Penn History Review Volume 27 Issue 1 Article 4 March 2021 “No Pity – I Claim Only Justice”: Radical Memory of the Peterloo Massacre among the English Working Class, 1819-1848 Conor Muller Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/phr Recommended Citation Muller, Conor (2021) "“No Pity – I Claim Only Justice”: Radical Memory of the Peterloo Massacre among the English Working Class, 1819-1848," Penn History Review: Vol. 27 : Iss. 1 , Article 4. Available at: https://repository.upenn.edu/phr/vol27/iss1/4 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/phr/vol27/iss1/4 For more information, please contact
[email protected]. “No Pity – I Claim Only Justice” “N! P"#$ – I C%&"' O(%$ J)*#"+,”: R&-"- +&% M,'!.$ !/ #0, P,#,.%!! M&**&+., &'!(1 #0, E(1%"*0 W!.2"(1 C%&**, 3435-3464 Conor Muller On Monday, August 16, 1819, tens of thousands of working men, women and children gathered at St. Peter’s Fields in Manchester to demand parliamentary reform, uni- versal male suffrage and equal representation. Protests and de- mands for such a program had been common throughout the period of hardship, poverty and high unemployment in Eng- land that followed demobilization at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. Meetings with attendances in the thousands or even the tens of thousands were called at Spa Fields in London in 1816 and in Manchester in 1817 amid talk of attempts to overthrow the government and imprison or even kill the king, even among the organizers of the meetings.1 In all cases the authorities had sought to disperse the crowds, and indeed no meaningful revolutionary action actually took place.