Chartist lives and Chartist histories

Richard Brown, whose book Chartism (Cambridge University Press, 1998) has been a boon to a generation of history students, has now turned his hand to the web, making his expertise available online to a potentially much wider audience.

Using a blog format, his History Zone website is now home to a growing volume of material on the Chartist movement.

The material there breaks down into two main groups:

·     a selection of Chartist Lives, featuring solidly referenced biographies of figures associated with the movement, among them the Newport Chartist Zephaniah Williams, William Lovett (author of the Charter and secretary to the first convention), and the Christian Chartist Arthur Wade; and

·    a series of articles called “Chartism: a question of interpretation” which examine the ways in which Chartism has been interpreted and understood in the 150 years since it ceased to be a force in the land. 

 This latter selection of articles – essentially a history of the history of Chartism – expands and updates the opening section of Richard Brown’s 1998 book