of the Irish Catholics. He had permission from Lalor to address the Catholics and pointed out to them their poor defences and their lack of experience in the face of well-armed troops and police, with more reinforcements on the way. He pleaded for them to stop before blood was spilled, and to attend Mass the following morning, but was largely unsuccessful. No license hunt occurred in the morning and by midday most diggers agreed that nothing would happen until Monday at the earliest and Lalor believed that this would take the form of further license hunts not a direct attack on their camp. By mid-afternoon, 1,500 men were drilling in and around the Stockade. Captain Thomas suggested that the rebels were ‘forcing people to join their ranks’. [5]

 

 

 



Around 4.00 pm, 200 Americans, the Independent Californian Rangers under James McGill, arrived in the Stockade.[6] Their arrival bolstered men’s spirits as McGill had some military knowledge and was promptly appointed second-in-command to Lalor. There is considerable ambiguity over the extent of McGill’s military experience. [7] But he put whatever military training he had to work and set up a sentry system to warn the rebels of a British attack. Even so McGill and two-thirds of his Californians left before midnight on the pretext that they were going to intercept further reinforcements from Melbourne. McGill’s wife later claimed that a representative of the American consul, a friend of Hotham, had ordered McGill to get his men out of the Stockade. [8] Vern, also without providing any evidence to support his assertion, suggested that McGill accepted a bribe of £800 to absent himself from the Stockade. This left the Stockade seriously under-manned and Rede’s spies observed these actions. In the evening, most men had drifted home to their families or visited friends outside the boundary. Lalor had retired to the stores tent within the Stockade for much needed sleep by midnight and there were only about 120 diggers within the Stockade with a hundred or so firearms between them.

 

Although it appears that Lalor did not anticipate an imminent military assault, this was not the position in the Camp where tension was rising. Captain Thomas later stated that shots were fired over the heads of sentries and that the rebels in the ‘intrenched camp… [had] the avowed intention of intercepting the force under the Major-General’s command en route from Melbourne.’ [9] Rede knew that unless he used his available men, he could lose the opportunity to end the rebellion quickly. Soldiers and mounted police had poured in from around the state; 106 men from the 40th Regiment and 39 mounted troopers arrived from Geelong. Reinforcements were also sent from Castlemaine, as well as directly from Melbourne. Rede was informed by his spies that the Californian Rangers had left the Stockade depleting its defenders. There was a hint of things to come when on the day before the attack Rede had written to Hotham:

 

I am convinced that the future welfare of the Colony and the peace and prosperity of all the Gold Fields depends upon the crushing of this movement in such a manner that it may act as a warning.

 

Now, he concluded, was the ideal time to attack and destroy the Stockade.

---

[1] Ibid, Molony, John, Eureka, pp. 146-147, draws attention to the ‘alleged’ nature of this document but says nothing more.

[2] Vern, Frederick, ‘Col. Vern’s Narrative of the Ballarat Insurrection, Part I’, Melbourne Monthly Magazine, November 1855, pp. 5-14, Part II, does not appear to have been published.

[3] Ibid, Carboni, Raffaelo, The Eureka Stockade, pp. 80-81.

[4] Ibid, Carboni, Raffaelo, The Eureka Stockade, p. 84.

[5] Thomas to Major Adjutant-General, 3 December 1854, PROV, 1085/P Duplicate 162, Enclosure no. 7.

[6] Ibid, Carboni, Raffaelo, The Eureka Stockade, pp. 84-86, 88.

[7] Ibid, Blake, Gregory, To Pierce The Tyrant’s Heart: A Military History of The Battle for The Eureka Stockade 3 December 1854, pp. 49-51.

[8] SLV, MS 13518, Charles Evans, Diary, 3 December 1854, pp. 134-135, gives an alternative explanation suggesting that one government spy ‘[possibly McGill] had decoyed a large body of men from the Stockade last night on some pretence or other, leaving only about 150 in it and they imperfectly armed…’

[9] Thomas to Major Adjutant-General, 3 December 1854, PROV, 1085/P Duplicate 162, Enclosure no. 7.

The Chartists, Regions and Economies

Like its predecessor volume it provides a characteristically illuminating, succinct and thoroughly researched regional and local perspective on this complex but fascinating movement. It identifies clearly the salient features of each geographical area under review, comparing and contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of Chartism within and between each region, and displaying a clarity and subtlety of analysis which will make this volume and its predecessors so valuable to both students and teachers…  John Hargreaves

This book looks at Chartists from the grassroots. It abridges and builds on the two separate volumes—Chartism: Locations, Places and Spaces--dealing with Southern England and the Midlands and The North, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The focus is on how Chartism played out regionally and locally reinforcing the point that local priorities and political agendas did not always correspond with those put forward nationally and that, although the national leadership developed principles and policies and who passed through Chartist communities on their never-ending peregrinations, daily operational details were left to local leaders and organisations. For those communities, individuals such as Peter Bussey and William Carrier were as much the leaders of the Chartists to local men and women as Feargus O’Connor or Bronterre O’Brien. Is it better to see Chartism as a network of semi-autonomous political organisations over which national control was limited rather than a unified political movement? Should we see Chartism as a national debate over the exclusion of the working-classes not simply from the parliamentary franchise but from playing any role in determining the future direction of society, the economy and cultural aspirations?

Although there have been many local studies since Chartist Studies was published in 1959, the question of how the movement relates to the changing historiography of local history has rarely been raised. In part this was a consequence of the historiographical focus since the 1980s on its role as a national political movement but also reflects the difficulty of drawing these studies together. Although there are inevitably omissions, this book is an attempt to do so. In doing this, I have summarised often unpublished theses to bring their insights to a wider audience. One consequence is that I have written more on those areas, such as Worcestershire, which are largely ignored in the current literature than, for instance, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire or Essex that have. Although the focus in the chapters on England is on how Chartism developed its county profiles, county boundaries--osmotic not immutable--are an artificial conceit since ideologically and organisationally the movement transcended them as trans-county and regional delegate conferences show. The influence of London and Birmingham went far beyond their geographical, constitutional and political limits. There are six chapters considering the nature of Chartism in the English regions and a chapter each on Wales, Scotland and Ireland and the Isle of Man. Each chapter contains a detailed analysis of social and economic structures as well as a consideration of Chartism. The book ends with discussion of people, places, classes and spaces. It considers the question of ‘who were the Chartists?’ and the difficulties in identifying who they were and why they became Chartists and how far class played a part in this process. It also examines Chartism within its geographical context drawing on points made in the regional chapters. Finally, it looks at the whole question of radical spaces and how these spaces were created and contested.

Chartism and Jeremy Corbyn

The ‘Six Points’ of the People’s Charter is something that I have written about on many occasions in the last few decades.  They are central to any discussion of Chartism and formed the foundation for what was arguably the most widely supported working-class movement since the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381.  Millions of men and women saw in the Charter the solution to their economic, social and political woes.  Although Chartism was deemed a failure by many contemporaries, five of its six points were ultimately translated into law.  That we today have universal suffrage, the secret ballot, paid MPs, single member constituencies and no property qualifications baring anyone from standing for Parliament is a direct result of the Chartist agitation of the 1830s and 1840s.  That annual parliaments—the sixth of the six points—has never been implemented, has been largely forgotten.  Yet it was potentially the most revolutionary of the electoral principle adopted by Chartists and has a particular resonance to the current situation in the Labour Party.

Kennington Common, 10 April 1848

The essence of annual parliaments for Chartists was its participatory nature.  MPs would be elected by their constituents and their actions in Parliament would be closely monitored with, for instance, how they voted and how many sessions they attended would be published in the press.  To keep their seats, MPs would need to consult not just their own supporters but all who could vote in their constituencies regularly to ensure that they represented their opinions.  This did not mean that they were delegates mandated by their electors to vote in particular ways but certainly did mean that they would be held accountable for their actions by those electors.  The link between MPs and their electors would inevitably be more personal, more intimate and more defined. 

Although I suspect that annual parliaments are not part of his thinking, there is much in what Jeremy Corbyn has said in the past suggesting that he favours a more participatory approach to politics, an attempt to push decision-making away from Westminster and placing it more in the hands of the electors.  The Labour leader has sent out a survey to party members asking for their views on bombing IS in Syria and urging them to respond by the start of next week.  He has also told his MPs to go back to their constituencies this weekend and canvas the views of members.  Jeremy's supporters are convinced that his views are closer to Labour’s grassroots than those of dissenting MPs while his opponents suspect him of trying to bypass the parliamentary party and appeal directly to the members who emphatically elected him in September. 

But we do not have a participatory but a representative democratic system—one reason why annual parliaments have never been introduced.  Once elected MPs represent their constituencies as a whole not just the narrow number of activists who may have helped them get elected.  So MPs should not simply be canvassing the views of members, as Jeremy suggests, but seeking the views of electors from across the political spectrum before they make their decision on what is essentially a matter of ‘conscience’.  Even if the notion of a free vote can be seen as the only way Labour can get out of the hole they’ve constructed, when John McDonnell says that MPs should not be ‘whipped or threatened’ and that they should follow their ‘own judgement’ on possible air strikes over Syria, he is restating this long-established principle that there are some issues that are above party politics. 

Review of Localities, Spaces and Places

Chartism: Localities, Spaces and Places, The Midlands and the South, Richard Brown, Authoring History, 2015, paperback, 403 pp., ISBN 9781501017247

This volume focusing upon the local and regional dimension of Chartism in the Midlands and the South, is Richard Brown’s sixth excursion into Chartism, which with a sequel print volume encompassing the North of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, will provide an extensive and unprecedented analytical survey by a single author of Chartism from a regional and local perspective. As Chartist historian Stephen Roberts has commented such ‘a comprehensive survey of the Chartist Movement, region by region, will be of immense value to all students of Chartism’ since the intended scope of the two volumes and unified Kindle version is ‘truly astonishing’. Not since the ground-breaking collection of essays edited by Asa Briggs in 1959, which E.P. Thompson observed brought us ‘closer to the local roots of Chartism than any previous study’ and which stimulated a myriad of further local studies, has there been a more considered, in-depth, attempt to re-visit this dimension of Chartism. Indeed, since the 1980s, influenced particularly by the controversial intervention of Gareth Stedman Jones in the historiographical debate, the focus of Chartist studies shifted priorities sharply towards considerations of Chartism as a national political movement. Brown’s contention is that both dimensions remain vital to understanding this extraordinary movement. ‘Is it better’, he asks, ‘to see Chartism as a network of semi-autonomous political organisations over which national control was limited rather than a unified political movement?’ His answer is emphatically, that ‘neither one nor the other’ approach will suffice and that a combination of both approaches is now necessary to understand the full impact of this momentous movement on the history of Britain at every level. Chartism, he concedes, ‘may have been a national, political movement but it was grounded in the experience of its local activists as much, and perhaps arguably more than through grandiloquent oratory and the organisational structures of its national leaders’.

Brown engages elegantly and informatively with the historiography of local history in his opening chapter to explain how ‘local and regional considerations, linked to prevailing social and economic conditions played a major role in the ways in which the movement developed nationally’. For example, he argues that the strikes of 1842 arose ‘not from the decisions of national leaders but from the intensity of local anger and frustration at the inequities of local economic structures’. He also draws upon recent writers, notably Katrina Navickas, who have explored the significance of space and place in the development of grassroots radical politics, arguing that recognition of the centrality of space to human experience is ‘fundamental in understanding how and why Chartism developed and exchanged information and ideas within communities, localities, regional and national locations within Britain as a whole’.

Each exploration of regional and local dimensions in subsequent chapters is prefaced by an in-depth socio-economic profile of the locality presenting a rich tapestry focusing upon ‘how Chartism played out regionally and locally reinforcing the point that local priorities and political agendas did not always correspond with those put forward nationally and that, although the national leadership developed principles and policies, operational details were frequently left to local leaders and organisations’. This timely and illuminating study is a poignant and worthy tribute to the author’s wife who died shortly before this volume was completed. It will enrich understanding of Chartism as a national movement, whilst ‘drawing attention to the tensions between the aspirations of the Chartist national leadership and leadership at the local level’, thereby providing an indispensable overview to researchers seeking to understand how the Chartist movement played out in their own particular locality or region.

John A. Hargreaves

‘Revolutionary Chartists – From Whom May Heaven Protect Us’

This is a review recently published by Stephen Roberts on his excellent Chartism & The Chartists website

‘Revolutionary Chartists – From Whom May Heaven Protect Us’  – Cambridge Independent Press, 12 January 1856.

If you had been alive in the Victorian period you would certainly have known who the Chartists were.  This was a national movement.  In towns and villages across Britain working people gathered to read the Northern Star, collect signatures for petitions, organise marches and tea parties, listen to speeches by ‘missionaries’, paste up posters. Almost nowhere was impervious to the Chartist campaign.  You couldn’t even travel on a railway train without a Chartist demanding the Northern Star from the newspaper seller.  Of course, you might have been one of these Chartists.  If you were a weaver or a frame worker knitter or a wool comber, chances are you were. The Chartists were everywhere, demanding a say in law-making for working men.  And long after they were gone, they will still remembered … and feared.  Little wonder that, as late as 1856, the editor of the Cambridge Independent was still shaking in his boots at a return of the Chartists.

The publication of Chartist Studies, edited by Asa Briggs, in 1959 launched a flurry of research into the Chartist localities.  Whatever William Lovett and his friends were up to in London was for the time being set aside.  What was going on in Sheffield, Norwich, Brighton and a host of other places was what mattered now.  In the Amateur Historian Dorothy Thompson issued a clarion call for local investigations, offering guidance on how to frame that research and on the sources  that could be consulted (That essay has recently been reprinted in THE DIGNITY OF CHARTISM).  And so articles in local history journals and M.A and Ph.D theses began to appear.  Small saplings soon became dense woods.  As the years passed, we learned more and more about Chartist activities in the localities.  The peak of all this local research was in the 1960s and 1970s, but it continued after that point until we reached the point where we now are:  there is no local Chartist stone undisturbed.

Anyone who wants to read all these articles and theses will need to lock themselves in the stacks of a university library for a fortnight and make very good use of inter-library loans.  The material is that scattered.  The good news is that such extreme measures are no longer necessary.  Happily, Richard Brown has embarked on a two-volume project to survey all the Chartist localities.  The first volume has just been published.  CHARTISM: LOCALITIES, SPACES AND PLACES, Volume 1 examines London, East Anglia, and the Midlands.  The rest of the country will be covered in the second volume, due next year.  The first thing to say about this first volume is that it is extremely detailed.  Anyone interested in what the Chartists in Suffolk or Worcestershire or Derbyshire will  almost certainly find the answers they seek.  A notable strength of Brown’s work is the depth of his research.  Whilst he has, of course, delved into the many essays that have been published about local Chartism, he has also returned to the primary sources, particularly newspapers.  This first volume is an extremely useful addition to the study of Chartism. It is thoroughly-researched, clearly-researched and, above all, very handy.

Chartism: Localities, Spaces and Places, The Midlands and the South

 

Just Published

This, the third part of the series, looks at Chartism from the grassroots. Although I originally intended to deal with the local roots of Chartism in one book, the scale of the project necessitated dividing it in two. Although there is inevitably overlap with Chartism: Rise and Demise, these books focus on how Chartism played out regionally and locally reinforcing the point that local priorities and political agendas did not always correspond with those put forward nationally and that, although the national leadership developed principles and policies, operational details were frequently left to local leaders and organisations. Is it better to see Chartism as a network of semi-autonomous political organisations over which national control was limited rather than a unified political movement? Should we see Chartism as a national debate over the exclusion of the working-classes not simply from the parliamentary franchise but from playing any role in determining the future direction of society, the economy and cultural aspirations? The answer is neither one nor the other but both. The first volume covers southern England and the Midlands. The opening chapter examines Chartism in its local and regional context and how it related to different places and spaces, issues explored in greater detail in the remainder of the book. Chapter 2 examines Chartism in London and the South. Chapter 3 looks at East Anglia, an area of agricultural labour where industrial employment was based largely on the products of farming. Economic and social conditions were not conducive to the development of a mass regional movement. Dealing with the Midlands in one chapter would simply have been too large and consequently I divided it so that Chapter 4 examines the largely agricultural counties while Chapter 5 focuses on those counties where manufacturing and mining were predominant. A Postscript brings the first volume to a conclusion. The second volume looks at northern England covering Yorkshire and the North-East in Chapter 6, Cheshire, Lancashire and the North-West in Chapter 7 and at Scotland, Wales and Ireland respectively in Chapter 8, 9 and 10. It also includes the synoptic concluding chapter.

The Dignity of Chartism

Stephen Roberts (ed.)

The Dignity of Chartism: Essays by Dorothy Thompson

(Verso), 2015

xxx, 206pp, £14.99 paper, ISBN 978-1-78188-849-6

The historian Dorothy Thompson, who died aged 87 in 2011, was best known for her writing on the social and cultural aspects of the nineteenth-century Chartist movement. The documents she edited in The Early Chartists (1971) brought to life the intense and dangerous interior world of working-class meetings, conventions and newspapers, while The Chartists (1984) revealed greatly neglected areas such as middle-class involvement, women’s role, the part played by Irish radicals and schemes for land settlements. Her collection Outsiders: Class, Gender and Nation (1993) demonstrated a mix of exacting scholarship and conceptual clarity.

The volume is divided into five parts. 'Interpreting Chartism' includes six essays that consider various aspects of the historiography of the movement. ‘Chartism as an Historical Subject’, a succinct discussion, originally published in 1970 a decade before ‘the linguistic turn’, examines the nature and importance of Chartism and, linked with her essay on historiography published in Outsiders: Class, Gender and Nation makes an excellent introduction to the subject. This is followed by a characteristically combative review of ‘The Languages of Class’ through a critical analysis of Gareth Stedman Jones’ work. The remaining four essays in this section extend what is, I think, the most innovative section of The Chartists—‘Who were the Chartists?’ ‘Who were ‘The People’ in 1842?’, first published in 1996, examines the use of language as a major historical ‘source’ against the backdrop of the climatic events of 1842. ‘Women Chartists’ is an excellent summary of her findings on what was, until she resurrected them, a neglected dimension of radicalism. The other two essays are reviews of Gregory Claeys’ six volume collection of Chartist tracts and David Vincent’s book on working-class autobiographies.

The second section, in many respects the heart of the book, consists of two essays originally written in the 1950s. There is a short essay on ‘Chartism in the Industrial Areas’, still a valuable synopsis. It is, however, the study of Halifax as a Chartist Centre, from which the book gained its title, which is the jewel of the collection. Originally written with her husband Edward Thompson as part of Asa Briggs’ Chartist Studies and unpublished until now, it is a detailed study of how Chartism developed in one community. At over 30,000 words in the original that is available on the Internet, the essay, which was never completely finished, has been sympathetically edited to make it a more manageable length. Although it reflects the historiography as it stood in the 1950s, it remains a model for how the local study of Chartism should be written and its publication is important.

The third section examines the leaders of the people. There is a short essay on O’Connor, for Thompson the most important of Chartist leaders originally written in 1952 when he remained under a Gammage-Lovett-Hovell dominated cloud and two decades before his resurrection to his rightful position at the heart of the movement as an innovative, combative, if erratic, radical leader. This is followed by a chapter that combines two reviews on George Julian Harney ‘a radical to the end of his days’, something evident in David Goodway’s recently published collection of Harney’s journalism. Miles Taylor’s book on Ernest Jones is subjected to a review originally published in 2003 while books on Joseph Sturge and John Fielden, two middle-class supporters of the movement, were subjected to not uncritical review in 1987.

The three essays in the next section ‘Repercussions’ consider Chartism from the perspective of 1848 and beyond. ‘The Chartists in 1848’ published in 2005, and one of the final things Dorothy Thompson wrote on the movement, places greater emphasis on the role played by Irish radicals as a stimulus to continued Chartist activity after Kennington Common. There is a valuable review of John Saville’s 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement that has much to say about her view of the significance of 1848 and her criticism of Saville’s notion of the ‘radical triangle’ of Paris, Dublin and London. ‘The Post-Chartist Decades’ combines reviews originally published in 1994 and 1995 of Margot Finn’s After Chartism and Miles Taylor’s The Decline of British Radicalism and considers the question of what happened to Chartists after Chartism ceased to be a mass political movement—‘Poor people’s movements do not have the resources to sustain a permanent organization: they gain their effect in particular short-term ways…’

The collection ends with a section appropriately entitled ‘Looking Back’, an essay in which Dorothy Thompson reflected in 2003 on how Marxist ideas shaped her thinking both as a political activist and as an historian. This essay exemplifies much about how Dorothy Thompson approached the writing of history and particularly the humanity and elegance of her writing. It is a fitting way to end this invaluable collection. There is also a valuable and succinct bibliography and an excellent index.

The Dignity of Chartism collects together Dorothy Thompson’s essays and reviews, previously published in many different places, into a single volume making her writing on Chartism easily available. Stephen Roberts, one of Dorothy’s doctoral students, has done a great service for historians of nineteenth century radicalism in bringing this material together which he does with considerable aplomb in his introductory essay, a combination of personal reminiscences and historiographical analysis, and in the sureness of his editing. This is volume that all historians of Chartism should read and provides further evidence, if any was needed, that Dorothy Thompson was the most important historian of Chartism in the past half century.

Book review--Chartism: Rise and Demise

Chartism: Rise and Demise, Richard Brown, Authoring History, paperback, 2014, ISBN 9781495390340

Chartism, the mass petitioning movement for universal male suffrage, conveniently punctuated with intense bursts of activity around its three national petitions of 1839, 1842 and 1848, appears deceptively familiar to many students. These three fairly distinctive phases of the movement, have readily promoted analytical narrative approaches from R.G. Gammage, via Mark Hovell, J.T. Ward and Malcolm Chase, which have been supplemented by more thematic explorations of other aspects of the movement by a host of prominent historians who have focused on the roles of the government and public order (F.C. Mather); women and the family (David Jones and Dorothy Thompson) and individuals like Feargus O’Connor (Donald Read, Eric Glasgow and James Epstein) and Ernest Jones (Miles Taylor). Richard Brown, in a richly nuanced approach, deftly weaves into his narrative, which broadly follows the conventionally phased structure, discussion of these and many other themes. He explains, for example, how cultural dimensions of the movement though often divisive helped to sustain its momentum in the late 1830s and 1840s and indeed beyond. He also provides a more explicitly historiographical perspective than Malcolm Chase, which students will find particularly helpful, and takes a generally more sympathetic view of O’Connor than some other recent writers, recognising the Chartist leader’s failings, but attributing the successful development of the mass platform which underpinned the movement largely to his abilities as a platform speaker.

Brown’s three-volume review of Chartism, of which this is the second volume, is based predominantly but not exclusively on the undiminishing secondary literature of the movement, supplemented by some pertinent references to contemporary newspapers and archival evidence where appropriate to offer fresh insights into the movement. Brown readily acknowledges his debt to previous writers in the field commenting that Chartism has been exceptionally rewarded by ‘so many good historians who have taken up the Chartist mantle and whose innovative thinking has made the subject so popular’. Succinctly encapsulated within the title Chartism: Rise and Demise Brown’s aim is to give ‘greater attention to the radical context in which Chartism developed’ explaining why it emerged as a widespread political movement in the late 1830s and how it peaked reaching ‘a high water mark of active local and popular support’ in the strikes of 1842, which he suggests have been effectively airbrushed from the narrative of Chartism by some historians. He considers other hitherto neglected aspects of the final phase of the movement such as the Land Plan, commending the subscription lists as an invaluable source for the later history of the movement; the significance of the events of 1848 offering a revisionist view of so-called ‘fiasco’ interpretations; and exploring the movement’s links with socialism and its global impact. One of the most distinctive features of the book is Brown’s facility for drawing apt comparisons with international parallels, for example, he locates the depression that affected Britain after 1837 within ‘a broader crisis within North American and European economies’; notices parallels between tithings in Wales and hunters’ lodges in Canada in 1838-39 and makes comparisons between the Newport rising with the attack on Harper’s Ferry, twenty years later during the anti-slavery campaign in the United States.

Brown’s revised synthesis now constitutes the most up-to-date, detailed and wide-ranging of any overview of the movement produced for the general reader and will be an invaluable aid to students in tertiary and higher education engaging initially with Chartist history in all its complexity. No prior knowledge is assumed and Brown includes lucid explanations of such basic features of the movement as the origins and terms of the People’s Charter. Chartism remains one of the most stimulating and rigorously probed areas of historical enquiry, as enticing now as when I was first introduced to research into the movement under the guidance of the late Professor F.C. Mather many of whose informed, judicious assessments of the movement emerge from Brown’s analysis with continuing plausibility. Indeed, Brown concludes that Chartism was ultimately defeated not only by its own inner weaknesses but also by effective government control with the authorities in 1848 inflicting ‘a most damaging psychological defeat on the most significant, populist, radical movement of the century bankrupting the long tradition of the mass platform’.

John A. Hargreaves

Chartism: Rise and Demise

Just Published

 

Chartism was the largest working-class political movement in modern British history. Its branches ranged from the Scottish Highlands to northern France and from Dublin to Colchester. Its meetings drew massive crowds: 300,000 at Kersal Moor and perhaps as many as half a million at Hartshead Moor in 1839. The National Petition in 1842 claimed 3.3 million signatures, a third of the adult population of Britain. At its peak, the Northern Star sold around 50,000 copies a week, more than The Times. This was a national mass movement of unprecedented scale and intensity that was more than simply a political campaign but the expression of a new and dynamic form of working-class culture. Across Britain, there were Chartist concerts, amateur dramatics and dances, Chartist schools and cooperatives and Chartist churches that assaulted the political hegemony of the wealthy, the conservative and the liberal. For over a decade, Chartists led a campaign for the franchise with a mass enthusiasm that has never been imitated. Chartism: Rise and Demise provides the analytical narrative for the series. The causes of Chartism and how they have been interpreted is the focus of the opening chapter. The remainder of the book explores the development of Chartism chronologically from its beginnings in the mid-1830s to its demise in the 1850s and divides this into four phases. The first phase covers the years between 1838 and 1841 and revolves round the critical events of 1839, the first Convention, the First Petition and the Newport Rising. The second phase lasts from 1841 to 1843 and focuses on the emergence of the so-called Chartist ‘new move’, the creation of the National Charter Association, the relationship between Chartists and the middle-classes and the strikes of 1842. The third phase covers the years between 1843 and 1850 during which there were attempts to reposition the movement, the Land Plan and the seminal events of 1848. The final phase considers the ways in which the movement developed during the 1850s when leadership moved away from Feargus O’Connor to Ernest Jones.

 

Chartism: Rise and Demise---the video

Reviewing the nineteenth century

I am most grateful to Stephen Roberts for writing a review of these two books.  They are printed on his excellent  Chartism & The Chartists website: http://www.thepeoplescharter.co.uk/index.htm

Richard Brown, Coping with Change: British Society 1780-1914 (Authoring History, 2013); and Before Chartism: Exclusion and Resistance (Authoring History, 2014).

Those who study, write and teach about Chartism will be familiar with the name of Richard Brown. His Chartism (1998) is one of a clutch of short histories of the movement; but, alongside that by Edward Royle, is the book that would top anyone's recommendations of where to begin when starting out on a study of the Chartists. Brown's contribution to our understanding of Chartism would be useful enough if he had written only that one book ... but he hasn't. Brown is in fact a prodigious writer. He does not, as a rule, delve deeply into primary sources in his writing. What Brown does is immerse himself in the relevant secondary sources; and 'immerse' is the correct verb because the range of Brown's reading takes in almost everything written on a subject and is truly astonishing.

Coping with Change is a door-stopper of a book. At 746 pages, it leaves no gaps - there are chapters devoted to industry, agriculture, transport, public health, education, crime, leisure, religion and so on. All that Brown has to say is thoroughly footnoted, ensuring the reader does not have to check library catalogues for further reading. Brown writes both authoritatively and clearly. With a detailed index, this is an easy book to use. I can pay it no greater tribute than by saying that I shall keep my copy within easy reach of my desk when I am writing.

Before Chartism offers a comprehensive examination of the radical movements and protests that came before the late 1830s. Chartism cannot be understood without knowing what immediately preceded it - the popular unrest that followed the end of the French wars in 1815, the great 'betrayal' of the 1832 Reform Act, the hated Poor Law of 1834, the agitation over the press in 1830s London and so on. I always thought that the introductory chapters of J.T. Ward's Chartism (1973) were useful, if not particularly sympathetic to the leaders of the people. But that book is long out-of-print and the reader seeking up-to-date and reflective writing on these themes needs to consult a range of different books. That is no longer the case. Brown provides, in a well-researched, sympathetic and readable volume, the stories of the campaigns that fed into Chartism. It is another valuable volume from the Brown writing factory.

Before Chartism: Exclusion and Resistance

AVAILABLE FROM 1ST JANUARY 2014

'An accessible and illuminating study based on an impressive range of reading and with footnotes which in effect provide a critical bibliographical guide to the most relevant... sources, which enhances the utility of the book for students at all levels seeking to engage with the vast literature on Chartism and its antecedents which shows not signs of diminishing. The book is well structured and clearly signposted by headings and sub-headings which are always fresh and entirely fit for purpose, e.g. ‘politics of the Excluded’, ‘Rebellions of the Belly’ etc. The index entries are clearly differentiated. Bibliographical references are invariably balanced and informative, for example, the balanced references to the sources for the life of Robert Peel. Hitherto neglected texts are utilised such as R.I. Moore’s Sir Charles Wood’s Indian Policy which reinforces Brown’s facility for discussing themes in a broad global context...It is also refreshing to see such a strong emphasis on regional and local studies in a work of synthesis of this kind...' Dr John A Hargreaves

Chartism was the largest working-class political movement in modern British history.  Its branches ranged from the Scottish Highlands to northern France and from Dublin to Colchester.  Its meetings drew massive crowds: 300,000 at Kersal Moor and perhaps as many as half a million at Hartshead Moor in 1839.  The National Petition in 1842 claimed 3.3 million signatures, a third of the adult population of Britain.  At its peak, the Northern Star sold around 50,000 copies a week, more than The Times.  This was a national mass movement of unprecedented scale and intensity that was more than simply a political campaign but the expression of a new and dynamic form of working-class culture.  Across Britain, there were Chartist concerts, amateur dramatics and dances, Chartist schools and cooperatives and Chartist churches that assaulted the political hegemony of the wealthy, the conservative and the liberal.  For over a decade, Chartists led a campaign for the franchise with a mass enthusiasm that has never been imitated.

Before Chartism: Exclusion and Resistance acts as a preamble to the four volumes in the Reconsidering Chartism series and seeks to summarise current thinking.  The prologue examines the nature of economic networks in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. The first chapter explores the ways in which society changed in the decades leading up to the beginnings of Chartism and confronts the central issue of how far society was a class-based. Chapter 2 considers the radical legacy from the 1790s to the collapse of the Whig government in 1841 and surveys key questions such as the ways in which working people responded to economic change.  Chapter 3 looks at the ways in which working- and middle-class radicals confronting the question of reform from the 1790s through to 1830. The importance of the radical press and the ‘war of the unstamped’ is explored in Chapter 4.  The politics of inclusion and exclusion and the role of repression by the Whig governments in the 1830s is examined in Chapter 5 while the dilemma faced by radicals provides a short conclusion to the book.

The 1820s: writing off a decade of radical activity

The 1820s is often written off as a decade of little radical activity yet it was during these years that Britain became a manufacturing society. Whether factories and firms were small or larger-scale, whether increases in productivity were achieved by increasing the labour force or using machine technology, whether growth was achieved using skilled or unskilled labour or in urban or rural settings, British society was increasingly and irrevocably manufacturing in its emphasis. The relative stability and long perceived certainties of pre-industrial Britain were replaced by the vibrancy, uncertainties and class tensions of a free market economy and modernising society.

The economy revived in the early 1820s and there was a decline in radical political activity, something that reinforces the link between poor economic conditions and concerted radical action. But popular radicalism always meant more than demanding inclusion in the political system and embraced a range of causes of beliefs. Some radicals focused on building cooperative institutions such as trade unions, friendly societies, mutual aid societies and Mechanics Institutes. Others sought greater religious equality for nonconformists and to establish a system of secular education. Many nonconformists also were radical in their politics because they objected that being a member of the established Church of England gave individuals important legal privileges denied to nonconformists. Religious issues could stir deeper passions than politics and the religious question, as contemporaries called it, was a key political issue for most of the century.

Some workingmen turning to religion--there were revivals in particularly in the north and south-west. There was, for instance, a Primitive Methodist revival among lead miners in Weardale and more generally across the North-East in 1822 and 1823. [1] Revivalism in the 1820s occurred largely in areas with a significant rural population. Primitive Methodism was largely rural in character and, with the exception of the North-East and the Potteries; its main strength was in the largely agricultural counties of England. It was not until after 1850 that its appeal to the urban worker became obvious. Primitive Methodism was the medium through which agricultural labourers could fight for social and economic recognition and its chapels provided rural workers with a symbol of independence and defiance of the established social order.

While Primitive Methodism represented a radical theology, Wesleyan Methodism was increasingly strident in its support for the existing social order and, under the influence of Jabez Bunting, large numbers of people were expelled for radical activities. Growth in the northern manufacturing districts came to a halt and even went into temporary decline in 1819 and 1820 and in Rochdale there was a fifteen per cent decrease in membership between 1818 and 1820.[2] Although Bunting and his supporters recognised the value of revivalism and encouraged it so long as it did not disrupt regular circuit life and could ideally be managed, they disapproved of some of its methods, especially ranting and disassociated themselves from the emotionalism of Primitive Methodism.[3] This, and John Wesley’s policy before his death in 1791 which was continued by his successors of concentrating on evangelising urban areas where the Church of England was failing in its functions, meant that the links between Methodism and urban radicalism were loosening, although the extent to which this occurred varied from locality to locality. This view of Methodism, akin to E. P. Thompson’s excoriating critique of the movement as an instrument of social control, neglects the internal battles of the 1790s and early years of the nineteenth century in industrial towns over lay participation in church governance, control over Sunday schools and the extent of denominational control over the political activities of its members. In the 1820s, its nature as a popular movement meant that it could still undermine the established order of Church and State even if, by 1850, its role as an alternative national faith had evaporated. [4]

The 1820s also represented a critical decade for workers in textile industries as it saw an intensification of the demise of handloom weaving. The introduction of powered spinning largely in spinning factories from the 1780s resulted in surging production of yarn that had to be woven on handlooms by weavers whose numbers in Britain reached a peak of about 240,000 workers in 1820. For several generations, handloom weavers had enjoyed high prices, a relatively good standard of living and benefitted from increasing demand for the products of their looms. They were also vocal in defence of their livelihood with, for instance, 130,000 signing a petition in 1807 calling for a minimum wage and the following year, some 15,000 attended a demonstration in Manchester. The development of a reliable power loom by Richard Roberts, a Manchester engineer, in 1822—he also perfected a fully mechanised self-acting mule for spinning between 1825 and 1830—led to the rapid adoption of powered weaving. Edward Baines estimated that there were 2,400 power looms in British factories in 1813, 14,150 in 1820 but over 115,000 by 1835. This shift placed handloom weaving under growing pressure, its profitability tumbled and the numbers of handloom weavers in Lancashire fell from between 150,000 to 190,000 in 1821 to about 30,000 by 1861.

The decline in handloom weaving was uneven with some millowners using both machinery and hand-working while some weavers used finer grades of cotton, which early power looms could not weave, or turned to silk that remained largely unmechanised. Even so, handloom weaving was in terminal decline and, as many children of handloom weavers did not follow their fathers in the trade, it was increasingly characterised by an ageing workforce. [5] By the late 1820s, progressive cuts in wage-rates left many handloom weaving families with serious economic problems. Handloom weavers who move into urban areas might mitigate this by deploying women or children in the factory labour market while those weavers who remained in rural areas could take advantage of supplementary earning opportunities afforded by farming and mining. Nonetheless, by 1830 both sets of weavers found themselves in endemic structural poverty unable to generate sufficient income to cover basic costs and heavily dependent on poor relief.

The idea of a government-applied minimum wage to give give handloom weavers a degree of security was still being suggested and not just by the weavers. Some of the more respectable ‘putting-out’ firms, facing competition from machine-weaving businesses who undercut them by paying their unskilled workers low wages, saw the benefits of such a scheme. In September, 1819, a month after the Peterloo Massacre, 35 calico producers supported the call for a minimum weavers' wage and as late as 1822, several manufacturers met in Rossendale to demand restrictions on the use of power looms. The Committee of Manchester Weavers joined the outcry, claiming:

The evils of multiplying power looms, by first ruining half a million who depend on manual weaving (he was presumably referring to families rather than individuals), and especially those unhappy young people they now employ, are such as no human being can think are counterbalanced by any good expected from them.

Having repealed the legislation that might have protected weavers in 1809, the government was unwilling to introduce obstacles to the free market accelerating the trend towards mechanisation and it was not until 1834-1835 that a Select Committee examined the problems faced by weavers. James Hutchinson, one of the calico producers who had protested in 1819, like many of his fellow businessmen, finally opened his own power-loom mill at Woodhill, Elton.

Handloom weavers publicised their plight whenever the opportunity arose. Actress Fanny Kemble, one of the guests at the opening on the Liverpool-Manchester Railway in 1830, described the arrival of the first train into Manchester, packed with dignitaries including Wellington:

High above the grim and grimy crowd of scowling faces, a loom had been erected, at which sat a tattered, starved-looking weaver, evidently set there as a representative man, to protest against the triumph of machinery and the gain and glory which the wealthy Liverpool and Manchester men were likely to derive from it. [6]

For radicals such as Peter Murray McDouall writing in his Chartist and Republican Journal in 1841, the gradual disappearance of handloom weavers, represented the destruction of independence, family economy and control over the pace and nature of work and the creation of wage slavery by ‘factory slaves’ within the developing factory system of industrial capitalism.

Other radicals campaigned successfully against the Combination Acts leading to their repeal in 1824. A downturn in the economy led to a rapid increase in trade union activity with extensive strikes, including some violence in the winter of 1824-1825. Employers lobbied for the reintroduction of the Combination Acts and in 1825 new legislation was passed allowing unions to negotiate over wages and conditions but without the legal right to strike. This effectively limited trade unions to peaceful collective bargaining with employers and if they went beyond this narrow definition of legal activity for trade unions, they could be prosecuted for criminal conspiracy. Faced with technological change and the considerable powers left to employers after 1825, workers were increasingly convinced that small unions could never succeed. What was needed, some argued, were national or general unions representing all the workers in a particular trade from different parts of the country. In 1829, John Doherty, leader of the Lancashire cotton spinners formed a Grand General Union of Spinners. For greater negotiating power, the next step was to try to unite all unions in all trades into a single union. He formed the National Association for the Protection of Labour in late 1829 in Manchester and it spread into the neighbouring cotton towns the following year and subsequently into other manufacturing areas especially the East Midlands. [7]

The 1820s also saw a refinement of working-class analysis of the exploitative nature of the economy. [8] William Cobbett’s solution was to get rid of the system of corruption, the national debt and paper money and he implied that life would revert to the patterns of the past; little analysis, simply populist nostalgia. By contrast, Thomas Spence, William Ogilvie, Thomas Hodgskin, William Thompson, Robert Owen, John Gray and later John Francis Bray, Ernest Jones, James ‘Bronterre’ O’Brien and George Harney argued that the rights of man must be grounded in the possession of economic power. Their anti-capitalist and socialist political economies stood in stark contrast to the classical political economies of James and John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, Robert Torrens, John Ramsey McCulloch and Nassau Senior. [9]

Robert Owen had outlined his cooperative views in A New View of Society in 1813. Although Owen was influential in the working-class movement in the early 1830s, he sought social reform from above, a reflection of his elitist and paternalist attitudes. His reform programme was not confrontational: he saw his reforms as a means of avoiding class conflict, violent protest and revolution. His most important contribution was seeing capitalism not as a collection of discrete events but as a system. Throughout the 1820s, a growing group of labour radicals embraced Owen’s critique of capitalism and his views on cooperation. Thompson, Hodgskin and Gray articulated not simply the theoretical basis for a distincly anti-capitalist political economy but also considered its scope, methods, content and aims. All were, to a degree, Ricardian socialists who adopted the labour theory of value while rejecting the elements of Ricardo’s model that claimed capital, too, was productive. Hodgskin, for instance, argued that capitalists were parasites who diverted the fruits of labour’s productivity into unproductive consumption.

Thompson rejected the notion, expressed particularly by Thomas Malthus that any increase in the wages of labourers could only lead to their further immiseration. [10] Hodgskin, though he rejected Thompson’s cooperative views, suggested:

…the real business of men, what promotes their prosperity, is always better done by themselves than by any few separate and distinct individuals, acting as a government in the name of the whole.[11]

In 1825, in his Labour Defended Against the Claims of Capital, he argued that free-trade economists had invested ‘capital’ with productive powers that it did not possess and that capitalists could only grow rich where there was an oppressed group of workers kept in poverty. Writing in the aftermath of the repeal of the Combination Acts in 1824 and the repressive legislation the following year, Hodgskin believed that laws against trade unions and collective bargaining had created an unfair advantage against workers in favour of capitalists and that the large profits made by capitalists were not the result of natural economic forces but were generated by the coercive power of government. Only with the freedom of the free market, he maintained, could labourers of every kind receive just compensation for their work. Economic intervention by governments could do nothing to increase wealth or to accelerate its progress and that the laws of economics would only have the power to transform society when unrestricted by arbitrary legal systems. [12]

John Gray argued that the producers receive only about a fifth of the value of their products, whereas their labour creates all of that value. [13] However, he did not believe that this issue could be resolved by the unrestricted operation of the free market arguing that free market competition hampered the economy’s productivity because incomes remain low, limiting demand and therefore production. The market was seen as a source of exploitation and economic depression and the competitive pressures unleashed by the market resulted in socially destructive and morally corrosive behaviour. To overcome the limits competition places on social production and the hardships it imposes, Gray proposed a communitarian solution. What was necessary, Gray maintained, was central direction and control over the industrial economy by a National Chamber of Commerce, which would own the means of production, as a way of achieving certain socialist objectives. He also called for the formation of a National Bank that would ensure that money would increase as product increased and decrease as produce was consumed or redemanded as well as a system of cooperative associations to organise supply and demand. In this way, Gray believed that economic activity could be managed to ensure distributive and commutative justice, price stability, efficient allocation of resources and an end to economic depression resulting from supply outstripping effective supply.

The major problem with populist anti-capitalist thinking in the 1820s was that it lacked a comprehensive understanding of the nature of the causes of the exploitation and alienation of capitalism. Largely because of their failure to address this issue, Thompson sought to establish cooperative solutions irrespective of what was going on in the wider capitalist society. His solution was not to replace the existing capitalist system but to circumvent it by creating separate cooperative communities. The communities established by Robert Owen failed to translate the theory of cooperative living into communities that worked largely because of his paternalistic and undemocratic approach to running them and their need to operate within a capitalist environment. Gray, however, went further in suggesting socialist solutions to replace market capitalism. Although anti-capitalist economists had developed an effective critique of capitalism in the 1820s and this continued into the 1830s, what they had not done was to link their critique to the question of parliamentary reform. It was the publication of the Poor Man’s Guardian, edited by Bronterre O’Brien that proved crucial. Although strongly influenced by the popular economists and by Owen, he rejected Owen’s opposition to political action. He transformed the traditional rhetoric of radicalism by treating parliamentary reform as meaningless on its own. Without social and economic transformation, he argued, parliamentary reform could not address the ills of the working-classes.

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[1] Patterson, W. M., Northern Primitive Methodism, (E. Dalton), 1909, pp. 154-170.

[2] Engemann, T. S., ‘Religion and political reform: Wesleyan Methodism in nineteenth-century Britain’, Journal of Church & State, Vol. 24, (1982), pp. 321-336, provides a good summary. Hempton, David, The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion, c1750-1900, (Routledge), 1996, pp. 162-178, is excellent on the historiography.

[3] Hempton, D., Methodism and Politics in British Society 1750-1850, (Hutchinson), 1984, Edwards, M., After Wesley: a study of the social and political influence of Methodism in the middle period, 1791-1849, (Epworth Press), 1948, Taylor, E. R., Methodism and Politics 1791-1851, (Cambridge University Press), 1935, and Wearmouth, R. F., Methodism and the Working-class Movements of England 1800-1850, (Epworth Press), 1937.

[4] Ibid, Hempton, David, The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion, c1750-1900, pp. 170-171.

[5] Bythell, Duncan, The Handloom Weavers: A Study in the English Cotton Industry During the Industrial Revolution, (Cambridge University Press), 1969, Nardinelli, Clark, ‘Technology and Unemployment: The Case of the Handloom Weavers’, Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 53, (1), (1986), pp. 87-94, and Timmins, Geoffrey, The Last Shift: The Decline of Handloom Weaving in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire, (Manchester University Press), 1993.

[6] Kemble, Frances Ann, Records of a Girlhood, (R. Bentley & Son), 1878, p. 304.

[7] The development of trade union is explored in greater detail.

[8] Thompson, Noel W., The People’s Science: The popular political economy of exploitation and crisis 1816-34, (Cambridge University Press), 1984, and The Real Rights of Man: Political Economies for the Working Class, 1775-1850, (Pluto Press), 1998.

[9] McNally, David, Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique, (Verso), 1993, pp. 104-138.

[10] Thompson, William, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness; applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth, (Longman, Hurst Rees, Orme, Brown & Green), 1824, and Labor Rewarded. The Claims of Labor and Capital Conciliated: or, How to Secure to Labor the Whole Products of Its Exertions, (Hunt and Clarke), 1827.

[11] Hodgskin, Thomas, Travels in the North of Germany: Describing the Present State of the Social and Political Institutions, the Agriculture, Manufactures, Commerce, Education, Arts and Manners in that Country Particularly in the Kingdom of Hannover, 2 Vols. (Constable), 1820, Vol. 1 p. 292.

[12] Slack, David, Nature and Artifice: The Life and Thought of Thomas Hodgskin (1787-1869), (Boydell), 1998, pp. 89-136, considers his thinking in the 1820s.

[13] Gray, John, Lecture on Human Happiness: Being the First of a Series of Lectures on that Subject in which Will be Comprehended a General Review of the Causes of the Existing Evils of Society, and a Development of Means by which They May be Permanently and Effectually Removed, (Sherwood, Jones & Company), 1825, and The Social System: A Treatise on the Principle of Exchange, (Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green), 1831. See also, DLB, Vol. 6, pp. 121-125, and Kimball, J., The Economic Doctrines of John Gray, 1799-1883, (Catholic University of America Press), 1946.