'The Chartist Legacy' is a collection of eleven essays, analysing different aspects of Chartism, the great 19th Century popular movement for social change through parliamentary reform.
Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson, and Stephen Roberts (known to some as Pugnose) assembled a diverse range of scholars to address different aspects of the movement - and the results are absolutely fascinating. Given that we now have a government who claim to be embarking on a massive programme of constitutional reform - when could be a more relevant time to explore those who have gone before? My A-level history teacher had a sign on the classroom wall which read, "Anyone not interested in history is like a leaf that doesn't realise that it is part of a tree". How true!
The collection is as diverse as the contributors, and the essays within it which I enjoyed most were those which had some connections with areas I had studied before. It begins (after Asa Briggs' introduction to the field) with Miles Taylor's piece entitled, "The Six Points and the Reform of Parliament." This was one of the few essays which took a general approach to understanding Chartism, rather than delving deeply into specific aspects of it. He argues that the traditional understanding of Chartism - in continuity with the radical tradition is mistaken. His reading is that Chartism is characterised as a new movement in response to the 1932 Refrom Act and its consequences, and as such stresses its discontinuities with the older tradition. While I felt that Taylor claimed more than he proved in this regard, it is a well-written piece which will be worth returning to.
Then there are a whole cluster of essays which present detailed research into particular strands of the Chartist story, personal, regional or ideological. These were on the whole really good reading, the fruits of massive research and some good writing too. These included, Joan Hugman's detailed study of the Chartist Newspaper the Northern Liberator, Owen Ashton on Chartist Oratory (really interesting), Roberts on the forgotten aspects of Feargus O'Connor's Parliamentary career, Pickering on O'Connor and the Irish Question and Timothy Randall's delightful contribution on Chartist poetry and song.
My favourite essays in the collection were however Jamie L Bronstein's exploration of the Chartist movement's interaction with America. This was undoubtedly because this linked up with so much of what I had previously studied. Of special interest here was the way in which English Chartists re-evaluated the extent to which parliamentary reform would be an engine for social justice, in the light of the American experience. The essay which lives most vividly in my memory however is Robert Fyson's biographical study of William Ellis, the transported Chartist. He records the suppression of this Chartist, his treatment at the hands of the courts, and his experience in the Australian penal colony to which he was confined - a fabulous twenty or so pages of living history.
The book then concludes with a detailed piece of literary criticism from Kelly Mays - so loaded with technical terminology and impossibly dense prose that I skipped it, and then two essays which focus on the decline and memory of Chartism from Robert G. Hall and Anthony Taylor. They explored the ways in which the movement was memorialised by participants and how it then interacted with the rising Liberal Party later in the century.
Ironically I found this book celebrating 19thC discontent and sedition, in a second hand bookshop in the shadow of Queen Victoria's Balmoral Castle. While a disappointingly rainy holiday meant that days in the hills were numbered, sitting in a holiday cottage with a coffee, and a view down a great Loch, with a book as multi-faceted and stimulating as this wasn't a bad substitute.
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