Ruffy Ridley and the Australian gold rush

News of the Australian gold rush did not escape the Chartist movement. Stories of prodigious finds and the enormous wealth to be had reached England soon after gold was discovered in Victoria in July 1851, and within a matter of months fresh discoveries at Ballarat and Castlemaine had begun to draw in thousands of prospectors.

Former Chartists And Chartist ideas would later figure large in histories of the gold miners’ rising at the Eureka Stockade and in the early days of Australian democracy. But right at the start, it was the London Chartist Ruffy Ridley who brought the story of the gold rush to England’s declining Chartist movement.

On the Chartist Ancestors website: Whatever happened to Ruffy Ridley? 

Star of Freedom,
22 May 1852.

In May 1852, the Star of Freedom (as the Northern Star had become) carried an extract from a letter received from Melbourne and dated 17 January (NS, 22 May 1852, p6). It told of the apparently ‘inexhaustible’ reserves of gold to be found around Mount Alexander, claiming, ‘I saw four men lifting a seamen’s chest into a dray half an hour ago almost too heavy for their united strength. The chest contained the product of six weeks’ labour, and contained 250lb of gold.’

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.

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.

Brief lives of the Chartist Land Company subscribers

In his third blog post about a U3A project to extract information on Londoners and women from the Chartist Land Company share registers, Peter Cox looks in more detail at some of the individual subscribers found in the records.

Previous posts in this series
Transcribing the Chartist Land Company registers.
Analysing the Chartist Land Company registers.

With a wealth of online sources now available for the family historian, and plenty of experience, we embarked with some optimism on the attempt to track down individuals. They proved much more elusive than we expected, even limiting the search to the one in ten or so with less usual names.

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.

The poetry of Chartism analysed

More than 1,000 poems appeared in the pages of the Northern Star, the principal Chartist newspaper, from its launch in 1838 to closure in 1852. This body of work, possibly constituting the most widely read collection of poetry in the Victorian era, is now examined in a new book, titled The Poetry of Chartism. 

The Poetry of Chartism, by Dr Mike Sanders of the University of Manchester, is the first full-length study of the Northern Star's poetry column. It analyses the interplay between politics, aesthetics and history in the aftermath of the Newport insurrection (1839), during the mass strikes of 1842 and the year of European revolutions (1848). 

The Poetry of Chartism is published by Cambridge University Press. More information about it can be found on the CUP website. The University of Manchester has also issued a press release in which Dr Sanders explains how “ Victorian poets brought Manchester to the brink” during the heady days of the 1842 general strike. 

The Poetry of Chartism is being launched on Thursday 26 March at a reception in Manchester Central Library. Dr Sanders will be kicking events off with a talk on "Rebel poets - Chartist poets" at 5pm. Further information from Libby Tempest on 0161 234 1981.

Feargus O'Connor: died 30 August 1855

Feargus O’Connor was never happier in life than when at the centre of a controversy.

In death, the Chartist movement’s greatest leader remained also its most disputed figure, blamed by earlier generations of historians for his bluster but now at least partially rehabilitated and admired once more.
Today marks the 153rd anniversary of his death on 30 August 1855, at the home of his sister Harriet in Notting Hill.

O’Connor’s final years were sad ones. Having contracted syphilis many years before, he was by the 1850s suffering from dementia brought on by his condition. Neither was his health improved by the consumption of some 15 glasses of brandy a day.
Yet O’Connor was the most remarkable figure to have been associated with Chartism.
Without his drive and commitment in establishing the Northern Star at the heart of Chartism and in nurturing the National Charter Association, the cause might well have disappeared in the days after the first petition.

He was, too, a man of great personal commitment who gave his time, his money and his freedom to the Chartist cause. And, of course, he succeeded in becoming the only Chartist elected as such to Parliament, winning a seat at Nottingham in 1847.
Earlier, Fabian-influenced historians of the Chartist movement had little time for O’Connor, often blaming him for the movement’s lack of success in the 1830s and 1840s, and accusing him creating an O’Connor cult which brooked no rivals.
Yet it is difficult to see how the Chartist cause could have survived without O’Connor’s single-minded determination.

Read the Chartist Ancestors interview with Paul Pickering, author of Feargus O’Connor: a Political Life.

Northern Star: a Chartist newspaper in numbers

Throughout 1841 and 1842, anyone reading the Northern Star would have come across the name of its proprietor, Feargus O’Connor, an average of 40 times in each weekly issue.

Over the course of the 15 years from 1838 to 1852 during which O’Connor owned and ran the paper, his name appeared nearly 15,000 times – on a par with the number of times the Charter itself appeared in print, and twice as often as the Chartist petitions.

Having used the search engine on the newly digitised run of the Northern Star to look at the issues and the people which preoccupied the paper, I have now added a page to Chartist Ancestors revealing The Northern Star in numbers.

The charts and tables on the page make it possible to track the rise and fall of interest in the Chartist land campaign, in the petitions themselves, and in the cause of temperance.

They also show graphically how O’Connor’s comrades and potential rivals inside the Chartist camp struggled to get their own names into print.

In 1841, after both O’Connor and William Lovett emerged from prison, O’Connor’s name appeared 1,967 times in the Northern Star, while Lovett, who wrote the Charter and had been secretary to the first Convention, was named just 312 times.

Read more about the Northern Star in numbers.

How to search the Northern Star for Chartist ancestors

Having had a little time to play around with the new online version of the Northern Star, I’m delighted to report that most of my early fears were either unfounded or are already being addressed.

The Northern Star was the most important Chartist newspaper of the period, and remains one of the most important sources for the study of Chartism. So getting a freely accessible and reliable version is a great step forward for family historians.

You might want to have a quick look at the Chartist Ancestors page on How to read the Northern Star before you start searching the paper for ancestors.

Search and navigation
Some of the difficulties I had at first attempt suggest that navigating your way through to the content you want is not a particularly intuitive process and could be improved.

It is really important to grasp that, as well as the usual divide between browsing and searching your way to the article you want, there are two almost completely separate search navigation tools on the NCSE site.

On balance, if you are looking for a named individual (and probably for most other searches), I would use this search and not this one. Here’s why.

Facsimiles navigation
The first set of navigation tools, to be found at the top left of the screen or here, under the facsimiles heading, has just a single search box and the option to refine results to include just articles, pictures or advertisements.

Importantly, this search tool allows you to use “double quotes” to search for a phrase. As a result:

• A search on Isaac Armitage will bring back all articles in which both words appear – 90 of them; and
• A search on “Isaac Armitage” brings back just those articles in which the phrase appears – six of them.

Although some alt text on the search box suggests it is possible to use other modifiers (such as AND, OR and NOT), in practice I couldn’t see any comprehensible differences in the search results, which is a shame but hardly a major problem.

What is ideal is that, when you press “search the edition” and your results come back, they are accompanied by a snippet showing the section of the page where the word or phrase appears. And when you follow the link to the page, the word or phrase is highlighted.

There is also a link from this page to an advanced search page with further options.

Keywords navigation
The second set of navigation tools, to be found at the top right of the screen or here is a supposedly more sophisticated tool. But in my attempts to use the search, I found it less useful in finding what I wanted.

This second search, headed “keywords”, works using boolean logic (that is, using AND, OR and NOT as ways of modifying the search), but avoids the need for users to understand how to use these terms by forcing them to enter each term within a separate box.

This is fine (though a bit unnecessary, I would have thought, especially since Google, to name but one, seems to manage without such a restriction).

But rather more of a problem is the fact that it does not seem possible to use “double quotes” to search for a phrase. A search on either Isaac Armitage and “Isaac Armitage” produces 62 results. Try it on Google if you want to see the difference.

I am also unsure why the search here produces 62 results when I would have expected to see either the six “whole phrase” results or all 90 Isaac AND Armitage results found in the first search.

Apparently the correct way to search on both names is to enter Isaac into the first “persons” box and Armitage into the second. Although this is clearly intended as way of helping those without much experience of web searches, I can’t say that it succeeds.

From search results to article

Rather frustratingly, having got back your list of search results using the keywords search, there is then no easy way to see what each item is likely to lead to.

Each of the 62 items returned from a search on Isaac Armitage, for example, includes the name of the newspaper, the date, volume and issue number, the page number, and even the page size and original price.

But no headline, snippet of text or other hint at what lies beyond.

And when you do click through to the item, page or issue in question, the search term is not highlighted on the page. Since the default search result is an image rather than text, it is not possible to carry out an in-page search (using Ctrl F on your keyboard) either.

One other I problem I have is that, unless you keep your Internet Explorer or Firefox browser window set to a very narrow measure, the ordered sequence of search results breaks down as the page attempts to fit in items side by side rather than one above the other.

This is a fairly straightforward web design glitch and should be easy enough to fix.

PDF download – found it!When I first used the site, I thought there was no PDF download facility. I was wrong. Once you have the required page from the Northern Star on screen, click on the “Actions” pull-down menu at the top right of the screen.

This is pretty much essential if you are having to plough through lengthy Northern Star articles and either don’t want to stay online to do it or would like to transfer the page to another computer.

Next steps for the NCSE

This service is still in beta test version, and I see that better integration between the two searches is on the “to do” list.

Corrections and improvements are promised every four to six weeks, with a final version going live later on this year.

Personally, I remain in awe of the NCSE project’s achievements and salute a magnificent new tool for those interested in Chartism and the Chartists.

The Northern Star is now online

A free and fully searchable edition of the Northern Star is now available online. Although still officially in a beta (test) version, you can find this important Chartist newspaper on the Nineteenth Century Serials Edition website along with a number of other papers from the period.

Go straight to the Northern Star online.

Getting the paper up and running like this is a fantastic achievement for all concerned, and they deserve the thanks of family historians everywhere for their efforts.

These are early days, and I am still getting to grips with the site. I was delighted to see that along with the paper, the site includes about half of the 34 prints known to have been given away with the paper during its 15-year existence.

This version also has an advantage over the version available to academic institutions since last year in that it each page of the Northern Star that you open is accompanied by metadata – information about the page itself.

On the downside, I have not so far found the process of getting from a search result to an image of that word or phrase on the page particularly easy to navigate. But these are early days and any archive as sophisticated of this needs and deserves some practice.

I have now added a page called How to read the Northern Star to Chartist Ancestors. It is not yet complete, but it is worth getting a bit of the history before you have a look at the paper itself...

Go here for some background on the Northern Star

Go here to browse issue by issue

Go here to search the Northern Star

Northern Star: a Chartist newspaper online

The single most important source for anyone looking for a Chartist ancestor goes online on Tuesday 13 May, when a free, publicly available and fully searchable run of the Northern Star newspaper is due to be released online.

The three-year Nineteenth Century Serials Edition project will culminate on that day with a symposium at the British Library to launch the online editions of the Northern Star and five other significant periodicals from the era.

It is almost impossible to overstate the importance of the Northern Star to Chartism. In the absence of a centralised body to steer the movement, and for a campaign which began before the advent of the penny post, Feargus O’Connor’s weekly newspaper was the key organising tool.

It served as a parish-pump newspaper, reporting Chartist meetings up and down the country, rallied support for imprisoned and victimised Chartists, and was the forum in which Chartist ideas and identities evolved.

Importantly for those looking for their Chartist Ancestors, the Northern Star recorded the names of thousands of those who spoke at meetings great and small, were elected to local branch committees and as delegates to regional and national conferences, or who simply wrote in to the Editor.

There has been an edition of the Northern Star online for some months. But with use limited to those with access to an academic library, most family historians have been excluded from what it has to offer.

Tuesday 13 May is a day well worth writing in your diary. Find out more about the Northern Star online edition.

200 more contributors to the Frost defence fund

The failed Chartist uprising at Newport in December 1839 came as a huge shock to many Chartists. Those who had prepared for similar rebellions across the North of England but had been dissuaded from acting must have been particularly affected by the bloody end to the Welsh rising.

With Frost and his fellow leaders at Newport facing the death penalty, and dozens more lined up for transportation or long prison sentences, Chartists dug deep into their meagre savings to provide what financial assistance they could.

The Northern Star, in the absence of any central Chartist organisation, formed the focus of this fund-raising activity, and for the first couple of weeks all donations were acknowledged individually in its pages.

The first 1,000 or so contributors to the Frost Defence Fund have been named on Chartist Ancestors for some time. I wrote about this here. A further 200 or more names are now on the same page.

After this, the Star gave up hope of listing all contributors, concluding that it would rapidly run out of space to report anything else.

For now, however, if you are looking for Susan and Samuel Rothwell of Rochdale, Samuel and Mary Buck in Naresborough, or Benjamin Yarman in Great Yarmouth around 1840, then you might just have stumbled on a Chartist ancestor.

See the names of contributors to the Frost Defence Fund.