Chartism, Commemoration and the Cult of the Radical Hero

Matthew Roberts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429582486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Chartism, the British mass movement for democratic and social rights in the 1830s and 1840s, was profoundly shaped by the radical tradition from which it emerged. Yet, little attention has been paid to how Chartists saw themselves in relation to this diverse radical tradition or to the ways in which they invented their own tradition. Paine, Cobbett and other 'founding fathers', dead and alive, were used and in some cases abused by Chartists in their own attempts to invent a radical tradition. By drawing on new and exciting work in the fields of visual and material culture; cultures of heroism, memory and commemoration; critical heritage studies; and the history of political thought, this book explores the complex cultural work that radical heroes were made to perform.

Part 1

Chartism and the radical tradition

1 Inventing the radical tradition

On 31 January 1846, the Chartists of Ashton-under-Lyne held a commemorative dinner to celebrate the anniversary of that ‘noble of nature, Thos. Paine’. The party gathered in the evening at the home of Mr. James Ashworth, a regular host of such events. The room set aside for the occasion was ‘tastefully decorated with splendid portraits of all the leading characters of the School of Reform, at the head of which was a large painting of the immortal Henry Hunt’, hero of the post-war mass platform. At the opposite end of the room hung a piece of gilt-framed plate depicting the ‘great national petition procession’ (of 1842), surmounted by the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor and the Newport rebel John Frost along with the radical MP Thomas Slingsby Duncombe, by this time Chartism’s foremost parliamentary friend. After the assembled party had feasted, the cloth was ceremoniously removed and Mr. James Higson, a radical veteran, was called on to chair the proceedings. A series of toasts were proposed, including to ‘The immortal memory of Thomas Paine’. There were also a number of recitations – ‘Paine’s Dream’ and ‘Emmett’s Speech’ (after the leader of the abortive Irish rebellion of 1803) – and songs such as ‘The Birth of Paine’ and ‘Liberty Tree’. Events of this kind were a staple feature of the Chartist experience and part of the movement’s heritage.¹

The radical tradition invented by the Chartists revolved around a calendar, punctuated by anniversaries and commemorative events. While Chartists certainly did not go to the lengths their French Revolutionary forebears did in reconceptualising time and inventing a new calendar, they were nonetheless issuing a challenge to the establishment by asserting their right to contribute to the festive calendar through the public celebration of their own heroes and histories. In the process, they appropriated some of the sacrality that surrounded official calendric rites, thus clothing their own heroes in pomp, dignity and awe.² The Northern Star, the movement’s premier newspaper, even produced a ‘Chartist calendar’, which included such dates as the expulsion of John Wilkes from the House of Commons in February 1769 (ironically written as ‘Wilkes expelled the House of Commons’); the outbreak of the American Revolution; the deaths of Lord Bacon, Voltaire, Lord Byron and Paine; the murder of Wat Tyler; and the invention of printing in England. Chartist almanacs were published which also included the births and deaths of radical heroes.³

Events of this kind were far from being nostalgic outpourings of longing for glorious times past. As the Ashton-under-Lyne vignette suggests, the past was linked to the present both through the inclusion of the second Chartist petition and the positioning of the present leaders of the movement as apostolic successors. The spirit of Paine and Hunt lived on (hence the reference to the ‘immortal’ Hunt and Paine, and a further hint at the transference of sacrality to these secular gods). A link between the radical past and present was also forged by the presence of a veteran like Higson of Ashton, someone who very possibly had been present at Peterloo on the never-to-be-forgotten 16 August 1819, when the local authorities sent in the military to put down the radical meeting at which Hunt was to have spoken.⁴ Each locality had its corps of veterans, and not just in Lancashire but throughout Britain. Radical veterans helped forge a sense of ‘transgenerational belonging’,⁵ one of the means by which group identity, cohesion, lineage, legitimacy and purpose are reinforced in social movements.

This chapter clarifies the different ways in which Chartists harnessed radical figures from the past, and in so doing establishes some of the similarities and differences between traditions invented by radical/oppositional movements like Chartism and those invented by the state and the propertied classes. Elites had the funds and privileged access to the public sphere in ways that were clearly not available to dissident groups. Across Europe elites were involved in acts of pantheonisation in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, building new or re-designating existing spaces and buildings to house pantheons of national heroes.⁶ Chartists were forced to accept a virtual pantheon due to the lack of ‘capital’ and restricted access to the public sphere. Nonetheless, the concept of a pantheon, loosely defined as an imagined community of exemplary men, is a useful term to denote the Chartist practice of commemorating heroes. ‘Remembrance is part of the landscape’, observes Jay Winter, but as this chapter will show, in dissident movements by necessity this usually assumes much more transient and ephemeral forms than the monuments we have come to associate with the ‘statuemania’ of the nineteenth century or the war memorials of the twentieth century.⁷

Print culture and reading practices

One of the most important conduits through which knowledge of radical heroes flowed was the Chartist press. References to the radical tradition (heroes, organisations, episodes) constitute one of the most ubiquitous subjects, appearing in the reports of speeches delivered at meetings when speakers invoked the names of radical greats, in the communications and poetry columns, and even in the advertisement pages, notably from radical booksellers. In one such comprehensive list of works on sale at the Chartist William Evans’s shop at Shelton (the Potteries), after listing Cobbett’s Spelling Book, English and French grammars, Advice to Young Men and Women, Legacy to Parsons, Reformation and Gardner, Evans assured the potential customer that ‘All Cobbett’s works constantly on Sale’.⁸ The Chartist press was also studded with biographies, quotations and extracts from writings and speeches, and book reviews of new editions of canonical texts. For a time there were even features in The English Chartist Circular and Cleave’s Gazette of Variety that were devoted exclusively to the writings of Cobbett.⁹ The Welsh Chartist press translated into Welsh extracts from Cobbett, Paine and the French freethinking philosopher Volney.¹⁰ The Merthyr Chartist newspaper Udgorn Cymru published extracts from Cobbett’s History of the Protestant Reformation, a choice which no doubt reflected the Welsh radical hostility to the Anglican Church, as Cobbett’s text was an exposure of the fraudulent, violent and plundering origins of the Church of England.¹¹ Udgorn Cymru also furnished its readers with a Welsh translation of Robert Emmet’s defiant courtroom address.¹² The short-lived Irish National Guard, an organ of Irish Chartism, serialised the lives of the fourteenth-century Swiss folk hero William Tell and the 1790s United Irish leader Wolfe Tone.¹³

A regular feature, and one that was common to virtually all Chartist newspapers, was to print short extracts from the works of radical authors under appropriately titled headings such as ‘Thoughts for the Thoughtful’ (The (Scottish) Chartist Circular) and ‘Materials for Thought’ (The True Scotsman). George Julian Harney believed that such short extracts were one of the requirements for making a Chartist periodical successful.¹⁴ The Leicester-based Midland Counties Illuminator identified itself and Chartism with the radical tradition through its masthead by including a scroll-like rendition of the People’s Charter accompanied by a quotation from Milton: ‘What in me is dark, illuminate’. If we take one of its ‘The Thinker’s Notebook’ as an example, there were extracts from the works of Locke, Algernon Sidney, Milton, Cobbett, Mary Wollstonecraft and Paine.¹⁵ The National Association Gazette, the organ of William Lovett’s National Association for Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People (the successor to the London Working Men’s Association), displayed on its masthead the motto ‘The Rights of Man and the Rights of Woman’, thus conjoining the teachings of Paine and Wollstonecraft.¹⁶ With their greater receptivity to ideas of gender equality and female enfranchisement, it is not surprising that Lovett’s metropolitan circle of knowledge Chartists (those who placed the greatest emphasis on education, rational recreation and self-improvement) were one of the few groups who invoked Wollstonecraft: as early as 1835 Hetherington’s Poor Man’s Guardian was advertising her portrait for sale.¹⁷ Wollstonecraft’s legacy may have been at its strongest in London, but she had some followers amongst provincial Chartists: a new edition of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1841 and advertised in the Northern Star, with a short notice proclaiming that ‘Every advocate of female emancipation should buy and read it’.¹⁸ Cleave’s English Chartist Circular also included in one issue a column entitled ‘Scraps from Mary Woolstoncraft [sic.]’.¹⁹ The fact that these were regular features in the press underlines the importance accorded to the radical tradition by editors.²⁰

The biographies and extracts from writings and speeches in the Chartist press situated the movement in a much wider and longer context than just a British reforming tradition. What strikes the modern reader of ‘Thoughts for the Thoughtful’ and ‘Materials for Thinking’ is the eclectic range of Chartist thinking, an eclecticism that transcended national boundaries: Americans of the revolutionary and early republic eras featured regularly, especially Lafayette, Washington, Jefferson and Joel Barlow.²¹ The Scottish Chartist Circular had for its masthead Lafayette’s famous quotation ‘For a nation to be free, it is sufficient that she wills it’, a quotation that also appeared regularly on Chartist banners. Bolívar was also occasionally invoked, as were other nationalist revolutionaries, though generally Chartists appear to have been but dimly aware of the liberation movements in Latin America; theirs was ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART 1 Chartism and the radical tradition
• PART 2 The cult of the radical hero/villain
• Conclusion
• Selected bibliography
• Index