Northern Star Research Articles

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...

Child Murder & British Culture 1720-1900 (review)

Reviewed by: Child Murder & British Culture 1720–1900 Sophia Andres (bio) Josephine McDonagh , Child Murder & British Culture 1720–1900 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. xiii+278, 6 half tones, $65.00 cloth. Josephine McDonagh draws on a wide and multifarious context for her subject – child murder. For this "extensive and complex" topic, McDonagh has chosen to concentrate on "discussions of commercial society from the 1720s; anthropological debates about the nature of man in the 1770s ...; debates about the social order following the French Revolution in 1798; the explosive responses to the New Poor Law at the end of the 1830s; and the so-called epidemic of child murder in England around 1859." In each of these contexts, McDonagh demonstrates, "child murder emerges as a motif in which debates of serious nature about key issues in Britain's self-imaginings are conducted" (9–10). Included in these wide-ranging [End Page 337] primary sources are also allusions to various contemporary journals such as Illustrated London News, the National, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, National Reformer, Northern Liberator, Northern Star, Pall Mall Gazette. Beginning with Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees and Swift's Modest Proposal, McDonagh reads infanticide in these texts as vehicles of discussing "the modes and manners of commercial life, the pleasures and pains of luxury, the pitfalls of colonial policies, the corruptions of the state" (15). In Swift's perspective, commerce creates vanity, avarice, dishonesty, vices "tantamount to killing babies" (17–18). Luxury and unlicensed passions for commodities turn "civilized people" into child-eating savages. For Mandeville, "modest" women would not flinch at killing their children if they were unwanted, while "common Whores ... are full of motherly tenderness" (26). Infanticide is an act that "paradoxically contributes to the national good by sustaining the economy of public benefit and private vice" (28). Burke's influential Reflections on the Revolution in France "emblematized social and political disorder in revolutionary France" through the figure of the "the sexually voracious woman" (68). For Burke, the French Revolution was associated with sexual excess and violence. Mary Wollstonecraft was seen as a dangerous persona of the French Revolution, "a mother without being a wife" (84). Wordsworth and Malthus both "respond to the political risks posed by women at the end of the eighteenth century by absorbing dissident femininity into nature" (71). From that time on child murder is usually associated with "the horror of femininity." Malthus added the possibility that child murder could be one of the "preventive checks" that could help regulate population growth (88). The unmarried mother in "The Thorn" is represented as a "pathetic but traditional and indigenous form of deviancy"(80). Chapter Four discusses the Anti-Malthusian polemics prevalent in the contemporary press. By 1839 Chartists began to blame infanticide and early childhood death on the industrial culture. A series of articles attack the so-called "Marcus pamphlets," satirizing Malthusian politics as justifications for infanticide. These pamphlets illustrate "the way in which ideas ... circulated within the culture, and were co-opted by different individuals and groups to support widely different political positions: in this case, child murder is incorporated in the rhetoric of people of party and opinion as different as the Tory Radical, Baxter, Chartists of various complexion ... as well as the Owenite, Mudie" (112). The 1860s saw an epidemic of child murder cases – 12,000 women in London were estimated to be murderers (123). Despite "the tenor of much of the literature on female infanticide in India, the child-murder [End Page 338] outbreak in Britain in the late 1850s and 1860s shared many characteristics with its occurrence in India" (144). The most famous child murder in the literature of the period appears in Adam Bede, the genesis of which was based on a story of child murder. In this case McDonagh carefully aligns dates in Eliot's notebooks with sociopolitical events and legislative acts related to child murder. Child murder in Adam Bede, she contends, functions "as the bearer of memories that have to be forgotten for the perpetuation of the nation." However, "the figure of forgetting is also the bearer of those memories that must be forgotten, so that to forget...

From Pariah to Science Powerhouse?

SCIENCE IN LIBYAT Now that international sanctions on Libya have been lifted, Muammar Gaddafi is inviting outsiders to help create a northern star of science and technology in Africa.

Local Order

Local Order

Mazzini and Marx: thoughts upon democracy in Europe

Foreword by Spencer M. DiScala Introduction In London: The Idea of Democracy The Italian Workers' Union: A Democratic Society The Opening Letters Affair Italy and the English Institutions (1845) Mazzini and the Northern Star The German The Polish Democracy and the Cracow Manifesto The Democratic Communists of Brussels: Engels and Marx upon Democracy in Europe Agreement and Disagreement on Democracy The People's International League: A Democratic Society The Deficiencies of Communism and Cosmopolitism The Replies of the Cosmopolites The Communist League in London and the Communist Manifesto The Political Language of the Thoughts Conclusion Appendix Subject Index Index of Political Terms

"In louring Hindostan": Chartism and Empire in Ernest Jones's The New World, A Democratic Poem

The fiction and poetry written by the Chartists continue to exert a powerful ideological pull on both historians and literary critics concerned with the Victorian period, not only because the reform movement was itself politically unique--"the first working men's party which the world ever produced," as Friedrich Engels described it 1 --but also because the creation of an alternative literary culture was seen from the very beginning by its members as an integral part of the struggle for political emancipation. Chartist writers, Martha Vicinus states, "sought to create a class-based literature, written by and for the people." 2 Thus, the novels, stories, and poems published regularly in Chartist newspapers such as the Northern Star represent a pioneering attempt to bridge the aesthetic gap between working-class politics and literature in Britain.

Adaptive Optics Integral Field Spectroscopy of the Young Stellar Objects in LkHα 225

Progress in understanding the embedded stars in LkHα 225 has been hampered by their variability, making it hard to compare data taken at different times, and by the limited resolution of the available data, which cannot probe the small scales between the two stars. In an attempt to overcome these difficulties, we present new near-infrared data on this object taken using the adaptive optics with a laser for astronomy adaptive optics system with the MPE 3D integral field spectrometer and the near-infrared camera Omega-Cass. The stars themselves have K-band spectra which are dominated by warm dust emission, analogous to classes I-II for low-mass young stellar objects (YSOs), suggesting that the stars are in a phase where they are still accreting matter. On the other hand, the ridge of continuum emission between them is rather bluer, suggestive of extinct and/or scattered stellar light rather than direct dust emission. The compactness of the CO emission seen toward each star argues for accretion disks (which can also account for much of the K-band veiling) rather than a neutral wind. In contrast to other YSOs with CO emission, LkHα 225 has no detectable Brγ emission. In addition, there is no H2 detected on the northern star, although we do confirm that the strongest H2 emission is on the southern star, where we find it is excited primarily by thermal mechanisms. A second knot of H2 is observed to its northeast, with a velocity shift of -75 km s-1 and a higher fraction of nonthermal emission. This is discussed with reference to the H2O maser, the molecular outflow, and [S II] emission observed between the stars.

Speech and Writing in the Northern Star

Speech and Writing in the <i>Northern Star</i>

The Lazarus Effect: Rejuvenation of Leaf-senescent Seedlings in a Rare Grassland Perennial

Abstract Over 75% of the seedlings of the endemic sandplain grassland perennial, northern blazing star (Liatris scariosa var novae-angliae), die within their first growing season. During a study of the reproductive ecology of this rare plant, we found 17 seedlings whose leaves had become completely desiccated and brown and were classified as dead. Upon subsequent inspection, we discovered that these seedlings had developed a new shoot with green leaves. We have called this rejuvenation “the Lazarus effect.” These seedlings became dormant by late June, which coincided with extended periods of drought, and were senescent for periods of 4–10+ wk. Rejuvenation of leaf-senescent seedlings occurred in late July and August, coincident with periods of increased precipitation. Survivorship of “Lazarus” seedlings to their second summer (9 of 17, 53%) was similar to survivorship of “normal” seedlings (≈58%) which did not senesce. Thus, becoming senescent did not have undue costs to survivorship.

Suppression of phaseolin and lectin in seeds of common bean, Phaseolus vulgaris L.: increased accumulation of 54 kDa polypeptides is not associated with higher seed methionine concentrations

Suppression of phaseolin and lectin accumulation in common bean resulted in higher concentrations of bean seed polypeptides with apparent molecular weights of 54 kDa and from 70 to 84 kDa on SDS-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. Polypeptides of 54 and 56 kDa segregated as products of different alleles. Genes for the 54/56 kDa bands and phaseolin were estimated to be 26.2 +/- 3.7 map units apart. The 54 kDa band phenotype manifested by SDS-PAGE consisted of from one to three polypeptides of 54 kDa MW on 2D gels, and the 56 kDa phenotype consisted of one polypeptide of 56 kDa plus two minor polypeptides of 54-54.5 kDa molecular weight. The pKI of these polypeptides was approximately 5.25. The methionine content of the 54 kDa polypeptides of the cultivar Great Northern Star was 1.6 +/- 0.1 g/100 g protein, which was not statistically different from the value (1.5 +/- 0.1%) obtained for phaseolin isolated by the same procedure. F2 seeds deficient for phaseolin and lectin contained as much total N per g as wild-type seeds and were not shrunken, but contained 50% more free amino acids. F2 seeds from two of the three populations contained from 8 to 13% less methionine per mg total N.

Infrared images of Monoceros R2 IRS 3 - Evidence for a circumstellar disk

Diffraction-limited IR images of the protostellar system Mon R2 IRS 3 reveal a bright conical nebula which extends about 0.5 arcsec south from the southern component of the previously known star pair. The bright nebula is probably dust scattering the starlight which emerges along the polar axis of a large (greater than 500 AU) circumstellar disk. We estimate a lower limit to the disk mass of 3 X 10 exp -2 solar masses. A faint, previously unknown pointlike source lies 0.37 arcsec east of the northern star.

The Northern Star and the propagation of enlightened ideas

The <i>Northern Star</i> and the propagation of enlightened ideas

A Northern Star

A Northern Star

Radical Dining, Toasting and Symbolic Expression in Early Nineteenth-Century Lancashire: Rituals of Solidarity

In 1869 William Aitken looked back over a long and distinguished career as a radical activist in the Lancashire factory town of Ashton-under-Lyne. In a letter to the Ashton Reporter, he recalled his introduction to the ranks of radicalism: “My earliest remembrances of taking a part in Radicalism are the invitations I used to receive to be at ‘Owd’ Nancy Clayton's in Charlestown, on the 16th of August to denounce the Peterloo Massacre, to drink in solemn silence ‘To the immortal memory of Henry Hunt’.…” In November 1838 the Northern Star, Chartism's great newspaper, made what would appear to be the first mention of Aitken's public role in radical politics. The twenty-four year-old Aitken, former piecer and cotton spinner turned school master, attended a dinner held in the working-class suburb of Charlestown at the home of John and Nancy Clayton to commemorate the birthday of the hero of Peterloo fields.

STAR COUNTS AND COLOR INDICES IN A SOUTH-GALACTIC-POLE FIELD

ABSTRACT Faint star counts and color indices have been obtained in a south-galactic-pole field. The counts are presented over an area of 0.55 deg2 and span a magnitude range, 19.25 ≤ J ≤ 22.25. The color distribution was obtained for a 0.33 deg2 subarea for the interval 20 ≤ J ≤ 22. The data are in very good agreement with the standard model suggested by Bahcall and Soneira and by Pritchet. The following main results are highlighted. (1) The color of the blue peak suggests an intermediate metallicity (similar to that of M13) for the halo component. (2) The data are not consistent with the Gilmore and Reid normalization of the thick disk component, although it does not rule out the existence of this component. (3) The author notes that the number of observed objects at (J-r) ≤ 0.5 is consistent with the density of QSOs suggested by Koo and Kron. (4) The good agreement with the northern star counts suggests that the observed field-to-field variations in the galaxy number counts are real.

The Summer of Jack London by Andrew J. Fenady

Reviews 361 The Summer of Jack London. By Andrew J. Fenady. (New York: Walker & Co., 1985. 173 pages, $13.95.) Since, as it is so often said, Jack London’s life reads like a novel, it is puzzling that more novelists have not discovered his story. The only fictional treatment of London’s life before this engaging book by novelist and screen­ writer Andrew Fenady (discounting Irving Stone’s Sailor on Horseback, which, in several of its countless printings was subtitled “A Biographical Novel”), was Rose Wilder Lane’s He Was a Man (1925), a melodrama in which London’s name is disguised, but little else. Fenady’s is a polished story covering one pivotal summer of London’s young life when the budding writer, not yet 20, has just returned from a voyage on the hell-ship “Northern Star” to face the responsibility of support­ ing his family while falling in love with a young society beauty and struggling to learn his writing craft. Fenady’s principal sources seem to be London’s Martin Eden, John Barleycorn, and The Sea-Wolf, with healthy dollops of The Valley of the Moon, Cruise of the Dazzler, with perhaps stories like “South of the Slot” also consulted. Since all these works are novels (including the seemingly autobiographi­ cal Barleycorn), it means that Fenady has the unusual distinction of creating a work of fiction that is based, for the most part, on works of fiction. But it works for obvious reasons: London’s work is autobiographical and Fenady is not interested in following strict biographical fact. Nor should he be except when it fits his story purpose. He is a novelist and borrows on the same licenses granted to Jack London and all fiction writers. And so, sequential time isout of kilter in “The Summer ofJack London,” and real people like John London, Flora Chaney, “Mammy Jennie” Prentiss, and Eliza Shepard, share space with such creations as the remorseless Captain Erik Diequest, skipper of the “Northern Star” who is most certainly inspired by London’s Wolf Larsen just as the “Star” is Fenady’s fictional version of London’s fictional “Ghost” in The Sea-Wolf. Fenady occasionally leavens his fiction with a bit of well-handled fact: The reader learns of London’s deep love for John London, that feckless Pennsylvania farmer who gave young Jack his name and his unlimited affec­ tion; of London’s “work-beast” experiences as a coal-shoveler; of London’s shattering discovery that his true father was William Henry Chaney, the itinerant astrologer with whom Flora Wellman had a common-law “mar­ riage.” The result of all this is a very entertaining piece of story-telling—in the Jack London tradition. DALE L. WALKER The University of Texas at El Paso ...

From a Place of 'Horrible Destitution' to a Paradise of the Working Class. The Transformation of British Working Class Attitudes to Australia, 1841-1851

British working-class attitudes towards Australia in the 1840s, as indicated by working-class newspapers,1 reflected not only the flow of news from Australia, but also the contemporary problems of the British working class. The latter, in what was an extraordinary eventful and turbulent decade, had a profound influence on verdicts about Australia. They were a major factor in a quite dramatic change from virtual contempt to enormous enthusiasm. The emergence of this strongly favourable image appears to have been very important in the revival of emigration in the late 1840s and in the great wave of emigration which occurred in the 1850s, and inasmuch as the image was produced by developments largely external to Australia the traditionally neglected 'push* factor in emigration seems to have been of great significance. The present study is based on an examination of eight working-class newspapers,2 particularly Northern Star and Lloyds Weekly London Newspaper. Northern Star was the principal mouthpiece of the Chartist movement, with a circulation far ahead of any other working-class news paper for most of the decade. After 1848 it declined in importance (and circulation) and by 1852 had degenerated to almost 'rat-bag' status. Lloyds, established in 1842, was less militant than Northern Star, but well attuned to working-class needs and wishes. By 1851 Lloyds had emerged as the working-class newspaper with the greatest circulation, and it main tained that position for many decades. Of the other newspapers, News of the World, examined closely from 1846, was closest to Lloyds in its views. Among working-class newspapers, it most resembled the establishment press. Glasgow Sentinel, although started in 1850, is particularly valuable as a vigorous regional represen tative of the working class. The more militant Reynolds Weekly News paper dates from the same year and is perhaps the most important of the 'post-Chartist' newspapers. Finally, there are three newspapers more akin to magazines and not so clearly aimed at working-class readers, but offering strong expositions of working-class interests: Douglas Jerrold's Weekly (1846-8), edited by this popular playwright and novelist who, later in the 1850s, became editor of Lloyds; Spirit of the Age, later renamed Spirit of the Times (1848-9), a journal of vigorous, broadly Chartist views; and the Leader, from 1850 perhaps the most 'intellectual'

‘Great Northern Star’ Dry Bean Tolerant to Bacterial Diseases1

Abstract The bacterial diseases of beans (Phaseolus vulgaris L.), common blight and bacterial wilt, caused by Xanthomonas phaseoli (E. F. Smith) Dawson and Corynebacterium flaccumfaciens (Hedges) Dows., have caused substantial bean yield losses (4). There is no satisfactory chemical control of these bacterial diseases. An objective of our breeding program was to develop an early maturing ‘Great Northern’ (GN) cultivar tolerant to the two bacterial diseases and comparable to the standard GN cultivars. This has been difficult to achieve because of unfavorable linkages, low heritability of the common blight reaction, and the number of genes involved (2). The recently released ‘Great Northern Star’ (‘GN STAR’) combines the desired traits and is described here.

Feargus O'Connor and the Northern Star

The first edition of theNorthern Star and Leeds General Advertiserwas published on November 18th, 1837, with Feargus O'Connor as proprietor, Joshua Hobson as printer and publisher, and the Rev. William Hill as editor. Its price was 4½d. Together with the platform theNorthern Starprovided the essential medium of national communication and organization for the Chartist movement. TheStarwas the most important agency for the integration and transformation of disparate local radical agitation and organization into the national Chartist movement. Throughout the Chartist period theStargave local working-class protest a national focus. It brought national perspective to the localities and gave local radicalism national coverage.

Republicanism in Nineteenth Century England

To one familiar with the attitude of “near devotion” accorded the monarchy by the majority of Englishmen today, it may come as a shock to discover a lack of this devotion in mid-Victorian England. A sampling of comments from the radical press is a striking example. The regular arrival of Victoria's progeny evoked this impious suggestion in the Northern Star: That, rather than reciting national prayers of thanksgiving, congregations should sing “hymns of despair for their misfortune in being saddled with another addition to the brood of royal Cormorants.” The National Reformer referred to “our good kind, and dear Queen, who…could easily dispense with the allowance which her loyal subjects make her…unless she desires to be the last of England's monarchs…”