The Making of the Chartists

Chartism has generated one of the liveliest historiographies of the twentieth century, with the development of new linguistic and cultural approaches in the 1980s proving to be a particularly innovative line of enquiry. Yet the shift towards language and meaning has not been without a price. In particular, the tendency to frame Chartism as an intellectual force has led scholars to overlook the fact that Chartism was also a social movement, constituted, quite literally, of millions of working men and women, who had traditionally been excluded from the political sphere. This article uses working-class autobiography to restore a social-history dimension to our understanding of Chartism. It asks how a body of men with no experience of bourgeois forms of civic engagement orchestrated such a large-scale and sophisticated political campaign. How had a working-class ‘public’, with the capacity for effective political action, been created? And how, if at all, was the emergence of the world’s first workers’ movement related to the broader socio-economic context—in particular, to the processes of industrialisation and urbanisation with all the social flux they entailed

Grassroots · Working class · Australian History and Society · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes

• John James Bezer (1816–1888) and his Autobiography of One of the Chartist Rebels of 1848 (1851)

  Open Access•Madeleine Pham-Thanh•Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens•2022

  Añadir item

• Free Trade and Print Culture

  H Miller, Henry James Miller•Cultural and Social History•2017

  Añadir item

• Chartist Studies and Malcolm Chase

  Open Access•Katrina Navickas•The English Historical Review•2023

  Añadir item

• Autobiography as a Micrometer for Empire

  Open Access•Christopher Ferguson•History•2015

  Añadir item

• Politics in Schoolgirl Debating Cultures in England, 1886–1914

  Open Access•Helen Sunderland•The Historical Journal•2019

  Añadir item