Chartist Poetry Research Articles

Coordinating chartist poetry: Past, present, future

AbstractThis article traces the development of the critical debate surrounding Chartist poetry with a particular focus on work from the last decade. It situates that critical work in relation to four key areas: its relationship to Chartist historiography, the implications of Romanticism as the dominant critical frame for discussions of Chartist poetry, its contribution to the wider field of Victorian Studies, and attempts to identify the esthetic specificity of Chartist writing. The article concludes by suggesting a number of areas for further study including discussions of the particular historical knowledge/evidence provided by Chartist poetry, the antecedents of Chartist poetry in the radical working‐class press of the 1820s and 1830s, its relationship to canonical Victorian poetry, and the elaboration of an appropriate set of esthetic criteria for Chartist poetry.

“Thy sun, Revolution, is winning its noon”: Political Symbolism in Arnold, Clough, and Chartist Poetry

“Thy sun, Revolution, is winning its noon”: Political Symbolism in Arnold, Clough, and Chartist Poetry

Hospitality artisans and sustainability

Hospitality artisans and sustainability

Chartist Drama: The Performance of Revolt

Drama played an important but under-recognized role in the dynamic counterculture of Chartism, the working-class protest movement for political rights. Making use of a wide range of theatrical genres, the Chartists staged amateur productions in their own associations and held frequent benefits in many of London’s largest working-class theaters. They recontextualized an array of published plays and produced such original works as John Watkins’s John Frost, a Chartist Play (1841) and reenactments of the Irish revolutionary Robert Emmet’s 1803 trial. Within Chartism, drama exemplified a form of collaborative labor that advanced claims about the capacity of working-class people to imagine and create alternative social formations. It also functioned as a means of debating the most pressing issues that the Chartists faced, including the potential and limits of political violence. Whereas Chartist poetry commonly shied away from endorsing “physical force,” on stage Chartists instantiated revolutionary crowds and enacted the threat of governmental reprisal.

The Democratic Idiom: Languages of Democracy in the Chartist Movement

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Democratic Idiom: Languages of Democracy in the Chartist Movement*Peter J. GurneyPeter J. GurneyUniversity of Essex Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 86, Number 3September 2014 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/676730 Views: 524Total views on this site Citations: 9Citations are reported from Crossref © 2014 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:George Ouma Ogal, Eliud Kiruji Kirigia, Victor Ondara Ntabo, Unpacking modified idiomatic expressions in Kenyan political discourse: A cognitive linguistic perspective, Studies in Linguistics, Culture, and FLT 10, no.22 (Aug 2022): 48–65.https://doi.org/10.46687/QCDQ4857Anna Plassart, Hugo Bonin Democratic Struggle or National Uprising? The Canadian Rebellions in British Political Thought, 1835–1840, Global Intellectual History 7, no.11 (Jan 2020): 28–46.https://doi.org/10.1080/23801883.2020.1711530Hugo Bonin Between panacea and poison: “democracy” in British socialist thought, 1881–1891, Intellectual History Review 31, no.44 (Sep 2020): 671–691.https://doi.org/10.1080/17496977.2020.1810911Hugo Bonin Friend or foe? British receptions of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, 1835–1885, British Politics 4 (Jun 2021).https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-021-00182-8Hugo Bonin From antagonist to protagonist: ‘Democracy’ and ‘people’ in British parliamentary debates, 1775–1885, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 35, no.44 (Nov 2019): 759–775.https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqz082Mike Sanders Coordinating chartist poetry: Past, present, future, Literature Compass 17, no.55 (Mar 2020).https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12567Valerie Wallace Introduction: Empire of Dissent, (Feb 2018): 1–31.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70467-8_1Josh Gibson The Chartists and the Constitution: Revisiting British Popular Constitutionalism, Journal of British Studies 56, no.11 (Jan 2017): 70–90.https://doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2016.121Matthew Hale, Graham Raymond, Catherine Wright List of publications on the economic and social history of Great Britain and Ireland published in 2014, The Economic History Review 68, no.44 (Oct 2015): 1388–1440.https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.12237

Wars of words : A historical and rhetorical analysis of political and literary texts in the English 1830's and 1840's

This article focuses on two major political events ofthe first half of the 19th centyry, namely: The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 and the Chartist Movement (starting 1838). The aim of this research is to examine the hidden or less obvious messages that can be traced through these apparently self-explanatory texts. Thus, the first part of the article concentrares on the analysis of three texts, each reflecting a different stage in the elaboration of the final Poor Law Act of 1834. From the study of these extracts the "vested interests "of the classes in power at the time become more apparent.In the second half of the article, the same type of analysis is applied to Chartist Poetry, with the subsequent discovery of underlying polítical messages of hope and fu tu re victory directed to the working class readers.

The Importance of Ernest: Poetic Vanguardism and Popular Revolution in Capel Lofft’s Forgotten Epic

In 1839 Britain teetered on the threshold of a revolution. The poet Capel Lofft aspired to trigger it by disseminating his incendiary epic, Ernest; or, Political Regeneration, among the working classes. Ernest narrates the sanguinary triumph of a popular insurgency, and provides a blueprint for founding a democratic-communist republic. This essay seeks to recuperate Lofft and draw attention to his forgotten masterpiece of Chartist poetry. I make a case for Ernest’s literary merit and historical interest, highlighting its standing as the British nineteenth century’s most strident justification of political violence. My reading of the poem shows that Lofft uses a logic of vanguardism to synthesize two deeply antithetical convictions: radical egalitarianism, on the one hand, and belief in the inherent superiority of the poet, on the other. In his eponymous protagonist, Lofft creates a seductive image of the committed artist-revolutionary, and thereby sublimates his own conflicting ideas about the poet’s relation to the demos. Lofft proved incapable of quelling his ambivalence in life, however. He swiftly withdrew Ernest from circulation, stifling his own call to revolt—and ensuring that his poem would be neglected by posterity.

Mary Hutton and the Development of a Working-Class Women’s Political Poetics

is impossible for the truly generous mind to understand the small envyings that surround the daily path of an author, particularly a female one. Mary Hutton, Preface to Cottage Tales and Poems (1836) What do we know about the working-class women who wrote poetry the Victorian period? As so often happens in the study of non-canonical writers, their biographies exist in fragments, a miscellany of facts with very little cohesion. We may know that a writer was a factory girl or a domestic servant; however, we often know little of the circumstances in which she wrote, her family history, or the particularities of her work. It seems that the lack of extant working-class women's poetry lies in the historical (de)valuations surrounding their lives; the difficulties in recovering their texts is, in part, linked to the unavailability of biographical information. Perhaps deemed too unimportant by the establishment for a record of their lives to be kept, nineteenth-century working-class women poets all but disappeared from historical record, and we are only now in the process of rediscovering them. While male working-class poets have enjoyed a rebirth with the work of Michael Sanders, Ian Haywood, and Roy Vickers, (1) the study of working-class women writers is still in its nascent stages. Mary Hutton is one such writer who has been neglected until now in scholarship on working-class poetry. Hutton's rediscovery was first recorded in Ian Haywood's The Literature of Struggle: An Anthology of Chartist Fiction, in which Haywood names Hutton the only author of Chartist Fiction. (2) Recently, John Goodridge's Nineteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets: 1800-1900 (3) collected five of Hutton's poems, and Patricia Johnson gives a passing nod to Hutton in her study of the development of Ethel Carnie's Feminist Vision. (4) Florence Boos, whose work has reinvigorated the study of working-class verse, mentions Hutton in Class and Victorian Poetics and has done much to illuminate the possibilities within working-class women's writing. In her study of the resonances of working-class women writers, she works to belie critical assumptions that Victorian women's preoccupations with religion vitiated their verse. (5) Following the recuperative momentum of Boos's paper, I argue for Hutton's important role in the formation of a working-class political discourse in Victorian poetry. This study of Hutton's poetical negotiations of politics and class seeks to enrich the present initial discussion of a new discourse of poetic politics: that of the working-class woman of the 1830s and 1840s. In order to understand the politics underpinning Mary Hutton's poetry, we must attend to the ways in which her poems enter into the political discourses of the early 1830s--namely, issues surrounding the New Poor Law, poverty, and slavery. Boos has pointed out that most Victorian working-class women poets had little direct access to the Chartist movement and its cultural institutions (Boos, 'Nurs'd Up,' p. 153). Despite this fact, Hutton's poems on the Poor Law and poverty are strikingly aligned with the poetry of the Chartist movement in both her appropriations of images of slavery and her use of discourses on human rights and freedom. (6) In this paper I wish to show how Hutton engages with nineteenth-century class politics and how her use of simple diction and her engagement with themes that resonate with Chartist poetry earns her a place as a de facto Chartist poet in the canon of nineteenth-century working-class literature. What little we know of Hutton's life and work, we learn from two contemporary middle-class male sources. The first is William Cartright Newsam's The Poets of Yorkshire: Comprising Sketches of the Lives, and Specimens of the Writings of those 'Children of Song' who have been Natives of, or otherwise connected with the County of York (1845), and the second is the preface to Hutton's first work, Sheffield Manor and Other Poems (1831), written by John Holland. …

The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (review)

Reviewed by: The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History Larry K. Uffelman (bio) Mike Sanders , The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. vii + 299, $99 cloth. Chances are that when most of us think of the term "Victorian poetry," we don't think first of, for instance, Ernest Jones or Gerald Massey. This is the case, Sanders theorizes, because we have been reared in a critical tradition that is concerned with "individual, subjective, psychological states," a tradition that gives preeminence to poets such as Tennyson and Browning. Sanders wishes to expand our view of Victorian poetry by examining its role in another—more public and socially direct—critical context, the Chartist movement. This movement, he says, linked poetry to a larger context and purpose than portraying individual psychological states of mind. What's more, he argues, Chartist poetry needs to be reevaluated and seen as a major contribution to the category indicated by the term "Victorian poetry." First, Sanders suggests that because writing poetry is a highly literate skill, its practice might well have encouraged the development of communication skills among those members of the working classes who participated in it. These skills then proved useful in other aspects of the advocacy of Chartism. Beyond that, however, the ability of members of the working classes to write poetry demonstrated to others the fitness of those classes for the franchise and helped to transform the consciousness of a larger audience. [End Page 85] Readers of VPR will be especially interested in Chapter 3, which focuses on the Northern Star's poetry column from 1838 to 1852. Sanders defines a Chartist poem straightforwardly as one published in a Chartist newspaper, particularly the Northern Star. This is so, he argues, because all the contributors and editors of this newspaper were engaged in Chartist activity. During the lifetime of the poetry column, some 1,500 poems written by "at least" 300 Chartist poets appeared. Furthermore, the column reprinted poems by Shelley, Bryon, and Shakespeare, as well as by contemporaries who weren't explicitly Chartists. Chapter 4, "Insurrectionary Sonnets: The Ideological Afterlife of the Newport Uprising," should also be of interest to the readers of VPR. In this chapter, Sanders considers the editorial problems faced during the trial of John Frost, Zephaniah Williams, and William Jones, following the Newport riots in November 1839. He suggests that the relationship between the reporting of the riots in the news columns and the responses to the riots printed in the poetry column shows tension concerning what might be a "proper" response to the riots. Sanders attributes the disjunction between the attitude of the news reports and the representation of the riots in the poetry column to the wish of the editors neither to "denigrate the sacrifice" nor to "endorse violence." Readers of VPR might well wish to consider the possible intertextual relationships that exist between the editorially controlled published "reports" on the one hand and the far more personal "poetic" responses on the other, when both appear in the same issue of the newspaper. Throughout his discussion, Sanders emphasizes the challenge of finding a poetic mode suited to the expression of radical political principles. He asserts that the Chartists' success in accomplishing this goal deserves far more attention that it has received hitherto. In Appendix A, Sanders provides the texts of three Chartist poems: Charles Davlin's "On a Cliff Which O'erhung," published in the Northern Star on October 5, 1839; Davlin's "Questions from the Loom," published in the Northern Star on July 28, 1838; and P. B. Templeton's "To the 'Dear Little Dead,'" published in the Northern Star on January 19, 1839. Appendix B provides a list of the details of the poetry published in the poetry column of the Northern Star, beginning January 6, 1838, with notice of John Smithson's "Working Men's Rhymes—No. 1," and ending July 3, 1852, with notice of Charles Kingsley's "Epicedium on the Death of the Journal of Association." [End Page 86] Larry K. Uffelman Mansfield University Larry K. Uffelman Larry Uffelman, Professor Emeritus of English, is a long-time member of RSVP. He specializes in Victorian English...

BOOK REVIEW: edited by Joan Allen and Owen R. Ashton.PAPERS FOR THE PEOPLE: A STUDY OF THE CHARTIST PRESS. London: The Merlin Press, 2005.

Reviewed by: Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press Jamie L. Bronstein (bio) Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press, edited by Joan Allen and Owen R. Ashton; pp. xx + 232. London: The Merlin Press, 2005, £45.00, £15.95 paper, $79.95, $32.95 paper. The definitive history of the Chartist movement has yet to be written—a fact that has given rise to an extremely vibrant and interesting field of historical writing. The local [End Page 748] studies in Asa Briggs's 1959 collection of essays, Chartist Studies, encouraged books and articles on Chartism in many localities; G. D. H. Cole's 1965 Chartist Portraits was followed by a spate of excellent individual biographies of Chartist leaders. In the 1980s, with the publication of Gareth Stedman Jones's essay, "Rethinking Chartism" (in Languages of Class, 1983), and a second major set of essays edited by Dorothy Thompson and James Epstein, The Chartist Experience (1982), Chartist historiography entered a new phase. In addition to continuing to explore the social history of the Chartist movement, historians began to explore Chartist cultural history. They interpreted the message of the Chartists as refracted not only through the radical press, but also through material culture, gender roles and ritual, Chartist poetry and fiction, and the use of Chartist spaces, such as the Land Company allotments. Even the familiar chronology of the Chartist movement was expanded as Margot Finn traced the Chartists' entry into their post-petition, internationalist phase. More recently, Miles Taylor and Andrew Messner have called for historians of Chartism to move on from these social and cultural preoccupations, urging historians to reintegrate Chartism into the broader political narrative, to examine the political and economic thought of the Chartist movement, and to study the impact of Chartism in Britain's colonies and elsewhere abroad. In their introduction, Joan Allen and Owen Ashton position Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press as a response to this critique. While only a few of the essays in the volume actually do engage with that challenge, taken together they show the vibrancy of the Chartist public sphere and the ease with which it could be undermined by financial misfortune and government oppression. The volume opens with an essay by Aled Jones that touches on the iconography of the Chartist masthead and the relationship between Chartist journalism, the war of the unstamped, and the later Victorian popular press. Looking mainly at the Northern Star, Jones argues that the Chartist press resembled later popular newspapers in being crowded and full of variety, but that its embattled focus on politics made it unique. Malcolm Chase provides a sophisticated and convincing look at Chartist iconography, particularly the steel-engraved portraits that the Northern Star distributed to its subscribers in order to boost sales. He argues that these expensive, high-quality engravings of male leaders—in conventional poses, and abstracted from the controversial activities of the Chartist movement—catered to popular appreciation of portraiture but also legitimated the respectable "gentlemen leaders" who so prospered in the movement. Michael Huggins uses two short-lived Irish Chartist papers of 1848 to sketch a revisionist history of the Irish Chartist movement. He argues that Irish Chartists were holdovers from earlier, Enlightenment radical movements—that they were Jacobin descendants rather than Fenian ancestors. Their failure to ally with the Catholic masses or to create a mass platform kept them from crafting a national appeal. Only in 1848, when they were able to create a short-lived alliance with a few nationalists—leading to the creation of newspapers—was their message effectively communicated. Scottish Chartists faced a similar set of issues, as Hamish Fraser shows. Although more pro-Chartist newspapers survive for Scotland than for Ireland, Chartism there gravitated toward temperance, legal reform, and moral force. Just as English Chartists created an alternative history of Chartism that focused on the Norman Yoke, so Scottish Chartists created their own version of nationalism, which compared them with the Covenanters. Nonetheless, as in Ireland, the Scottish Chartists' inability to support a [End Page 749] Chartist press between 1842 and 1847 was not only a symptom of weakness in the Chartist...

Christian Election, Holy Communion and Psalmic Language in Ernest Jones's Chartist Poetry

Christian Election, Holy Communion and Psalmic Language in Ernest Jones's Chartist Poetry

Christian Election, Holy Communion and Psalmic Language in Ernest Jones's Chartist Poetry

Christian Election, Holy Communion and Psalmic Language in Ernest Jones's Chartist Poetry

Poetic Agency: Metonymy and Metaphor in Chartist Poetry 1838-1852

REFLECTING ON THE FIRST NATIONAL CONVENTION, THE ORIGINAL historian of Chartism, R. C. Gammage, commented wryly, did not turn out to be a perfectly harmonious body. [2] According to Gammage, major source of discord was disagreement between advocates of moral and physical (pp. 106-111). While subsequent historiography has offered a more nuanced account of range of opinion within Chartism, it has also confirmed Gammage's assessment that related questions of strategy and agency bedevilled movement throughout its existence. [3] intention of this article is to demonstrate extent to which poetics participate in this central problematic--that of identifying and representing a social force capable of securing Charter. Broadly speaking, article will argue that poetry represents agency through one of two poetic strategies. first uses metonymy and metaphor to invoke and evoke agency respectively, whilst second identifies specific concrete groups which it seeks to interpellate as agents of change. It will argue that these changes in poetic strategy are symptomatic of changes in political understanding. displacement of metonymy by metaphors of natural force, and increasingly self-conscious and sophisticated use of these metaphors combined with emergence of a strategy of interpellation is, it will be argued, poetic analogue of progressive, albeit uneven, development of political analysis. [4] Metaphor and Metonymy Early poetry (1838-1842) frequently represents both Chartism and Chartists in metonymic terms, with flag or banner offered as a sign of activity. Eugene La Mont's Universal Liberty--The Reaction for example begins See banner of freedom, now proudly unfurl'd--, whilst chorus of Edwin P. Mead's Chartist (Hark! 'tis trumpet call) begins Press around standard, press. [5] flag, banner, or similarly stands as a focal point for, or as an index of, action in a number of other poems of period: Air (Swearing death to King,), Presentation of National Petition, Nine Cheers for Charter, One and All, The Enslaved, Song (Ye working men of England). [6] In these poems, agency is generally symbolic rather than actual. A typical example is provided by anonymous poem entitled Air (Swearing death to King): Swearing death to King. Heaven guards heart; Join'd in hand and we'll sing, la Charte, la Charte! Ruin seize knave, Can slavery or woe impart Aught of pleasure to brave, la Charte, la Charte! Bear our high, Terror strikes each miscreant heart; Onward! Still our battle cry, la Charte, la Charte! Raise brand of liberty, Dare foe, smart; chorus loud and high, la Charte, la Charte! This poem makes use of an established radical political rhetoric consisting of abstractions; patriot heart opposes tyrant king, and the brave join battle for liberty. Moreover, despite use of collective pronouns we and ours, there is no sense of a concrete, collective agent within poem. Chartists are represented metonymically by means of their conquering standard (which is borne aloft apparently without assistance of human hands) and by disembodied voices who Swell chorus loud and high. Similarly second half of poem consists of a series of subject-less imperatives: Bear, Onward, Raise, and Swell. Even Charter itself is to some extent alienated by its translation into French, Vive Ia Chattel In short, poem is marked by its inability to instance agency capable of realizing its political aspirations. …

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

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. …

Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition

Acknowledgements Introduction: Romantic studies as a unified field Part I. A Dialectic of Romanticism: 1. The communitarian lyric in the dialectic of Romanticism 2. Ballad, lyrical ballad, lyric 3. The sun and the tree: lyrics of liberty Part II. Interventionist Poetics in the Tradition of Romanticism: 4. Allen Davenport on the threshold of Chartism 5. The forms of Chartist poetry and poetics: 1838-46 6. Labour's laureates: Allen Davenport, Thomas Cooper, and Ernest Jones in 1846 7. W. J. Linton and William Morris: Republican and Socialist poetics Conclusion Notes Index.

An Anthology of Chartist Poetry: Poetry of the British Working Class, 1830s-1850s

Chartist poetry was written by and for workers. In contrast with the portrayal of workers by mainstream Victorian writers, Chartist verse is intellectual, complex, and socially conscious and reflects an international outlook.