Historians from around the UK and some distance beyond were in Newport, South Wales, at
the weekend for the annual Chartism Day conference.
The
conference was organised by the Society
of Labour History, the Chartist Study Group and – as hosts this year –
the South
Wales Centre for History and Interdisciplinary Research, and held in the
main boardroom of the University of Wales' Caerleon Campus (pictured
here).
The day is a great opportunity for Chartist
historians to network, and to hear presentations of work in progress. This
year’s conference ranged widely from the development of Chartist rhetoric, to
the Chartist Gothic literary tradition and Chartist songs.
What follows is more an attempt to give a
flavour of the day and of the presentations rather than a full report of the
detailed evidence and rather more subtle arguments put forward by the four main
speakers.
Janette Martin, currently working on her PhD
thesis at Leeds University, explained how the styles of
speech used by Chartist orators changed over the period from 1838-48, and
explored some of the gaps between what was said and how it was reported at the
time.
She suggested that while some Chartist
orators – among them George Julian Harney – drew on an older political
tradition of public speaking that prized classical structure and allusion,
others began to develop a newer, less formal approach which gradually displaced
it.
This new style of speaking drew on the
tradition of nonconformist sermons, and would be influenced by visiting
American speakers and music hall.
The emergence, thanks to the railways, of
itinerant lecturers and “celebrity” preachers who travelled all over the
country, honing their performance on the way, also encouraged the development
of a more homogenised style which could be widely understood.
Given the recent launch of various versions
of the Northern Star online, Janette Martin’s comments on the gap between what
was said and what was reported, either in the press or even in political tracts
published by the speakers themselves, was timely.
She pointed to the difficulties facing
reporters and newspapers – including, for example, the problems in hearing what
speakers said at often noisy outdoor meetings, the time restrictions facing
reporters, and the difficulty of conveying tone of voice and gesture.
Distortions could be used for political ends,
as when hostile newspapers sought to make a Chartist speaker sound more
confrontational through the use of punctuation and other forms of emphasis, and
might even be introduced deliberately by the speakers themselves.
Richard Oastler, confronted on one occasion
with the accusation that the speech he had delivered was not the same as that
which he had published, replied that,
“…the hour was late, ten o’clock at night;
the people had been out five hours, and I feared to tire and starve them; so I
then gave the outline; now, I print, what, if circumstances had permitted, I
should have spoken…”
Ernest Jones, meanwhile, would tell one of
his reporters setting out to cover a meeting to welcome the return of the
Chartist leader John Frost from exile,
“Do not trouble to report what they said;
send me two or three columns of what they ought to have said.”
Dr Fabrice Bensimon, of Université Paris 10 –
Nanterre, spoke on the presence of British workers and Chartists in France in
the 1840s.
In the period after the Napoleonic wars, Britain enjoyed a technological advantage over France which
meant that British workers were much in demand, especially in the textile and
steel industries and as railway builders.
In 1846, an estimated 66,000 British workers
were present in France.
As economic migrants, some of these workers were attracted to Chartism, and
branches of the land company existed in Rouen, Boulogne and elsewhere.
Thomas Sidaway, an innkeeper who had been
active in radical politics around Gloucester
since Peterloo, and his son John Sidaway, who became a Chartist lecturer,
appear to have been especially active in the land company.
The Nailers’ Arms, a public house run by the
Sidaways, was a centre of Chartist activity in Rouen, and in seeking customers Thomas
Sidaway advertised his Oddfellow connections in the Norman Times, a short-lived
paper produced for British workers in the city.
Fabrice
Bensimon also showed a fascinating illustration from L’Illustration (a
French paper somewhat similar to the Illustrated London News) showing a British
factory worker reading what appears to be the Northern Star to fellow workers
in the workshop.
The author commented:
“Not a single syllable is uttered during
twelve working hours of the day; only in the centre of the room, a reader,
concealed behind the broadsheet format of The Times, with a powerful voice
which seems to borrow its notes from the voice of a locomotive, declaims to his
fellow workers, all of them fervid Chartists, the content of the gigantic
newspaper from the date to the name of the publisher.”
Later in the day, Dr Rohan McWilliam (pictured below at the lectern) of Anglia Ruskin
University spoke on the
“Chartist Gothic”, drawing links between radicalism and popular literature
during the 1840s.
Drawing especially on the work of GWM
Reynolds, the Chartist journalist and author of the long-running serialised
novel The Mysteries of the Court of London, he explained how writers often
attacked as pornographers used their exposés of Victorian low life as a
political tool.
At least in the earlier period of the
serialisation, Reynolds would often digress from the story line to launch into
a political point or would use footpoints to provide facts and statistics that
drove the point home.
This link between radicalism and popular
culture loosened after 1850, however, and was even displaced by a more
conservative sensibility.
The most travelled of the speakers were Dr
Kate Bowan and Dr Paul Pickering of the Australian
National University
in Canberra. Dr
Pickering is an eminent historian of Chartism. His latest book, a biography of
Feargus O’Connor, was launched at the conference.
Kate Bowan and Paul Pickering are currently
exploring Chartist songs and the popular aural tradition.
As Paul Pickering pointed out, historians
often skate over the fact that many works treated as Chartist poetry and verse
are in fact songs with known and recognisable tunes, while the evidence that
song formed a central part of Chartist culture is strong.
Henry Vincent published a regular Song for
the People in his Western Vindicator, Thomas Cooper formed a choral society
among his Leicester Chartists, Feargus O’Connor was proud of his singing voice
and unashamed to use it in public, for example.
As their research develops, Paul Pickering
and Kate Bowan are investigating what Chartist song would have sounded like, as
well as its part in radical culture – exploring the instruments used, the tunes
adopted and the resonances these tunes would have struck with Chartists.
As I said earlier, this is not an attempt to
give a full account of the speakers’ contributions – just a brief taste of what
they had to say. Nonetheless, I hope I have not too seriously misrepresented
what they had to say.
Richard Brown is the author of 
, published in January 2010 and available from the 
and 
. 
and 
Many of the most significant 
is aimed at anyone wanting to look into the trade union and labour
aspects of their family history, and also has a big chunk on Chartism. 
More
than 1,000 poems appeared in the pages of the Northern Star, the
principal Chartist newspaper, from its launch in 1838 to closure in
1852. This body of work, possibly constituting the most widely read
collection of poetry in the Victorian era, is now examined in a new
book, titled The Poetry of Chartism. 
. 
,
the labour historian W Hamish Fraser describes the Chartist Circular as
“not a newspaper, but an educational journal intended to bring a
greater understanding of the aims of Chartism”. 
It
has been claimed that between 1854 and 1916, “not a single book of
permanent value on the history of Chartism had been published in
England” 
Feargus O’Connor was never happier in life than when at the centre of a controversy. 
The Chartist land settlement at Heronsgate has come a long
way since the 1840s. Then it was a refuge for industrial workers seeking a
cottage of their own and two or three acres to farm. Now it is one of the most sought-after
of areas for London commuters.
William Lovett occupies a pivotal place in the history of Chartism.
He drafted the People’s Charter, was secretary to the London Working Men’s
Association, and subsequently served as secretary to the first Chartist
Convention of 1839.
"We had to shut the main gates on Great Russell Street
to prevent more people from coming in. It was the first time we did that since
the Chartist riots of 1848 - although on that occasion the staff were actually
on the roof, armed with stones."
Throughout
1841 and 1842, anyone reading the Northern Star would have come across
the name of its proprietor, Feargus O’Connor, an average of 40 times in
each weekly issue.
James Watson (pictured left) was one of the six working men whose names
appear (alongside those of six radical MPs) on the People’s Charter, and played
a prominent role in establishing free speech in this country.