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Chartism
Malcolm Chase, University of Leeds
Focus The term Chartism emerged early in 1839 as a descriptor for the largest parliamentary pressure movement in British history. The People’s Charter (published May 1838) had quickly become the focal point for a mass agitation that sought to complete the work that Magna Carta (1215) had begun, namely the transfer of polit- ical power down the social scale. There was nothing new in the Charter’s famous six points (a vote for all men aged over 21, no property qualification to become an MP, salaries for all MPs, voting in secret, equal-sized constituencies and annual general elections). These demands were an established part of radical cam- paigning. What was new about Chartism? It dwarfed all earlier campaigns in size and vitality. The eye-catching title was a
Title page for an edition of the People’s Charter published in 1838 or early 1839
- before the presentation of the first petition.
itself was the work of the London Working Men’s Association and more specifically its secretary William Lovett, a cabinet maker and socialist. The Association gave serious thought to demand- ing the vote for women but concluded that this would alienate support and delay universal male suffrage. That, however, did not prevent large numbers of women from lending their support to Chartism, and specifically female associations were a conspicuous feature of the movement in its early years. Though Chartism did not lack middle-class or rural support, it was primarily a movement of industrial workers. Their perceptions of social and economic injustice increasingly came to the fore in the movement. The Charter was essentially a means to a far wider end: a parliament that would legislate in the interests of the majority of the population. These interests were never conceptualised as con- fined to regulating working conditions and humanising poor relief. So by 1842 the formal demands of the movement had broadened to include home rule for Ireland, complete religious freedom and an end to all legislative links between the State and the Church of England, abolition of the national debt, the standing army and the civil list, and an end to class bias in the administration of justice. The 1842 demands were embodied in a petition (Chartism’s second) to Parliament signed by more than 3.3 million people (approximately one in three of the adult population). To be a Chartist need mean no more than being in favour of the Peo- ple’s Charter and most signatories probably saw themselves as simply demanding the Charter. Detailed discussion of the pol- icies expected of a reformed parliament was the preoccupation of smaller activist core, the size of which is impossible to define. Northern Star sold around 50,000 copies weekly at it peak: the widely documented practice of reading the paper aloud in work- places, and at formal and informal meetings, suggests a core support several times greater than the paper’s circulation. (The paper’s own estimate in April 1839 was 400,000.) An organising body to direct the movement’s efforts, the National Charter Association (NCA), was not established until the autumn of 1840. Before then systematic coordination was attempted only
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between February and September 1839, the duration of a national convention, mainly convened to manage Chartism’s first national petition, which was presented that June with 1.3 million signa- tures. The NCA itself required no more commitment than assent to the six points of the Charter and the payment of a small annual subscription. This subscription base peaked in 1842 at 50,000 but there were numerous localities which only loosely affiliated to the NCA, while organisation in Scotland was largely independent of it. This looseness was actually a source of great strength: a wide range of opinions existed and even flourished under the Chartist umbrella, notably education reform, temperance, religious radi- calism, rural resettlement and land redistribution, the assertion of women’s right to the vote, and international solidarity. Chartism also commanded the support of virtually all who belonged to the contemporary socialist movement (commonly called Owenites after its leader Robert Owen). But Chartists were wary of becom- ing too closely identified with Owenism, primarily because of the latter’s atheistic character. The idea that Jesus Christ was in effect the first Chartist, or that a small-producer economy would best achieve economic justice, did not sit comfortably alongside Owenism. Furthermore, Owen’s progressive stance on gender roles and, even, sexual relations was seen as inimical to family values and the male breadwinner ideal that were close to the heart of Chartism. Yet Chartism was anything but socially and politically con- servative. The audacity of its demands are difficult to comprehend in 21st-century Britain. We take parliamentary democracy for granted, while until very recent flurries around the Scottish referendum and Labour Party leadership, participation in the political process has been steadily diminishing (as evidenced in electoral turnouts, party activism and membership). However, the challenge Chartism posed to Britain’s political, social, and economic elites was fundamental. The French Revolution of 1789 had left the British political establishment profoundly cautious about all concessions to popular opinion. The 1832 Reform Act had been conceded only after two years of strenuous extra-par- liamentary agitation, including major breakdowns in civil order
The Great Chartist Meeting on Kennington Common, organised by O’Connor 1848.
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Methods It must be stressed, though, that the Chartism of 1851 was not the Chartism of 1839 or 1842. Support for the movement had ebbed during the economic recovery of the mid-1840s, and although it surged forward again during a further economic crisis in 1847- 48, the presentation of a third mass petition in April 1848 was premature. The NCA’s authority over the national movement had been only partly restored when the petition was presented and the national network of Chartist localities was not fully rebuilt. Amidst leadership claims that 5 or even 6 million had signed, the petition was exposed as having only 2 million signatories. This was hardly desultory, given that the British population itself numbered only around 17 million, but allegations of bluster and wild exaggeration were impossible to shake off. Critically Parliament, which had at least received the 1842 petition with courtesy, was in no mood to make any sympathetic gestures to radical reformers when continental Europe was in the throes of revolution. In November 1839 Chartism had impres- sively withstood the impact on its reputation of an attempted rising in South Wales – indeed in 1840 more people petitioned for the leaders of that insurrection to be pardoned than had signed the 1839 petition for the Charter. In 1848 the humiliation of April was followed by the exposure in August of sufficient evi- dence of a revolutionary conspiracy to tarnish Chartism almost fatally. Petitioning campaigns in 1849 and 1852 yielded only 54,000 and 12,000 signatures respectively. The NCA struggled on until 1858, a minority pressure group for social democratic reform, and it never revived the tactic of petitioning Parliament. However, this does not detract from Chartism’s achievement during its first decade in mobilising an unprecedented level of criticism against the undemocratic nature of the British state. This was in effect Britain’s civil rights movement and it had moved society closer to recognising that humanity and dignity are pro- moted and protected only when government answers to all people and not merely to the propertied. Petitioning was at the heart of movement’s approach to campaigning. It is important to emphasise
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strategy, but rejection was widely predicted since one of the central premises of Chartism was that Parliament acted exclu- sively in the selfish interests of its members and those able to vote for them. So why do it? First, constitutional and legal propri- ety: extra-parliamentary agitations were hedged around by legal restrictions but meeting to organise a petition evaded most of the prohibitions. These petitions tested Westminster opinion: each was presented to a new parliament (following a general election). What should happen after rejection was a vexed question: but that petitioning was the prerequisite was never contested. Moral suasion, boycotts of taxed goods, general strike, open revolt and sheer pressure of numbers all featured in the various scenarios for which Chartists argued after petitioning failed. But every strat- egy depended on the mobilisation of mass support. And here the petitions were indispensable. There were both radical and moderate campaigning factions within Chartism, especially after the events of 1839. Co-opera- tion between those who adhered to at least the principle of direct action (the majority of Chartists) and those who favoured moral persuasion dwindled, although mass petitioning and the Peo- ple’s Charter itself remained powerful unifying forces. This was most vividly demonstrated in 1842 when O’Connor and Lovett (leading figures in these so-called ‘physical force’ and ‘moral force’ strands) jointly opposed co-operating with an organisation of middle-class reformers, because the latter insisted on the termi- nology ‘Chartism ’ and ‘People’s Charter’ being dropped. Complementing the national petitions (and the micro-po- litical processes that made them possible) was a wide range of lower-level political interventions, designed to maintain support and press Chartism’s claims on local and regional elites. Mass occupations of Anglican churches were held in 1839. Meetings of middle-class reformers, notably the Anti-Corn Law League (which promoted free trade as the panacea for economic injustice) were subjected to boisterous disturbance. No less boisterously, Chartists gathered en masse at parliamentary election hustings (the open air meetings, required by law, where candidates were
formally nominated ahead of polling). Here they often proposed their own candidates who would then be elected by a show of hands; and on more than 60 occasions between 1839 and 1859, Chartist candidates actually stood at the poll (Feargus O’Connor sat as Chartist MP for Nottingham, 1847-52). The most enduring tactic, however, was to participate as Chartist electors, candidates and elected representatives in local politics, where the right to vote was more widely, if still unequally, distributed. The extent of this activity has yet to be fully under- stood, but it was particularly pervasive in the English midlands and north and it ranged from local highways boards and parochial vestries to local councils and borough corporations. This aspect of Chartism was the cradle from which popular participation in local politics (along with the close canvassing and doorstep poli- tics necessary to prevail) became the norm. Local political activism also largely defined the occupational groups most committed to Chartism: the declining crafts where jobs were most vulnerable to mechanisation (such as handloom weaving and hosiery knitting), factory workers, and skilled crafts- men who still had considerable autonomy at the workplace, such as shoemakers and printers. Support from urban workers thought of as unskilled and from agricultural workers was far weaker. Jour- nalists and lawyers were disproportionately represented among Chartism’s national figures, the most widely and passionately acclaimed of whom was Feargus O’Connor, the presiding genius over Northern Star as well as one of the most accomplished public orators of the early Victorian age.
Outcome The broad social democratic programme adopted (as we saw) by the National Charter Association in 1851 did not stem the decline of Chartism. The organisation held its last national con- vention in 1858. It was a muted affair compared to that of 1839, albeit one that at last recognised the case for co-operation with middle-class radicals. The Chartists failed to achieve any of the six points of the People’s Charter. Universal male suffrage became
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