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.

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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

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

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Programme ID: m001hx7n

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

Auto-category: 941.081 (History of Great Britain—Victorian period, 1837–1901)

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.