The life of Henry Vincent

Henry Vincent was without doubt the great orator of the Chartist movement. An early member of the London Working Men’s Association, he was soon sent off on tour to establish similar bodies across Yorkshire, before moving to Bristol where he also launched the Western Vindicator newspaper.

If he had not already been arrested and imprisoned for his seditious speeches at Newport in South Wales, he would almost certainly have suffered the same fate as his friend John Frost and found himself transported to Australia following the Newport uprising. As it was, he emerged from prison in 1841 to marry and forge a new life for himself.

I’ve written a biography of Vincent for the main Chartist Ancestors website. You can find it here.

Northern Star rises again - NCSE is back online

A free, searchable and browsable online version of the Northern Star newspaper is back online. This is great news for family historians and others without easy access to university libraries or paid-for digital newspaper websites.

Launched in 1837, a little in advance of the first publication of the People’s Charter, the Northern Star played a central role in organising, informing and spreading the culture of Chartism among a mass audience – not to mention cementing the position of Feargus O’Connor as the movement’s leading figure. It continued in one form or another until 1852.

The Nineteenth Century Serials Edition project launched a decade ago and gave access to the Star and to half a dozen other publications, but over time and as technology moved on it ceased to work properly.

Now it’s back.

Clearly much has changed since the project first went live in 2018, so I strongly suggest reading these reflections on compiling a 10-year update to the NCSE.

Even if you do have access to an alternative digitised version do take a look at the NCSE site – not least for the article about the history of the paper and its reproduction of the portrait prints distributed to readers of the Star over its first 10 years of publication.

Personally, I still find the British Newspaper Archive version of the Star easier to use, but this may well be a matter of familiarity and individual preference, and I am certainly not going to complain that the NCSE takes a different approach.

Congratulations and a huge thank-you to all involved.

Find the NCSE here.

The Southern Star and the victims of political persecution

James Bronterre O'Brien established the Southern Star in 1840 to provide himself with a platform within the Chartist movement and as a counterweight to Feargus O'Connor's Northern Star.

The paper did not last long. O'Brien lacked O'Connor's charisma, and in any event there was no mass audience for such a paper in the South of England - unlike in the North, where campaigns against the New Poor Law had created a ready constituency among the spinners, weavers and factory workers.

George Julian Harney: The Chartists were Right

George Julian Harney was among the most important of the Chartist leaders. Almost uniquely, he was active throughout the movement’s history, having been a radical long before the Charter was published and living on, his political interests undiminished, until near to the end of the 19th century.

Best known as a journalist and editor of the Northern Star, Harney was a staunch internationalist and a prominent figure in the National Charter Association’s post-1848 adoption of a socialist programme. It was Harney who befriended Engels, Marx and a host of European exiles in the wake of the year of revolutions, and Harney’s own paper, the Red Republican, which first published the Communist Manifesto in English translation.

The Northern Star has moved

The online version of the Northern Star, the main Chartist newspaper and an invaluable source of information for family historians, has moved, so many of the links from Chartist Ancestors no longer work properly.

The new website address is http://ncse-viewpoint.cch.kcl.ac.uk/. I hope to get round to updating the links on Chartist Ancestors in due course, but this is a manual process so it is going to take time.

Chartist newspapers go online

Many of the most significant Chartist newspapers have now become available online to the public thanks to a British Library initiative to digitise and publish more than 2 million pages of material from 19th century newspapers. 

Among the papers that can now be viewed are the Charter, Chartist, Chartist Circular, Northern Liberator, Reynolds's Newspaper and the Southern Star. 

The most significant of the Chartist papers, Feargus O'Connor's Northern Star, is also available using the new service, although this has been separately available for some time wtihout cost at the Nineteenth Century Serials Edition website. 

Up to now, the British Library initiative, carried out in partnership with JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) and Gale, part of Cengage Learning, has been available only through academic libraries and at the National Archives. 

Making the papers more widely available will be a massive boost to family historians who believe they may have Chartist ancestors since newspapers are among the best sources for names and often detailed accounts of Chartist activities. 

Guardian archive a Chartism goldmine

The launch of The Guardian newspaper’s historic online archive today offers anyone looking for ancestors in the Chartist movement fresh hope of a discovery.

The site charges for access, but is currently offering 24 hours free access for first-time visitors and a cut price rate of £3.97 a day for the rest of November, before the price doubles to £7.95, so it is worth giving it a try soon.

To give some indication of the volume of material, a search on Chartist comes back with 1,000 items, Chartism produces 1,000 more (I suspect the search engine has a default upper limit at this level, so you will need a rather better defined search) and Feargus O’Connor a further 138.

The Guardian is not the first newspaper to put its archives online. The Scotsman’s archives go back to 1817 and have been online for some time. Like The Guardian, it charges £7.95 for a day pass, rising through various levels to £159.95 for a one-year season ticket.

The big excitement to come, however, is the digitisation project for the Northern Star, the principal Chartist newspaper, owned by Feargus O’Connor himself and packed full of news items about the what Chartists were up to all over the country.

This project is now pretty well advanced and things are looking good for a launch in spring 2008.