Talking Chartism: the video is here

I recently spent a very enjoyable hour and a half chatting about all things Chartism with professional genealogist Natalie at Genealogy Stories. You can watch the first hour of our conversation below.

This was a completely unscripted and unplanned talk (at least on my part), so please excuse the ums and ahhs, and any stories I launched into before getting sidetracked.

In part two, which you can access through Natalie's website, we talked a little about what happened to Chartism after 1848, and rather more about some interesting Chartists, including William Cuffay and Susanna Inge.

On the whole, I am really pleased with how it came out - although there are so many things I didn't get round to talking about, and of course if I'd prepared an answer to every question I might well have looked at alternative interpretations of some events. 

Natalie herself did a great job, and was very easy to talk to. Do check out Genealogy Stories where she has a growing collection of interviews along with some other great family history resources.

James Watson: Chartist and campaigner for free speech

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.

A veteran of the struggle of the unstamped press in the 1820s and 1830s, he became a founder member of the London Working Men’s Association, under whose guidance the Six Points of the Charter were drawn up and published, and would go on to be a prominent campaigner against punitive blasphemy laws.

Five years after his death in 1875, the Chartist writer and engraver W J Linton published a biography of Watson recalling his part in the radical struggles of the early nineteenth century.

The full text of James Watson: A Memoire of the Days of The Fight for a Free Press in England and of the Agitation for the People's Charter now appears on the excellent Minor Victorian Poets and Authors website.

James Watson was born in Malton, Yorkshire, on 21 September 1799, and after becoming involved with a radical group associated with the Republican newspaper in Leeds, moved to London in 1822 to work for the radical publisher Richard Carlile.

Caught up in Carlile’s campaigns against the repressive Six Acts, Watson rapidly found himself on the wrong side of the law, and in April 1823 he was convicted of blasphemy for publishing Elihu Palmer's Principles of Nature, serving 12 months in Cold Bath Fields prison.

Watson would later work as an agent for Robert Owen’s Co-operative Trading Association before establishing his own radical publishing business in Finsbury.  In 1832, he launched the Working Man’s Friend, for which he would again be imprisoned.

Watson was active in the National Union of the Working Classes, and campaigned on behalf of the Tolpuddle Martyrs before, in 1836, becoming a founder member of the London Working Men’s Association.

Like many London radicals, Watson’s involvement in Chartism waned after 1839, when leadership moved to Feargus O’Connor. He did, however, play a role in William Lovett’s National Association of the United Kingdom for Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People.

In the 1840s, Watson took up the campaign against the laws on blasphemy, co-publishing The Reasoner with the secularist and Chartist George Jacob Holyoake.

In 1848, he returned briefly to the Chartist cause as a member of the People’s Charter Union, which soon turned itself into the Newspaper Stamp Abolition Committee.

Watson eventually sold his business in 1854 to Holyoake, retiring a decade later with his wife to Norwood, as Linton notes, “to be within walking reach of the Crystal Palace”.

Linton tells us:

“Day by day there was his walk to the Palace, and hours of quiet pleasure, viewing and examining the marvels of art and science here stored.  More than all, there was a never-failing delight in the frequent concerts."

Watson died on 29 November 1874 at Burns Cottage, Hamilton-road, Lower Norwood; and was buried in Norwood Cemetery. 

Read W J Linton’s James Watson: A Memoire of the Days of The Fight for a Free Press in England and of the Agitation for the People's Charter.

The Charter: voice of London Chartists

The Charter had all the necessary elements to become one of the great success stories of the radical press.

A short history of The Charter and those involved with it, including a list of the members of its management committee, now appears on Chartist Ancestors.

The paper’s editor was a veteran of the unstamped press; its publisher had been a founder member of the London Working Men’s Association; and the secretary of its management committee was none other than William Lovett, who had personally drafted the famous six points.

The Charter was even adopted as the official organ of the General Convention of the Industrious Classes – the first Chartist convention.

Yet it failed to exploit all these elements to its advantage, either by using its connections to provide a better insight into Chartism’s inner workings, or to reach out to a large audience throughout the country which badly wanted to know what was happening at the convention and beyond.

In the end, its publisher’s limited enough ambition of selling 10,000 copies a week and turning a profit that could be used to fund other political activities proved too much, and by the end of its first year of publication sales were running at barely a quarter of the anticipated level.

The Charter was pulled apart by internal strife, poor management and a lack of the imagination needed to turn it from an in-house journal for metropolitan activists into a mass-circulation newspaper. The contrast with Feargus O’Connor’s Northern Star is instructive.

The short account on Chartist Ancestors of The Charter’s all-too-brief run of 60 issues is, as far as I know, the first published attempt at a history of the paper.

I know a little of what became of Robert Hartwell, its publisher, and William Carpenter, its editor. For much of the information on Carpenter I am indebted to Richard Brown’s History Zone blog, which provides extensive details of his publishing career.

However, I would like to know more about The Charter – and in particular to find pictures of its principal figures if any exist.

Read more about The Charter.

Henry Hetherington - radical publisher

Henry Hetherington was the hero of the campaign for an unstamped press – the radical protest movement which defied the law to publish news and political opinion while refusing to pay a newspaper tax which put most publications out of the reach of working people.

He would later go on to be a founder member of the London Working Men’s Association and a delegate to the First Chartist Convention of 1839.

While serving as a delegate, the Charter newspaper published a profile and portrait of Hetherington. This forms the basis of a page on Henry Hetherington which now appears on Chartist Ancestors.

During the 1830s, Hetherington was three times imprisoned for his principled stand before finally claiming a partial victory for The Poor Man’s Guardian, which he published, when the government backed down and repealed to obligation to pay tax on political publications.

He would later go to prison once again when he was convicted of blasphemy for publishing a book attacking the Old Testament. In later years, Hetherington would devote much of his energy to the cause of free thinking and rational religion.

Hetherington played an important role in the development of the moderate form of Chartism more usually associated with William Lovett, but less as an original thinker or leader than as “a symbol of conscience”, as his entry in the Dictionary of National Biography puts it. 

Hetherington was largely out of sympathy with the mass movement that Chartism became, and his lack of humour and tendency to self-righteousness managed to alienate even his allies, among them Francis Place, who described him as “one of those men whose peculiarities fit them for martyrs”.

Yet he was without doubt a brave fighter for the causes in which he believed.

Read The Charter’s profile of Henry Hetherington.

William Lovett born 8 May 1800

Chartist anniversaries fall thick and fast in May. On 7 May 1839, the first Chartist petition was presented to Parliament, and today is the birthday of William Lovett, the man who wrote the text of the People’s Charter and served as secretary to the First Chartist Convention of 1839.

Lovett was born at Newlyn near Penzance. His father died at sea before William was born, so he was brought up by his mother, aunt and grandmother in a strict Methodist household. Moving to London in 1821 if not earlier, he became active in radical politics.

Lovett played a part in early trade unionism, the co-operative stores movement and other causes, refused to serve in the militia – at some personal cost – and joined the National Union of the Working Classes.

It was on his initiative that the London Working Men’s Association was founded in 1836 and it was this body from which the Charter emerged.

In truth, there was nothing new about the Six Points, all of which had long been part of the radical canon. Neither did Lovett or the LWMA organise the famous petition to Parliament (this originated with the Birmingham Political Union).

And, had the organisation of Chartism been left to Lovett and his LWMA comrades, it is likely that it would scarcely merit a footnote in the history books. They were unable even to print copies in time for its launch.

But Lovett was a man of great principle, who went to prison for his Chartist activities and played an honourable if not always effective part in the radical politics of the day. Lovett died on 8 August 1877, and is buried in Highgate Cemetery.

For more on William Lovett, see the Chartist Ancestor pages on
William Lovett and Knowledge Chartism
William Lovett’s profile and portrait in The Charter
William Lovett’s account of the First Chartist Convention

William Lovett: author of the People's Charter

William Lovett was without doubt the Father of the People’s Charter. He had been a founder member of the London Working Men’s Association, and of radical bodies before that, and was a natural choice to draft its political platform.

The third in our series of profiles and portraits of delegates to the General Convention of the Industrious Classes – otherwise known as the First Chartist Convention – offers a fairly detailed account of his life up to 1839, and shortly before his arrest and imprisonment for sedition.

Both words and text are taken from Lovett’s own newspaper, The Charter. In all, there were 12 such profiles, all of which will be added to Chartist Ancestors in due course. The page on William Lovett can be seen here.

Nominally, the Charter was the work of 12 men – six drawn from the ranks of the London Working Men’s Association, and six sympathetic MPs. The Charter, and its famous six points, were, however, almost entirely the work of Lovett – albeit based on many previous radical programmes.

It is important to distinguish the Charter and the petitions which supported it. The first was a draft parliamentary bill extending the franchise to all working men; and the petitions raised numerous grievances, many of which, they contended, could be solved by enacting the Charter.

And while the Charter was the work of the London Working Men’s Association, the first petition originated with the Birmingham Political Union. It was the marriage of these two things and the building of a mass platform (that is, popular support) that first made Chartism unique.

See the profile and portrait of William Lovett.

See also pages on:
* The London Working Men’s Association
* The Chartist petitions
* A Chartist timeline