The Chartist Imaginary

Examines the Chartist movement to argue that imaginative literature can change the political and social history of a class or nation.

First published in 1999. For the first time since their appearance in Chartist newspapers these two major radical narratives are reprinted in a single volume. The Political Pilgrim’s Progress combines Utopian politics with Bunyanesque satire to tell the story of the journey of Radical and his family from the City of Plunder to the City of Reform. Sunshine and Shadow is the only serialized novel to have been published in the Northern Star. It brings together fictional biography and historical chronicle to form the first truly working-class novel. Both texts offer a unique insight into the literary achievements of the Chartist movement, and will be a valuable and entertaining source for scholars of radical politics. The texts are fully annotated, and the editor also provides an introduction to each story and a bibliography of recent scholarship.

This book explores the contribution made by Chartist poetry to the struggle for fundamental democratic rights.

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Chartism, the British mass movement for democratic and social rights in the 1830s and 1840s, was profoundly shaped by the radical tradition from which it emerged. Yet, little attention has been paid to how Chartists saw themselves in relation to this diverse radical tradition or to the ways in which they invented their own tradition. Paine, Cobbett and other ‘founding fathers’, dead and alive, were used and in some cases abused by Chartists in their own attempts to invent a radical tradition. By drawing on new and exciting work in the fields of visual and material culture; cultures of heroism, memory and commemoration; critical heritage studies; and the history of political thought, this book explores the complex cultural work that radical heroes were made to perform.

Redressing a gap in Chartism studies, Rob Breton focuses on the fiction that emerged from the movement, placing it in the context of the Victorian novel and reading it against the works aimed at the middle-class. Breton examines works by well-known writers such as Ernest Jones and Thomas Cooper alongside those of obscure or anonymous writers, rejecting the charge that Chartist fiction fails aesthetically, politically, and culturally. Rather, Breton suggests, it constitutes a type of anti-fiction in which the expectations of narrative are revealed as irreconcilable to the real world. Taking up a range of genres, including the historical romance and social-problem story, Breton theorizes the emergence of the fiction against Marxist conceptualizations of cultural hegemony. In situating Chartist fiction in periodical print culture and specific historical moments, this book shows the ways in which it serves as a critique of mainstream Victorian fiction.

Structured around three broad sections (on ‘Ways of Being: Identity and Ideology’, ‘Ways of Understanding: Knowledge and Belief’, and ‘Ways of Communicating: Print and Other Cultures’), the volume is sub-divided into 9 sub-sections each with its own ‘lead’ essay: on subjectivity, politics, gender and sexuality, place and race, religion, science, material and mass culture, aesthetics and visual culture, and theatrical culture. The collection, like today’s Victorian studies, is thoroughly interdisciplinary and yet its substantial Introduction explores a concern which is evident both implicitly and explicitly in the volume’s essays: that is, the nature and status of ‘literary’ culture and the literary from the Victorian period to the present.

As the last leader of the Chartist movement, Ernest Charles Jones (1819-69) is a significant historical figure, but he is just as well-known for his political verse. His prison-composed epic The New World lays claim to being the first poetic exploration of Marxist historical materialism, and his caustic short lyric ‘The Song of the Low’ appears in most modern anthologies of Victorian poetry. Despite the prominence of Jones’s verse in Labour history circles, and several major inclusions in critical discussions of working-class Victorian literature, this volume represents the first full-length study of his poetry. Through close analysis and careful contextualization, this work traces Jones’s poetic development from his early German and British Romantic influences through his radicalization, imprisonment, and years of leadership. The poetry of this complex and controversial figure is here fully mapped for the first time.