Chartism

• 1. Introduction

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  Chartism was a working-class movement for political reform in the United Kingdom that lasted from 1838 to 1857, and at its peak put the signatures of millions of ordinary people before a Parliament that repeatedly refused to listen. Picture the scene in June 1839: a petition signed by 1.3 million working people was carried to the House of Commons, and MPs voted by a large majority not even to hear the petitioners. That rejection was not the end of Chartism. It was, in a sense, the beginning of what would become one of the most consequential grassroots campaigns in British history.

  The movement drew its name from the People's Charter of 1838, a document calling for six specific reforms to make Parliament more democratic. Its strength was concentrated in places where workers had little economic cushion: Northern England, the East Midlands, the Staffordshire Potteries, the Black Country, and the South Wales Valleys, where single industries ruled and wages could collapse without warning. What drove people to sign, march, and sometimes drill in secret was a feeling that the working class had been betrayed, first by the Reform Act 1832, which extended voting rights only to property owners, and then by the hated Poor Law Amendment of 1834, which abolished outdoor relief and forced the poor into workhouses where families were separated.

  Over nearly two decades, Chartism moved through cycles of mass petitioning, violent suppression, bold electoral challenges, and quiet decline. It never won a single parliamentary vote in its own name. Yet almost every demand it made eventually became law. This documentary follows the movement from its explosive launch on Kersal Moor in 1838 to the handful of delegates who gathered for its final National Convention in 1858, and asks what a movement that appeared to fail actually achieved.

• 2. The Six Demands

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  In 1837, six Members of Parliament and six working men from the London Working Men's Association formed a committee to draft a political programme. What they produced in 1838, the People's Charter, was a list of six demands that were not new in themselves but had never before been combined into a single national manifesto with mass support behind it.

  The first demand was a vote for every man aged twenty-one years and above, of sound mind, and not undergoing punishment for a crime. Without this, nothing else mattered: working people had no voice at all. The second was the secret ballot, so that an elector could not be punished by an employer or landlord for how he voted. The third removed property qualifications for Members of Parliament, opening the House of Commons to men who owned no land and no significant wealth. The fourth introduced payment for MPs, which made it practically possible for a working man or tradesman of modest means to serve in Parliament without financial ruin.

  The fifth demand was equal constituencies, so that a small rural pocket borough could not carry the same weight as a large industrial town full of working people. The sixth, and the only one that was never adopted, was annual parliamentary elections, on the theory that no wealthy interest could continuously buy a constituency year after year under universal manhood suffrage.

  Joseph Rayner Stephens, speaking at the huge mass meeting on Kersal Moor near Salford, Lancashire, on the 24th of September 1838, captured the economic urgency behind the political programme when he declared that Chartism was a "knife and fork, a bread and cheese question". The Charter gave scattered radical groups a common language. As activist John Bates recalled, local associations had wanted different things before the Charter arrived; afterwards, it transformed them into a unified national campaign.

• 3. Newspapers and the Radical Press

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  The Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser was published between 1837 and 1852, and in 1839 it was the best-selling provincial newspaper in Britain, with a circulation of 50,000. That figure understates its reach: like other Chartist papers, it was read aloud in coffeehouses, workplaces, and the open air, multiplying its audience far beyond the number of copies sold.

  The Star was the successor to the Poor Man's Guardian, edited by Henry Hetherington in the 1830s, which had wrestled openly with questions of class solidarity, manhood suffrage, property, and temperance, and which had condemned the Reform Act 1832 while exploring the tension between moral and physical force in the movement. When the Star took over as the voice of radicalism, it published justifications for the Charter's demands, accounts of local meetings, commentary on education and temperance, poetry, and advertisements for upcoming meetings organised by grassroots branches in public houses and their halls.

  Research on the distribution of Chartist meetings advertised in the Northern Star found that the movement in London was not spread uniformly across the city. It clustered in the West End, where a group of Chartist tailors had their shops, and in Shoreditch in the east, and it relied heavily on pubs that also supported local friendly societies. Other Chartist periodicals included the Northern Liberator, the English Chartist Circular, and the Midland Counties' Illuminator, all published in the early 1840s.

  The press also carried international news. Readers found in these pages denunciations of imperialism; the First Opium War of 1839-42 was condemned, as were the arguments of free traders about the civilising and pacifying influences of commerce. George Julian Harney, who edited the Northern Star for five years between 1845 and 1850, had come to Chartism through the fight against stamp duties on newspapers, which had been one of the defining radical causes of the previous generation.

• 4. The Newport Rising

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  On the night of the 3rd-the 4th of November 1839, John Frost led several thousand marchers through South Wales to the Westgate Hotel in Newport, Monmouthshire, expecting to seize the town and trigger a national uprising. The hotel was occupied by armed soldiers. What followed was a brief, violent, and bloody confrontation: shots were fired by both sides, more than twenty Chartists were killed, and at least another fifty were wounded. Frost and the other leaders were forced to retreat.

  The preparations for that night had not been improvised. By early autumn of 1839, men were being drilled and armed in South Wales and in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Secret cells were set up, covert meetings were held in the Chartist Caves at Llangynidr, and weapons were manufactured. William Price of Llantrisant, described as more of a maverick than a mainstream Chartist, later said that Frost had put "a sword in my hand and a rope around my neck". The Yorkshire Chartist Ben Wilson testified that Newport was meant to be the signal for a national uprising across the country.

  After the defeat, Feargus O'Connor concentrated the movement's energy on petitioning for the pardon of Frost and his fellow Newport leaders, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones. They were transported. Samuel Holberry led an abortive rising in Sheffield on the 12th of January, and on the 26th of January Robert Peddie attempted similar action in Bradford. In both cities, spies had kept magistrates informed, and the attempts were easily crushed. Holberry and Peddie received long prison sentences with hard labour. Holberry died in prison and became a Chartist martyr; a hymn, "Great God! Is this the Patriot's Doom?", was composed for his funeral.

• 5. The Strike Wave of 1842

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  Dorothy Thompson, the preeminent historian of Chartism, wrote that 1842 was "the year in which more energy was hurled against the authorities than in any other of the 19th century". In early May of that year, a second petition bearing over three million signatures was submitted to Parliament, which rejected it again. The Northern Star's editorial response was scorching: it declared that three and a half million people had "quietly, orderly, soberly, peaceably but firmly" asked for justice, and that Parliament had turned a deaf ear.

  A depression the same year brought wage cuts, and workers responded with strikes across 14 English and 8 Scottish counties, principally in the Midlands, Lancashire, Cheshire, Yorkshire, and the Strathclyde region of Scotland. Strikers typically resolved to stay out until the People's Charter became the law of the land. The protests were collectively known at the time as the Plug Plot, because protesters removed the plugs from steam boilers to shut down industrial machinery. Later historians used the term General Strike; some modern historians prefer "strike wave".

  The unrest began in the Potteries of Staffordshire in early August, spreading north, and at Manchester a meeting of the Chartist national executive endorsed the strikes on the 16th. There were serious outbreaks of violence in the Potteries and the West Riding, including property destruction and the ambushing of police convoys. The drift back to work began on the 19th of August; the Manchester power loom weavers were the last to return, on the 26th of September.

  The state's response was severe. Hundreds were imprisoned during the late summer. In the Pottery Riots alone, 116 men and women went to prison. Josiah Heapy, nineteen years old, was shot dead. The government's most ambitious prosecution, personally led by the Attorney General, targeted O'Connor and 57 others including nearly all of Chartism's national executive; none was convicted of the serious charges. Thomas Cooper, convicted separately for speaking at strike meetings in the Potteries, wrote a long poem in prison titled "The Purgatory of Suicides".

• 6. Leadership and Character

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  Feargus O'Connor, proprietor of the Northern Star, stood over six feet tall and possessed, according to Dorothy Thompson, "a voice which could easily carry an open-air meeting of tens of thousands". Thompson called him the "most well-loved man" of the movement and noted that, whatever his faults, no other leader had his ability to win the confidence and support of the great crowds that filled Chartist meetings at the movement's height.

  O'Connor was also a divisive figure. Early historians accused him of egotism and of being quarrelsome; Robert George Gammage, a veteran Chartist who later became a historian of the movement, blamed Chartism's decline largely on O'Connor's vanity. More recent historians, Thompson prominent among them, have tended to see the movement's trajectory as too complex to pin on any single personality. In 1847 O'Connor was elected MP for Nottingham, the only Chartist ever to win a parliamentary seat; it was a remarkable, if solitary, victory.

  George Julian Harney, described by Tristram Hunt as Chartism's "enfant terrible", was firmly on the radical wing of the movement, advocating physical force and provoking his conservative comrades by wearing the red cap of liberty at public meetings. He was in and out of jail, endlessly feuding with fellow Chartists, and was ultimately expelled from the party. He remained convinced that insurrection was the surest route to the Charter's demands.

  Ernest Jones, born in 1819 and died in 1869, was born into the landed gentry, became a barrister, and left a large documentary record. Thompson called him "the best-remembered of the Chartist leaders, among the pioneers of the modern Labour movement, and a friend of both Marx and Engels". Jones and Harney both knew Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels personally, and during the movement's final years helped steer it toward a clearer socialist direction.

• 7. Faith, Hymns, and Dissent

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  A widely held religious doctrine in early Christianity in England held that it was wrong for a Christian to meddle in political matters. This created a sharp tension with many Chartists, for whom Christianity was above all practical, something that had to be carried into every walk of life, including politics. William Hill, a Swedenborgian minister who wrote in the Northern Star, argued that anyone who claimed rights for himself that he refused to extend to others had failed to fulfil the precept of Christ.

  To bridge this tension, more than 20 Chartist churches had formed in Scotland by 1841, combining radical politics and Christian worship as inseparable. Between late 1844 and November 1845, subscriptions were raised for the publication of a hymnal, printed as a 64-page pamphlet and distributed for a nominal fee. No known copy of that hymnal is thought to survive. In 2011, however, a previously unknown and uncatalogued smaller pamphlet of 16 hymns was discovered in Todmorden Library in the North of England, and it is now believed to be the only Chartist Hymnal in existence.

  Heavily influenced by dissenting Christians, the hymns concern social justice, the striking down of evildoers, and the blessing of Chartist enterprises, rather than the conventional themes of crucifixion, heaven, and family. Some protest the exploitation of child labour and slavery. One proclaims: "Men of wealth and men of power / Like locusts all thy gifts devour". Two hymns celebrate Chartist martyrs directly: one was composed for the funeral of Samuel Holberry, the Sheffield leader who died in prison in 1843, and another honours John Frost, Zephaniah Williams, and William Jones, transported to Tasmania after the Newport rising.

  Facing severe persecution in 1839, Chartists also took to attending services at churches they held in contempt, arriving in numbers to display their strength and demanding that ministers preach from scriptural texts the Chartists chose, such as passages from James and Matthew. The ministers often preached meekness and obedience in response.

• 8. Legacy and Eventual Reforms

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  Malcolm Chase argues that Chartism was not "a movement that failed but a movement characterized by multiplicity of small victories". Five of the Charter's six demands were eventually enacted, though none came directly through the movement itself. Secret voting was introduced in 1872. Payment for MPs arrived in 1911. The Reform Act 1867 admitted part of the urban working class to the franchise, and full manhood suffrage was achieved in 1918. Annual elections remain the one demand never adopted.

  Chartism's influence spread beyond Britain. Leaders transported to Australia carried their beliefs with them. In 1854, Chartist demands were put forward by miners at the Eureka Stockade on the gold fields at Ballarat in Victoria, Australia. Within two years of the military suppression of that revolt, the first elections of the Victorian parliament were held with near-universal male suffrage and by secret ballot. The successful use of secret voting in Australia then spread to the United Kingdom, Canada, and eventually the United States.

  At home, participation in the movement changed working people in ways that outlasted any particular petition or strike. Former Chartists went on to become journalists, poets, ministers, and councillors. Chartism has also been seen as a forerunner to the UK Labour Party, and in Manchester the movement had undermined the political power of the old Tory-Anglican elite that had controlled civic affairs.

  In Kennington, the Brandon Estate features a large mural by Tony Hollaway, commissioned by London County Council's Edward Hollamby in the early 1960s, commemorating the Chartists' meeting on the 10th of April 1848 on Kennington Common, where O'Connor cancelled the planned procession to Parliament after 100,000 special constables were recruited to face the demonstrators. That mural stands as a reminder that the movement which MPs refused to hear was not forgotten.