Chartism: a New History

Malcolm Chase
Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007, ISBN: 9780719060878; 421pp.; Price: £18.99
Queen Mary University of London
https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/699
Date accessed: 21 September, 2023
The campaign for the ‘People’s Charter’, a democratic movement which thrived in the decade after 1838, was probably the most important mass movement in British history. Chartism captivated contemporaries and has had a magnetic attraction for historians, generating over 100 books and articles in the last decade alone. Some of the best contributions to that literature have come from Malcolm Chase, whose superb new book provides the first modern account of Chartism in its entirety. Sweeping across the whole of the British Isles and covering the entire duration of the movement, Chase has written a work of genuine importance and interest.
The sheer scale of Chartism remains astonishing, and Chase has an eye for the telling detail. The National Petition of 1842 covered six miles of paper and claimed 3.3 million signatures, equivalent to about a third of the adult population of Britain. There were branches from the Scottish Highlands to the north of France, and mass meetings drew crowds of 200,000 at Holloway Head, 300,000 at Kersal Moor and perhaps as many as half a million at Hartshead Moor. This was mass organisation on an unprecedented scale, and it created near panic among the governing classes. As Charles Greville confided to his diary, ‘there is no military force in the country at all adequate to meet these menacing demonstrations’ (p. 61).
Thomas Carlyle once described the Chartists as ‘wild, inarticulate souls … unable to speak what is in them’.(1) It was not one of his more penetrating observations; for, as Chase makes clear, Chartism was articulate to the point of logorrhoea. Its orators spent months at a time on the road, criss-crossing the country like itinerant preachers in the Chartist Church. From June 1838 to August 1839, Feargus O’Connor alone spent 123 days on the road and made 147 major speeches – a remarkable record in the infancy of the railway network. The largest Chartist newspaper, the Northern Star, had a peak circulation of around 50,000 copies a week, exceeding even The Times and giving it a claim to be considered the first truly national newspaper in Britain.
This was the more remarkable for the barriers to be overcome. Chartism relied upon those least able to purchase newspapers, to pay subscriptions or to take time off work for campaigning. Involvement could mean loss of employment, persecution by local officials and financial ruin. Men like O’Connor enjoyed a degree of protection by virtue of their social status, but poorer activists could expect severe penalties from the courts. Many Chartists had their health, if not their spirits, broken by solitary confinement, poor nutrition and the treadmill.
Chartism was not just a political programme, it was a new and dynamic form of working-class culture. Fittingly, then, what Chase offers is less a political narrative than a cultural history. Petitioning and mass organisation are set alongside Chartist concerts, amateur dramatics and dances. He describes the Chartist schools and co-operatives, the homes decorated with prints from the Northern Star, and the letters signed affectionately, ‘Yours in Chartism’. Chase writes particularly well on the Chartist press, which cultivated a new print culture embracing poetry and religion as well as politics. The practice of reading articles aloud, together with the declamatory style of the radical press, blurred the divide between oral and written communication. These readings, for Chase, were ‘almost theatrical events’, which located Chartism ‘at the cusp of the transition from a largely oral to a mainly print-based popular culture. Through the Northern Star, O’Connor especially was able to thrive in both worlds’ (p. 45).
Chartism was national in scale but very personal in application, and Chase writes convincingly on the relationship between the two. The National Charter Association (NCA) was ‘the first national political party in history’; its president ‘Britain’s first, formally elected national political leader’ (pp. 162–3); but it was individual experience that gave meaning and force to the Chartist diagnosis. Chartism was fired by the lived experience of suffering – men evicted from their jobs; women shaved of their hair in the workhouse; children lost to disease and malnutrition. The proliferation of ‘Fearguses’ and ‘Bronterres’ on the baptismal register marked symbolic – and very public – declarations of allegiance, requiring courage in the face of clerical disapproval. At periodic intervals, the church became a battlefield in other ways, too. Chartists would descend en masse for Sunday Eucharist, dressed in their working clothes and occupying the private pews reserved for wealthy parishioners. The authority of the Bible was turned against its exponents, with James 5:1 a favourite text: ‘Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall be upon you’.
Chase does not disguise his respect for the Chartists, but nor does he conceal the divisions, tactical blunders and sheer incompetence to which they fell victim. His account is broadly chronological, following the classic arc of Chartism from its rise in 1838, through the pivotal year of 1842, to the collapse of the movement after 1848. He warns repeatedly, however, against a crude perception of rise and fall. Chartism, he shows, was a protean entity, which switched between a range of different forms. Even during ‘the Doldrums Years’, from 1843 to 1846, the movement nurtured benefit societies and popular education, as well as greater co-ordination between trade unions. Chase is reluctant to assign an end-point to the movement, for he sees it less as a structure than as a social ethic: ‘an endeavour to improve every dimension of human life’ (p. 270). As the coherence of the movement was lost, the Chartist ethic was absorbed into municipal politics, trade unionism and the burgeoning Liberal party. Even at its peak, it had been difficult to distinguish between ‘Chartist’ and ‘non-Chartist’ forms of activity. As Richard Otley told the jurors at his trial, ‘In the manufacturing districts there are, at least, four out of every five of the working classes, that either are actually Chartists, or hold Chartist principles. This being the case, it is quite impossible that there should be a turnout for wages, without having a great number of Chartists among the turnouts’ (p. 213).
One of the great successes of the book is its emphasis on women’s involvement. As Chase demonstrates, ‘Female participation was a crucially important factor in shaping Chartism’ (p. 41). The campaign against the New Poor Law – one of the engines of Chartism – was driven by women activists, and women were also to the fore in exclusive dealing and popular education. If O’Connor inclined towards the sentimental in his appeals to women – promising, for example, ‘to give the fond wife back to her husband, and the innocent babe back to its fond mother’ (pp. 268–9) – his listeners proved rather more robust. When Vincent was attacked at a meeting in Cirencester, it was the women in the crowd who hunted down the perpetrators and dealt out ‘a good thrashing’ (p. 42). The female Chartists of Ashton warned ominously that no man but a Chartist would ‘enjoy our hands … or share our beds’ (p. 267).
The iconography of Chartism acknowledged women’s involvement, depicting both male and female workers on the NCA membership card (p. 163). Nonetheless, as Chase shows, ‘the majority of male activists saw women as fulfilling a subaltern role’. Chartism drew heavily on a romanticised image of pre-industrial society, ‘in which the male was the breadwinner and the woman a wife and mother’ (p. 43). Women were hardly ever elected to formal positions in the movement, and the increasingly masculine culture of Chartism may explain why women’s involvement dropped over time, falling from 13–20 per cent of signatories in 1839 to a maximum of 8 per cent nine years later.
Women were also disproportionately active in religious movements, and Chase does an important service in restating the significance of Chartist religion. The rhetoric of Chartism was steeped in Christianity: as Ernest Jones put it in 1850, ‘Christ was the first Chartist, and Democracy is the gospel carried into practice’ (p. 338). The Revd. J. R. Stephens was more direct: ‘The Lord Jesus Christ … was the prince of Jack Cades!’ (p. 30). Chartism drew on the dissenting tradition of England and Wales as well as the Covenanters of Scotland, and both its organisation and its open air meetings owed a considerable debt to Methodism. Historians of Chartism have sometimes been uneasy of its religious language, seeing this primarily as a rhetorical strategy to turn established authority against itself. But as Chase makes clear, ‘a radical social gospel’ was at the very heart of Chartist thought (p. 141). He presents Chartism as a religious movement as well as a political campaign, drawing powerfully on the evangelical revival. Even O’Connor – to whom ‘religion meant little’ (p. 269) – recognised its significance to his followers. He was careful to distinguish his land plan from the sceptical rationalism of the Owenites, condemning as ‘a national evil … the infidelity [with] which Mr. OWEN and all the principal leaders of Socialism interlard their system’ (p. 250).
Perhaps inevitably, O’Connor casts a large shadow across the book. Chase’s account is broadly sympathetic, though there is no attempt to hide his many faults. O’Connor’s appeal lay partly in his rhetorical gifts and partly in his status as a ‘gentleman radical’. He projected himself as a foot-soldier, ‘promoted from the ranks of the aristocracy to a commission in the democracy’, and gave visual expression to this concept by wearing a suit of fustian cloth on his emergence from prison in 1841 (pp. 183–4). If the attention paid to O’Connor is sometimes to the detriment of other leaders, his imagination and charisma are skilfully conveyed. So, too, is the tightrope he had to walk between constitutionalism and physical violence. As the Northern Star put it, in a typical act of ambiguity, ‘Beware of the trap! THE TIME FOR FIGHTING HAS NOT YET COME’ (p. 40).
From about 1843, O’Connor’s energies were consumed by the Chartist Land Plan. Chase sees the Land Plan not as an ‘alternative to, or deviation from, Chartism’, but as a practical demonstration of ‘how society would be reconstituted under the Charter’ (p. 253). Given the poverty of its constituency, the scale of investment in the scheme was extraordinary. At its peak, there were at least 70,000 weekly subscribers spread across more than 600 local branches, while five model settlements were established as a living demonstration of Chartist principles. The Land Plan filled the vacuum created by the declining fortunes of the mainstream movement. It had the particular advantage, as O’Connor recognised, that it flourished in good times when radicalism was traditionally in retreat. It is no coincidence that when the Land Plan went bust in the 1850s, Chartism as a national movement expired with it. Its finances in ruins, the Land Plan was wound up by Act of Parliament in 1851. A year later, O’Connor was committed to an asylum.
Chase intersperses his account with a wealth of intriguing detail. There are passages on Chartist costume, on anti-Semitism and race, and on the regional diversity of the Chartist experience. He writes excellently on the torch-lit demonstrations that so frightened contemporaries, exploring the practical reasons for their prevalence and their insidious effect on Chartist rhetoric. Flashes of humour remind us that Chartism could be ‘immense fun’ (p. 142). George Julian Harney entertained the jurors at his trial by claiming to have been misreported: he had urged his followers to carry ‘biscuits’, not ‘muskets’ (p. 84). There are fascinating insights into O’Connor’s veneration for Sir Robert Peel, and his claim in 1846 that ‘for five years Peel has led an incipient Chartist Movement’ (pp. 272–3). O’Connor published a fulsome obituary of the former premier in 1850, and Peel was even added to the Chartist portraits issued by the Northern Star. Sandwiched between ‘Louis Kossuth’ and ‘The Presidents of the USA’, one can only imagine Peel’s distaste.
Chase also offers a series of ‘Chartist Lives’, which punctuate the narrative and bring out the diversity of the radical experience. A biography of John Watkins precipitates a discussion of Chartist poetry. Ann Dawson, whose sampler adorns the back cover of this book, inspires a reflection on Chartist children and of family life in O’Connorville. William Cuffay prompts an exploration of racial attitudes and the relationship between the Chartist movement and American abolitionism. Many of those covered were known only in their localities, and Chase shows how much can be learnt about the movement from the skilful use of microhistory.
Chartism is a vast subject, and even a large book cannot cover everything. Chase’s knowledge of Chartism is probably unrivalled, so it is a pity that he does not tackle more directly some of the great interpretative questions associated with the movement. There are hints and pointers throughout the manuscript, but the lack of a concluding chapter can make it difficult to be sure precisely where Chase stands. He insists, early in the text, that while Chartism ‘cannot be explained without reference to economic conditions’, economic cycles ‘explain no more than the timing of the peaks of Chartist activity’. Chartism was ‘a profoundly politicised response to recent political history’, and ‘not mere hunger politics’. (pp. 19–20, 270). Yet he clearly has reservations about analyses that privilege the political response to Chartism, like the work of Gareth Stedman Jones.(2) In ‘accounting for the decline of Chartism’, Chase writes, ‘Peel’s legislation is certainly not a sufficient explanation’ (p. 273). It is not clear, however, what interpretative structure he erects in its place. Chase identifies ‘an understandable drift towards the politics of the possible’ (p. 333) – but the idea that there was a ‘politics of the possible’, in the absence of transformative constitutional change, marked a critical breach in the Chartist understanding of politics.
The book is stronger on what it was like to be a Chartist than on why Chartism superseded other forms of protest. For a period of about a decade, Chartism infused a campaign for the franchise with a degree of mass enthusiasm that has never been replicated. The movement succeeded in channelling a great array of particular grievances – ranging from starvation wages and the unstamped press to the poor law and the new police – behind a movement for constitutional rights, in a manner that no other movement was to equal. For most of the century, radicals found it rather difficult to agitate the masses on electoral reform. Chartism was an anomaly on an epic scale, and one that needs explanation.
Chartism has been of particular interest to historians of class and of the languages by which class is understood. The movement has been seen, at different times, as a progenitor of working-class consciousness, as a new articulation of older radical tropes and as a throwback to pre-industrial ways of thinking. Marx was famously ambiguous about the movement: though he hailed the Chartists on one occasion as ‘saviours of the whole human race’ (p. 289), he suspected Ernest Jones in particular of a form of ‘feudal socialism’. Chase tends to emphasise the pre-industrial flavour of Chartist rhetoric, but it would be useful to know more clearly where he locates himself in this debate.
It should not be thought that Chase ignores these questions, for his analysis throughout the text is wonderfully sensitive to the language, iconography and historical reference of Chartism. There is abundant material for those who wish to draw their own conclusions, and it is in this respect that Chase makes his finest contribution. His account of Chartism is subtle, wide-ranging and richly detailed, synthesising a lifetime of research and engagement. Both students and scholars can mine it for their own areas of interest, assisted by a full and intelligently ordered index. Chartism: a New History is an excellent work of scholarship, which makes richly rewarding and highly enjoyable reading.
Notes
- Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (London, 1840), p. 6.Back to (1)
- G. Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983).Back to (2)
Author's Response
I am delighted that Chartism: a New History has received such a comprehensive and enthusiastic review. There is nothing in it with which I could possibly take issue. Robert Saunders’s review is itself a vivid exposition of what Chartism was, and why it continues to matter to British historians. However, I welcome this opportunity to address more directly ‘the great interpretative questions associated with the movement’ about which the book is seemingly reticent, as Dr Saunders points out in his concluding paragraphs. Following him I take these questions to be the relationship of Chartism to the fortunes of the British economy; the impact on the movement of political responses to it (in particular Peel’s ministry, 1841–6); its anomalous appearance as the one epic mass agitation for electoral reform in modern Britain; what Chartism became in the absence of transformational constitutional change; and finally, Chartism in relation to class, and the languages by which class is understood.
Writing the book, I took a conscious decision to dispense with both an introductory historiographical survey, and a concluding overview of the movement’s turbulent two decades-long history. I did so for two reasons. While avoiding, I hope, the fallacy that it is possible to portray history ‘as it actually happened’, I wanted my narrative to unfold as far as possible without abusing the privilege of hindsight. I also hoped readers would reach their own conclusions concerning the character of the movement, without feeling either alienated by long passages of abstraction or dragooned by the author into accepting a particular interpretation. My reasons for this were, first, that a substantial narrative of Chartism, covering the whole of its 20-year history, was long overdue. I hoped to supply this gap with a volume grounded in an intensive reading of contemporary sources as well one drawing extensively on the subject’s huge secondary literature. Secondly, and more prosaically, was the problem of length. Neither author nor publisher really believed the originally contracted length of 100,000 words would suffice. Extensive discourse on the theoretical interpretation, historiography, or antecedents of Chartism had to be yielded up (as were maps and illustrations) if the text was to be brought in under 200,000 words. I still think the exclusion of a historiographical survey was a correct decision but I am less certain about a concluding chapter. So here briefly are some of the points I would have made.
That many Chartists sometimes went hungry does not mean that Chartism was merely hunger politics. However cyclical downturns in the British economy gave the movement an additional impetus, making it easier to recruit support en masseand command the attention (not necessarily sympathetic) of the social and political establishment. Furthermore, areas of systemic contraction – most conspicuously in demand for domestic-based manufacturing labour – powerfully shaped local and regional support for the movement. However, terms like ‘additional impetus’ and ‘powerfully shaped’ are preferred here because economic factors are a necessary but never sufficient explanation for Chartism.
On any dispassionate assessment of the evidence, those who called themselves Chartists had much to protest about, but why those protests were channelled into a movement for electoral reform is by no means self-evident. The text of the 1839 National Petition provides a clue. ‘We have searched diligently in order to find out the causes of a distress so sore and so long continued’, it declared. But, ‘we can discover none in nature, or in Providence. Heaven has dealt graciously by the people; but the foolishness of our rulers has made the goodness of God of none effect. The energies of a mighty kingdom have been wasted in building up the power of selfish and ignorant men, and its resources squandered for their aggrandisement’. In terms of political responses to Chartism, it is therefore easy to see that Peel’s policies might well have eroded the Chartist conviction that the State was in the hands of the selfish and self-aggrandising. The review draws attention to how Chartism: a New History shows the extent to which O'Connor venerated Peel. O’Connor, Robert Saunders remarks, ‘throws a long shadow across the book’. He did so across Chartism itself: but it is an exaggeration to suppose that ‘had the name Chartist not been coined, the radical movement between 1838 and 1848 must surely have been called O'Connorite Radicalism’.(1) The impact of Peel’s policies was ameliorative (as he intended them to be) not transformative. Furthermore, after July 1846 Peel was not in power: a continuation of genuinely disinterested government under the Whigs could not be predicted. Against the 1847 Public Health Act had to be set the reversal of fiscal reform as, against the background of the commercial crisis that autumn and the broader economic downturn that followed, income tax rose and (even more critically) the downward trend of indirect taxation stalled.
So, far from accounting for the decline of Chartism, Peel’s legislation perhaps helps explain the revival of its fortunes in 1847–48. Chartists claimed for themselves much of the credit for Whig electoral defeat in 1841 (and not a few Liberals paid Chartism the compliment of blaming it for the Tory victory). Pressure for electoral reform had now to be renewed if further ameliorative measures were to be won. Moreover the economic crisis of 1847–48 provided potentially fertile ground for Chartists and middle-class reformers to make common cause. This ground, however, rapidly slipped away in parallel with the emerging revolution in France. This might have mattered less for Chartism had London not now assumed a large place in the movement’s identity. That it did so was largely due to the combination of regional economic factors and the metropolitan drift of the movement’s executive forces (symbolised by the transfer of Northern Star from Yorkshire to London in 1844). This contrasted sharply with earlier peaks in Chartist activity, when the capital seemed close to stupor in comparison with Britain’s industrial districts.
In retrospect Chartism certainly appears anomalous, as the one epic mass agitation for electoral reform in modern Britain. It’s a nice point if even the early 20th century movement for women’s suffrage approached it in extent or potency. As Gareth Stedman Jones pointed out (in a study sometimes misinterpreted as arguing the opposite), ‘Chartism could not have been a movement except of the working class, for the discontents which the movement addressed were overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, those of wage earners, and the solidarities upon which the movement counted were those between wage earners’.(2) Giving renewed life to the ambitious hopes, but not the organisational forms, of general unionism in the years 1829–34, Chartism naturally focussed on electoral reform. It did so not least because in 1832 parliament had dramatically shown itself open to self reformation due to a potent combination of moral suasion and pressure from without. It would take rather more than just Whig declamations that 1832 was a final measure of reform, for Chartists to be persuaded that further self-reformation was out of the question. It is here that the tyranny of hindsight has most impinged on our understanding of Chartism. It was, first and foremost, a constitutional movement – constitutional in its objectives and constitutional in the form of its agitation. Neither progressive reforms nor official oppression punctured Chartism. Rather, it was the steadfast disavowal by the State that the electoral system was open to further reform that gradually blunted Chartist energies. The book takes care to analyse the debacle around the 1848 National Petition, precisely because the oft-cited allegations of fraud damaged not only the reputation of Chartism as seen from without, but also the Chartists’ own sense of rectitude. Chartism: A New History certainly does not suggest that 10 April 1848 was the point that the movement collapsed. But it does argue that the NCA executive (distracted by events in Paris) mismanaged the Petition campaign; and this, coupled with O'Connor’s misjudged handling of the Petition’s reception in the Commons, undermined the credibility of the movement and the respect – albeit grudging – that it had frequently commanded from outside its ranks.
Yet even this was not fatal to Chartism’s fortunes. As the review vividly summarises, it was a multi-faceted movement. The explanation for its demise needs similarly to be multi-causal. Among longer-term factors identified by the book is the haemorrhaging of support from women (whose participation in Chartism up to 1842 was one of its most striking features); among the short-term factors is the rapid loss of cohesion from 1849, as O'Connor’s effectiveness as a figurehead ebbed away. As far as I am aware, no study before this book has noticed the Chartist petitioning campaigns of 1849 and 1852 and the precision (53,816 and 11,834 signatures respectively) with which they document the decline of the movement.
However, it is necessary to distinguish between Chartism as a political movement and what I term Chartism as ‘a tool to think with’. Robert Saunders perceptively comments that ‘the idea there was a “politics of the possible”, in the absence of transformative constitutional change, marked a critical breach in the Chartist understanding of politics’. However, Chartists had always believed the adoption of the People’s Charter to be possible. This is why the cumulative blunting of Chartist energies, mentioned in the previous paragraph, was so significant. ‘We have now had ten years of Chartist organising, speech-making, petitioning and suffering’, the normally indefatigable George Julian Harney wrote in his address for the New Year 1849, ‘and how near are we to the enactment of the Charter?’ But the movement, as the book’s concluding chapter tries to show, equipped its supporters with the conviction and skills to confront (often successfully) political exclusion in local government, and to diminish social exclusion through energetic involvement in a wide range of voluntary initiatives. Hence Chartism: a New History characterises the movement as exhibiting both a multiplicity of small endings and a multiplicity of small victories.
This brings me, finally, to Chartism in relation to class and the languages by which class is understood – issues of critical importance ever since Stedman Jones’s ‘Rethinking Chartism’. My bookmay make relatively little use of the concept of class, but it never underplays the potency that class analyses brought to the ideology of the movement, especially from 1842. I have argued elsewhere (3) that an appropriate and necessary part of historical analysis of the years from circa1830 turns on working people’s growing awareness of their distinctive situation and common sense of political purpose. This is not to surrender to a metaphysical concept of class, in which ‘the working class’ becomes almost an historical actor in its own right, seemingly capable of independent thought and action. Nor is it to suggest that class consciousness was uniform across all occupations and localities. But the fact remains that Chartism was a national movement of unprecedented scope, intellectual reach, cultural vitality and political ambition. Belief in electoral reform, however widely adhered to, could not alone engender those qualities; neither could the reiteration of the traditional radical trope of ‘old corruption’.
In 1834 the Liberal MP John Roebuck highlighted ‘an important distinction now made by the Working Classes themselves, between the classes that live by the wages of labour, and those who live by the return to capital’. Roebuck added they believed ‘they have interests which are common to themselves as labourers ... [but] opposed to interests of the other classes of society.(4) However, this belief was not all that Chartists thought they had in common. They articulated other ‘ways of seeing’ their situation: as the politically excluded, as unwilling subjects of a corrupt state and its venal administrators, as true patriots and as ‘the People’. And the means through and by which this repertoire was articulated was not restricted to print alone. ‘Rethinking Chartism’ caused much confusion by seemingly suggesting that it was. This implication was compounded by the relatively narrow range of contemporary references it cited. (Fewer than 15 per cent of its citations of historical material relate to the years after 1839, while significantly more than half of the remainder pre-date Chartism.) More critically, ‘Rethinking Chartism’ was read as privileging print over other forms of communication – speech, ritual, iconography – and as down-playing (or perhaps even denying) the existence of reality beyond language. There was always an element of caricature about this reading, while Stedman Jones has himself recently qualified the extent to which his seminal essay shares Derrida’s conviction that ‘there is nothing outside the text’.(5)
However, even if we do confine our apprehension of Chartism to the printed word alone, it is clear that its language drew heavily on the vocabulary and conceptual apparatus of class. This was a movement deeply rooted in a shared conviction among wage-earners that their economic and political interests starkly contrasted with those of the rest of society. Too often, however, its history has been written as if this effectively is all that is needed to explain Chartism. Plainly it is not. Chartism: a New History therefore strives for a clearer understanding of the movement, accepting that it exhibited a plurality of motives. It was sprawling and it was untidy, but it was also dynamic and of enduring significance, ‘ever present to the progressive mind’.(6)
Notes
- D. Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1984), p. 96.Back to (1)
- G. Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1983), p. 95.Back to (2)
- M. Chase, Early Trade Unionism: Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour (Aldershot, 2000), pp. 138-9.Back to (3)
- J. A. Roebuck, Trades’ Unions: Their Advantages to the Working Classes (London, 1834), p. 5.Back to (4)
- See his ‘Postface’ to the French translation of ‘Rethinking Chartism’ in Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine,54, 1 (2007), 63-8.Back to (5)
- A comment by the Durham miners’ leader and Lib-Lab MP, John Wilson, Memories of a Labour Leader (London, 1910), p. 30.Back to (6)