For the remainder of the pamphlet see: http://www.calderdale.gov.uk/wtw/search/controlservlet?PageId=Detail&DocId=102253&PageNo=1
Although the hymns are printed without authors, John Henry Bramwich, a Leicester Chartist and stockinger who also wrote poetry for the Northern Star, is known to have written hymns 1-14 in his friend Thomas Cooper’s Shakesperian Chartist Hymn Book and may have contributed to this collection. [4] There is no music. This came later to hymn books and singers would have fitted the words to tunes they were already familiar with. Each hymn is marked with the metre of the hymn, for instance L.M. for Long Metre and this would have helped them know how the words went with the rhythm. Mike Sanders, commented,
Elizabeth Gaskell, especially in Mary Barton seems to suggest that suffering is something that Christians have to accept and she repeatedly insists that the only way people can be happy is to resign themselves to God’s will. During the nineteenth century, the Church of England and those Nonconformist churches that sought ‘respectability’ used to insist on this point as well and it seemed to many Chartists that the Church was an accomplice of the middle-classes by keeping the poor quiet and resigned to their suffering fate. When Mrs. Gaskell insisted on this resignation to God’s will she puts everything under this resignation of suffering, death and poverty. In fact throughout the novel, the protagonist John Barton questions whether poverty is in fact God’s will or whether it was brought about by the incessant greed of the rising middle-class. Distress and unemployment were caused by man’s selfishness not the Lord’s judgement and this was a very different message to that extolled by mainstream Christianity. The ways the working-class is presented in the novel suggests that the only way that the laws that had enriched the middle-class were to be changed it would be by Chartism.
Religion helped to give Chartists strength, sanctify their crusade and face the possibility of dying in the struggle. For many, millenarian Christianity emphasised historical change brought about by an awakened people. In occupying church pews, Chartists were asserting their moral authority but were also showing their contempt for the Anglican usurpation of Christianity and the Constitution and this was even more the case in South Wales where the church represented an alien culture and government. Christianity was just as capable of being democratised as political institutions. [9] Sanders argues that there was a distinctive Chartist theology that prioritised communal feeling and action over individual subjectivity and conversional relationship with God. This, he suggests, is evident in the politically conscious nature of the hymns in the Todmorden booklet in which there are clear tensions between Chartism’s own religious sensibilities and Chartist attitudes towards religious institutions. What was important was not the visions of heaven and unified nature evident in conventional Victorian hymns but the expression of contemporary political and economic antagonisms. The issue for Chartists was justice in this life not the next.
See also http://myfamilyhistoryjj.com/TNG/showmedia.php?mediaID=29909&medialinkID=8571