Reviews

‘Revolutionary Chartists – From Whom May Heaven Protect Us’

This is a review recently published by Stephen Roberts on his excellent Chartism & The Chartists website

‘Revolutionary Chartists – From Whom May Heaven Protect Us’ – Cambridge Independent Press, 12 January 1856.

If you had been alive in the Victorian period you would certainly have known who the Chartists were. This was a national movement. In towns and villages across Britain working people gathered to read the Northern Star, collect signatures for petitions, organise marches and tea parties, listen to speeches by ‘missionaries’, paste up posters. Almost nowhere was impervious to the Chartist campaign. You couldn’t even travel on a railway train without a Chartist demanding the Northern Star from the newspaper seller. Of course, you might have been one of these Chartists. If you were a weaver or a frame worker knitter or a wool comber, chances are you were. The Chartists were everywhere, demanding a say in law-making for working men. And long after they were gone, they will still remembered … and feared. Little wonder that, as late as 1856, the editor of the Cambridge Independent was still shaking in his boots at a return of the Chartists.

The publication of Chartist Studies, edited by Asa Briggs, in 1959 launched a flurry of research into the Chartist localities. Whatever William Lovett and his friends were up to in London was for the time being set aside. What was going on in Sheffield, Norwich, Brighton and a host of other places was what mattered now. In the Amateur Historian Dorothy Thompson issued a clarion call for local investigations, offering guidance on how to frame that research and on the sources that could be consulted (That essay has recently been reprinted in THE DIGNITY OF CHARTISM). And so articles in local history journals and M.A and Ph.D theses began to appear. Small saplings soon became dense woods. As the years passed, we learned more and more about Chartist activities in the localities. The peak of all this local research was in the 1960s and 1970s, but it continued after that point until we reached the point where we now are: there is no local Chartist stone undisturbed.

Anyone who wants to read all these articles and theses will need to lock themselves in the stacks of a university library for a fortnight and make very good use of inter-library loans. The material is that scattered. The good news is that such extreme measures are no longer necessary. Happily, Richard Brown has embarked on a two-volume project to survey all the Chartist localities. The first volume has just been published. CHARTISM: LOCALITIES, SPACES AND PLACES Volume 1 examines London, East Anglia, and the Midlands. The rest of the country will be covered in the second volume, due next year. The first thing to say about this first volume is that it is extremely detailed. Anyone interested in what the Chartists in Suffolk or Worcestershire or Derbyshire will almost certainly find the answers they seek. A notable strength of Brown’s work is the depth of his research. Whilst he has, of course, delved into the many essays that have been published about local Chartism, he has also returned to the primary sources, particularly newspapers. This first volume is an extremely useful addition to the study of Chartism. It is thoroughly-researched, clearly-researched and, above all, very handy.

Chartism: Localities, Spaces and Places, The Midlands and the South, Richard Brown, Authoring History, 2015, paperback, 403 pp., ISBN 9781501017247

This volume focusing upon the local and regional dimension of Chartism in the Midlands and the South, is Richard Brown’s sixth excursion into Chartism, which with a sequel print volume encompassing the North of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, will provide an extensive and unprecedented analytical survey by a single author of Chartism from a regional and local perspective. As Chartist historian Stephen Roberts has commented such ‘a comprehensive survey of the Chartist Movement, region by region, will be of immense value to all students of Chartism’ since the intended scope of the two volumes and unified Kindle version is ‘truly astonishing’. Not since the ground-breaking collection of essays edited by Asa Briggs in 1959, which E.P. Thompson observed brought us ‘closer to the local roots of Chartism than any previous study’ and which stimulated a myriad of further local studies, has there been a more considered, in-depth, attempt to re-visit this dimension of Chartism. Indeed, since the 1980s, influenced particularly by the controversial intervention of Gareth Stedman Jones in the historiographical debate, the focus of Chartist studies shifted priorities sharply towards considerations of Chartism as a national political movement. Brown’s contention is that both dimensions remain vital to understanding this extraordinary movement. ‘Is it better’, he asks, ‘to see Chartism as a network of semi-autonomous political organisations over which national control was limited rather than a unified political movement?’ His answer is emphatically, that ‘neither one nor the other’ approach will suffice and that a combination of both approaches is now necessary to understand the full impact of this momentous movement on the history of Britain at every level. Chartism, he concedes, ‘may have been a national, political movement but it was grounded in the experience of its local activists as much, and perhaps arguably more than through grandiloquent oratory and the organisational structures of its national leaders’.

Brown engages elegantly and informatively with the historiography of local history in his opening chapter to explain how ‘local and regional considerations, linked to prevailing social and economic conditions played a major role in the ways in which the movement developed nationally’. For example, he argues that the strikes of 1842 arose ‘not from the decisions of national leaders but from the intensity of local anger and frustration at the inequities of local economic structures’. He also draws upon recent writers, notably Katrina Navickas, who have explored the significance of space and place in the development of grassroots radical politics, arguing that recognition of the centrality of space to human experience is ‘fundamental in understanding how and why Chartism developed and exchanged information and ideas within communities, localities, regional and national locations within Britain as a whole’.

Each exploration of regional and local dimensions in subsequent chapters is prefaced by an in-depth socio-economic profile of the locality presenting a rich tapestry focusing upon ‘how Chartism played out regionally and locally reinforcing the point that local priorities and political agendas did not always correspond with those put forward nationally and that, although the national leadership developed principles and policies, operational details were frequently left to local leaders and organisations’. This timely and illuminating study is a poignant and worthy tribute to the author’s wife who died shortly before this volume was completed. It will enrich understanding of Chartism as a national movement, whilst ‘drawing attention to the tensions between the aspirations of the Chartist national leadership and leadership at the local level’, thereby providing an indispensable overview to researchers seeking to understand how the Chartist movement played out in their own particular locality or region.

John A. Hargreaves