The Poetry Of Chartism

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

Chartist poetry was written by and for workers. In contrast with the portrayal of workers by mainstream Victorian writers, Chartist verse is intellectual, complex, and socially conscious and reflects an international outlook.

This book is a comprehensive analysis of a neglected aspect of Chartism, its poetry. Here the Chartists are documented as poet-politicians. In order to show how much this poetry can contribute to a deeper understanding of the movement, the poems are treated as literary pieces and as historical sources. Being a mass phenomenon, these poems and songs served as a vehicle of Chartism. They not only express critical insights into society, but also, and even more so, reveal the emotions and values which brought about the mass consensus.

Can imaginative literature change the political and social history of a class or nation? In The Chartist Imaginary: Literary Form in Working-Class Political Theory and Practice, Margaret Loose turns to the Chartist Movement?Britain's first mass working-class movement, dating from the 1830s to the 1840s?and argues that, based on literature by members of the movement, the answer to that question is a resounding ?yes.” Chartist writing awakened workers' awareness of discord between professed ideals and reality; exercised their conceptual powers (literary and social); and sharpened their appetite for more knowledge, intellectual power, dignity, and agency in the present to fashion a utopian future. Igniting such self-respecting, politically transfigurative energy was a unique kind of agency Loose calls ?the Chartist imaginary.” In examining the Chartist movement, Loose balances the nervous projections of canonical Victorian writers against a consideration of the ways that laborers represented Chartism's aims and tactics. The Chartist Imaginary offers close readings of poems and fiction by Chartist figures from Ernest Jones and Thomas Cooper to W. J. Linton, Thomas Martin Wheeler, and Gerald Massey. It also draws on extensive archival research to examine, for the first time, working-class female Chartist poets Mary Hutton, E. L. E., and Elizabeth La Mont. Focusing on the literary form of these works, Loose strongly argues for the political power of the aesthetic in working-class literature.

Chartism, the mass movement for democratic rights, dominated British domestic politics in the late 1830s and 1840s. It mobilised over three million supporters at its height. Few modern European social movements, certainly in Britain, have captured the attention of posterity to quite the extent it has done. Encompassing moments of great drama, it is one of the very rare points in British history where it is legitimate to speculate how close the country came to revolution. It is also pivotal to debates around continuity and change in Victorian Britain, gender, language and identity. Chartism: A New History is the only book to offer in-depth coverage of the entire chronological spread (1838-58) of this pivotal movement and to consider its rich and varied history in full. Based throughout on original research (including newly discovered material) this is a vivid and compelling narrative of a movement which mobilised three million people at its height. The author deftly intertwines analysis and narrative, interspersing his chapters with short ‘Chartist Lives’, relating the intimate and personal to the realm of the social and political. This book will become essential reading for anyone with an interest in early Victorian Britain, specialists, students and general readers alike.

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.

The nineteenth century was a time of 'movements' - political, social, moral reform causes - which drew on the energies of men and women across Britain. This book studies radical reform at the margins of early Victorian society, focusing on decades of particular social, political and technological ferment: when foreign and British promoters of extravagant technologically assisted utopias could attract many hundreds of supporters of limited means, persuaded to escape grim conditions by emigration to South America; when pioneers of vegetarianism joined the ranks of the temperance movement; and when working-class Chartists, reviving a struggle for political reform, seemed to threaten the State for a brief moment in April 1848. Through the forgotten figure of James Elmslie Duncan, 'shabby genteel' poet and self-proclaimed 'Apostle of the Messiahdom', The Poetry and the Politics considers themes including poetry's place in radical culture, the response of pantomime to the Chartist challenge to law and order, and associations between madness and revolution.Duncan became a promoter of the technological fantasies of John Adolphus Etzler, a poet of science who prophesied a future free from drudgery, through machinery powered by natural forces. Etzler dreamed of crystal palaces: Duncan's public freedom was to end dramatically in 1851 just as a real crystal palace opened to an astonished world. In addition to Duncan, James Gregory also introduces a cast of other poets, earnest reformers and agitators, such as William Thom the weaver poet of Inverury, whose metropolitan feting would end in tragedy; John Goodwyn Barmby, bearded Pontiffarch of the Communist Church; a lunatic 'Invisible Poet' of Cremorne pleasure gardens; the hatter from Reading who challenged the 'feudal' restrictions of the Game Laws by tract, trespass and stuffed jay birds; and foreign exotics such as the German-born Conrad Stollmeyer, escaping the sinking of an experimental Naval Automaton in Margate to build a fortune as theAsphalt King of Trinidad.Combining these figures with the biography of a man whose literary career was eccentric and whose public antics were capitalised upon by critics of Chartist agitation, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in radical reform and popular political movements in Victorian Britain.