Sir Francis Burdett, 1770-1844

Sir Francis Burdett was for many years a powerful advocate of parliamentary reform. As MP for Westminster after 1807, he was a strong supporter of Catholic emancipation and advocated a series of radical measures that would later be included in the People’s Charter.

But he was no Chartist. Following the Reform Act of 1832, the fifth baronet drifted away from his earlier convictions, fell out with his notoriously radical constituents, and in 1837 got himself elected for North Wiltshire instead, where he became a staunch Tory.

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.

Chartism's great class divide

There is now a page on Chartist Ancestors listing some 400 delegates to a joint conference of the National Charter Association and Complete Suffrage Union, held in December 1842.

This page has been on the site for some years, but lacked around 100 names. Happily, I have now been able to add them to the list, along with a profile of Joseph Sturge (pictured) and his Complete Suffrage Union. The delegates’ list also records their position on the key votes.

Go straight to the Unity Conference page.

Chartism was always an uneasy alliance of different interests and organisations, so with the rejection of the first petition in 1839 and the authorities’ heavy-handed crackdown on the movement’s local and national leaders, it is no surprise that there were splits in the Chartist ranks.

The faction around Feargus O’Connor concluded as a result of that year’s events that there was a need for both a mass movement and a more centralised layer of organisation – and created the National Charter Association.

O’Connor dealt firmly with anything he saw as creating divisions, turning his ire on Church Chartism, Teetotal Chartism, so-called Knowledge Chartism and those who set up rival bodies to the NCA.

His appeal to middle class reformers was limited, however, and it was the Quaker and anti-slavery campaigner Joseph Sturge who filled the vacuum, establishing the Complete Suffrage Union in November 1841. This organisation, which committed itself early on to all six points of the Charter, would also provide a rallying point for opponents of O’Connor among the Chartists.

Following the rejection of the second Chartist petition in 1842, efforts were made to unite the NCA and CSU. These efforts foundered on questions of tactics and leadership (not to mention personality) but were brought to a head by the use of the word “Chartist”.

Sturge and the CSU believed the term to be too loaded violent associations to appeal to a middle class constituency; O’Connor and the NCA – backed by William Lovett and others who had no great love for O’Connor – were not prepared to budge.

The December 1842 conference called to try to unite the two factions ended with Sturge and his supporters walking out, and in the ascendancy of the NCA.

In due course, Sturge and his middle class reformers would turn their attentions to corn law repeal. For O’Connor, the rallying cry would be “the Charter and nothing less”.

Go straight to the Unity Conference page.

Interview: paul Pickering on Feargus O'Connor

A new biography of Feargus O'Connor, written by Dr Paul Pickering (left), is due for publication later this spring. O'Connor was probably the single most significant figure in Chartism for more than a decade, and was the only person ever elected to Parliament specifically on a Chartist ticket.

A Chartist historian of long standing, Dr Pickering has published extensively on Australian, British and Irish history, and is the author, among other titles, of Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford, The People's Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League (with Alex Tyrrell); and Friends of the People: Uneasy Radicals in the Age of the Chartists (with Owen Ashton).

He is also Convenor of Graduate Studies in the Research School of Humanities and Senior Fellow in the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, Canberra. Further details of his work can be found here.

I spoke to Dr Pickering about O'Connor's contribution to Chartism and the Irish dimension of his politics, and about the future direction of Chartist studies.

Mark Crail: Why Feargus O'Connor?
Paul Pickering: Many years ago I read a splendid short biography of Daniel O'Connell by Seán Ó Faoláin and I remember thinking that O'Connor's tempestuous life would lend itself to such a treatment. There are no dull moments. Feargus has not received the attention that his prominence in the movement warranted. My book is not, and was never intended to be, a comprehensive cradle-to-grave study. For me it was an opportunity to examine a wonderfully interesting and wide ranging career and to explore the possibilities of biography as a form. If I provide a few new tastes and inflections of a life lived in the full glare of public attention I will have achieved my objective. I hope there are no dull moments.

Mark Crail: Feargus O'Connor had a terrible press among historians from Robert Gammage onwards, and only recently has begun to get a more sympathetic hearing. Why was that, and in your view did Chartism on the whole prosper or suffer from his leadership?
Paul Pickering: Unquestionably, in my view, O'Connor made a positive contribution to the movement.  His style of leadership was perfectly suited to the needs of the movement; among the Chartist majority he fostered a sense of solidarity and common purpose and he deliberately helped to create space for the further development of an important form of independent working class radicalism.  “No Surrender” meant something. Without him the Chartists would have been more rather than less divided.  

Mark Crail: Your book provides a focus on the Irish dimension of Feargus O'Connor's career. How important is his legacy as an Irish political leader and how important was his Irish background to the leadership he gave to the Chartist movement?
Paul Pickering: Dorothy Thompson once made the point that historians of England don't know enough about Ireland. The same is true in reverse of historians of Ireland. O'Connor is hardly even a footnote in Irish history. His ideas deserve to be better known if for no other reason than that they had few proposers in subsequent generations. His experience in England sharpened his awareness of class but his core ideas changed very little between 1820 and 1850. It is unhelpful to think of his career as having separate parts – he did not see it that way.

Mark Crail: Feargus O'Connor's deteriorating mental health in his final years can appear to be something of a metaphor for the state of Chartism at the time. Do you think he could have saved Chartism as a mass movement had he been in good health after 1848?
Paul Pickering: No. By 1850 the agenda of the movement was already being set by others. At his most potent, Feargus was the best advocate for an instrumentalist view of politics – that changing the composition of the House of Commons was the way to change the world. Long before he was overtaken by declining health he helped to undermine this view himself – through the land plan. By 1850 the vote was not enough.

Mark Crail: This seems like a boom time for Chartist history. We've had Malcolm Chase's Chartism: a New History and some fantastic books from the Merlin stable in the past couple of years, including Robert G Hall's Voices of the People and Owen Ashton and Joan Allen's Papers for the People. And we have your life of Feargus O'Connor. In what directions would you like to see Chartist studies moving now?
Paul Pickering: In my view Chartism was one Britain's most successful if unheralded exports. I have been working for some years on a study of Chartism abroad. Many former Chartists had a powerful impact on the political and social culture of their new homes, often quickly obtaining the rights they had sought fruitlessly in Britain and facing the new challenges of power. For example, not many people realise that Henry Parkes, one of the “founding fathers” of the Australian Federation whose head is on our $5 note, was a Chartist. There are many untold stories of Chartism throughout the Anglophone world. These are stories worth telling. What first drew me to Chartism was an interest in its vibrant social culture and I am just starting a large project with a colleague, Kate Bowan, who is a musicologist, to explore another element of that culture. Our working title is “Songs for the Millions” and the study involves a wide-ranging examination of popular music and radical politics.  Many of the Chartist musings that have been treated as poetry by scholars were, in fact, lyrics for songs with identifiable melodies which drew on a rich aural tradition in popular culture.

Mark Crail: Finally, in writing your book you must have spent a vast number of hours immersed in the Feargus O'Connor's life. Do you think you would have like him as a man if you'd had the chance to meet him?
Paul Pickering: By all accounts O'Connor was uncommonly amusing and great fun to be around. I'm sure that I would have liked him. The question is would he have liked me. I spent many years as a political advisor and it is a habit that is hard to kick. I suspect that Feargus liked to do more talking than listening and I'm sure he would soon have grown tired of being interrupted by me.

Feargus O'Connor is published by Merlin Press.

Chartist land company list up to 5,000 names

The list of Chartist Land Company subscribers in Ashton under Lyne, Audenshaw and Duckinfield has leapt up from 168 to 1,120.

How has this been achieved? Well, fortunately someone familiar with Dr Jamie Bronstein’s database remembered the Ashton list being rather longer than it appeared on Chartist Ancestors. So, I went back to the original spreadsheet and found that I had lost a huge chunk of names while converting it to a more recent version of Excel.

Up until today’s revision, the published list included all those subscribers registered at 1 May 1847, but none of those who had signed up when the register was updated on 17 July the same year.

The addition means that, in total, some 5,075 subscribers to the Chartist Land Company from 11 Lancashire towns now appear on Chartist Ancestors.

The picture below shows Heronsgate, the first of six Chartist land colonies, which was renamed O'Connorville after the Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor.