Chartism

9 Feb, 2023 940 History of Europe

On 21 May 1838 an estimated 150,000 people assembled on Glasgow Green for a mass demonstration. There they witnessed the launch of the People’s Charter, a list of demands for political reform. The changes they called for included voting by secret ballot, equal-sized constituencies and, most importantly, that all men should have the vote. The Chartists, as they came to be known, were the first national mass working-class movement. In the decade that followed, they collected six million signatures for their Petitions to Parliament: all were rejected, but their campaign had a significant and lasting impact.

With

Joan Allen Visiting Fellow in History at Newcastle University and Chair of the Society for the Study of Labour History

Emma Griffin Professor of Modern British History at the University of East Anglia and President of the Royal Historical Society

and

Robert Saunders Reader in Modern British History at Queen Mary, University of London.

The image above shows a Chartist mass meeting on Kennington Common in London in April 1848.

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Guests

  • Joan Allen No other episodes
    Visiting Fellow in History at Newcastle University and Chair of the Society for the Study of Labour History
  • Emma Griffin 6 episodes
    Professor of Modern British History at the University of East Anglia and President of the Royal Historical Society
  • Robert Saunders No other episodes
    Reader in Modern British History at Queen Mary, University of London

Reading list

  • Joan Allen, Joseph Cowen and Tyneside Radicalism
    Merlin, 2007
  • Joan Allen and Owen Ashton (eds), 'Radicals, Chartists and Internationalism'
    Labour History Review, 78.1, 2013
  • Joan Allen and Owen Ashton (eds), 'New Perspectives on Chartism'
    Labour History Review, 74.1, 2009
  • Joan Allen and Owen Ashton (eds), Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press
    Merlin, 2005
  • Owen Ashton and Paul Pickering, Friends of the People: Uneasy Radicals in the Age of the Chartists
    Merlin Press, 2002
  • Owen Ashton, Fyson Robert and Roberts Stephen (eds), The Chartist Legacy
    Merlin Press, 1993
  • Malcolm Chase, The Chartists: Perspectives and Legacies
    Merlin Press, 2015
  • Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History
    Manchester University Press, 2007
  • James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-class Radicalism and Culture, 1830-60
    Macmillan, 1982
  • Hamish W. Fraser, Chartism in Scotland
    Merlin Press, 2010
  • David Goodway, London Chartism, 1838-1848
    Cambridge University Press, 1982
  • Carl J. Griffin, Protest, Politics and Work in Rural England, 1700-1850
    Palgrave Macmillan, 2014
  • Emma Griffin, Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution
    Yale University Press, 2013
  • Emma Griffin, 'The making of the Chartists: working-class autobiography and the rise of Chartism'
    English Historical Review, 129/538, 2014
  • Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846
    Oxford University Press, 2006
  • D.J.V. Jones, The Last Rising. The Newport Insurrection of 1839
    Oxford University Press, 1985
  • Katrina Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848
    Manchester University Press, 2016
  • Paul Pickering, Feargus O'Connor: A Political Life
    Merlin Press, 2007
  • Paul,Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford
    Macmillan Press, 1995
  • Neil Pye, The Home Office and The Chartists, 1838-48: Protest and Repression in the West Riding of Yorkshire
    Merlin Press, 2013
  • Matthew Roberts, Political Movements in Urban England, 1832-1914
    Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
  • Stephen Roberts (ed.), The People's Charter: Democratic Agitation in the Early Victorian Age
    Merlin Press, 2003
  • Edward Royle, Revolutionary Britannia? Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain, 1789-1848
    Macmillan, 2002
  • Edward Royle, Chartism
    Longman, 1996
  • Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement
    Macmillan, 1991
  • Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism and the Romance of Politics, 1819-1869
    Oxford University Press, 2003
  • Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution
    Temple Smith, 1984
  • Dorothy Thompson (ed.), The Early Chartists
    London, 1971

Related episodes

Programme ID: m001hx7n

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hx7n

Auto-category: 941.081 (Chartism in Great Britain and Ireland)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello. On May the 21st, 1838, an estimated 150,000 people assembled on Glasgow Green for a mass demonstration.