Malcolm Chase (1957-2020)

Malcolm Chase, who has died aged sixty-three, was a strong supporter of History Workshop and a great embodiment of its ideals. He was steeped in the work of E. P. Thompson and cared passionately about history from below. One of the distinguishing features of Malcolm’s work was his deeply felt commitment to reconstructing the lives of the poor and taking their politics seriously. Like Thompson, he was particularly strong on the tone of workers’ voices in the past. In a remarkably productive career, over the last quarter century, he became an important historian of nineteenth-century British radicalism and the leading authority (in a crowded field) on Chartism. Heavily committed to adult education, he was a gifted teacher and mentor to a large number of students. In his funeral address for Malcolm, Robert Poole noted that the same words would often come up when people spoke about him: ‘inclusive, generous, open-minded, careful, engaging, insightful, humane’. The sorrow felt by friends, colleagues and readers following his death expresses the feeling that a major historian and an empowering presence in the life of the scholarly left has now gone.

Art · Feeling · Genealogy · Literature · Media studies · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Quarter (Canadian coin) · Sociology · Sorrow · Supporter · Tone (literature) · Canadian Identity and History · History · Law · Psychology · Race, History, and American Society · Social Psychology · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies