The Chartist Imaginary

The Chartist Imaginary The Chartist Imaginary Literary Form in Working-Class Political Theory and Practice Margaret A. Loose THE OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY PREss COLUMBus Copyright © 2014 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Loose, Margaret A., 1967– The Chartist imaginary : literary form in working-class political theory and practice / Margaret A. Loose. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1266-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-8142-1266-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8142-9370-6 (cd) — ISBN 0-8142-9370-0 (cd) 1. Politics and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 2. Chartism. 3. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 4. Literature and society—Great Britain—History— 19th century. 5. English literature—Women authors—History and criticism. 6. Working class writings, English—History and criticism. 7. Political poetry, English—History and criticism. 8. Working class in literature. I. Title. PR468.C43L66 2014 820.9'007—dc23 2014013225 Cover design by Thao Thai Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Minion Pro Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American Na- tional Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48–1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 • contents • List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgments ix Introduction: Chartism and the Politics of Form 1 1 Ernest Jones and the Poetics of Internationalism 12 Internationalist and Romantic Traditions 15 The Dialectic of the Self and the Social: “A Song for May” (1847) 16 Jones’s Oratory and Journalism as a Microcosm of Chartist Poetics 23 The Maid of Warsaw (1847–48, 1854) 27 2 Epic Agency 33 Grotesque Epic: Linton’s Bob Thin (1845) 35 Spenserian Epic: Cooper’s Purgatory of Suicides (1845) 42 Religion as a Mystical Veil on Reason 47 Religion as a Divine Cover for War 51 Religion as an Antagonist to Learning 53 Religion as an Ally of State Repression 58 Heroic Epic: Jones’s New World (1851) 64 vi CONTENts 3 Revolutionary Strategy and Formal Hybridity in Chartist Fiction 74 Somerville’s Dissuasive Warnings (1839) 76 • “Argus”’s “The Revolutionist” (1840) 80 Wheeler’s Sunshine and Shadow (1849–50) 83 Generic Doubleness: The Novel as History and Fiction 86 Revolution, Not Reform 90 Mistakes and Lessons of the First Chartist Convention 92 Diametrically Opposed Class Interests 96 Uneven Development and the Strike of 1842 100 Ironic Success at Kennington Common 106 Hybridity and Hubris 109 4 The Gender Legacy: Women in Early to Late Chartist Literature 111 1839: W. J. Linton 112 1842: Mary Hutton 114 1845: Thomas Cooper 116 1852: Ernest Jones 118 1856: Gerald Massey 123 Biographical, Literary, and Political Context 127 Innermost Circle: Deciphering Linguistic and Marital Concealment 131 Intermediate Circle: Frame Narrative as Reader Interpellation 136 Outer Circle: Epistolary and Theatrical Address to the Reader 140 Conclusion: Medievalism, Gender, Genre, and Epistemology 145 5 The Politics of Cognition in Chartist Women’s Poetry 151 Elizabeth La Mont 152 Mary Hutton 160 E. L. E., “A Sempstress” 168 Works Cited 173 Index 181 • illustrations • Figure 1 The Letter W 37 Figure 2 The Letter O 38 Figure 3 Concentric Structure of Enclosure in “Only a Dream” 126 Figure 4 The Sheffield Workhouse after 1829 167 vii • • acknowledgments • Petitioning among their fellows to support and identify with the People’s Charter galvanized communities of people and conferred on them a unity of aspirations, identity, and effort. That sense of collectivity might seem anti- thetical to the solitary project of writing, but one of the saving revelations of working on this book was the breadth and warmth of other people’s com- mitment to it and to me, the feeling of shared hope and the knowing sympathy of prolonged labor in similar endeavors. I have been deeply touched by the outpouring of support from all of my colleagues in the Department of Literature at the University of California, San Diego, and especially Kath- ryn Shevelow, Meg Wesling, Don Wayne, Nicole Tonkovich, Heather Fowler, Jin-kyung Lee, and Stephanie Jed. Jin and Stephanie have read drafts, raised questions, pushed me in new directions, and guided me in the arts of author- ship with unfailing optimism and human kindness, and I feel so lucky to have them as allies. The Literature Department and the University of California, San Diego generously afforded me grants and teaching leave that made pos- sible my writing and my research abroad. I also wish to give sincere thanks to the anonymous readers whose detailed, thoughtful feedback dramatically improved my manuscript. Thanks, too, to Philological Quarterly for permis- sion to incorporate a revised version of my essay “Chartist Revolutionary Strategy” into chapter three. My friends at the Dickens Project have likewise inspired and aided me professionally over the years, including in particular Tricia Lootens, John Jor- dan, Carolyn Williams, Elsie Michie, Carol MacKay, Teresa Mangum, Rebecca ix x AcKNowLEdgMENts Stern, Galia Benziman, and Miriam Margolyes, who graciously hosted me in her home while I conducted research at the British Library. This project began and made some of its greatest progress under one of the finest teachers and scholars I have ever known, Florence Saunders Boos. Her exquisite ear for and delight in poetry renewed the joy of its study for me month after month, and her skill as a writer improved my own. In addition, her generosity in sharing her research on working-class women poets helped me learn about the abundance and range of their writing, and gave me leads to pursue in my own search for working-class Chartist women writers. My family, and especially my mother Margaret M. Loose, has believed in me since my earliest memory, actively promoted my intellectual curios- ity, cheerfully made sacrifices to enable my writing, and helped me maintain perspective about what I most value in life. Mimi Van Ausdall has steadily encouraged and heroically supported me in my work through all the years, and her example has taught me much about what it means to be a careful thinker and a humane teacher. Anne Myles too has lent me daily friend- ship and sympathy, moved me with superb writing, and stayed up late to go crazy talking with me about poetry. For over a decade Liz Corsun has been my friend and fellow traveler on Victorian roads, reading drafts of my work, suggesting new ideas, making me laugh, and sharing life with dogs. In more recent years my friend Teresa McGee has given me so much of her creative intelligence, patient confidence, and cheerful wisdom that I wonder if I would ever have finished this book without her. To all of this community who have helped this book come into existence, I am more deeply grateful than a few paragraphs can tell. • introduction • Chartism and the Politics of Form While cycling in southwest Utah some years ago, I encountered pre-Colum- bian petroglyphs representing not only the sun, bighorn sheep, and dogs, but also people carrying things on their backs, holding tools, and perhaps gazing at their reflections in water. I still wonder about the ancestral Puebloans who scratched those nonutilitarian images into the red sandstone over a thousand years ago. When desert survival must have dominated everything about their lives, they made representational art. I am only the latest person to wonder why, but for those of us who teach and do research in the humanities, such questions and speculations are our raison d’être, the most compelling basis for why we do what we do and believe that it matters. Sculpture, painting, music, narrative, and other arts seem to be part of our species being, as fundamental as finding water. The more I have thought and written about what function literature served for those variously edu- cated nineteenth-century working people calling themselves Chartists, the more I have come to realize how absolutely essential it was for the existence of a political movement. It was not simply that imaginative writing expressed ideals or promoted community or demonstrated cultural refinement; it half created the people who created it. These marginalized people felt and affirmed their humanity—its range of emotional experience, its ability to imagine and remember, for instance—in the acts of reading and of writing creatively. In purely human terms, that was a crucial achievement for a group of people so often represented as subhuman, and who might even have felt themselves to be so when they were forced to devote all their energies and time to the 1 2 INTRoductION procurement of food and shelter. The sense of personal dignity and species belonging were not the only results, however. Working-class writers also exercised their latent powers of postulating unrealized scenarios, strengthening or even generating their ability to con- ceive of altered social circumstances, to set political goals, to motivate and sustain themselves and others in aspiring to greater equality. As Sanders shows (Poetry), on their own account, reading (or hearing) and writing even simple poems or short stories in their local Chartist newspapers also made them intellectually hungry, stimulating self-education and a demand for living and working conditions more conducive to self-education. This was a geomet- rically cumulative, self-perpetuating, and self-fulfilling force, and it lies at the heart of what I mean by the “Chartist imaginary” of the book’s title. Lucidly theorized by Mike Sanders1 (with application specifically to poetry, though I am broadening its use somewhat here), the term refers to the “total qualitative transformation of consciousness” which results from contact with imaginative literature (13).

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