Chartism Research Articles

Chartism’s Critical Carbon Theology: What Fossil Power’s Nineteenth-Century Demonizers Contribute to the Ethics of Energy Justice Today

Recent scholarship on religion and energy highlights the religious attachments some groups of people form with fossil fuels that have served to facilitate their extraction and use in building socially and economically stratified worlds. This scholarship foregrounds the business owners, managers, scientists, inventors, industrial spokespersons, and other panegyrists of the beneficent, civilizing power of coal and oil. However, little research to date has examined the religious attachments formed with fossil fuels by those who mined them, labored with machines powered by them, and lived in places that were diminished to extract, burn, and waste them. This article builds on the work of Andreas Malm and Terra Schwerin Rowe to examine these “critical carbon theologies”. It focuses in particular on the theological themes in popular literature produced by the nineteenth-century British Chartist movement—the first great social movement led by those who experienced in their bodies, communities, and environments the traumas that accompanied the introduction of fossil fuels as a motive power. These Chartist activist-theologians condemned coal power as a demonic force in history and envisioned a way to exorcize an industrializing society of its demons. This article uncovers and evaluates the largely overlooked theological dimensions of this movement and applies them toward a consideration of the ethics of energy transition today.

Kennington Common, 10 April 1848: The Photographs, the Chartist Crowd, and the Coachman

ABSTRACT The daguerreotypes of the Chartist meeting on Kennington Common in London on 10 April 1848, often considered as the first crowd photographs, are among the most reproduced photos of the Victorian era. But they have not yet yielded all their secrets. This article discusses the old question of the number of people attending the meeting. Re-examining the daguerreotypes in the light of other sources, it additionally addresses issues relating to the depiction of labour. It looks at what the daguerreotypes tell us about the relationship between the Chartist movement and London’s working class. It attempts to identify places and objects. Finally, it focuses on the place of individuals in the images of this anonymous, faceless, and voiceless crowd. It suggests the name and identity of a little-studied Chartist figure who may be seen on a photo, the coachman, carpenter and builder Henry Cullingham (1791–1873), and considers what we may derive from that.

Glasgow in the Year of Revolutions

In 1848, a series of revolutions and demonstrations occurred across Europe, though Britain was comparatively unaffected aside from generally peaceful Chartist agitation and a handful of small riots. One of these riots occurred in Glasgow between 6th-8th March, following increasing unrest surrounding the scale of poverty and unemployment, involving thousands of Glaswegians and inspiring further unrest in towns across Scotland. Using a variety of sources, though principally local and national newspapers, this paper will assess the context preceding the riot, provide a microhistory of the riot itself, its consequences, and explore the significance of the riots within the history of Glasgow, and within the context of Scottish and British Radicalism. It will argue that the riots demonstrate both the scale and circumstances of poverty within Glasgow in the 1840s, and the social divisions existing within Glasgow’s Chartist movement.

“A Natural Anomaly”: Democracy, Equality and Citizenship in Nineteenth-century British Travelogues about America

Many British travelers who visited America in the first half of the nineteenth century did so in order to see first-hand the democratic system and, depending on their own political views, warn their British readers against its dangers or present the U.S. as a model to imitate. My paper focuses on British travelogues written between the end of the Napoleonic wars (1815) and the American Civil War (1861), exploring how their authors conceived the American system and how they wanted to portray it to their compatriots. While progressive writers such as Harriet Martineau and Frances Wright believed that the young republic could, at most, be faulted on not being democratic and egalitarian enough, Tories such as Frances Trollope, Basil Hall and Charles Augustus Murray believed that the American model was harmful. The word “citizens” was used by them as a term of abuse, to signify people characterized by materialism and bad manners. They warned against equality, which they thought would result in leveling down, the tyranny of the majority and universal suffrage. The American model of citizenship seemed menacing especially in the 1830s and 1840s, when British Conservatives felt that the order of the Empire was threatened by the Radicals and the Chartist movement.

A People's History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland, 1689 to 1939

A People's History of Classics: Class and Greco-Roman Antiquity in Britain and Ireland, 1689 to 1939

Slavery and Abolition in Chartist Thought and Culture, 1838–1850

AbstractIn Britain between 1838 and 1858, the Chartist movement demanded the implementation of the ‘Six Points’, a parcel of parliamentary reforms centred on universal male suffrage. Despite the movement's recognized importance, little study has been made into Chartism's attitude towards slavery and abolitionism. This article will provide the first comprehensive study of this topic, from Chartism's origins in the 1830s until its decline in the decade after 1848. It will illustrate that Chartism was influenced by the radical labour component of the ‘Democratic’ coalition that supported President Andrew Jackson. This helped reinforce amongst early Chartists theories that wage labour was more exploitative than chattel slavery, alongside a racist reaction to West Indian emancipation more extreme than has previously been acknowledged. By 1842, however, various changes within the movement helped bring to the fore more consistently anti-slavery and even anti-racist sentiment with Chartist culture, as did growing exposure to American abolitionism, especially that of William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. The development of the anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology amongst American labour radicals profoundly influenced the late Chartist position on slavery by inserting abolition into Chartist aspirations for land reform. Consequently, a core component of late Chartism was its own anti-slavery ‘Free Soil’ ideology, which greatly informed pro-Union working-class agitation during the American Civil War.

Marx and the British working class

This article examines the evolution of Karl Marx’s understanding of class and class consciousness in light of his encounters with the British working-class movement, specifically his first visit to England in 1845 and his experience of the disintegration of the Chartist movement in the 1850s. It argues that the development of Marx’s understanding of the working class as an active force for social transformation, and his distinction between a class ‘of itself’ and ‘for itself’ in 1846-47, was strongly influenced by his reading of Friedrich Engels’s Condition of the Working Class in England (1845) and his subsequent meetings in Manchester.

‘Glorious Auxiliaries’? Gender, Participation, and Subordination in the Chartist Movement (1838–1851)

In his famous poem ‘Woman’s Mission’, published in 1856, Chartist leader William Lovett extolled the moral virtues of women not only for the care of their families but also for society in general. ...

A Useable Past, vol. 1. Victorian Agitator, George Jacob Holyoake: Co-operation as “This New Order of Life.”

A Useable Past, vol. 1. Victorian Agitator, George Jacob Holyoake: Co-operation as “This New Order of Life.”

Time, Space, and Gender in the Digitised Periodical

This essay uses the leading Chartist weekly, the Northern Star, as a case study to explore what the digitised archive can tell us about time, place, and gender in the Chartist movement. Margaret Beetham’s studies of the Victorian periodical draw attention to the occupation and, especially in the case of working-class women, the assertion of space and time. More recently, she has argued the crucial role of the Victorian periodical in recontextualising time and “the now” during the industrial process. Building on Beetham’s work, I consider how the contents of Victorian periodicals were and continue to be taken out of context and consumed in new times and places.

The Rise of Victorian Caricature by Ian Haywood

Reviewed by: The Rise of Victorian Caricature by Ian Haywood Jo Devereux (bio) Ian Haywood, The Rise of Victorian Caricature (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. vii + 296, $99.99/€83.19 hardcover, $79.99/€67.40 e-book. The Rise of Victorian Caricature seeks to overturn the widely held assumption that Punch was the first periodical to feature caricature in the nineteenth century. Ian Haywood presents "the caricature history of the period from the bottom up" and connects the development of caricature in the popular radical press of the early decades of the century to the political events and movements of the time (4). Focusing on the "caricature-sheet serial" amid other forms of visual and print culture, Haywood provides a richly detailed and scholarly examination of the carnivalesque images in periodicals such as Cleave's Gazette of Variety, Penny Satirist, and Odd Fellow (156). In the course of his study, he discusses the work of the caricaturist Charles Jameson Grant and explores caricature's response to subjects ranging from the rise and fall of Chartism in the 1830s and 1840s to the young Queen Victoria's coronation, marriage, and many children. In the first chapter, "Introduction: Graphic Arguments and Serial Offenders," Haywood uses the term "serial offender" to denote "a popular textual-visual mode" of reportage first seen in "William Hone and George Cruikshank's mock-newspaper, A Slap at Slop (1821)" (7). Hay-wood argues that this mode was further developed in the 1830s to reach a large and varied readership. He traces the initial joy at the passing of the Reform Bill in 1832 through the disillusionment that followed and the renewal of satire's "mission to hold the government to account," arguing that illustrated satirical broadsheets had the power, absent from the unillustrated radical press, to offer "iconoclasm though visual and textual fantasy" (7). [End Page 455] Chapter two, "Re-forming Caricature: Political Crisis and the Reinvention of the Satirical Image 1830–1832," addresses the presumed gap between the decline of political satire, such as Thomas Rowlandson's sketches, and the appearance of Punch in the 1840s (17–18). Citing recent scholarship by Celina Fox, Richard J. Pound, Brian Maidment, and Henry Miller, Haywood examines the "unprecedented counter-hegemonic visual force" that preceded Punch (19). Providing close readings of caricatures in Figaro in London and Thomas McLean's Looking Glass; or, Caricature Annual, he argues that by December 1832 these publications "had reconfigured caricature into a new type of populist, political reportage" using the woodcut, which was a cheaper, more democratic form than the lithograph (81). In the third chapter, "Everybody's Caricature: Charles Jameson Grant," Haywood endeavors to redress the lack of scholarship on this artist, whom he calls "the unsung hero of the radical remaking of caricature" (10). Grant was the most prolific caricaturist of the 1830s after Robert Seymour, taking up themes including the new queen in 1837, the Chartist movement, and the Condition of England question before Punch appeared in 1841. Hay-wood discusses Everybody's Album and Caricature Magazine (1834–35) in detail and then moves on to the less aesthetically pleasing Political Drama (1833–35). Primarily, his focus is on "the carnivalesque potency and pleasures of Grant's images"; he is most interested in the grotesque, Rabelaisian qualities of Grant's political caricatures (117). Chapter four, "The Reform Hurricane: Radical Satirical Broadsheets," examines Cleave's Weekly Police Gazette (launched 1834) in terms of its "radical cultural hybridity" and argues that this periodical's combination of popular entertainment with political activism was "an appealing melange of news, critique and fun" (157, 161). He then explores the Penny Satirist (April 1837–April 1846), which challenged the class hierarchy of the time through, for example, "powerful images of John Bull's continuing torments" (172). The third and "most short-lived" pro-Chartist satirical broadsheet was the Odd Fellow, which ran from January 5, 1839, to December 10, 1842 (175). As Haywood points out, the caricatures in these broadsheets are as grotesque and urgent as the verbal caricatures deployed by Jonathan Swift the century before. The fifth chapter, "The Chartist Carnival," is especially shaped by the Bakhtinian idea of the carnivalesque and includes previously...

Defiant Mourning: Public Funerals as Funeral Demonstrations in the Chartist Movement

Defiant Mourning: Public Funerals as Funeral Demonstrations in the Chartist Movement

Plot and Character in Chartist Historiography

Chartist historiography is inevitably inflected by the political desires of its authors. This desire, combined with the contingent nature of history, imparts a fictive dimension to Chartist historiography. In support of these claims, this article applies the literary concepts of plot and character to Mark Hovell’s The Chartist Movement (1918). It argues that Hovell’s political desire leads him to construct a tragic and entropic plot for Chartism, which is often contradicted by his own assessment of the movement’s vitality. Similarly, Hovell’s plotting is also driven by his reading of Chartism as a conflict between two characters, a flawed hero (Lovett) and a villain (O’Connor). The article closes with a close reading of Hovell’s characterisation of O’Connor, which demonstrates the skill with which he interweaves fact and interpretation.

‘Packed Tightly with the Strong Meat of History and Political Economy’

This article provides the first detailed account of Mark Hovell’s The Chartist Movement, focusing on the overall achievement of the work as published in 1918, contemporary reactions to the circumstances of its production, and the ways in which Hovell’s research cemented twentieth-century dominant narratives around the rise and fall of Chartism. The article also offers a counterfactual evaluation of Hovell’s manuscript, focusing on the probable direction of his vision of Chartism, and suggesting how the work completed by Hovell (had he lived) might have looked compared with the version eventually produced by Tout.

“A Queer-Looking Lot of Women”: Cross-Dressing, Transgender Ventriloquism, and Same-Sex Desire in the Fiction of Amy Dillwyn

“A Queer-Looking Lot of Women”Cross-Dressing, Transgender Ventriloquism, and Same-Sex Desire in the Fiction of Amy Dillwyn Kirsti Bohata (bio) In her 1992 study of cross-dressing and cultural anxiety, Vested Interests, Marjorie Garber invites us to look directly at rather than through the figure of the transvestite (9). She sees the cross-dressing figure as a “third term,” one that undoes binaries and thereby creates a “category crisis”: “By ‘category crisis’ I mean a failure of definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits of border crossings from one (apparently distinct) category to another” (16).1 In Amy Dillwyn’s The Rebecca Rioter: A Story of Killay Life (1880), gangs of cross-dressed men breach physical boundaries in the name of social justice, class, and nationality. But beyond the dramatic account of men smashing tollgates, The Rebecca Rioter is a text invested in a variety of different border crossings, from the purported translation of the original story (from Welsh to English) to the multi-layered transgender ventriloquism of the text’s narrative. Jay Prosser has convincingly argued that we need to disentangle transgender bodies from queer bodies and transgender identity from queer sexuality, but in the case of Dillwyn’s novel, these are deeply and deliberately intertwined. Indeed, as I shall argue, the queer erotic triangle at the heart of the text’s expression of female same-sex desire is contingent on the transgender construction of Evan, who is both one of the cross-dressing rioters and a character who ventriloquizes his genderqueer creator. This essay draws on recent historiography, newly available archival sources, and queer theory to investigate Dillwyn’s representation of trans Victorian identities and acts. In doing so, it claims the novel as a paradigmatic example of Victorian trans literature. Published nearly forty years after the popular uprisings of 1839–43 known as the Rebecca Riots, Dillwyn’s novel is closely based on historical events in which large gangs of protesters—mainly men dressed in female costume— destroyed hundreds of tollgates, liberated a workhouse, and conducted campaigns of protest and intimidation. The riots began in the face of an agricultural depression and focused on removing the numerous and costly tollgates run by turnpike trusts, but the movement that became known as “Rebeccaism” expanded to protest elements of the New Poor Law, absentee landlords, and other issues of social justice. There was an element of [End Page 113] nationalist protest in some of Rebecca’s declarations (Williams 192), and historical research suggests that there were also links between the Chartist movement stirring in industrial South East Wales and the Rebecca uprisings in the rural west (Williams 150–57). From the outset, Rebecca and her daughters (as the rioters were known) went about their protests wearing women’s clothing: often a white smock-like garment or a bedgown, bonnet, and shawl in keeping with the attire of farmers’ and labourers’ wives, though they occasionally sported more lavish wigs and dresses. Rebecca, referred to in contemporary accounts in the third person to mean the leader of a particular riot, the wider body of men (who are also her children/daughters), and the movement itself, took her name from the Book of Genesis: “let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them” (King James Bible, Gen. 24.60). Another widely circulated folk story is that the burly leader of the first riot borrowed his costume from Becca Mawr of Llangolman. There were hundreds of successful attacks on tollgates during 1843 (D. Jones 201), the year in which the riots of the novel take place; by summer, Rebeccaism had spread from the rural west to industrialized Glamorgan, where this story is set. The attacks depicted in the novel are based on events in which the author’s father and uncle were directly involved as magistrates summoned to help ambush the rioters.2 Dillwyn’s novel was considered by contemporaries a compellingly realistic account of the riots and was consulted and quoted by historians (Davies 328–29; Evans viii). As one local woman recalled, “such was the accuracy of [Dillwyn’s] portrayal of the rioters, that their now respectable descendants demanded an injunction in court...

Ten Days of Tumult: The Mass Strike of 1842 in the West Riding of Yorkshire

Variously termed the ‘Plug Riots’, ‘general strike’, or ‘strike wave’, the industrial unrest that hit northern England in the summer of 1842 was perhaps the most serious in modern British history. This article offers the first detailed account of this mass strike in the West Riding, showing how pickets from Lancashire and Cheshire successfully persuaded Yorkshire communities (including women) to assume the direction of the action. The article also analyses its causes, character, and the factors that led to the mass strike’s failure. Chief among the latter was the rapid militarisation of West Riding industrial centres to back civil authority’s response to the strike. The interpretation (widely circulated at the time) that the strike was a conspiracy by mill owners who supported the Anti-Corn Law League to promote political unrest is refuted. Although some historians have seen the strike as purely a movement to raise wages (typically to their 1840 levels), this article argues that support for the Chartist movement was decisive in shaping it. However, it is shown that not all strikers necessarily identified their actions with Chartism, while key figures in the movement’s leadership suspected ACLL involvement and/or were fearful that official suppression meant strike action could not be sustained.

(8)チャーティスト運動における教育の自由(2.個人発表論文要項,II 教育史学会第5回大会記録)

(8)チャーティスト運動における教育の自由(2.個人発表論文要項,II 教育史学会第5回大会記録)

後期チャーティスト, アーネスト・ジョーンズの教育論についての一考察

後期チャーティスト, アーネスト・ジョーンズの教育論についての一考察

“The Real rights of Man” : Thomas Spence, Paine and Chartism

Le mouvement Chartiste s’enracine dans la pensee de Thomas Spence. Si la quete de reforme parlementaire radicale des Chartistes s’inscrit dans leur interpretation de l’œuvre de Paine, c’est chez Spence qu’il convient de rechercher la source de leur projet de reforme agraire. Paine a souvent suscite une deference sans nuance qui a tendu a rejeter dans l’ombre certains de ses contemporains pourtant egalement influents en matiere de pensee politique radicale. En matiere de reforme agraire, c’est l’influence de Spence, et non celle de Paine, qui s’est averee la plus pertinente. Cela se manifeste meme dans les ecrits de Richard Carlile, le disciple le plus zele de Paine. Quatre elements sous-tendaient la pensee Chartiste en matiere de propriete fonciere–quatre elements egalement au cœur des idees de Spence. 1] La conviction que la petite propriete fonciere permettait de maximiser la production du sol. 2] L’hostilite aux grands domaines de propriete fonciere, quelle qu’en soit la forme legale. 3] La defiance envers le gouvernement en tant que proprietaire ou gestionnaire potentiel du domaine national. 4] La propriete fonciere s’inscrivait dans une attaque plus large des citadelles du pouvoir economique et politique. Cet article se propose d’etudier chacun de ces quatre aspects.

Democrazia popolare e democrazia autoritaria. Dal cartismo (1836-1848) all'Italicum (2015)

In the first half of the nineteenth century - in the UK - the Chartist movement linked the labor and class’ unrest to the achievement of universal suffrage and political democracy. By contrast, in Italy, the electoral laws engineered by the government of the center-left (2015) through the legislatve measure called Italicum distorts the purpose of the democratic tradition of the left and tends to replace the national political structure with an autocratic, authoritarian and caesaristic system.