As part of our Chartism Week series, the Department’s Professor David Stack reflects on the place of Chartism in his development as a historian.

What Chartism means to me

I first encountered Chartism as a teenager, when I took a book on Karl Marx out of the school library. I am sure there was much in that book I did not understand, but the passage that troubled me most was a quote from Marx in which he referred to the Chartists, and I didn’t know who or what they were. For context, I should add that mine was a highly politicised upbringing, steeped in trade union politics, especially the politics of the then General and Municipal Workers Union (now the GMB). Consequently, I already knew a fair bit about Annie Besant, the matchgirls’ strike, and the rise of the ‘new unionism’ of the 1880s. Chartism, however, was a mystery. Once I found out more, I was hooked. It probably helped that my discovery of Chartism coincided with the miners’ strike. That year, 1984-1985, when I was 15, was extraordinary. As a schoolboy in South London the strike was consumed vicariously through television, the Morning Star, flyers from support groups, and donating £1 of my pocket money each week to the strike fund, but even at a distance it shaped my initial understanding of Chartism.

Rightly or wrongly, the parallels struck me as compelling: ordinary working people in struggle, ranged against the full might of the state. On the one side a reasonable ‘demand’; on the other, the police, the courts, and the press. The Chartists had divided internally on the question of ‘moral’ or ‘physical force’ tactics, and something similar seemed to divide the miners. The Chartists had been led by the charismatic Feargus O’Connor, a man who inspired devotion, so closely was he able to identify with the ‘blistered hands and unshorn chins’ of his followers. The President of the National Union of Mineworkers, Arthur Scargill, possessed the same strengths, and some of the same weaknesses. There was also the geography. Chartism was a national movement, but its heartlands were Yorkshire, Lancashire, the North East, South Wales, and Scotland; foreign lands to me, but the sites of the main coalfields whose names were the daily staple of news bulletins.

And then there was the defeat.

When I got to university, my first undergraduate essay was on ‘Why Did Chartism Fail?’ It didn’t, I answered indignantly. Sure, none of the Six Points were achieved in the lifetime of the movement, but that was not the key test. The success of Chartism I argued, drawing heavily on a point made by Edward Royle, had been its existence. At a time of intense poverty, urbanisation, and industrialisation, when ordinary people were being stripped of their identities by social and economic change, Chartism gave autonomy and self-respect to millions. The Chartist schools, the Chartist churches, the songs, the poetry, the mass meetings, the gathering to hear a literate friend read aloud from the Northern Star, the pride in having a membership card for the National Charter Association, the hope inherent in the Chartist Land Plan, and, most fundamentally, the dignity in being able to call oneself a Chartist, that – I thought then and I still think now – was the success of Chartism.

It was not an argument that would have impressed my future PhD supervisor, Gareth Stedman Jones. His revisionist essay ‘Rethinking Chartism’, which first appeared in 1982, and then in an expanded version a year later, set aside the predominant focus upon the social character of the movement, and insisted instead that we take seriously the political case of the Chartists: they asked for the Six Points, let’s try to understand why?

Forty years on it is difficult to recapture how impassioned many left-leaning historians became about this essay. (I have been told several times the, probably apocryphal, story of the two now eminent professors who, as younger men, literally came to blows on the subject.)

The most telling criticisms of ‘Rethinking Chartism’ came from those who pointed to its insufficiency.  In applying a contextualist reading inspired by the Cambridge School of the history of political thought to Chartism, Stedman Jones gained much but somehow lost the spirit of the movement. Where was the feeling? Where was the symbolism and non-verbal communication? Where was the sense of community, and of what it meant, beyond the formal politics, to be a Chartist?

By 1991, when I started my PhD, some of the passion had dissipated, and as an aspiring intellectual historian I avoided the subject of Chartism in my thesis. But I never lost my interest. My first published article, in The Historical Journal in 1999, was on William Lovett, the Cornish carpenter who drafted the People’s Charter; eight years later I edited a collection of documents, supplemented with a lengthy introduction, chronicling the life of the great Chartist theorist James Bronterre O’Brien.

The choice of these two subjects was serendipitous – the Lovett article a by-product of another project, the O’Brien book the result of a chance encounter with the series editor – and much in my approach owed a debt to the same contextualist, intellectual history method that ‘Rethinking Chartism’ had pioneered. At the same time, the two pieces taken together also represented a longer standing interest of mine in Chartism: the often-uneasy alliance of English and Irish radicalism. The Charter itself grew out of the English radical artisan tradition but the movement was shaped fundamentally by the participation of Irish immigrant labourers, and a new breed of Irish political leaders. This, at least when I was younger, spoke to part of how I understood my own identity. In the skilled, self-educated tradesman Lovett, I saw my maternal English grandfather, an electrician by trade. In the unskilled Irish labourers, led by O’Connor and O’Brien, I saw my father. Chartism was both of them. And so was I.

But what of Chartism today?

Well, the younger me would have no problem finding out about the subject. It is now included in Key Stage 3 history, and the many online guides and resources available show that the academic study of Chartism is alive and well. I’ve even started teaching it again myself, after having rested it for a few years, and am toying with a future research project. But Chartism will never be just another academic topic for me.

The struggle the Chartists undertook – for a fairer, more equitable, and democratic society – is still with us, and Chartism today remains a living, breathing inspiration, socially and politically. 

The Chartist Anthem proclaimed this sense of a movement calling down the years:

Sons of our sons are listening,

To hear the Chartist cheers.

And one doesn’t have to search far to hear its echo.

Chartism today can be found at the food bank and the Credit Union where ordinary people help each other through hard times. Chartism is the light that exposes the corruption of our Parliamentarians. It is the working-class culture that makes music, poetry, and songs in its own image, and it is the demand for a political system that is truly representative. It is an alternative view of British history, one in which Kings and Queens and conquests are put to one side, and citizens, friends, and internationalism are celebrated. Most of all, it is the dignity and self-respect of ordinary working men and women, and their hope for a better world. That’s what Chartism means to me.

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David Stack is a Professor of History at the University of Reading, specialising in the inter-relationship of ideas and politics in the history of Britain and beyond.

All comments and opinions presented in this article are that of the author.

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