Chartism Lives

Now more than ever

On Saturday 7 September I attended and presented a paper at the Chartism Day 2024, held at the University of Reading. About 60 attended, mostly but not exclusively, professional historians. The event had a nice comradely atmosphere. I came away thinking that the Chartists of near-200 year past still speak to present concerns of the Left. The following report was written up by Mark Crail. of the Society for the Study of Labour History

Dorothy Thompson

One hundred years on from the birth of the great Chartist historian Dorothy Thompson, the event sought to honour her intellectual legacy with a wide-ranging selection of papers that highlighted the field’s continuing vigour.

Dorothy Thompson was ‘formidable’, and would not have minded in the least being described as such, Dr Joan Allen told delegates to Chartism Day 2024. Her piercing gaze and probing questions could strike fear into those who didn’t know her. But as the doyenne of Chartist studies, she had produced work with which historians today still needed to engage, and as the founder of what would become Chartism Day in the early 1990s had created a forum in which virtually every Chartist historian of the past thirty years had been able to test their ideas.

One hundred years on from Thompson’s birth in October 1923, this year’s Chartism Day, at the University of Reading, was held in her honour, and though she died in January 2011, many of those present had memories of her to share. Dr Allen recalled meeting Dorothy Thompson at the first Chartism Day at the University of Birmingham in 1993, where she was ‘in awe of being in such stellar company’. She added: ‘I hid at the back.’ But though Thompson did not suffer fools, when she subjected younger academics to close questioning on their work, this was a sign that they had captured her attention and interest. Dr Allen, who came to know ‘Dottie’ well, and has herself been the convenor of Chartism Day now for many years, recalled how Thompson had later ‘pressed into my hand a copy of [her book] The Chartist Experience’ – a gift she would always treasure.

Dr Allen noted that, importantly, Thompson was an activist as well as an historian – and believed firmly that Chartism could only be properly understood by those who had themselves been politically active. In addition to her activism, she also brought up three children while undertaking groundbreaking research on Chartism. Dr Allen also noted how Dorothy and her husband Edward (E.P.) Thompson discussed ideas together, ‘working either side of a large table – you can just imagine the conversation’. This approach had helped both historians to develop their thinking, she said: ‘The rush to publish that marks academic life now is not necessarily the best way to write history.’

From Kidderminster to Snig’s End

In the first paper of the conference, Dr Len Smith, who was tutored by Dorothy Thompson while researching his PhD on the Kidderminster carpet weavers, talked about the life of the Rev Humphrey Price (1774-1853). One of the few Church of England Ministers to participate actively in the Chartist movement, Price had come under the influence of the Clapham Sect as a young man, but in 1828 he supported a strike by more than 2,000 carpet weavers in his home town of Kidderminster, and earned himself a year in prison for publishing inflammatory libels. Price continued to support and advocate for the carpet weavers, but after his release, he came to the view that strikes alone could not solve the workers’ problems, and advised them to seek a political solution, arguing that they needed to be represented in Parliament. Price became an early supporter of the Chartist cause, claiming, ‘I approve of the Charter with my whole soul’, and in turn was hailed by the Northern Star as ‘the good Chartist parson’. Deeply committed to peaceful reform, he became disillusioned with the Chartist leadership, and while disavowing any wish to displace Feargus O’Connor at the movement’s head, advocated an alternative plan and programme. After several years of ill health, Price died of apoplexy aged 78, his death coinciding with a further strike by the Kidderminster carpet weavers

Stephen Hawksworth drew on generations of his family’s records to challenge both the idea that the Chartist land plan had failed, and subsequent histories of the settlements it established. When the Snig’s End Chartist land settlement opened in 1848, John Hawksworth and his family were among those allocated a smallholding. Stephen Hawksworth is the great, great grandson of the original colonist, and his family remained on their Gloucestershire smallholding for 125 years. Hawksworth suggested that the Primitive Methodists had played a significant role in establishing and running the colonies, and argued that Feargus O’Connor had ‘hoodwinked’ those allocated land at Snig’s End by significantly departing from the ideas set out in his book A Practical Work on the Management of Small Farms when building houses, providing one or two acres of land rather than the promised four, and failing to create the necessary community facilities such as a shop and chapel. Despite these challenges, he said, the colonies had proved successful in the decades that followed the collapse of Chartism, and had spawned further Chartist colonies elsewhere in the country and as far afield as New Zealand. Hawksworth was also critical of the only full-length history of the land plan, Alice Mary Hadfield’s The Chartist Land Company (David & Charles, 1970), revealing that those living at Snig’s End had distrusted Hadfield as ‘an establishment figure’.

Chartism and disability

Dr Matt Roberts.

Dr Matthew Roberts set out some key questions he hoped to be able to address in a research project, currently in its early stages, that looks at chronic illness and physical disabilities, and both at how Chartists viewed physical impairments and at the part those with disabilities played within the movement. He noted the exceptionally high level of physical impairment among workers in the mid-nineteenth century, often resulting from workplace injuries and sometimes from confrontations with the forces of law and order. In one study, 17 of a group of 93 Chartist prisoners were reported to have chronic illnesses or physical disabilities – including William Cuffay, who had deformities to his legs and spine; Peter Hoey, who had lost the use of a leg after serving a term of imprisonment; and Charles Neesom, whose poor eyesight forced him to give up his work as a tailor. There were, said Dr Roberts, many workers who had lost limbs at Chartist protests, but so common was this that their presence was seldom considered noteworthy. He also noted that Chartists suffered mental ill health: while in goal, James Bronterre O’Brien endured near starvation and felt humiliated at having to rely on friends for food, while the oppressive ‘silent system’ that prevented him from talking to fellow prisoners left him lonely and depressed. Though O’Brien suffered badly, a prison interview noted merely that he exhibited ‘increased irritability’ as a result of his confinement.

Professor Simon Morgan set out to rescue the Chartist poet James Vernon of South Molton in Devon from obscurity and from earlier historians’ confusion of the poet with a similarly named London Chartist leader. Professor Morgan noted how the Russian historian Y.V. Kovalev in his Anthology of Chartist Literature (1956) had written that Vernon suffered a stroke due to harsh working conditions, and wrote his poetry while confined to bed. As he noted: ‘It all sounds very noble, but almost none of it is true.’ Later historians conflated James Vernon with William J. Vernon, a London Chartist arrested for rioting in 1848 and assumed that the poet Vernon’s disabilities were due to police brutality and awful prison conditions. Again, this was not the case. In fact, James Vernon had suffered from paralysis since his teens, due to an hereditary condition that he shared with several of his siblings. Vernon wrote his poetry in an attempt to transcend the physical limitations placed upon him, and in the Northern Star he found a ready outlet for his work – at one point becoming the most prolific contributor to the paper’s poetry column. He would subsequently publish an anthology titled The Afflicted Muse. However, as he was to discover, a commitment to Chartism brought little financial reward, and placed the charity on which he relied at risk. In a ‘conscious retreat from radicalism’, Vernon repositioned himself as a ‘Devonshire poet’ and achieved some success in seeking wealthy patrons.

Rethinking Chartist women

Dr Judy Cox.

In ‘From “Hen Chartists” to “Lady Insurrectionists”, Dr Judy Cox challenged the idea that Chartism venerated middle-class concepts of domesticity and female respectability and that it increasingly marginalized women. Her own research, she argued, supported a radically different interpretation of the gender politics of Chartism, suggesting that Chartism offered women unprecedented opportunities to organize, theorize, lecture and contribute to the press. While Chartist women in their speeches and addresses did talk about their duty to perform domestic duties, they also presented themselves as independent and influential activists, and defied conventions governing female behaviour. Furthermore, said Dr Cox, rather than retreating from political activism over the course of the 1840s, as Dorothy Thompson had suggested, women became more asserted in pursuit of the Charter and their own rights. She said: ‘Too often historians see women’s involvement as episodic. I want to argue that women created their own traditions as Chartist women and also horizontally between women.’ She took as examples three moments in Chartist history: 1838 when the press looked on in horror at Elizabeth Hanson, Mary Grassby and the Chartist women of Elland near Leeds; 1842 when Susanna Inge, Mary Ann Walker and the ‘hen Chartists’ of the City of London Female Charter Association were the again at the centre of a press sensation; and 1848 when Sarah Theobold became a full-time lecturer for the National Charter Association. Dr Cox noted that by the time Theobold, the ‘lady insurrectionist’, took up her role, the involvement of a woman in politics was less shocking than it had been in earlier years.

Professor Robert Poole went back a generation to focus on the reformer Mary Fildes, who had been on the platform at Peterloo and was sabered and badly injured by a dragoon. Identifiable as ‘the woman in the white dress’, she has appeared in numerous depictions from contemporary prints to twenty-first century films, some making greater claims to show the real Mary Fildes than others. Now, a formal portrait photograph of Mary Fildes in later life has come to light. Professor Poole, the author of Peterloo: the English Uprising (2019) and an active member of the Peterloo Memorial Campaign, is investigating further in the hope that it might be possible to bring the portrait to a wider audience.

Three beers for the Charter

‘The Charter, No Surrender’: Chartist tankards.

In a session introduced as ‘more a show and tell than a conference paper’, Mark Crail talked about his discovery of a set of three pewter tankards that may once have belonged to the Chartist leader Ernest Jones. The tankards, bought at a general auction in 2023, are inscribed with the Chartist slogan ‘The Charter, No Surrender’, show radical images such as a liberty cap, tricolour flag, musket and cannon, and have the initials EJ at their centre. Crail linked the tankards to the radical tradition of giving commemorative gifts to speakers at great public events, and noted that according to the Northern Star, when Jones was found guilty of sedition, and sentenced to two years in Tothill Fields prison in 1848, ‘He left the dock with the cry of “THE CHARTER AND NO SURRENDER”.’

The life and work of Helen MacFarlane

David Black has spent many years researching the life and ideas of Helen MacFarlane, and earlier this year published a biography titled Red Antigone: The Life and World of Helen MacFarlane 1818-1860. At Chartism Day, he set out how MacFarlane’s commitment to Chartism followed on from her involvement with the anti-slavery movement in Glasgow and to her experiences in Vienna at the time of the 1848 revolutions. Writing under the pen name Howard Morton for George Julian Harney’s Red Republican, MacFarlane won the praises of Karl Marx and provided the first translation into English of the Communist Manifesto (which appeared over several issues from 9 November 1850). And it was to be key passages in Marx and Engels’ work that helped explain the downfall of her own family of gentrified Highland lairds brought down by bankruptcy. Black traced this family story from the days when MacFarlanes led Highland forces into battle for Mary Queen of Scots through to their emergence as the capitalist owners of a calico printworks at Barr Head near Glasgow, and the ruin of their business in the face of technological advances. Although Helen MacFarlane’s brother appears to have masterminded a relocation of the family to Natal in South Africa, she resisted emigration until 1853, when she set out to take her husband and baby daughter to join them. The ill-fated voyage would end in tragedy for Helen MacFarlane.

Although MacFarlane is primarily remembered for her work on the Communist Manifesto (then titled Manifesto of the German Communist Party), the translation has often been the subject of humour for its opening phrase ‘A frightful hobgoblin stalks throughout Europe…’ rather than the better-known Samuel Moore version, ‘A spectre is haunting Europe’. However, Sam Miller, whose graduate dissertation focused on MacFarlane’s translation, sought to explain both her use of the phrase and her approach to translation. He pointed out that Feargus O’Connor had in reference to the 1848 revolution in France predicted that enemies would exploit the ‘hobgoblin’ of their success against workers in both France and Britain, and so the phrase would have some resonance with a Chartist audience. Miller also pointed out that MacFarlane had translated the original German word ‘gespenst’ successively as hobgoblin, ghost and bugbear, all within the opening paragraph. This was, he pointed out, typical of her work, which acknowledged that words used in specific contexts might not have a direct similarly nuanced equivalent in English. Rather, she sought to ‘preserve the element of choice’, enabling the reader to find a word that had meaning to them. He pointed to MacFarlane’s use of the word ‘shopocracy’ alongside ‘petty Bourgeoisie’ as word which better encapsulated for some English readers the sense of the original.

The meaning of freedom

Huw Ryochi Davies said he was fascinated by the failure of middle-class reformers in the National Complete Suffrage Union (NCSU) to achieve political accord with the Chartists, even though on the face of it both appeared to advocate a similar programme of reform. This failure came to a head in December 1842 when a conference intended to bring the two sides together instead drove a final wedge between them. Davies ascribed the two parties’ differences to a fundamental ideological gap in their understandings of ‘freedom’; to ambiguities in their understandings of ‘equality’ that meant those on the NCSU side were prepared to accept reforms that did not deliver one man, one vote, and which avoided the question of women’s right to vote entirely; and to a divide between ‘evangelicals’, who believed that rights derived from scripture, and ‘rationalists’, who sought justification for their position in the claim of ‘natural rights’. These ideological differences, argued Davies, meant that Chartists suspected their would-be middle-class allies would be willing to accept arrangements short of the Charter, while the attachment of many in the NCSU to abstract rights made it difficult for them to work with Chartists and appeal to wider sections of the middle class.

North and South: Chartist lives

Dr John Sanders, the author of the recent book Workers of Their Own Emancipation, a study of working-class leadership and organisation in the West Riding of the 1830s, talked about the life of John Hanson, a member of the Huddersfield Short Time Committee who became a trusted lieutenant of the ‘Factory King’, Richard Oastler. Later an Owenite socialist and leading local Chartist, Hanson withdrew from politics after an episode of ill-health in the 1840s, but devoted his time to completing an ambitious series of musical oratorios on the four seasons that were eventually performed by the Huddersfield Choral Society in the 1850s. Hanson would later move to live with family members in Liverpool where he worked in his daughter’s shop and gave music lessons, but in the 1871 census can be found in the West Derby Union Workhouse at Walton. He spent his final years at Shepley, near Huddersfield where he died in 1877.

Dominic Barron-Carter introduced the life of William Woodward (1811-1901). A carpenter turned political activist, Woodward worked for the radical publisher Henry Hetherington as an organizer of the National Union of the Working Class and vendor of the Poor Man’s Guardian, serving three months in Cold Bath Fields prison for selling unstamped newspapers. On his release, he moved to Brighton, which had become a parliamentary constituency for the first time in 1832 and numbered many working men among its electors. Woodward played a leading part in the town’s Chartist movement, despite its isolation from the radical centres of London and the North of England, and would continue to campaign on radical causes for the remainder of his long life. In the 1850s he helped form the Brighton Democratic Society, continued to argue for reform of the franchise, and criticized Britain’s failure to support the Union during the American Civil War. However, he fell out with former allies who sought incorporation for Brighton, a move which would disenfranchise some 3,000 women who had retained the right to vote under the old system (though in practice just 300 did so). Just six months before his death he was elected as Brighton’s delegate to the inaugural conference of the National Democratic League, which sought to unite liberals and socialists on a common democratic programme.

Keynote: Disraeli among the Chartists

Professor Mike Sanders.

Nearly two centuries on, Benjamin Disraeli and Young England may make strange bedfellows for Feargus O’Connor and the Northern Star. However, in his keynote address to Chartism Day, Professor Mike Sanders set out the evolving relationship between the working-class Chartists and paternalist and largely aristocratic Tories around the future Conservative prime minister. First elected an MP in 1837, Disraeli often received favourable coverage in the Northern Star until well into the early 1840s. Disraeli appears to have known the pro Chartist MP Thomas Slingsby Duncombe since the early 1830s, and he would later join Duncombe in supporting the Ten Hours Movement and the repeal of the New Poor Law; in 1839 he was one of only seven MPs alongside Duncombe to call for a free pardon for the Newport Chartists Frost, Williams and Jones. In return, the Northern Star took a keen interest in Disraeli’s novel Coningsby, publishing no fewer than twelve articles reviewing it between November 1844 and March 1845. It may well have been, Professor Sanders suggested, that O’Connor hoped to co-opt Disraeli and Young England into Chartism as he had done with the Tory radical Richard Oastler. He was, however, to be disappointed. Despite Disraeli’s obvious interest in Chartism, seen most clearly in his 1845 novel Sybil, he was too accomplished a politician to succumb to O’Connor’s wooing. In March 1847, Disraeli supported Austria’s suppression of the Cracow Uprising, to the Northern Star’s dismay. From there on the paper was unrelentingly hostile towards Disraeli’s ‘opportunism’ and began instead to praise the Tory prime minister Robert Peel.

We would like to thank Professor David Stack, who hosted Chartism Day 2024 at the University of Reading and played a significant part in organizing the event.