Volume 9. Annotated Bibliography of Chartism 1995-2018

‘When he entered the town council twenty years ago, he was a despised Chartist and the council believed that not a street lamp would be put up but a lecture would be made on the Charter’ – a Chartist remembers, 1871.

In their time the Chartists were indeed ‘despised’. In the mid-1850s, when the transported leaders of the Newport Rising were granted pardons, there were members of the propertied elite who still quite openly declared that they should have been hanged. In the mid-1880s, however, with the United Kingdom electorate augmented to 5.7 million, the Chartists were feted. Thomas Cooper of Leicester liked to be called an old Chartist, and John Carter of Nottingham treasured the Chartist flag he had carried in 1842. The Chartist demand for a say in law-making for working men had been right all along.

Unsurprisingly the Chartist Movement has attracted a great deal of interest from scholars. Lists of primary and secondary sources have filled two volumes. This volume is intended as a supplement to The Chartist Movement: A New Annotated Bibliography (1995), edited by Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson and Stephen Roberts. There is no overlap. It lists manuscript material located in the last quarter of a century – including petitions, letters and sketches – and the many books, articles and theses that have been produced. For all those interested in Chartism, this book is indispensable.