Chartist Circular: the voice of Scottish Chartism

The Chartist Circular was among the most important and certainly one of the longest-lived of the many newspapers that sprang out of Chartism in Scotland. 

Launched in September 1839 by the former handloom weaver and co-operator William Thomson, the paper was published weekly “from the steam press of W & W Miller, 90 Bell Street”, in Glasgow, until July 1842 until growing losses and bad debts forced it to close. 

The complete run of papers was reissued in a single volume by the New York publishers Augustus M Kelley in 1968, but has not been easily accessible otherwise. Fortunately, the Google Books project has now caught up with the Chartist Circular and the whole thing has been published online. 

See the whole Chartist Circular. 

The paper is of relatively limited use to family historians since, unlike the Northern Star, it carried very few reports of Chartist activities either nationally or locally, and consequently names very few of those involved in the movement. 

Writing in Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press (Chartist Studies Series), the labour historian W Hamish Fraser describes the Chartist Circular as “not a newspaper, but an educational journal intended to bring a greater understanding of the aims of Chartism”. 

He adds: “What one has is a display of the central ideas of Chartists and of the perceptions which shaped their beliefs." 

Thomson himself had been general secretary of the General Protecting Union of the Handloom Weavers of Scotland, and in the years before Chartism was editor of the Weavers Journal from October 1835 to April 1837. 

He subsequently became, general secretary of the Universal Suffrage Central Committee for Scotland from August 1839 until six months after its demise in January 1842, and the Chartist Circular proclaimed that it was published under the committee's ‘superintendence'. 

The paper did carry some of the lists of Chartists that make the Northern Star such a valuable paper. Among them were the names of:

•  those present at the Scottish delegate conference of 1839; and

•  101 signatories to a Scottish teetotal Chartist address. 

In his final few issues of the paper, Thomson would also go on to name those who had ordered multiple copies of the paper but failed to pass on payment (most likely because they had been unable to sell the copies sent to them).

William Villiers Sankey - a Chartist aristocrat

William Villiers Sankey came from aristocratic stock. The son of an Irish volunteer and Member of Parliament, he moved among the political elite of his day. Yet he also served as a delegate to the First Chartist Convention of 1839.

While representing Edinburgh at the convention, Sankey was profiled by The Charter newspaper. Both the profile and a portrait sketch which accompanied it now appear on Chartist Ancestors.

Sankey appears to have been a fiercely clever young man who considered the law, the church and medicine as potential careers before settling on a life as a professor of mathematics. He had also shown an aptitude for Ancient Greek and Hebrew studies.

As a convention delegate, Sankey proved to be somewhat erratic, voicing hard-line views before retreating to a moral force position as the convention went on.

However, his sympathy for the Chartist cause outlasted the first flush of enthusiasm, and he was still politically active in the early 1840s, all the while contributing his thoughts on mathematics and other subjects to specialist publications.

Read The Charter’s profile of William Villiers Sankey.

In Friends of the People: The Uneasy Radicals in the Age of the Chartists Owen Ashton and Paul Pickering focus on six middle class Chartist leaders, among them William Villiers Sankey. Order this book online.

45 Scottish women Chartists

A database of 45 women who were active in the Chartist movement in Scotland has now been added to Chartist Ancestors. Here is the page.

Women played a big part in Chartism. Although none of the Chartist petitions called for women to be given the vote, up to 20% of those adding their names in some parts of the country were women.

They also organised themselves in Female Chartist Associations – some 23 of which are known to have existed in Scotland alone, as well as taking part in an enormously wide range of other activities, from the domestic to the public political sphere.

Yet this is an enormously hard subject to research. There has been no major new work on Scottish Chartism since the start of the 1970s, and academic study of women's part in Chartist agitation is still less well served.

I am therefore indebted and grateful to Sue John, who researched and compiled the database of Women Chartists in Scotland and kindly permitted its publication on Chartist Ancestors.

Glasgow delegate conference 1839

The Great Meeting of Scottish Delegates which took place in Glasgow from 14 to 16 August 1839 marked a turning point in Chartist organisation.

A page on the events leading up to it, and a list of the names of delegates has now been added to Chartist Ancestors.

The first of the three great Chartist petitions had been rejected by the House of Commons on 12 July 1839, when by a margin of 235 to 46 MPs voted against even considering the grievances it raised. In response, the Chartist National Convention, now meeting in Birmingham, initially called for a “sacred month” (or general strike) to force Parliament to see sense.

It became clear, however, that the Chartists lacked both the support and the organisation in the country to make such a strike effective – not least in Scotland, where many smaller Chartist organisations were becoming concerned at the direction their leaders were taking.

With the leadership of the Edinburgh Chartists losing their grip on the wider Scottish movement, the Glasgow Chartists now came to the fore and, having won the support of other groups throughout Scotland to do so, organised a Scottish delegate conference.

The Great Meeting of Scottish Delegates, as it was called, both created a national organisation capable of directing Chartism for the first time, and cemented the power of the Glasgow Chartists by electing a central committee almost entirely drawn from the town.

Importantly, this precedent would inspire Feargus O’Connor, who attended as delegate from the Chartist Convention, and his supporters to reorganise Chartism by setting up the National Charter Association in July 1840

The Chartist Ancestors page on the conference lists delegates to the meeting and names those chosen to serve on the central committee.

See also Scottish Chartism on the Map.

Scottish Chartism on the map

Chartism in Scotland was largely a product of the central belt, running across the country from Greenock on the West coast, through Glasgow and Edinburgh, and on up to Dundee on the East of the country.

This is hardly surprising as most of Scotland's population was found here in the 1840s (when it was known as the Scottish Midlands) just as it is today.

However, the extent to which Chartism was a central belt phenomenon becomes very obvious when shown on a map.

Alexander Wilson compiled lists of Chartist associations, female Chartist associations, Chartist churches and Chartist co-operative societies for The Chartist Movement in Scotland (Augustus M Kelley Publishers, 1970).

I have now taken these lists and created two Google Maps with them. The first shows local Chartist associations; the second shows female associations, churches and co-operative societies.

To get a sense of the spread of Chartism in Scotland, it is necessary to open the maps and get larger versions. Sometimes it is possible to see a string of towns along a main road, each with its own Chartist body. Perhaps this reflects the success of a particular Chartist missionary on his travels. No doubt other patterns will also emerge.

In due course, I will add both maps to the Chartists in Scotland page on Chartist Ancestors. But both are shown below for now.

View Larger Map  
View Larger Map

Sixty-one more Scottish Chartists named

In January 1842, the Chartist movement in Scotland refused to endorse the wording of the second petition, work on which had begun in England the previous October.

Anxious to gain the support of Irish nationalists, both in Ireland and in the great cities of England and Scotland where there were substantial migrant communities, the National Charter Association leadership had included in the petition a call for repeal of the Act of Union.

This had not been elevated to a seventh point, but was listed alongside demands for repeal of the New Poor Law, cuts in spending on the monarchy and armed forces, and other radical causes.

Nonetheless, the union was a sensitive issue in Scotland, and a convention of Scottish delegates voted (on the chairman’s casting vote) not to endorse the petition.

Read the full story, along with the names of the 61 delegates to the Scottish convention.