Slaves in Heaven, Laborers in Hell: Chartist Poets' Ambivalent Identification with the (Black) Slave

Abstract

CHARTIST LEADER ERNEST JONES'S THE POET'S MISSION (1855) OPENS with question: [1] Who is it rivets broken bands And stranger-hearts And with fast-decaying hands A to last for ever? (II. 1-4) As poem's title and last stanza tell us, answer is or The Bard (I. 25), and striking image at heart of this initial question tells us much about Jones's vision of that poet's role and mission. Rivet[ing] broken bands / And stranger-hearts together, poet acts like smith or mechanic. Yet where smith welds together bits of metal, poet welds together people, forging an affective community out of isolated stranger-hearts. As subsequent stanzas make clear, poet does so in part by call[ing] up glories (I. 9), connecting people together in present, so poet implies, by connecting them to their history. Thus, just poets voice defies and death (I. 17), to ring thro' advancing years-- / And history--and time (II. 19-20), so, too, does community he forges with that voice. As result, community itself may well be death- and time-defying, eternal home that Jones initially insists that poet builds with fast-decaying hand s. In emphasizing role of poet and of poetry in actively creating mutually sustaining sense of both community and history, The Poet's Mission arguably takes up position somewhat like that advocated in Gareth Stedman Jones's Rethinking Chartism. For in this well-known essay, Stedman Jones insists that we must see of Chartists like Jones merely reflecting experiential reality or hailing working-class community always already united by shared material situation, but rather actively constituting that reality and that community by organizing particular understanding of both oppression and an alternative to it. [2] Because it was thus, for Stedman Jones, not simply experience, but rather particular linguistic ordering of experience that inspired and shaped Chartism, Chartist language--what Chartists said or wrote--should itself be vital object of scholarly attention (pp. 101, 94). If The Poet's Mission reminds us that at least some Chartists believed, with Stedman Jones, that their task was to wield to create sense of community, of present-day reality, and of past history, it may also remind us of something that Stedman Jones and many other labor and literary historians tend to forget--that much of what Chartists actually said or wrote took form of poetry and that this was so, in great part, because they envisioned poetry one of most vital forms of what Stedman Jones calls public language (p. 95 n10). In The Poet's Mission, after all, it is just any that creates (political) community but that particular linguistic form called poetry. That Jones's sentiments were widely shared within movement is amply illustrated by ubiquity and prominence of activist-poets like Jones; by amount of space Chartist periodicals devoted to poetry, poetical extracts, and discussions of poetry and particular poets; by amount of Char tist meetings large and small gave over to mass singing ... of hymns or anthems or other forms of verse; [3] and by frequency with which Chartist speakers quoted from, and alluded to, poetry. In all of these ways, Anne Janowitz notes, Chartists used poems mere representations of political situations but as interventions of especial importance in creating a sense of common identity or what Ulrike Schwab helpfully calls distinctly Chartist we-consciousness. [4] As result, attending to what the Chartists said or wrote should, in practice, mean investigating Chartist poetry in order to discover exactly what vision of community, of present-day reality, and of past history it sought to create--an investigation begun in work of Janowitz and Schwab, well Isobel Armstrong, Timothy Randall, and Peter Scheckner. …