Chartist Fiction

Volume One

Ian Haywood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317234470
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1999. For the first time since their appearance in Chartist newspapers these two major radical narratives are reprinted in a single volume. The Political Pilgrim's Progress combines Utopian politics with Bunyanesque satire to tell the story of the journey of Radical and his family from the City of Plunder to the City of Reform. Sunshine and Shadow is the only serialized novel to have been published in the Northern Star. It brings together fictional biography and historical chronicle to form the first truly working-class novel.

Both texts offer a unique insight into the literary achievements of the Chartist movement, and will be a valuable and entertaining source for scholars of radical politics. The texts are fully annotated, and the editor also provides an introduction to each story and a bibliography of recent scholarship.

Sunshine and Shadow

Thomas Martin Wheeler

Editor’s introduction

Sunshine and Shadow appeared in weekly instalments in the Northern Star between 31 March 1849 and 5 January 1850. Its author was the Chartist administrator and schoolteacher Thomas Martin Wheeler (1811-62). Some brief biographical details will show that Wheeler was well qualified for writing a historical review of Chartism’s progress.¹

Wheeler was born in south London, the son of a publican and wheelwright. From this respectable artisan background he went to school in Stoke Newington, and was later apprenticed to his uncle in Banbury, a haberdasher and woolcomber.² Some of this experience is echoed in the early career of his hero Arthur Morton, who is also apprenticed to an uncle. Wheeler soon left this trade, however, and embarked on a restless early manhood. He trained as a baker, tried his hand at gardening and spent several years wandering around the southern counties of England as an itinerant artisan. Eventually he settled in London and simultaneously became a teacher and a stalwart activist in metropolitan radicalism.³ He rose quickly into the ranks of Chartist officialdom. Like Thomas Cooper and other Chartist intellectuals he achieved a measure of social mobility through self-education and political service to radicalism. His schoolroom soon became a political venue for meetings. He became the London correspondent of the Northern Star in 1840, a Chartist lecturer, and a member and later secretary of the Executive of the National Charter Association. He was therefore at the hub of Chartism’s national organization and policy decisions. In 1845 he helped O’Connor formulate the Chartist Land Plan. He joined the Society of Fraternal Democrats, and in March 1846 he demonstrated his internationalist credentials in an address to the Friends of Poland. He is reported to have said, ‘there is more glory in dying in defence of our country’s rights and liberties than in a whole life of mean and truckling subserviancy’.⁴ Later that year he resigned his post as secretary to the Charter Association to take up a new position as secretary to the Chartist Land Company. The Land Company was an intiative aimed at resettling poor, urban labourers on the land. The company purchased land out of weekly subscriptions and built fine cottages in generous allotments (many of these buildings survive to the present day). As a reward for his administrative work Wheeler was provided with the freehold of a cottage in the settlement called O’Connorville (built at Heronsgate, now part of Rickmansworth, near London). He resigned his post in July 1847, but this did not mark the end of Wheeler’s activism. He participated in the National Convention in March and April 1848, where he argued that the Kennington Common demonstration on April 10 should go ahead despite government opposition. Wheeler moved:

That they should issue a proclamation, declaring their determination to hold the meeting on Monday next, notwithstanding the foolish proclamation of the Government, and notice of the police.⁵

On the great day itself Wheeler rode in the delegates’ carriage alongside O’Connor, Ernest Jones and George Julian Harney. After the failure of the petition he retired to his pastoral retreat and spade husbandry. The break from official duties gave him time to write. In March 1849 the Northern Star published the first episode of the 37 weekly ‘communions’ which would make up Sunshine and Shadow. With this achievement behind him, Wheeler resurfaced in ‘late’ Chartism. He was elected to the National Convention in 1851 and worked hard to sustain the National Charter Executive. He wrote for Reynolds’s Political Instructor (1849-50) and helped Ernest Jones set up the People’s Paper in 1852. His last Chartist publication was a very brief life of O’Connor written to accompany the funeral oration delivered at O’Connor’s burial in 1855.⁶ Wheeler ended his days working for the Friend-in-Need Life Assurance Company.

An indication of Wheeler’s aspiration to become a writer as well as an activist can be seen in a short series of articles he wrote for the Northern Star in early 1848. These form an account of a walking tour between several Chartist settlements.⁷ The style of the pieces owes much to Cobbett’s Rural Rides, interspersing topographical observations with historical and political disquisitions on the decline of the yeomanry and the rottenness of modernity. The major difference between Wheeler and Cobbett, however, is that Wheeler can look to the Chartist settlements as the Utopian solution to this problem. Sentimental nostalgia for the Saxon past is counterbalanced by equally sentimental praise for the Paradise Regained of the Chartist Land Plan. As a resident at O’Connorville, Wheeler constructs himself as the living proof that social relations have been restored to their ‘natural state’. The settlements are the reincarnation of that lost cottage economy so beloved by Cobbett, but they are also beacons of hope and social transformation. When Wheeler notes that Lowbands is fertile in misletoe and O’Connorville in holly, he waxes lyrical about the symbolic value of these crops:

Lowbands and O’Connorville — the misletoe and the holly — like them, may be green and flourishing amidst the decay and rottenness by which they are surrounded — like them may they, not only in Christmas season, but in every season, throw a gleam of joy and mirth around, and reciprocally unite and twine with each other.⁸

An oscillation between Quixotic emotionalism and radical diatribe is a hallmark of Wheeler’s style.

Sunshine and Shadow has not received the critical attention it deserves for two main reasons: its inaccessibility and its form. Those left-wing critics who have sought it out tend to dismiss it as a thinly veiled piece of propaganda or journalistic reportage, lacking rounded characters and a coherent plot.⁹ If those are the agreed requirements for good fiction then Sunshine and Shadows will certainly be deemed to be of low-grade quality. But the narrative requires a different set of reading principles, as Wheeler was writing for a Chartist audience.¹⁰

The date of composition is the first clue to the story’s purpose, which is to take stock of Chartism after the turbulence of 1848.¹¹ This does not mean that Wheeler merely wrote an elegy for a defeated cause, as some critics claim. Indeed, Wheeler makes impassioned pleas for renewed efforts and remobilization. But equally important was to find a narrative method that would allow him to both present and assess the movement as a historical event. As he declared at the opening of the first instalment, the ‘fiction department of literature has hitherto been neglected by the scribes of our body, and the opponents of our principles have been allowed to wield the power of imagination over the youth of our party, without any effort on our part to occupy that wide and fruitful field’ (p. 72). In order to ‘wield the power of imagination’ successfully Wheeler decided to focalize a ‘History of Chartism’ through the depiction of ‘one of yourselves struggling against the power of adverse circumstances’ (p. 192). In other words Wheeler proletarianized the Bildungsroman, not only in placing a working-class hero at the centre of the story, but in opening up realism to social and political analysis, and using the story to mobilize the reader. Moreover, he constructs his hero’s destiny out of the key moments in Chartism’s development. Arthur Morton does not stand apart from history but is woven into its texture, personifying its contradictions and uneven progress. Arthur’s immediate relevance is to show Chartism’s ‘high and generous inspirations’ (p. 192) in a climate of post-1848, counterrevolutionary smears and misrepresentation.

Arthur conforms to the conventions of Bildungsroman heroism in being an orphan and underdog (we think of Oliver Twist, Jane Eyre and Alton Locke among a host of others). His uncle is a crass south of England wool-merchant, who lazily dispatches his nephew to a second-rate boarding-school. The one ray of sunshine in this experience is the friendship of Walter North, son of a wine merchant and school boxing champ (any resemblance to David Copperfield and Steerforth must be coincidental, as Dickens’s novel did not commence serialization until May 1849). The North family take Arthur in, where he falls in love with Julia North, who is both educated and like himself a ‘lover of liberty’ (p. 91). Class forces soon assert themselves, and Arthur is separated from the Norths geographically and socially. While he is apprenticed to a printer, Walter goes to Liverpool to take over the expanding family business. Wheeler transforms the traditional device of the wresting apart of two childhood ‘brothers’ into a model of the class structure after 1832. As Arthur tramps for work in London, Walter becomes a merchant prince, ‘a specimen of that large and influential class’ set to ‘dethrone the feudal aristocracy of the realm, and monopolise the political and social power of the empire’ (p. 84). Talent and prosperity are inversely related. Arthur has a ‘cultivated intellect’ and a Shelleyan imagination. Walter is a philistine and so corrupted that he plots the seduction of Julia and her marriage to a West Indian island governor. Julia’s Clarissa-like treatment provokes one of several outbursts in the story against Victorian sexual morality. Marriages of convenience are merely ‘legalized prostitution’ (p. 87). Although at other moments in the story Wheeler takes a traditionalist patriarchal line in being dismissive of women’s public participation in the Chartist movement, his assault on bourgeois marriage and sexual hypocrisy owes much to Wollstonecraft and Godwin.¹² As the plot unfolds, it is clear that Julia has more in common with the exploited working class than her own exploiting class which betrays her.

The class polarization of Arthur and Walter gathers pace as Arthur tramps to Birmingham and arrives in the middle of the Chartist ferment of 1839.¹³ Chartism provides his grievances with a voice and he becomes an activist and speaker. After the Bull Ring riots, which Wheeler attributes to agents provocateurs, Arthur is wrongly accused of arson and flees to Liverpool to take a boat to America. He almost seeks refuge at Walter’s house, who is now a ruthless class enemy and would have certainly turned him in to the authorities. His sexual rite de passage begins appropriately at sea. His boat sinks in a storm and he and other survivors are picked up by a ship coincidentally carrying Julia to her new estate in the Caribbean. They embark on a liaison manqué. While Wheeler does not allow adultery to happen, he defends the lovers’ feelings, and refutes the convention of the fallen woman:

Love in her was no crime, albeit she was the bride of another, — it was the result of feelings as pure as nature ever implanted in human breast …. we produce human nature as it is —...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Dedication
• General Introduction
• The Political Pilgrim’s Progress (1839)
• Sunshine and Shadow