The New Reasoner Spring 1959 number 8 Review 139 The Chartist Challenge. A. R. Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge (Heinemann). The greatest challenge offered by the Chartist Movement has been to its historians. A movement which swept the country, which engaged the sym- pathy or concern of some of our greatest novelists and moralists, and which influenced both intellectual life and government policies to a degree which has not yet been seriously estimated, has left in its recorded histories a predominating impression of confusion, corruption and failure. One reason for the unsatisfactory nature of most of the histories yet written has been that they have been produced in the main by people actively engaged in the contemporary Labour Movement, who have pro- jected their own pre-occupations into the past. This is true from Gammage, who wrote whilst still deeply embroiled in the squabbles of the Chartist leadership, to the writers of the 'thirties, who looked backwards to a miniature rehearsal of their own situation. Reg Groves wrote, in his Narrative History (1937) - ' Chartism is deeply rooted in all our lives. All around us the results of its fevered struggles are evident. Everything in our democracy to-day upon which we build to further the struggle for Socialist power can be traced back to the Chartist Movement ... In ten years of its life Chartism tested out the weapons of Petition, of General Strike and of Insurrection: in those ten years it went over the problems and con- troversies which still agitate the Labour Movement ... In the course of the struggle, the relative parts played by the trade unions and the political party in the class war were clearly shown ... ' Not all the histories of the movement make quite such specific demands on the past, but underlying nearly all is the attempt to draw a contemporary moral, and hence, almost inevitably, the historian identifies himself with one or other tendency or sect. The moralising and lesson-drawing have preceded, instead of following, deep research into the facts. A. R. Schoyen's book must in many ways be considered to be the first important work on the Chartist movement. In spite of its title, it is written as a straight biography of George Julian Harney, with very little moralising, and with its central figure placed firmly in his own intellectual and social context. Harney is a particularly good figure to take as central to a study of Chartism. For its most important years he was editor of O'Connor's Northern Star, the paper which led and followed the movement in all its greatest periods of activity. He was one of the few leading figures who entered Chartism in its earliest days - coming in straight from an active part in the dramatic and principled fight against the stamp duties on news- papers which is one of the highlights of nineteenth century radical action - and remained active throughout the years of its mass influence. He lived to a very great age, remaining a radical to the end of his days, and his biographer is spared the tedious task of chronicling any of the obscure by-ways, from Unitarianism to Phrenology, into which so many erstwhile Chartists penetrated after the end of the movement. What is more, although he had his share of policy disagreements with other leaders, he was a man without the great personal vanity which made O'Connor, Jones, O'Brien and others indulge in so much bitter recrimination. W. E. Adams, the liberal editor of the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, who had grown up in the 140 The New Reasoner Review 141 Chartist movement and had known most of the leaders, considered that national context. It would be grudging to complain that the other per- ' No man had left behind so fair a record as George Julian Harney.' sonalities, particularly of the Chartist movement, are not drawn as clearly Harney was above all a journalist. His following in the movement was as they might be. Nevertheless, a short thumbnail sketch to accompany the amongst the thoughtful, younger members - men like Thomas Frost and introduction of the more important of Harney's associates would have W. E. Adams, young printers, aspiring journalists themselves, who saw in enlivened the book and made it more acceptable to the general reader. In his republicanism, internationalism, and his iconoclastically rational the case of Ernest Jones, the criticism goes further, for Mr. Schoyen con- approach to all institutions something which went beyond the bread and sistently underestimates him. He says of Harney - ' No English working- butter Chartism of some of the older leaders. It is understandable, there- class leader had had such a close contact with the continental socialists fore, that Mr. Schoyen has made most use in his book of Harney's pub- before 1848 ...', but there is surely evidence that Jones had at least as much lished writings. It seems very strange, though, that a man who lived for contact in the period 1847-48. He had the great advantage of a thorough so long, and who was a public figure for the greater part of his life, should knowledge of French, German and Italian, and he was welcomed at the have left so little record of his private personality. True, Harney belonged German workmens' clubs, for instance, as the ' most popular and able of to a class which tends not to keep papers. His family were working-class the Chartists' (F. Lessner: Sixty Years in the Socialist Movement). Jones folk who would not have had the room to store the mass of family trivia was a barrister a spellbinder, and, in many ways a less attractive character and day to day correspondence that has. for instance, survived Ernest than Harney. But the great period of Chartist internationalism was the Jones. But among the various caches of papers left by Marx and Engels - time of their close collaboration - on the editorial staff of the Star, and perhaps in the Amsterdam Institute of Social History, or in the Marx- on the committee of the Fraternal Democrats. Engels Institute in Moscow - there must be some letters of Hatrney's which This is a book which places Chartism firmly back in the nineteenth will throw more light on the man himself. Until these come to light, we century. In reading it we get a fuller picture of the development of must share the chagrin of the author, whose preface is mainly devoted to thought amongst the serious leaders of the working-class, as well as of the bewailing the almost complete lack of personalia. effects of the state of trade and other economic factors on the actions of The collected correspondence of Marx and Engels during the active period the people. Harney emerges, not as a fore-runner of the modern movement, of Chartism has been drawn upon quite extensively. This is fascinating, particularly in view of the lack of other personal comments. But the sharp, nor as an imperfect disciple of Marx, but as a man striving with all his almost contemptuous tone of some of their references to Harney should available equipment to interpret the needs of his own time in terms of probably not be taken too seriously. Their comments on other figures, action; as such he can be seen as one of the great figures of the century. Ernest Jones among others, are also so sharp as to be almost bitter at times, but these, like Harney, were personal friends, and it must be Dorothy Thompson. remembered that the letters were written usually in great political excite- ment, and were, in any case, exchanged in privacy, between two very close friends. Certainly, in spite of the waspish tone of some of their references to Harney, he continued to admire them both, and to maintain a friendly correspondence with them. In 1885 he was still writing to Engels, who con- tributes a pathetic picture of the old Chartist in a letter to Paul Lafargue - ' I had a letter last week from old Harney; he sailed the 12th October, much too late for his condition of body and of course arrived rheumatic and gouty all over. But he could not leave England which he adores while he hates America, and if he lives he says he will come again next Spring and live and die in England. Poor fellow - when the Chartist movement broke down he found himself adrift, and the glorious time of free trade and prosperity in England was indeed enough to drive a fellow to despair. Then he went to Boston, only to find there, in an exaggerated form and ruling supreme, those very things and qualities which he hated most in England. And now when a real movement begins on both sides of the Atlantic amongst the English-speaking nations, he is too old, too decrepit, too much an outsider and - too patriotic to follow it. All he has learnt in America is British chauvinism.' Harney did, indeed, survive Engels, and returned to spend his last years in England, but it was a sad old age, and he used to describe himself as ' a straggler from 1848 '. In following Harney's long life, the book gives a lively and readable account of a number of radical movements. Harney's ideas as shown in his writing, are clearly examined and placed in their national and inter-