Land, leadership, culture, and emigration: Some problems in Chartist historiography

Historical Journal

Volumn 42, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 1093-1109

  Messner, Andrew ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW ENGLAND   (Australia)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 26444523372     PISSN: 0018246X     EISSN: 14695103     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0018246X99008663     Document Type: Review

References (109)

1. Miles Taylor, 'Rethinking the Chartists: searching for synthesis in the historiography of Chartism', Historical Journal, 39 (1996), pp. 479-95.
2. Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of class: studies in English working class history, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1983); Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: popular politics in the industrial revolution (Aldershot, 1986).
3. David Mayfield and Susan Thorne, 'Social history and its discontents: Gareth Stedman Jones and the politics of language', Social History, 17 (1992), pp. 165-88;
4. Jon Lawrence and Miles Taylor, 'The poverty of protest: Gareth Stedman Jones and the politics of language-a reply', Social History, 18 (1993), pp. 1-15;
5. James Vernon, 'Who's afraid of the "linguistic turn"? The politics of social history and its discontents', Social History, 19 (1994), pp. 81-97;
6. Neville Kirk, 'History, language, ideas and post-modernism: a materialist view', Social History, 19 (1994), pp. 221-40;
7. Patrick Joyce, 'The end of social history?', Social History, 20 (1995), pp. 73-91;
8. Marc W. Steinberg, 'Culturally speaking: finding a commons between post-structuralism and the Thompsonian perspective', Social History, 21 (1996), pp. 193-214;
9. Gareth Stedman Jones, 'The determinist fix: some obstacles to the further development of the linguistic approach to history in the 1990s', History Workshop Journal, 42 (1996), pp. 19-35.
10. Taylor, 'Rethinking the Chartists', pp. 482-6.
11. Miles Taylor, 'The linguistic turns in British social history', Bolletino del xix secolo, 4 (1995), pp. 5-13. Taylor identifies three different emphases: the 'culturalist', 'contextualist', and 'postmodern', which he equates with the work of Edward Thompson, Gareth Stedman Jones, and Patrick Joyce respectively.
12. Taylor, 'Rethinking the Chartists', pp. 494-5.
13. People's Paper, 6 Aug. 1853.
14. Taylor, 'Rethinking the Chartists', pp. 488-91.
15. Ibid., p. 492;
16. Philip Howell, '"Diffusing the light of liberty": the geography of political lecturing in the Chartist movement', Journal of Historical Geography, 21 (1995), pp. 23-38.
17. Taylor, 'Rethinking the Chartists', p. 492.
18. Ibid., p. 493.
19. Edward Royle, 'Chartism', History Today, 35 (1985), pp. 46-8.
20. Ibid., p. 48.
21. For various perspectives see Margot Finn, After Chartism: class and nation in English radical politics, 1848-1874 (Cambridge, 1993); Miles Taylor, The decline of British radicalism, 1847-1860 (Oxford, 1995); Antony Taylor, 'Modes of political expression and working-class radicalism, 1848-1874' (Ph. D. thesis, Manchester, 1992).
22. On the land plan generally see Joy MacAskill, 'The Chartist land plan', in Asa Briggs, ed., Chartist studies (London, 1959), pp. 304-41;
23. Peter Searby, 'Great Dodford and the later history of the Chartist land scheme', Agricultural History Review, 16 (1968), pp. 32-45;
24. Alice Mary Hadfield, The Chartist land company (Newton Abbot, 1970).
25. See, for example, Reg Groves, But we shall rise again: a narrative history of Chartism (London, 1938), p: 157;
26. G. D. H. Cole, Chartist portraits (New York, 1965), p. 306.
27. For re-evaluations see John Saville's introduction to R. G. Gammage, History of the Chartist movement, 1837-1854 (New York, 1969); Eileen Yeo, 'Some practices and problems of Chartist democracy', in James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson, eds., The Chartist experience: studies in working-class radicalism and culture, 1830-60 (London, 1982), pp. 343-80;
28. Malcolm Chase, 'The People's Farm': English radical agrarianism, 1775-1840 (Oxford, 1988); Malcolm Chase, '" We Wish only to Work for Ourselves": the Chartist land plan', in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck, eds., Living and learning: essays in honour of J. F. C. Harrison (Aldershot, 1996), pp. 133-48. Mention must also be made of Jamie Bronstein's 'Under their own vine and fig tree: land reform and working-class experience in Britain and America, 1830-1860' (Ph. D. dissertation, Stanford, 1996), which places the plan in an international and comparative context.
29. Thompson, The Chartists, p. 303.
30. G. D. H. Cole, A century of co-operation (n. p., 1944), p. 38.
31. For a brief discussion of O'Connor's debt to Owenite theory see Gregory Claeys, Citizens and saints: politics and anti-politics in early British socialism (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 244-7.
32. Chase, '"We Wish only to Work for Ourselves"', p. 136.
33. Annmarie Adams, 'Charterville and the landscape of social reform', in T. Carter and B. Herman, eds., Perspectives in vernacular architecture, IV (Columbia, 1991), pp. 138-45.
34. James Epstein, The lion of freedom: Feargus O'Connor and the Chartist movement, 1832-1842 (London, 1982).
35. See S. N. Eisenstadt, ed., Max Weber on charisma and institution building: selected papers (Chicago, 1968), pp. 54-65.
36. James Epstein, Radical expression: political language, ritual and symbol in England, I790-1850 (Oxford, 1994); Royle, 'Chartism', p. 47.
37. On O'Connor's illness see Laurence M. Geary, 'O'Connorite bedlam; Feargus and his grand-nephew, Arthur', Medical History, 34 (1990), pp. 125-43.
38. Paul Pickering, 'Class without words: symbolic communication in the Chartist movement', Past and Present, 112 (1986), pp. 146-62.
39. E. P. Thompson, The making of the English working class (Harmondsworth, 1968). For Hunt see John Belchem, 'Orator Hunt': Henry Hunt and English working-class radicalism (Oxford, 1985).
40. Epstein, The lion of freedom, pp. 91-3.
41. Gammage, History, p. 282.
42. Patrick Joyce, Visions of the people: industrial England and the question of class, 1848-1914 (Cambridge, 1991); Patrick Joyce, Democratic subjects: the self and the social in nineteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1994); James Vernon, Politics and the people: a study in English political culture, c. 1815-1867 (Cambridge, 1993).
43. People's Paper, 9 July 1853.
44. John Belchem and James Epstein, 'The nineteenth-century gentleman leader revisited', Social History, 22 (1997), pp. I74-93.
45. On Jones see John Saville, Ernest Jones: Chartist (London, 1952).
46. Vernon, Politics and the people, pp. 105-60 and passim.
47. See W. H. Maehl, ed., Robert Gammage: reminisces of a Chartist (Manchester, 1983), pp. 14-17.
48. Walter Ong, Oralily and literacy; the technologizing of the word (London, 1982).
49. Henry Richard Nicholls, typescript memoir of London Chartism, State Library of New South Wales, p. 1. On Nicholls see Paul Pickering, '" Glimpses of Eternal Truth": Chartism, poetry and the young H. R. Nicholls', Labour History, 70 (1996), pp. 53-70.
50. Jurgen Habermas, The structural transformation of the public sphere: an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (Cambridge, MA, 1989).
51. Jurgen Habermas, 'Further reflections on the public sphere', in C. Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the public sphere (Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 425-6.
52. See, for example, Edward Royle, Chartism (London, 1996), pp. 85-9. Compare Finn, After Chartism, ch. 3.
53. James Epstein, 'Some organisational and cultural aspects of the Chartist movement in Nottingham', in Epstein and Thompson, eds., The Chartist experience, p. 222.
54. Gammage, History, pp. 401-2
55. Ibid..
56. See, for example, John Belchem, 'The spy-system in 1848: Chartists and informers-an Australian connection', Labour History, 39 (1980), pp. 15-27. For an American perspective see R. Boston, British Chartists in America (Manchester, 1971).
57. Horatio Holyoake, Henry Holyoake, and Eliza Holyoake to Mrs C. Holyoake, 22 Apr. 1855, G. J. Holyoake collection, Co-Operative Union Library, Manchester.
58. Northern Star, 29 May 1841; David Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (London, 1975), pp. 85-7.
59. W. E. Murphy, 'Victoria', in The history of capital and labour in all lands and ages: their past condition, present relations, and outlook for the future... (Sydney, 1888), p. 118.
60. Ibid., p. 156.
61. Louis Hartz, The founding of new societies (New York, 1964); A. W. Martin, 'Australia and the Hartz "fragment" thesis', Australian Economic History Review, 13 (1973), pp. 131-47; G. C. Bolton, 'Louis Hartz', Australian Economic History Review, 13 (1973), pp. 168-76; J. B. Hirst, 'Keeping colonial history colonial: the Hartz thesis revisited', Historical Studies, 21 (1984), pp. 85-104.
62. For a brief survey of relevant literature see Weston Bate, Victorian gold rushes (Fitzroy, 1988).
63. Geof Trey Serle, The golden age: a history of the colony of Victoria, 1851-1861 (Parkville, 1963).
64. David Goodman, Goldseeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (St Leonards, 1994), p. x.
65. Ibid., p. xiii.
66. General accounts of the red-ribbon protest can be found in Bruce Kent, 'Agitations on the Victorian gold fields, 1851-1854: an interpretation', in F. B. Smith, ed., Historical Studies: Eureka supplement (Carlton, 1965), pp. 1-27; Serle, The golden age, pp. 101-18; Frank Cusack, Bendigo: a history (Melbourne, 1973), pp. 76-97.
67. Bate, Victorian gold rushes, p. 8.
68. For a typical treatment of the significance of the Chartist influence see Robin Gollan, Radical and working class politics: a study of eastern Australia, 1850-1910 (Carlton, 1967), pp. 13-32.
69. Serle, The golden age, p. 113.
70. G. Blainey, 'The gold rushes: the year of decision', Historical Studies (Australia and New Zealand), 10 (1962), p. 136.
71. Taylor, 'Rethinking the Chartists', p. 488.
72. "61 Ibid.
73. Kent, 'Agitations', p. 24; Serle, The golden age, pp. 113-15.
74. M. Hovell, The Chartist movement (Manchester, 1918).
75. On Hovell see Dorothy Thompson, Outsiders: class, gender and nation (London, 1993), pp. 27-30.
76. 6o Pickering, '"Glimpses of Eternal Truth"', p. 56.
77. Northern Star, 27 Oct. 1849.
78. Finn, After Chartism; Gregory Claeys, 'Mazzini, Kossuth and British radicalism, 1848-1854', Journal of British Studies, 28 (1989), pp. 225-61.
79. John Haslem, The old Derby china factory: the workmen and their productions (Wakefield, 1973), pp. 139-41. Dexter's wife, Caroline, was a prominent advocate of 'bloomer' dress reform.
80. Nicholls, Chartist memoirs, p. 23.
81. For the Chartist involvement in the 'Kossuth Fever' generally see Claeys, 'Mazzini, Kossuth and British radicalism', pp. 244-9; Taylor, 'Modes of political expression', pp. 59-62; Pickering, '"Glimpses of Eternal Truth"', pp. 64-5.
82. Nicholls, Chartist memoirs, p. 1; Serle, The golden age, p. 113.
83. For Harney see A. R. Schoyen, The Chartist challenge: a portrait of George Julian Harney (London, 1958). For Linton see F. B. Smith, Radical artisan: William James Linton, 1812-97 (Manchester, 1973).
84. On Reynolds see Rohan McWilliam, 'The mysteries of G. \V. M. Reynolds: radicalism and melodrama in Victorian Britain', in Chase and Dyck, eds., Living and learning, pp. 182-98.
85. Dorothy Thompson, 'Ireland and the Irish in English radicalism before 1850', in Epstein and Thompson, eds., The Chartist experience, pp. 120-51. D. Goodway, London Chartism, 1838-1848 (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 61-7. For 1848 see W. J. Lowe, 'The Chartists and the Irish confederates: Lancashire, 1848', Irish Historical Studies, 24 (1984), pp. 172-96; John Belchem, 'Nationalism, republicanism and exile: Irish emigrants and the revolutions of 1848', Past and Present, 146 (1995), pp. 103-35.
86. The petition was published in the Argus, 9 July 1853.
87. George Thomson, 'Leaves from the diary of an old Bendigonian of 1853', in T. Leavitt and W. Lilburne, eds., Jubilee history of Victoria and Melbourne (Melbourne, 1888), pp. 21-43.
88. Ibid., p. 25.
89. Serle, The golden age, p. 108, puts the number at approximately one quarter claimed by Thomson.
90. The petition is now held by the State Library of Victoria. At the time of writing the transcription forms part of a virtual exhibition on 'Life on the goldfields', which can be accessed at www.slv. vic.gov. au.
91. Argus, 22 July 1853.
92. James Epstein, 'The constitutional idiom: radical reasoning, rhetoric and action in early nineteenth century England', Journal of Social History, 23 (1989), pp. 554-8.
93. William Howitt's hostile account of a republican speech made by Dexter ('he was a citizen of the world and liked all nations') at the View Point meeting of 13 August is often cited in accounts of the red-ribbon protest. According to Howitt, after Dexter finished speaking George Thomson 'immediately rose and gave three cheers for the British flag...to which there was a thundering response, in which I joined with all my might'. See Land, labour and gold (Kilmore, 1972), pp. 223-7.
94. Examiner, 25 Aug. 1839, p. 538. On the protests see Eileen Yeo, 'Christianity in Chartist struggle', Past and Present, 91 (1981), pp. 109-39.
95. Vernon, Politics and the people, pp. 251-91.
96. Ibid., p. 263.
97. For Harrison see Bede Nairn, Geoffrey Serle, and Russel Ward, section eds., Australian dictionary of biography, 1v (Carlton, 1972), pp. 353-4.
98. Serle rated Thomson 'a good witness'. But consider the following excerpts of Thomson's description of Brown at pp. 35-6 of 'Leaves from the diary': 'He was by birth an Irishman, having been born at Bandon near Cork, had been fairly educated, and was a good Latin and tolerable Greek scholar. He had been thrown early in life upon society without either trade or profession; all pursuits of a steady character were distasteful to him...he knew nothing of goldfields grievances; but it was enough for him that they could be made the basis of an agitation of which he hoped to be leader and director... He had no fixed principles of any kind, or business capacity for organization of any kind. He was always declamatory, never logical; his speeches were appeals to the passions of his auditors rather than to their reason. '
99. Epstein, 'Some organisational and cultural aspects of the Chartist movement'; Vernon, Politics and the people; Belchem and Epstein, 'The nineteenth-century gentleman leader revisited'.
100. Eileen Yeo, 'Will the real Mary Lovett please stand up?: Chartism, gender and autobiography', in Chase and Dyck, eds., Living and learning, p. 165.
101. Argus, 22 July 1853, 19 Aug. 1853, and 1 Sept. 1853; Howitt, Land, labour and gold, p. 223.
102. Argus, 19 Aug. 1853.
103. Ibid..
104. Howitt, Land, labour and gold, p. 223.
105. Thomson, 'Leaves from the diary', p. 28.
106. Ibid..
107. Cusack, Bendigo, pp. 4-6 and 100-3.
108. Gerald Massey, 'The deserter from democracy (alias, that blasted Bezer!) ', in Frank G. Black and Renee M. Black, eds., The Harney papers (Assen, 1969), pp. 45-6.
109. John James Bezer, 'The autobiography of one of the Chartist rebels of 1848', in David Vincent, ed., Testaments of radicalism: memoirs of working class politicians, 1790-1885 (London, 1977), PP-I53-87.