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Chartism

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 19th-century campaign for greater democracy: the changes demanded in the People's Charter included votes for all men and secret ballots.

On 21 May 1838 an estimated 150,000 people assembled on Glasgow Green for a mass demonstration. There they witnessed the launch of the People’s Charter, a list of demands for political reform. The changes they called for included voting by secret ballot, equal-sized constituencies and, most importantly, that all men should have the vote.

The Chartists, as they came to be known, were the first national mass working-class movement. In the decade that followed, they collected six million signatures for their Petitions to Parliament: all were rejected, but their campaign had a significant and lasting impact.

With

Joan Allen
Visiting Fellow in History at Newcastle University and Chair of the Society for the Study of Labour History

Emma Griffin
Professor of Modern British History at the University of East Anglia and President of the Royal Historical Society

and

Robert Saunders
Reader in Modern British History at Queen Mary, University of London.

The image above shows a Chartist mass meeting on Kennington Common in London in April 1848.

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51 minutes

Last on

Thu 9 Feb 2023 21:30
Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4

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LINKS AND FURTHER READING

CONTRIBUTORS







READING LIST

Joan Allen, Joseph Cowen and Tyneside Radicalism (Merlin, 2007)

Joan Allen and Owen Ashton (eds), ‘Radicals, Chartists and Internationalism’ (Labour History Review, 78.1, 2013)

Joan Allen and Owen Ashton (eds), ‘New Perspectives on Chartism’ (Labour History Review, 74.1, 2009)

Joan Allen and Owen Ashton (eds), Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press (Merlin, 2005)

Owen Ashton and Paul Pickering, Friends of the People: Uneasy Radicals in the Age of the Chartists (Merlin Press, 2002)

Owen Ashton, Fyson Robert and Roberts Stephen (eds), The Chartist Legacy (Merlin Press, 1993)

Malcolm Chase, The Chartists: Perspectives and Legacies (Merlin Press, 2015)

Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester University Press, 2007)

James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-class Radicalism and Culture, 1830-60 (Macmillan, 1982) 

Hamish W. Fraser, Chartism in Scotland (Merlin Press, 2010) 

David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838-1848 (Cambridge University Press, 1982)

Carl J. Griffin, Protest, Politics and Work in Rural England, 1700-1850 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)

Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution (Yale University Press, 2013)

Emma Griffin, ‘The making of the Chartists: working-class autobiography and the rise of Chartism’ (English Historical Review, 129/538, 2014)

Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846 (Oxford University Press, 2006)

D.J.V. Jones, The Last Rising. The Newport Insurrection of 1839 (Oxford University Press, 1985)

Katrina Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848 (Manchester University Press, 2016)

Paul Pickering, Feargus O’Connor: A Political Life (Merlin Press, 2007)

Paul,Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (Macmillan Press, 1995)

Neil Pye, The Â鶹ԼÅÄ Office and The Chartists, 1838-48: Protest and Repression in the West Riding of Yorkshire (Merlin Press, 2013)

Matthew Roberts, Political Movements in Urban England, 1832-1914 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)

Stephen Roberts (ed.), The People’s Charter: Democratic Agitation in the Early Victorian Age (Merlin Press, 2003)

Edward Royle, Revolutionary Britannia? Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in

Britain, 1789-1848 (Macmillan, 2002)

Edward Royle, Chartism (Longman, 1996)

Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (Macmillan, 1991)

Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism and the Romance of Politics, 1819-1869 (Oxford University Press, 2003)

Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (Temple Smith, 1984)

Dorothy Thompson (ed.), The Early Chartists (London, 1971)


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  • Thu 9 Feb 2023 09:00
    Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4
  • Thu 9 Feb 2023 21:30
    Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 4

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