Book review: Workers of Their Own Emancipation: Working-Class Leadership and Organisation in the West Riding Textile District, 1829-1839

Workers of Their Own Emancipation: Working-Class Leadership and Organisation in the West Riding Textile District, 1829-1839, by John Sanders (Breviary Stuff Publications, 2024)

When in the autumn of 1830, two delegates from the National Association for the Protection of Labour arrived in Halifax to promote the union’s cause, they encountered an immediate problem. Having called a public meeting, they were unable to find even a single local working-class radical able to take the chair - and through want of local leadership, their cause foundered and failed in the town.

In the years that followed, everything changed. By October 1838, when the radicals of the West Riding met on Peep Green to elect delegates to the First Chartist Convention, all but a handful of the 21 speakers were local working men – among them Lawrence Pitkethly and George Barker of Huddersfield; Abram Hanson of Elland; Peter Bussey of Bradford; George White of Leeds; Thomas Todd of Dewsbury; Samuel Dickenson of Almondbury; Robert Wilkinson and William Thornton of Halifax; and Joseph Crabtree of Barnsley. And in the towns they represented, there were many other capable working class leaders able to articulate their well-developed political ideas in writing and on platforms, and to organise their friends and neighbours in support of a wide variety of causes affecting their lives.

Abel Heywood - the Chartist who built Manchester's town hall

Manchester's Radical Mayor: Abel Heywood, The Man who Built the Town Hall
By Joanna M. Williams (The History Press, 2017)

Abel Heywood’s memory deserves better. Search on Google for the man who almost personified Liberal Manchester in the middle decades of the 19th century and you will find page after page about a boutique hotel bearing his name.

Finally, eventually, an entry in the DNB appears before we go back to more hotel guest reviews. And that is about it.

Fortunately, a new biography by Joanna Williams sets out to recover the life story of this important figure from Manchester’s radical past – from the campaign for a free press in the 1830s, via Chartism and the Liberal Party to the office of mayor.

The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution

The late Dorothy Thompson played an unparalleled part in the development of Chartist history over decades, as a researcher, teacher and mentor to later generations of historians. Where earlier historians had focused on the Chartist leadership and its perceived failings, she opened up whole new areas of study, focused on the ordinary Chartist – both male and female – while rebalancing what had been a generally hostile view of the likes of Feargus O’Connor.

Now, thanks to the efforts of Breviary Stuff Publications, it is possible once again to get hold of one of her most important published works. The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution was for many years pretty much the standard work for anyone wanting a more serious understanding of the Chartist movement.

In the beginning... uncovering the origins of the Chartist hymn book

Music and poetry were always central to the cultural life of Chartism. But have you ever wondered what a Chartist song might have sounded like?

Radio 4’s Sunday programme with Edward Stourton recently supplied the opportunity to find out. The programme’s report on the discovery of the only known surviving copy of a Chartist hymn book in Todmorden library is well worth listening to, and will certainly satisfy your curiosity.

History in 2013: is the 19th century out of fashion?

Book publishing is a notoriously lengthy process. So a browse through Amazon’s “hot new releases” actually stretches not backwards but forwards in time to give an idea of book releases coming up a year or more into the future.

Doing this recently, I was struck not so much by the total absence of anything on Chartism but by the real dearth of new writing on the 19th century as a whole.

The day Parliament burned down and other history books for Christmas 2012

In common with most people who find their way to the Chartist Ancestors blog, I will be looking for some good new history books to read come Christmas 2012.

Looking through what’s new and coming up for publication in the run up to Christmas, I have found a few potential good reads, and have included these on a Christmas 2012 page for the History Bookshop. If you fancy buying any of them yourself, please do consider going via this page as a small sum comes to me to spend on the site every time you buy a book.

The book which appeals most to me is The Day Parliament Burned Down by Caroline Shenton. This is already available to buy and recounts the events of 16 October 1834 when “a huge ball of fire exploded through the roof of the Houses of Parliament, creating a blaze so enormous that it could be seen by the King and Queen at Windsor, and from stagecoaches on top of the South Downs”.

Written by Parliament’s chief archivist, this is the first full-length account of the fire and events surrounding it. The fire destroyed almost all of the 800-year-old Palace of Westminster, leaving only Westminster Hall still standing today, and rocked the nation at a crucial time in the development of our democratic history, midway between the passing of the Great Reform Act of 1832 and the beginning of the Chartist movement.

Yet today, memory of the fire has largely been obliterated, and Barry and Pugin’s new Parliament, with the Big Ben clocktower, appears always to have been there. Many visitors must assume that the mock gothic architecture is in fact genuinely medieval in origin.

Other history books out in time for Christmas include Andrew Marr’s A History of World, associated with Marr’s current BBC television series of the same name, and Vikings – again a television series spin-off from Neil Oliver.

 There are currently 12 books in my Christmas history books selection for 2012, but if others catch my eye I will add them as we go along.

More full-text Chartist resources

There has been a very welcome increase in the volume of materials about Chartism available online in recent months.

In part this is thanks to the efforts of people like Richard Brown, whose blog generously shares a career-worth of expertise with the wider world.  In addition to a great deal of biographical material on individual Chartists, and discussion of the many variations on Chartism, his blog also has a particularly useful guide to the different ways historians have understood Chartism down the years.

But those of us interested in Chartism and the Chartists have also benefited from wider projects.

Efforts by NCSE partnership to digitise a number of 19^th century publications, including the complete run of the Northern Star newspaper are especially exciting. Having spent days in the past peering at microfiche readers at the British Library’s newspaper library at Colindale, I look forward to the prospect of being able to search, download and really get a grip on the most important newspaper chronicling the Chartist movement from the comfort of my own home.

More incidentally, but no less valuable, Google Books has set out to digitise as many books as it can lay its hands on in order to make them available online. This is controversial in many respects, but for those of us with an interest in original Chartist material that is long out of copyright, it is a boon.

I have now added a series of links from Chartist Ancestors to the most valuable volumes. Among them are The Trial of John Frost for High Treason, published in 1840, and Feargus O’Connor’s own Practical Work on the Management of Small Farms – a fascinating read for those with an interest in the Chartist Land Company.

I have also added links to many other full-text resources on the ever excellent Minor Victorian Poets website.

The Chartist Ancestors further research page has links to these and many other Chartist resources.

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

Life of Thomas Slingsby Duncombe

Thomas Slingsby Duncombe was an unlikely ally of the Chartist cause. With a well-publicised reputation as a lover of the theatre, gaming and women, he became known during his long tenure as MP for Finsbury as "the handsomest and best-dressed man in the house".

Yet the "dandy demagogue" was also the man who presented the second Chartist petition of 1842 to Parliament, sought the release of John Frost and other Chartists imprisoned for their part in the Newport rebellion, and helped underwrite the ill-fated Chartist land plan.

When Disraeli wrote Sybil: or The Two Nations, it was to Duncombe that he turned for information on Chartism. And it was Duncombe who chaired the Labour Parliament of 1845 and continued to support the development of trades unions thereafter for many years.

Duncombe's contribution to the political life of the 19^th century has been rather neglected until now. But the good news is that a biography, to be titled Radical Dandy: The Curiously Forgotten Political Life of Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, may now help to rectify that.

The book is being written Stephen Duncombe, a distant relative and associate professor at the Gallatin School of New York University. It is being published by the University of California Press – though no date is yet given for it to appear.

Stephen Duncombe has set up a website giving more information about the project, including an outline of the eight chapters; there is also a good short biography of Thomas Slingsby Duncombe on Wikipedia.