« Fiel et aigreur » — The Compositors’ Chronicle (1840-1843), un journal collaboratif

Abstract

Printed and published by the London Union of Compositors, an organisation founded in 1834 to defend the interests of print workers, The Compositors’ Chronicle was launched in September 1840 as a monthly and existed for three years. Its main object was to protect printers from their masters’ ‘misconduct and tyranny’: ‘To these petty tyrants, the Chronicle will be gall and wormwood; and, by occasionally giving them a friendly hint, we shall endeavour to make them more considerate rulers, if not better men’ (‘Address’). This paper investigates the Chronicle as a cooperative medium seeking to support and sustain the development of a shared professional trade identity. It provides three successive highlights on different fields and modes of expression used in the Chronicle, paying attention to the connectedness of printers, within and outside the editorial structure of the journal. The Chronicle is first considered in its attempt to unite typesetters and pressmen across Britain in the fight against perceived threats to their working conditions and status. However, and beyond immediate trade interests, wider ideological networks also nourished the journal. Like many early Victorian trade societies, the London Union of Compositors was strongly influenced by the various movements ‘for the improvement of the moral and social condition of the working classes’ and in the pages of the Chronicle, utilitarian connections were apparent, in particular through the journal’s treatment of social subjects. Finally, the collaborative columns of the Chronicle were also instrumental in the creation of a distinct trade identity. At a time when many print workers remained outside the scope of British citizenship, Thompson’s journal offered them a space in which their literacy, sociability and respectability could be showcased through a virtual and actual community.