Abstract
WHO were the Chartists? The Chartists’ own view was stated by Thomas Duncombe, introducing the 1842 Petition: ‘those who were originally called radicals and afterwards reformers, are called Chartists’.1 But this was never accepted by the great bulk of contemporary opinion. From the moment that Chartism first emerged as a public movement, what seized the imagination of contemporaries were not the formally radical aims and rhetoric of its spokesmen, but the novel and threatening social character of the movement. A nation-wide independent movement of the ‘working classes’ brandishing pikes in torchlight meetings in pursuit of its ‘rights’ was an unprecedented event, and whatever Chartism’s official self-identity, contemporary observers could not refrain from projecting onto it deeper unavowed motives and sentiments. Thomas Carlyle’s distinction between the ‘distracted incoherent embodiment of Chartism’ and its ‘living essence’… ‘the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong condition therefore or the wrong disposition, of the Working Classes of England’, with its implied gulf between the real and formal definition of Chartism, set the terms of the predominant response, whatever the precise definition given to these terms.2 Chartists in vain protested their respect for property.3 Macaulay, debating the 1842 Petition, deduced the Chartist position on property from the social composition of its constituency.
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Notes
F. Engels, ‘The Condition of England, the English Constitution’, Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, Collected Works (1973) vol. 3, p. 513.
For two analyses which do illuminatingly focus upon the language and politics of radicalism during this period, see T. M. Parssinen, ‘Association, Convention and Anti-Parliament in British Radical Politics, 1771–1848’, English Historical Review, LXXXVII (1973); I. Prothero, ‘William Benbow and the Concept of the “General Strike”’, Past & Present, 63 (1974).
See Behagg’s ch. 2 below; see also T. Tholfson, The Chartist Crisis in Birmingham’, International Review of Social History, vol. III (1958).
See I. Prothero, ‘Chartism in London’, Past & Present, 44 (1969); D. Goodway, ‘Chartism in London’, Bulletin for the Society for the Study of Labour History, 20 (1970).
On the north-east, see W. H. Maehl, ‘Chartist Disturbances in Northeastern England, 1839’, International Review of Social History, VIII (1963); on south Lancashire, see Sykes’s ch. 5 below; see also J. Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution. Early Industrial Capitalism in three English Towns (London, 1974); P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics (Brighton, 1980).
For sources on country party ideology in the eighteenth century and its connections with radicalism, see the following: C. Hill, ‘James Harrington and the People’, in Puritanism and Revolution (London, 1958); P. Zagorin, The Court and the Country. The Beginning of the English Revolution (London, 1969); D. Rub ini, Court and Country 1688~1702 (London, 1967); C. Robbins, The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthman (New York, 1968); I. Kramnick, Boling- broke and his Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, Mass., 1968); J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment (Princeton, 1975); Pocock, ‘Virtue and Commerce in the 18th Century’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 3 (1972); M. Peters, ‘The “Monitor” on the Constitution, 1755–1765: new light on the ideological origins of English Radicalism’, English Historical Review, LXXXVI (1971); J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976); Brewer, ‘English Radicalism in the age of George IIP in Pocock (ed.), Three British Revolutions (Princeton, 1980); Kramnick, ‘Religion and Radicalism. English Political Theory in the Age of Revolution’, Political Theory, 5 (1977); C.H. Hay, The Making of a Radical: The Case of James Burgh’, Journal of British Studies, 18 (1979); M. Canovan, Two Concepts of Liberty — Eighteenth Century Style’, Price-Priestley Newsletter, 2 (1978); I. Hampshire-Monk, ‘Civic Humanism and Parliamentary Reform: the Case of the Society of the Friends of the People’, Journal of British Studies, 18 (1979); J. M. Murrin, ‘The Great Inversion, or Court versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688–1721) and America (1776–1813)’ in Pocock (ed.), Three British Revolutions; D. O. Thomas, ‘Richard Price and the Tradition of Civic Humanism’ (unpublished paper given to the ‘Political Economy and Society’, Seminar, Research Centre, King’s College, Cambridge, 1980).
On Spence and his doctrine see T. R. Knox, ‘Thomas Spence: the Trumpet of Jubilee’, Past & Present, 76 (1977).
(G. J. Harney), ‘The Charter and Something More’, Democratic Review (February 1850) 351.
For a characterisation of the conflict within modern industry during this period, see Stedman Jones, ‘England’s First Proletariat’, New Left Review, 90 (1975).
See P. Richards, ‘The State and early Capitalism: the Case of the Handloom Weavers’, Past & Present, 83 (1979).
Many aspects of the thinking behind the 1842 strike movement remain mysterious. For accounts of the strike, see A. G. Rose, ‘The Plug Riots of 1842 in Lancashire and Cheshire’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, LXVII (1958); F. C. Mather, ‘The General Strike of 1842; A Study in Leadership, Organisation and the Threat of Revolution during the Plug Plot Disturbances’ in J. Stephenson and R. Quinault, Popular Protest and Public Order (London, 1974); Jenkins, General Strike of 1842.
The suggestion that the strike did cause a re-orientation in government policy is put forward by John Foster in Jenkins, General Strike of 1842, pp. 3–4. While a good case has been made out for the change of government tactics during the trial which followed the strike, (see Jenkins, ch. 10) the larger claim remains doubtful. It is argued below that the State had already begun to retreat from the ideologically exposed position of the 1830s before the strike began, see also G. Kitson Clark, ‘Hunger and Politics in 1842’, Journal of Modern History (1953).
See for instance Perkin, Modern English Society; B. Harrison and P. Hollis, ‘Chartism, Liberalism and the Life of Robert Lowery’, English Historical Review, LXXXII (1967).
J. B. O’Brien, The Life and Character of Maximilian Robespierre proving by facts and arguments that that much calumniated person was one of the greatest men and one of the purest and most enlightened reformers that ever existed in the world (London, 1838) vol. 1, pp. 254–5.
The tension was exacerbated by the extent to which employers took over the magistracy in industrial regions in the’ 1830s; see D. Philips, ‘The Black Country Magistracy 1835–60: a changing local élite and the exercise of its power’, Midland History (1976).
The debate is summarised in A. J. Taylor, Laissez-faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth Century Britain (Economic History Society, 1972); for a critique and suggested reinterpretation, see P. Richards, ‘State Formation and Class Struggle, 1832–48’, in P. Corrigan (ed.), Capitalism, State Formation and Marxist Theory (London, 1980).
On the role and function of law in the eighteenth-century State, see Hay, ‘Property, Authority and the Criminal Law’ in D. Hay, P. Lineburgh, J. Rule, E. P. Thompson and C. Winslow, Albion’s Fatal Tree (London, 1975);Thompson, Whigs and Hunters (London, 1975).
See in connection with this, the shift in statistical societies from preoccupation with wages and employment to that of housing, health and education, Eileen Yeo, ‘Social Science and Social Change: A Social History of some aspects of Social Science and Social Investigation in Britain, 1830–1890’(Sussex University, unpublished Ph. D. thesis, 1972) ch. 3; see also on education P. Hollis, The Pauper Press, a study in working-class radicalism of the 1830s (OUP, 1970), chs 1,111; R. Johnson ‘Educational Policy and Social Control in early Victorian England’, Past & Present, 49 (1970).
See N. Gash, ‘Peel and the Party System’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society (1951); N. Gash, Reaction and Reconstruction in English Politics 1832–1852 (Oxford, 1964) ch. V.
See B. Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce (Oxford, 1977), pp. 308–13; B. Hilton, ‘Peel: a Reappraisal’, Historical Journal (1979).
For the changed character of radicalism in the post-Chartist period, see F. Gillespie, Labour and Politics in England 1850–1867 (Durham, N. C., 1927); F. M. Leventhal, Respectable Radical, the Life of George Howell (London, 1971) Harrison, Before the Socialists.
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© 1982 Clive Behagg, John Belchem, Jennifer Bennett, James Epstein, Robert Fyson, Gareth Stedman Jones, Robert Sykes, Dorothy Thompson, Kate Tiller, Eileen Yeo
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Jones, G.S. (1982). The Language of Chartism. In: Epstein, J., Thompson, D. (eds) The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–60. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16921-4_2
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