The Life and Legacy of Mark Hovell

i i i i Introduction: The Life and Legacy of Mark Hovell CHRISTOPHER GODDEN, UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER Mark Hovell, 1888–1916 (picture taken c.1915). Copyright of the University of Manchester. Mark Hovell was described as ‘one of the ablest and most promising men that the Manchester School of History has ever produced, a good scholar and forcible writer, and a man of strong and resourceful character’,1 and his death in the trenches in 1916 was said to have ‘permanently ended a career of unusual promise’.2 Recognition of Hovell’s work today rests exclusively on his early eorts, presented in the posthumous publication of his only book, The Chartist Movement (1918), to weave the history of Chartism into the social and political life of Britain. Setting Hovell’s book in context, it is important to recognise that, at the time of its publication, and despite the dramatic transformation of the political life of the British working classes throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, no sub- stantial study of Chartism had been published in English since Robert Gammage’s The History of the Chartist Movement (written from inside the movement) in 1854. What re-emerging interest there had been in the intervening period had largely come Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, Volume 94, No. 1 (Spring 2018), pp. 1–13, published by Manchester University Press. http://dx.doi.org/10.7227/BJRL.94.1.1 i i i i i i i i 2 BULLETIN JOHN RYLANDS LIBRARY from European scholars, most noticeably Edouard Dolléans’s La naissance du Char- tisme, 1830–1837 (1911) and Le Chartisme, 1830–45 (1913), Max Beer’s Geschichte des Sozialismus in England (1913) and Hermann Schlüter’s Die Chartistenbewegung (1916).3 Three volumes had appeared in 1916, all part of Columbia University’s series, Studies in History, Economics and Public Law – The Chartist Movement in its Social and Economic Aspects by Frank F. Rosenblatt, The Decline of the Chartist Movement by Preston William Slosson, and Chartism and the Churches: A Study in Democracy by Harold Underwood Faulkner. Yet despite these publications on Chartism, the noted political historian, Edward Porritt, in reviewing Hovell’s book in 1919, recognised the overall signicance of the work, adding that its author had admirably lled ‘a gap in the literature of political thought and activity in England in the nineteenth century that had been obvious for thirty or forty years’.4 Before leaving to join his regiment in France in the summer of 1916, Hovell had discussed his incomplete manuscript on Chartism with his friend and mentor, the internationally renowned medievalist and central force behind the Manchester History School, Professor Thomas Tout.5 As Tout later recalled: In saying good-bye to Hovell in July 1916 I learned from him that he had almost nished the rst dra of the book on which he had been working for several years, and I promised that, should the fortune of war go against him, I would do my best to get it ready for publication. Within a few weeks I was unhappily called upon to redeem my word.6 Hovell’s dra manuscript presented a fairly complete story of Chartism up to the strike wave of the summer of 1842. The remaining elements – ‘the declining years of the movement, including the Plug Plot of 1842, the petition and meeting on Kennington Common in 1848, and the slow ringing-down of the curtain un- der Ernest Jones’7 – were completed by Tout in a supplementary chapter, and the nalised work was published by the University of Manchester Press in January 1918. The eorts undertaken by Tout to full his pledge to his friend served as a tting memorial marking the end of Hovell’s short life. To mark the centenary of Mark Hovell’s death, a small symposium – entitled ‘Manchester Soldier, Manchester Historian: Exploring the Life and Legacy of Mark Hovell’ – was held at the People’s History Museum on 9 June 2016. This event was jointly arranged as part of the Manchester Histories Festival 2016 and the University of Manchester’s First World War centenary series,8 and the papers presented there form the basis for this issue of the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library. For newcomers to Hovell’s work, this introductory article will sketch out the main details of his life, thereby providing necessary context for the remaining articles. The most signicant source on Hovell’s life remains the admirable account written by Tout in 1917 included as an introduction to The Chartist Movement.9 It should be noted that all of the articles in this issue of the Bulletin – two dealing with Hovell’s experiences in Germany before the First World War, the other two covering aspects of his contribution to the study of Chartism – provide the most detailed accounts i i i i.

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