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Matthew Roberts. Chartism, Commemoration and the Cult of the Radical Hero. London: Routledge (2019), 2021, 250 p.

Rachel Rogers
p. 281-286
Bibliographical reference

Matthew Roberts. Chartism, Commemoration and the Cult of the Radical Hero. London: Routledge, ISBN 9780367784096, 250 p.

Editor's notes

Index Nominum William Cobbett, Daniel O’Connell, Feargus O’Connor, Richard Oastler, Thomas Paine, Gareth Stedman-Jones

Full text

1Chartism was a mass social and political movement which emerged in Britain in the mid-1830s after what was considered by many as the ‘great betrayal’ of the 1832 Reform Act and the opprobrium generated by the punitive New Poor Law introduced by the Whig ministry in 1834. The movement’s leaders and participants rallied round the ‘six points’ of the People’s Charter, a blueprint for democratic reform, which was presented to Parliament as part of a sustained petitioning campaign on three separate occasions, in 1839, 1842 and finally in 1848, the year of the mass meeting on Kennington Common in London. The demands themselves were rooted in the radical movements of previous decades, stretching back to the 1770s and the era of ‘Wilkes and liberty’. Calls for parliamentary reform and the overhaul of the existing constitution had been articulated in writing by men such as Thomas Paine and John Cartwright in the American and French revolutionary eras, and in the radical press and on the hustings respectively by William Cobbett and Henry Hunt in the post-Waterloo ‘mass platform’ years which culminated in the Peterloo massacre of 16 August 1819.

2In Chartism, Commemoration and the Cult of the Radical Hero, Matthew Roberts works through the manner in which preceding radical movements and heroic figures past and present inspired and galvanized the actions of a generation of Chartist reformers. The author explores the use that was made of this ‘pantheon’ of ‘radical heroes’ in shaping the demands, culture and tradition of an era of reform agitation which built upon the agenda of previous struggles while redefining itself for the industrialising age in which it emerged. It is worth stating that at no point does Roberts engage in a discussion, as other historians of protest and politics have done (Laurent Curelly and Nigel Smith, for instance), on the nature of the terms ‘radical’ and ‘radicalism’ in relation to late 18th and early 19th-century popular political history. Roberts takes it as a given that a radical political culture existed, and is in itself a legitimate and unproblematic object of study. The source material used in this book is vast in scope and size, the author having excavated the radical and regional press as well as an array of local and national archives.

3The book is neatly balanced in two parts. The first section, entitled ‘Inventing the Radical Tradition’, considers the commemorative nature of Chartism and the way in which its members actively drew upon and shaped in turn a ‘radical tradition’ which preceded and fed into it. To do so, the author considers popular print culture and reading practices, the centrality of banners in the movement and what Roberts calls (after Laurajane Smith and Natsuko Akagawa) the “intangible heritage” (xv) of previous struggles. He also addresses the dynamic tension between leaders and followers and the role of women in building a mass social movement.

4This part of the book, which does not aim at exhaustivity but is, as the author asserts, more akin to a collection of essays or perspectives, is enlightening on a number of fronts. Roberts considers and questions the role of ‘pantheonism’—the holding up of “an imagined community of exemplary men” (3)—in forging a Chartist political culture. He investigates how the works of radical authors were republished in the Chartist press—the Northern Star in particular—and how radical figures were commemorated by working men and women in performance art, reading practice, or in the upkeep of the rare statues of radical heroes in the public sphere. Given the contentious position of some radical figures celebrated, and their absence from state-sanctioned commemorative practices, there was a tendency to fall back on ephemeral and cheaper “makeshift monuments” (14). As a result, “[t]he Chartist home itself could become a site of the radical tradition. Its walls might be adorned with portraits of their radical heroes—past and present” (19). Children in Chartist families were also named after previous radical heroes and women were at the forefront of such domestic transmission. Roberts contests the supposed marginalisation of women in Chartist commemorative practices, arguing that “[b]y deciding which portraits to display, how to display them […] women were furnishing the very materials out of which the radical tradition was constructed” (23).

5The author also draws upon a database of 484 Chartist banners to examine ways in which Chartists engaged with a long-standing radical heritage in the visual and material culture of the movement. What is remarkable is that no Chartist banners actually survived—for reasons the author discusses—and so the database was compiled out of textual references to banners found primarily in the press. Roberts explains how Chartists dug up—sometimes literally—the banners from the Peterloo and Reform Bill eras, and used them in their own demonstrations, acts which simultaneously commemorated earlier radical campaigns and legitimated their own cause. As usual, messages on banners were ambiguous, often deliberately so, and even though the risk of prosecution for treasonable or seditious intent had faded after the repressive Six Acts of 1819, demonstrators still had to carefully navigate the channels of legality. Roberts contends that the Chartist movement migrated ‘indoors’ after the failure of the 1842 petition, engendering a decline in the use of banners, which would henceforth be used as backdrops in indoor meetings rather than held aloft in crowd actions. This is one of a number of ways in which Roberts emphasises the shifts within Chartism, from a more communal, outdoors and open movement in the 1830s to a more studied and introspective movement in the 1840s which acknowledged that the struggle for extended democratic rights would be long and arduous.

6The investigation of dining and toasting in chapter three intersects with the efforts of historians (Rémy Duthille for instance) to draw attention to the symbolic and festive practices of British radical activists in often highly charged contexts of international revolution. The author suggests that toasting past radical figures was less a way of harking back to a halcyon age of bygone liberty than a conscious attempt to create a “usable past” (57) which could have an impact on the present struggle, in forging cohesion, identity and legitimacy, boosting morale or providing “solace” (69) at times of setback. As with banners, toasts could allow critics to express things—republican affinities, revolutionary sympathy—without actually saying them. These practices are commented on further in chapter four which—drawing on a strong body of theory and scholarship in the field of ‘heritage studies’—examines the tensions within Chartism between ‘leaders’ and ‘followers’. In doing so, Roberts contributes to the deconstruction of historiographical tendencies since the 1980s which, he argues, tended to place too much emphasis on the ‘language’ of Chartism (to use Gareth Stedman-Jones’ term in his landmark essay ‘Rethinking Chartism’) rather than the circumstances and context of expression and the strategies used by radical reformers to veil more controversial sentiments and ideas. He argues that toasts could seem unifying and cohesive on the outside, but could create divergence within the Chartist movement amid disputes over which heroes to venerate. This leads to the assertion that the radical pantheon was “co-created” (98) not imposed by the leadership on the rank-and-file.

7The focus shifts in part two to consider four figures of the past or present radical tradition—international revolutionary Thomas Paine, Tory-turned-radical journalist William Cobbett, factory reformer Richard Oastler and Irish emancipation campaigner Daniel O’Connell—who, Roberts argues, were particularly influential in the Chartist movement as either ‘heroes’ or (in the case of O’Connell) ‘villains’, and whose contribution to and links with Chartism have been understated or even distorted in historical scholarship. Given the emphasis in part one on the influence and legacy of a vast array of European and American revolutionaries and freedom fighters from across the world and the ages, one might wonder why the focus in the second part is more narrowly limited to four men of a British and Irish radical tradition. The author’s choice is vindicated however in the following chapters which, in turn, deconstruct prevailing preconceptions of figures whose connections with Chartism have been, in Roberts’ view, misconstrued.

8As a cosmopolitan revolutionary, exponent of the universal rights of man and critic of hereditary monarchy, Thomas Paine was not a key influence on Chartists, or so the argument goes. Paine’s ideas, influential in the Atlantic revolutionary era of the 1790s when international brotherhood was the order of the day, had less leverage in a movement steeped in a constitutionalist idiom and intrinsically national in scope. His Deist credentials also sat uncomfortably within a movement influenced by Christian morality and popular piety. Roberts rewrites this narrative, however, arguing that there were, on the contrary, many adherents of Paineite republicanism and internationalism within the Chartist movement. The reason Chartists did not openly and consistently invoke his memory was because to do so was problematic. For presentational or ‘outward’ purposes—essentially to avoid prosecution for sedition—Chartists preferred to adhere to a more consensual ‘British constitutionalist’ position, interpreted (perhaps to excess) by Roberts as legalistic reform discourse, recalling past freedoms, and antithetical to revolutionary republicanism.

9This revisionist position is maintained in relation to the other figures identified for study in this section of the book. William Cobbett, a leading radical journalist in the mass platform era after 1815, is seen as having influenced Chartists’ fervent opposition to the issuing of paper money, a strategy which the latter saw as deepening the dependence of the state on credit and debt and impoverishing the working population in the process. As with other grievances within Chartism (the New Poor Law, the 1815 Corn Laws) the currency issue gave way to the central concern of securing the Six Points of the People’s Charter by the 1840s. Political representation was seen as the key to achieving social and economic redress for the industrial working class. Over and above consideration of Cobbett’s view on currency, further work is still required—in the mould of Ryan Hanley’s scrutiny of the question of slavery and race in popular radicalism in the Peterloo era—on Cobbett’s problematic position on transatlantic slavery (alluded to by Roberts) and the wider implications of his celebration of Andrew Jackson as a working-class underdog holding out against the exploitative banks.

10The final chapters of the book consider the position of two men who did not identify themselves as Chartists but who had strong links with the movement and who rallied people to its cause: Richard Oastler and Daniel O’Connell. Roberts suggests that even though Oastler (a campaigner for factory reform and outspoken critic of the New Poor Law) was considered a ‘Tory-Radical’ in his Huddersfield community, he was in many ways a “Chartist in all but name” (171). This analysis undercuts the view that working people supported Oastler because of his Toryism, but instead explains this support by reference to the fact that his views intersected with the principal campaign platform of Chartism and because he crystallised (as did Chartism) “popular revulsion for party politics” (157). The slight risk here—as with other conclusions drawn in this book—is that readers are encouraged to read into what was said and confer significance on what was not said openly (by Oastler, or by Chartists themselves) in order to access the ‘real’ radical views held within inner Chartist circles and those close to them. In a climate where open expression of radical ideas was still dangerous, it is certainly legitimate (as James Epstein has argued) to question the extent to which the language used by Chartists, and radicals in other eras, reflected the genuine views of its members or was a product of the particular circumstances in which they found themselves.

11Roberts’ final chapter is a vital contribution to the efforts at extending the scope of the study of British labour history and protest movements beyond national borders. He heeds the call, made in the late seventies by J. G. A. Pocock, to pay attention to the way in which national histories are shaped by the transnational frameworks and international contexts they emerge in. Roberts’ contribution to this endeavour is to argue that Daniel O’Connell, the scourge of the Chartists—for compromising on a wider franchise in his efforts to secure Catholic emancipation in 1829, for supporting the Reform Bill in 1831, for essentially selling out the working classes in an attempt to secure gradualist advances with the support of moderate middle-class reformers and Whigs—was actually not as diametrically opposed to Chartist priorities as has been suggested. On the contrary, there were significant “ideological affinities” (187) between Chartism and O’Connell’s Repeal movement, particularly in the early years. Both had roots in the Enlightenment and in the international revolutionary climate of the 1780s and 1790s (Chartists in their emphasis on rights, O’Connell in his vehement opposition to all forms of slavery); both were fundamentally about the fight for further democratic rights (the Six Points of the Chartist platform, a reformed Irish Parliament based on an extended franchise, in the Repeal movement); and both were also home-grown movements with a strong constitutionalist streak (Chartists followed legal means in the main to achieve their ends while O’Connell was in favour of the supremacy of the Irish Parliament over its British counterpart, not full Irish independence via militant republicanism).

12Roberts’ book is fascinating on a number of levels. It considers the significance of tradition and shared heritage in defining and galvanizing protest movements in the present and also provides revised perspectives on four men whose influence on Chartism has been steeped in platitudes and unchallenged assumptions. In its assertion of the primacy of material culture and its wariness of ‘language’ as a reliable indicator of Chartist beliefs, it is a welcome antidote to recent historiographical trends. Some of its conclusions—on the empowering effect of harnessing the past in ongoing political struggles, on disillusionment with party politics which rallied ‘gentleman reformers’ and working people alike, and on the identification of “metropolitan elites” (159) responsible for society’s ills—are apt and relevant in our contemporary world. Like any searching academic work, it also raises further questions. Who exactly considered themselves Chartists and how vast was the appeal of the movement? Did men and women outside Chartism also venerate figures of the ‘radical pantheon’? To what extent can a veritable ‘radical tradition’ be said to exist, or have existed? Or was it only in the eye of the beholders, the women and men who sought to use the struggles of the past to help define and consolidate a mass movement for change in their present?

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References

Bibliographical reference

Rachel Rogers, Matthew Roberts. Chartism, Commemoration and the Cult of the Radical Hero. London: Routledge (2019), 2021, 250 p.Caliban, 67-68 | 2022, 281-286.

Electronic reference

Rachel Rogers, Matthew Roberts. Chartism, Commemoration and the Cult of the Radical Hero. London: Routledge (2019), 2021, 250 p.Caliban [Online], 67-68 | 2022, Online since 20 October 2022, connection on 08 December 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/11723; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.11723

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) may be subject to specific use terms.

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