The Most Chartist of All the Factory Towns

Robert G. Hall. Voices of the People: Democracy and Chartist Political Identity, 1830-1870. Chartist Studies Series. Monmouth: Merlin Press, 2007. ix + 218 pp. $32.95, paper, ISBN 978-0-85036-557-3. Reviewed by Rohan McWilliam Published on H-Albion (January, 2009) Commissioned by Mark Hampton (Lingnan University) In June 2008, I was privileged to speak at the Northern Star, is now available in a searchable, annual Chartism Day conference at the University digital form. Not long ago, Malcolm Chase pro‐ of Wales, Newport. During the course of the event, duced his narrative history of the movement, there were four papers followed by a walking Chartism: A New History (2007), which is clearly tour of some of the nearby locations most associ‐ going to be a standard work. This is not bad for a ated with Chartism. We were taken to see where movement that often has been written off as a John Frost and the Chartists had gathered prior to failure. the Newport rising in November 1839 and then The frst historians of Chartism were, of proceeded to the Westgate Hotel where the cata‐ course, Chartists themselves. Robert G. Gammage strophic confrontation with the military took wrote his history of the movement as early as place. One of the most encouraging aspects of the 1854, History of the Chartist Movement, day was the large number of people (not all of 1837-1854. However, despite the work of such fg‐ them academics) for whom Chartism still matters. ures as Mark Hovell and G. D. H. Cole in the frst There was a passion and an excitement for peo‐ half of the twentieth century, the modern wave of ple’s history that reminded me of the old History research really dates from the publication of Workshop conferences. Chartist Studies in 1959 where Asa Briggs brought Chartist studies continue to fourish in a quite together the work of a group of scholars who had remarkable way. The volume under review is part been delving into the history of the movement in of the Merlin Press Chartist Studies series (seven different localities. Briggs's edited collection be‐ titles published so far). The Chartist Ancestors came a founding text of modern labor history and Web site has proven to be extremely popular Chartism was seen as one of the key episodes that (www.chartists.net). The Chartist newspaper, The defined the particular nature of Victorian politics H-Net Reviews and society. Broadly speaking, Chartism was used Chartist historians, argues that Ashton was "‘the to explore issues of class and locality in the 1960s most radical and Chartist of all the factory towns’" and 1970s. This mutated into a focus on Chartism (quoted on p. 2). Hall commences the book by not‐ as an attempt to create a new way of life and to ing that there were fourteen thousand signatures generate forms of democratic participation that from Ashton on the 1842 Chartist petition, which went beyond the right to vote. It says something amounted to 62 percent of the town’s population. about the significance of Chartism that, in the However, the reader would be wrong to assume 1980s, the critique of traditional labor history that Hall is simply going back to the kind of ap‐ (much of it generated by the Left) was partly ex‐ proach found in Briggs’s Chartist Studies with its pressed through discussions of the movement. Ex‐ discreet accounts of the movement’s history in a amining the peculiarities of its language and polit‐ range of different localities. Hall is interested in ical arguments, Gareth Stedman Jones’s rethink‐ Ashton as an example of the smaller, medium- ing of Chartism queried the Marxist analysis that sized factory town, which, he argues, was more saw the movement as a product of industrial-capi‐ characteristic of the movement than the large talist society.[1] Since Stedman Jones, Chartism cities studied in the Briggs collection. Moreover, has been interpreted in terms of gender and na‐ he is concerned to develop a perspective that ex‐ tional identities, while there has also been a plores Chartism through the relationship between greater focus on Chartist fction, literature, and the culture of the national movement and one of poetry, once routinely ignored. A lot of research its most important centers. The book is not a (evident in the Merlin Press series) has gone into study of Ashton Chartism or Chartism as a whole uncovering more about Chartist lives and consid‐ but of the complex interplay between the two. The ering the movement in terms of the development pitfall with this approach (which the book does of the press and mass communications. not always avoid) is the danger of falling between two stools. Hall insists he is not offering a micro- This is the context within which we should history of the Ashton community, but the book read Robert G. Hall’s new book on the movement. sometimes lacks a sense of place, which would The title is presumably meant to allude to Patrick have been useful to the argument. However, at its Joyce’s Visions of the People: Industrial England best, the book offers a productive way of thinking and the Question of Class, 1848-1914 (1991), one about local history in a sophisticated and complex of the key revisionist works on Victorian political way. What matters to Hall are issues of identity, culture. Voices of the People is also a contribution democracy, and political strategy. to what is increasingly being called “Post-Chartist Studies.” Unlike the generation of the 1960s who The book begins with an examination of mule were interested in radicalism up to the early spinning in Ashton, which grounds the interpreta‐ 1850s, Hall insists that we need to look at how tion in a material base. The chapter is intended Chartism related to different forms of radicalism not just to alert the reader to a part of the eco‐ and liberalism in the mid-Victorian period. This nomic history of Ashton but also to raise issues yoking together of the Chartist and post-Chartist about gender and skill. This focus on the labor periods has been one of the most distinctive shifts process and the politics of work seems curiously in the history of radicalism over the last twenty cut off from the rest of the book as workplace is‐ years. sues only reappear from time to time. Hall goes on to examine the kinds of political arguments At one level, the book is a study of the politics that Ashton Chartists deployed. For example, they of Ashton-under-Lyne from 1830 to 1870. In itself, developed their own view of British history, this is long overdue. Dorothy Thompson, doyen of 2 H-Net Reviews which refused elite constructions of the past in fa‐ meant to be a stepping stone toward further re‐ vor of a narrative that stressed the ongoing strug‐ forms that aimed for material improvements in gle for liberty. Democracy was not some foreign working-class life. innovation but an essential part of what it meant The key passage that defines Hall’s approach to be British. Radical banquets toasted the memo‐ comes when he argues that Ashton Chartism ries of Tom Paine and Wat Tyler. The spirit of rad‐ “broke through to a broader and more revolution‐ ical patriotism ran through Ashton Chartists, al‐ ary sense of itself as a class movement” but that though I was delighted to read about the Chartists “this vision was feeting and elusive.” He goes on who put on a reportedly popular play at various to argue that “there was a constant tension in local venues about the Irish revolutionary Robert Chartist politics between class antagonism and a Emmet. There was later a union between Chartist longing for class conciliation” (p. 55). I have al‐ and Irish Confederates in 1848. At these moments, ways been persuaded about the militancy of the Hall really captures the texture of early Victorian Ashton situation (and indeed Hall is right to argue popular politics. that Ashton was by no means untypical), but the Ashton Chartists did not have things all their “revolutionary” character of the local situation is own way. Hall recognizes the existence of the lo‐ perhaps open to question. There was mass arming cal Operative Conservative Association and in‐ and there were attempts at a general strike in deed the appeal of Tory radicalism. I was sur‐ 1842, but that is not quite the same as arguing prised that Joseph Rayner Stephens, a significant that a revolutionary situation existed as opposed local fgure (sometimes described as a radical to a moment of serious civil disorder. Hall sees Tory), did not feature in the book quite as much this militancy as the product of a particular con‐ as one might have expected. The extent to which vergence of political and economic crises in the Stephens was an actual Chartist is, of course, ar‐ later 1830s. Social reform and economic improve‐ guable, but he was one of the prominent individu‐ ment thereafter “undermined the movement’s als associated with the movement in its early sense of identity and mission,” although Hall does years. argue that economic improvements in mid-Victo‐ rian Ashton were patchy (p. 109). In general, Hall Following the work of Anna Clark (The Strug‐ is at his best when he talks about the ambiguities gle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of of Chartist radicalism and the competing and of‐ the British Working Class [1995]) and Jutta ten contradictory forces that shaped strategy. Schwarzkopf (Women in the Chartist Movement [1991]), there has been a tendency to view Char‐ Hall is concerned about the relationship of tism as shaped by a form of gender politics that national leaders and supporters in Ashton.

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