The Chartists on the hill: William Lovett, George Jacob Holyoake and Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery

Highgate Cemetery must be the most famous burial ground in England. This week I paid a visit in search of William Lovett, secretary to the London Working Men’s Association, author of the People’s Charter and more besides. I visited, by chance, just a day before the anniversary of Lovett’s death on 8 August 1877, climbing Highgate Hill to get there before passing through the huge stone gatehouse to buy the £10 ticket that gave me access to the cemetery proper. 

William Lovett memorial.

Although there are some 170,000 people buried there in more than 50,000 graves, Lovett is not too hard to find. He is buried in the western half of the cemetery, and passing through the iron gate you simply need to follow the Colonnade Path to the top of the hill, making a left-turn on to The Meadow. Lovett is no more than 10 metres along inside the loop of the path and just a little way back behind a row of smaller headstones.

If you plan to visit, make sure you know what Lovett’s memorial looks like (see picture here). The inscription is now very badly worn, and I was unable to make out more than his name and beneath it part of the word ‘Chartist’. It was obviously once an inscription of some length, and I am not aware of anywhere that the text is recorded, which is a great shame.

Lovett is not the only Chartist in Highgate Cemetery, but there are rather fewer here than in Kensal Green, another of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ London cemeteries that date back to the Victorian era, where Feargus O’Connor, Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, Henry Hetherington and others are all interred; or indeed Abney Park, where Bronterre O’Brien, Henry Vincent and John Cleave can all be found. To find others at Highgate you will need to go back to the main entrance, and cross the road that divides the East and West sides.

Make sure you pick up one of the free maps from the ticket office - it really is a big help.

Once inside the eastern burial ground, follow the main path a short way until it splits, then take the left fork. You will need to take a left turn pretty much the moment the great hulking memorial to Karl Marx comes into view ahead of you, followed by an immediate right (this will make much more sense with the map in front of you, but for obvious copyright reasons I can’t reproduce it here).

George Jacob Holyoake.

No more than 10 metres or so along that path you will come across a memorial to the author George Eliot on your right. Immediately behind her is the grave of George Jacob Holyoake, helpfully surmounted by a bust.

Holyoake was primarily in his early years an Owenite socialist. In 1842 he became one of the last people in this country to be imprisoned for blasphemy. After his release from gaol he launched the Reasoner newspaper in which to promote his views, coining the word ‘secularism’ in the process.

But Holyoake was also an important figure in the co-operative movement in his later life, and as is apparent from the wordy inscriptions on his memorial, they were keen to claim him as their own in death.

One more. Retrace your footsteps to the main party and pay a visit to the tomb of Karl Marx. He and his family are all buried beneath the huge bust of Marx erected in the 1950s and still visited by a regular stream of people. But this is not where he started out, and to be honest the monument all feels a bit, well, monumental. 

Last-but-one resting place of
Karl and Jenny Marx.

Continue round the corner and take one of the smaller paths on the right hand side, however, and you will come to the place where Marx and his wife Jenny von Westphalen were originally interred. The flat gravestone is still there, and the names just about visible. This last-but-one resting place feels a bit more human.

The grave is obviously empty, the Communist Party of Great Britain gathered up the bodies of family members and, slightly oddly, their housekeeper Helene Demuth (also Karl’s mistress), for reburial higher up the hill, leaving this an empty space. Despite this, when I visited there was a small scattering of money and small pebbles on the gravestone.

Was Marx a Chartist? Well, not really as he had other priorities, but he certainly engaged positively with Chartism when he moved to London in 1849, enjoyed an on-off friendship with George Julian Harney, and approved publication of the first English-language translation of the Communist Manifesto in Harney’s Red Republican. If not a Chartist, he (and Engels) certainly regarded the Chartists as the most advanced section of the British working class.

Read about The simple, secular funeral of William Lovett.

Meet the Kensal Green Chartists.

Greetings from Abney Park: John Cleave, Henry Vincent, Lucy Vincent and a family at rest.