Chartism

Chartism was a working-class movement for parliamentary reform in the United Kingdom, active from 1838 until the late 1850s and strongest in 1839, 1842 and 1848. Named after the People's Charter of 1838, it gathered millions of signatures on mass petitions demanding votes for working men. Parliament rejected every petition and the authorities suppressed the movement, but most of its demands were enacted in later decades.

The Reform Act of 1832 extended the vote only to men of property, and working-class leaders spoke of betrayal by the middle classes who had campaigned beside them. Anger deepened with the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, which forced paupers into workhouses that split up families. Like the earlier Luddites, the Chartists drew strength from economic hardship, but their aims were political. In 1836 William Lovett and Henry Hetherington founded the London Working Men's Association.

In 1837 a committee of six MPs and six working men, Lovett among them, drew up the People's Charter, published the following year. It set out six demands: a vote for every man aged 21 or over, a secret ballot, no property qualification for MPs, payment of MPs, equal constituencies and annual elections. None was new, but together they became one of the best-known political programmes of the century. Support was greatest where workers relied on a single industry: the north of England, the South Wales valleys, the East Midlands, the Black Country and the Staffordshire Potteries. The Northern Star, owned by Feargus O'Connor, sold 50,000 copies in 1839 and was often read aloud in coffee houses, workplaces and the open air.

After huge meetings, including one on Kersal Moor near Salford on 24 September 1838, a National Convention met in London in early 1839. In June a petition with 1.3 million signatures was presented, but a large Commons majority refused to hear it. During the night of 3–4 November 1839 John Frost led several thousand marchers into Newport, Monmouthshire, where soldiers occupying the Westgate Hotel fired on them; more than twenty Chartists were killed. Frost and two other leaders were transported, and attempted risings in Sheffield and Bradford the following January were easily crushed.

A second petition, with more than three million signatures, was rejected in May 1842. That summer, amid depression and wage cuts, strikes spread from the Potteries through Cheshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands into Scotland, many demanding the Charter as well as restored wages. Because strikers pulled the plugs from steam boilers, the disturbances were called the "Plug Plot". Hundreds were imprisoned and dozens transported, though the government's mass prosecution of O'Connor and 57 others largely failed.

From 1843 O'Connor promoted a Land Company to settle workers on small plots; five estates were bought before Parliament ordered it wound up in 1848. In 1847 he was elected MP for Nottingham, the only Chartist ever to win a seat. News of revolution in Paris in February 1848, part of the Revolutions of 1848, revived the movement, and a mass meeting was called on Kennington Common in London for 10 April. The government enrolled 100,000 special constables; O'Connor cancelled the march, and the third petition was taken to Parliament in three cabs. It too was rejected.

Chartism declined quickly after 1848, and its last National Convention, in 1858, drew only a handful of delegates. Ernest Jones and George Julian Harney, who knew Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels personally, steered what remained in a socialist direction. The demands were adopted gradually by others: some urban working men gained the vote in 1867, the secret ballot came in 1872, payment of MPs in 1911 and full manhood suffrage in 1918. Only annual elections were never introduced. Transported Chartists also carried their ideas to Australia, where miners at the Eureka Stockade in Ballarat put forward Chartist demands in 1854.

Our 1815 and 1878 maps show the British Empire, whose industrial heartlands in Britain were the centre of the movement.