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Introduction. Nineteenth-Century Protest Movements in Britain: A Survey of Historians’ Approaches

Introduction. Les mouvements protestataires en Grande-Bretagne au XIXe siècle : panorama historiographique
Fabrice Bensimon and Rachel Rogers

Abstracts

This article surveys the historiography of nineteenth and early twentieth century British protest movements and thus provides a broad framework for the contributions to this volume. It begins by providing a portrait of some of the key developments in the field, with a focus on the impact of post-war social history and the emergence of ‘history from below’. It then details some of the ways in which this body of work was built upon, challenged and consolidated in subsequent decades. A discussion of the type of sources exploited by historians working from a ‘bottom-up’ perspective is followed by some thoughts on the current state of protest studies in a British context. The contested ‘Britishness’ of nineteenth-century social and political movements is considered, along with the question of how historians today continue to study ordinary men and women in the past, and the movements they belonged to, in the words of Malcolm Chase, with both ‘empathy’ and ‘authenticity’.

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Introduction

1The nineteenth century is a crucial period for the study of social and political protest in British history. Marked by the industrial revolution, the century saw the transformation of the rising ‘middling orders’ into a new class, the bourgeoisie, which asserted its social and political hegemony in the period. A new social class, the industrial, urban working class, nascent at the time of the French Revolution, had also become a major social and political force by the early twentieth century. With the activism of radicals and Chartists, the Regency and later Victorian periods also saw huge advances in terms of popular participation in the electoral process and a transformation in British political culture. The long nineteenth century was the era of the rise of the women’s movement and ‘first-wave feminism’, culminating in the political crisis over the suffrage in the years before 1914. In many respects, on the eve of the First World War, Britain, now with an extensive overseas Empire, was very different from what it had been in 1811, when the country was still waging an uncertain and attritional war against Napoleonic France.

  • 1 E. Sylvia Pankhurst, Life of Emmeline Pankhurst: The Suffragette Struggle for Women’s Citizenship ( (...)
  • 2 Cecil Clarke, ‘Death of an Aged Chartist’, Notes & Queries, 1 Feb. 1902, p. 86; G.J. Holyoake, ‘Dis (...)
  • 3 Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 360, 40 (...)

2But at the same time, a series of threads can be woven, that link the ‘new’ trade unions of the 1890s to the early ‘combinations’ of the 1820s, that connect the socialism of Tom Mann and Keir Hardie to that of Robert Owen, or that link turn-of-the-century suffragists and suffragettes with Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Fildes and the female radicals of Lancashire in the 1810s. Without necessarily positing the existence of a protest ‘tradition’, echoes and connections can be detected between the labour activists of the Edwardian period and the radicals and Chartists of the early nineteenth century. The paternal grandfather of Emmeline Pankhurst (1858-1928), fustian cutter Richard Goulden (1787 - c. 1864), was at St Peter’s Field on 16th August 1819 and escaped injury and death in the ensuing massacre.1 He subsequently campaigned with Pankhurst’s grandmother Mary Goulden (1787-1852) in the Anti-Corn Law League (1838-46). Sixty-five years after the massacre, on 27 September 1884, during the agitation for the extension of the franchise, Peterloo veterans rode in a specific waggon in a demonstration in Failsworth, near Manchester (see Figure 1). George Jacob Holyoake, who was born in 1817 and became an Owenite agitator, a radical, a Chartist, and an early advocate of co-operation, lived until 1906. In 1902, he contributed to a discussion about ‘disappearing Chartists’ in the journal Notes & Queries, alongside another Chartist veteran, W. E. Adams (1832-1906).2 Henry Clubb, born in 1827, and involved in the Essex and Suffolk Chartist Union in 1848, did not die until 1921.3 Some radical lives spanned much of the century, while others were cut short, some tragically at Peterloo, or on the scaffold. The course of others was fundamentally altered by prosecution, incarceration or transportation. Yet the bonds between the movements under study were not just those of individual lives and trajectories, but also those of political, cultural or intellectual legacy. The heritage of former struggles can be glimpsed in trade-union history, in the radical and Chartist traditions, in the later socialist and women’s movements. This question of legacies is addressed below in Alexandra Sippel’s discussion of British ‘socialisms’.

3The essays gathered in this volume all address historiographical approaches to the British protest movements of the nineteenth-century across the period from 1811, and the beginnings of Luddism, to 1914 and the outbreak of the Great War, which brought a temporary end to women’s suffrage struggles, strikes and trade union action. This introduction first summarises the main historiographical shifts which, since the post-war period, have made the study of these protest movements possible. It then moves on to address some of the methodological issues which historians studying these movements have confronted over the last twenty-five years.

Figure 1: On 27 September 1884, eleven Peterloo veterans aged 79 to 81, including four women, posed in front of posters for electoral reform and the Peterloo banner of nearby Middleton.

Figure 1: On 27 September 1884, eleven Peterloo veterans aged 79 to 81, including four women, posed in front of posters for electoral reform and the Peterloo banner of nearby Middleton.

Photo by John Birch, reproduced by Benjamin Brierley, Failsworth: my native village, Oldham, W.E. Clegg, 1895.

The flourishing of history from below

4From the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, British historiography was dominated by works written in the Whig tradition. In his celebrated History of England from the Accession of James II (1848-61), penned in the mid-nineteenth century, Liberal politician Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-59) famously praised British exceptionalism and the country’s gradual achievement of political, imperial and industrial progress. His great-nephew George Macaulay Trevelyan (1876-1962), writing in the inter-war years, still assumed that Britain was unique in avoiding the pitfalls of revolution and despotism that its neighbours had succumbed to. In his best-selling History of England (1926), he wrote:

  • 4 George Macaulay Trevelyan, History of England (London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1926), pp. 615-616.

The good genius of English politics has often retrieved apparently hopeless situations. The last British Revolution is still that of 1688. By a gradual transition towards democracy, seldom hastening and never turning back, political rights were extended to all without a catastrophe. This great manoeuvre was safely accomplished because all classes and all parties showed, upon the whole, sound political sense and good humour, because the Victorian age was a period of peace and external security for Britain, and because its middle years were years of unexampled prosperity.4

  • 5 George Macaulay Trevelyan, English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries from Chaucer to Queen (...)
  • 6 François Crouzet, « Tout va très bien, madame l’Angleterre », Annales ESC 3.1 (1948), p. 35.

5And Trevelyan’s English Social History (1944), which had sold half a million copies by the early 1950s, still feted the development of parliamentary government, as well as the rule of law and the progressive achievement of religious toleration and civil freedoms in England. Cricket and football, tea and pudding, the public house and excursions, had all contributed to engendering harmony between classes.5 A critical French historian, François Crouzet, reviewing the historian’s work in the Annales journal, wrote: “le professeur Trevelyan […] nous démontre qu’à chaque période de son histoire le peuple anglais a joui des meilleures institutions possibles, du meilleur niveau de vie possible, des meilleures classes dirigeantes possibles6. Emmanuelle de Champs shows below how the passage of the First Reform Act in 1832 was later reclaimed by Whig historians and seen as the result of parliamentary rather than popular action.

  • 7 Christopher Hill, R.H. Hilton and E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘Past and Present. Origins and Early Years’, Past (...)
  • 8 J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968), p. 150, quoted in E. (...)
  • 9 E.P. Thompson, “Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism.” Past & Present 38 (1967), pp. 56 (...)

6By the 1950s and 1960s, these Whig assumptions were being challenged by a generation of Marxist historians like Christopher Hill (1912-2003), Rodney Hilton (1916-2002), Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012) and E. P. Thompson (1924-1993). A few landmarks can be identified. In 1946, the Communist Party Historians’ Group was created, which included a number of these scholars, although Thompson left the party in 1956. The group’s agenda included conducting research into a revolutionary tradition whose existence had been denied by Whig historians and which could provide inspiration in the present. In 1952, several of the group’s members were involved in the creation of the journal Past & Present, which was initially subtitled A Journal of Scientific History. Thanks to its combination of astute scholarly research and accessible papers, it had become a leading academic journal by the 1960s.7 It was in the first issue of Past & Present that Hobsbawm’s article ‘The machine breakers’ was published. In it, the historian countered the traditional analysis of machine breaking as backward resistance to technical progress and of Luddism as “pointless, frenzied, industrial jacquerie”.8 Carl Griffin’s article in this volume studies early nineteenth-century machine-breaking in depth. Later, many ground-breaking articles in labour and protest history were published in Past & Present. E. P. Thompson’s “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism”, his “Moral Economy of the English Crowd”, Douglas Reid’s study of Saint Monday, and Eric Hobsbawm’s and Joan Scott’s piece on the “political shoemakers” were among the seminal essays which appeared in the journal.9

  • 10 E.P. Thompson, The making of the English working class (London, Victor Gollancz, 1963).
  • 11 Christopher Hill, The world turned upside down: radical ideas during the English revolution (London (...)

7In 1960, historians like Asa Briggs, John Saville, Sidney Pollard, Henry Pelling and Eric Hobsbawm founded the Society for the Study of Labour History. In the following years, although labour history was still marginalised in the older, prestigious universities, it was making progress in other institutions, especially in adult education centres and trade-union colleges, where mature students, often with a working-class background, were pursuing their studies. Eric Hobsbawm taught in London at Birkbeck, a former Mechanics’ Institute which had become a college for adult education. E. P. Thompson and J. F. C. Harrison (1921-2018) taught at Leeds University’s Extra-Mural Department, as did Malcolm Chase (1957-2020) and Jill Liddington later. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963), focused on working-class movements and protest between 1792 and 1832, had an enormous impact and played a key role in arousing interest in labour history.10 The book was both well-written and committed, scientific, with its reliance on Home Office papers, exciting and dramatic. It did not confine itself to organisations like the unions or clubs and societies. Instead, it addressed the experience of workers themselves and laid emphasis on informal communal action and protest. In a similar way to Christopher Hill’s later book The World Turned Upside Down (1972) on the radical sects of the English Revolution, The Making took insurrectionary groups seriously, and combated the liberal assumptions that dominated British historiography, namely the inexorability of political and economic progress and the inevitability and desirability of integrated, legal, parliamentary action and aspiration.11 Thompson’s book captured the imagination of the 1960s, that other period of protest, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, all over the world, despite its length and the abundance of references.

8Ruskin College at Oxford was also a further education college, where from 1966 Raphael Samuel (1934-96) taught and pioneered the History Workshop movement. Samuel was convinced that history should be a collaborative enterprise, where the researcher, the archivist, the teacher and the enthusiastic amateur should be equally involved in excavating, writing and learning about the past. The purpose of the movement was to stimulate “history from below”, the history of daily life and of ordinary people. While the large, open conferences organised by the History Workshop are over, its thirteen pamphlets published in the early 1970s have survived and give a flavour of the atmosphere and content of the conferences where they had often begun as papers.12 In 1975, Raphael Samuel and a couple of others created the History Workshop Journal, which is still in print. Hobsbawm wrote in 1971 that these years were “a good time to be a social historian”.13 Much of the research carried out on British history in the decades after 1945 then fed into the publications which have become the defining works on nineteenth-century protest movements. The article by Delphine Frasch and Marion Leclair in this collection addresses the rise of people’s history and history from below in a British context.

  • 14 F.M.L Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge social history of Britain, 1750-1950, (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni (...)
  • 15 Jonathan C. D. Clark, English Society 1660-1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics During the Ancien (...)
  • 16 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, (...)
  • 17 Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, (...)

9Significant shifts occurred in historiographical trends from the 1980s onwards. Thatcherite attacks on the trade unions and the defeat of the miners’ strike in 1985, deindustrialisation and cuts in higher education, the challenge of the linguistic turn and the decline of Anglo-Marxism, all contributed to the marginalisation of labour history in this period. Many trade unions lost their grassroots base, while old staple industries, like mining, shipbuilding, iron and steel, which had been central in labour history, were dwindling. There are today comparatively fewer studies of trade-union history, which had often been carried out by former union officials. Few historians today claim to be labour historians, and within UK universities there are no chairs in labour history. It is telling that the three-volume, 1400-page long Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750-1950, edited by F. M. L. Thompson (1925-2017) and published in 1990, did not include a single chapter on class.14 Rather than focusing on the threat of revolution, the series highlighted the strength of voluntary action within British civil society, liberalism, social philanthropy and charitable initiatives, state intervention and the liberal spirit. There appeared to be an assault on Marxist and Thompsonian interpretations. In 1985, Jonathan Clark’s revisionist book on the long eighteenth century targeted E. P. Thompson’s interpretation, and barely mentioned Peterloo.15 Linda Colley’s influential Britons turned ‘the condescension of posterity’ against Thompson, arguing that working-class and popular conservatism, widespread in the Napoleonic War years, was looked down on by social historians.16 And if a visitor from Mars had read Boyd Hilton’s A Mad, Bad, Dangerous People? England 1783-1846 (2006), a volume in the ‘New Oxford History of England’ series, after perusing E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class, both of which were weighty books addressing a similar period, they might have thought they were dealing with different countries. Luddism mobilised 140 pages in Thompson’s work, while it took up only 40 lines in Hilton’s book, where even Peterloo was briefly addressed.17

  • 18 Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History: 300 years of women’s oppression and the fight against it (Lo (...)
  • 19 Jill Liddington, Jill Norris, One hand tied behind us: The Rise of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (L (...)
  • 20 Louise Raw, Striking a light: the Bryant and May Matchwomen and their place in labour history (Lond (...)

10New fields have also been explored since the 1980s. One of them is women’s history, followed by gender history. Since the early 1970s, the Women’s Liberation Movement had undertaken to recover the struggles of women in the past for posterity. A pioneer was the labour historian Sheila Rowbotham (b. 1943) and many proponents of women’s history saw workers and women alike as oppressed and pursuing common or complementary struggle. Labour history slowly came to incorporate the study of women, while women’s history itself began to include research focused primarily on working-class women.18 A good example of this was Jill Liddington and Jill Norris’s One Hand Tied Behind Us (1978).19 The book addressed the suffrage movement, as several other works of the 1970s and 1980s had done, but the authors focused more specifically on the “radical suffragists” of the Lancashire textile industry, women whose trade-union affiliation and suffrage activism within their local communities had been overlooked in studies of the women’s fight for the vote. The pioneering work of Liddington and Norris paved the way for later studies on working women and their struggles.20 In this vein, Muriel Pécastaing-Boissière’s article in this collection addresses some of the conjunctions and tensions between the women’s movement and socialism.

  • 21 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The tramping artisan’, Economic History Review 2nd ser., 3.3 (1951), pp. 299-320.
  • 22 Neville Kirk, Comrades and cousins. Globalization, workers and labour movements in Britain, the USA (...)
  • 23 Kate Bowan and Paul Pickering, Sounds of Liberty: Music, Radicalism and Reform in the Anglophone Wo (...)

11While labour history initially focused in the main on organisations and leading figures within them, with the rise of cultural history since the 1990s, research on protest movements now often includes work on the rituals of those movements, their meetings, processions and toasts, and on their songs, poetry and hymns, their iconography, music or material culture. Thompson drew attention to these cultural aspects and forms of expression in The Making, but by the 2000s, it had become a flourishing and vibrant field of inquiry. Another development has been the turn towards transnational approaches and perspectives. Long ago, Eric Hobsbawm argued that the life of workers was one of movement.21 The International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam also pushed for the globalisation of labour history. This has led to interesting research being carried out on the connections between British, Australian or US labour. While it was well-known that Australian dock workers had largely contributed to the 1889 dock strike in London, investigation by Neville Kirk for instance has shown that many British working-class activists emigrated to the overseas Empire and took with them practices and demands.22 Kate Bowan and Paul Pickering’s Sounds of Liberty combined the transnational framework and interest for music, performance and ritual.23 Aspects of this historiographical tradition are discussed in Yann Béliard’s contribution to this collection, which addresses anti-slavery and anti-imperial struggles across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

12It has been this huge endeavour at recovering the history of protest and resistance, and changes and new approaches within this scholarly tradition, which have allowed the social and political protest movements studied here to be brought to light. The articles in this volume testify to the alternative perspective provided by such efforts: from a history of kings and queens, Cabinet ministers and MPs, army generals, empire-builders and business leaders, to a history of impoverished framework knitters, navvies, dockers, seamen and domestic workers, from a history of parliamentary sessions and official ceremonies to one of rioting and machine-breaking, of marching, striking and resisting.

New sources for new questions

  • 24 Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (London, Virago Press, 1981 [ (...)

13The turn to history from below has been accompanied by an attempt at renewing the sources used in historical investigation. Before the 1960s, the main sources used when documenting the history of the nineteenth century were ministerial and Cabinet papers, records of parliamentary debates, or the memoirs and published correspondence of senior officials. For their celebrated trilogy, The Village Labourer (1911), The Town Labourer (1917) and The Skilled Labourer (1919), Barbara Hammond (1873-1962) and John Lawrence Hammond (1872-1949) pioneered the use of Home Office papers, which contained many valuable reports and letters on agitation and the activities of radicals and trade unionists. In the 1920s, when Ivy Pinchbeck (1898-1982) researched the lives of women workers during the industrial revolution, she used parliamentary papers, a huge body of public enquiries that were to prove extremely valuable for social history, and studied household budgets –in what was a highly original approach.24 E. P. Thompson, John Saville, Eric Hobsbawm, and the post-war generation of labour historians all made great use of these sources in their attempts to access and understand the lives of working people.

  • 25 John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall, The autobiography of the working class: an annotated (...)

14However, by the 1960s and 1970s, historians of protest were still confronted with a major dilemma. Parliamentary reports and Home Office papers, even transcriptions of judicial proceedings, were mostly produced by middle-class men who had not themselves been involved in the movements they commented upon. New sources had to be found and one of the most valuable was workers’ autobiographies. An early count in 1984 listed 804 of them for the period 1790-1900, most of them unpublished or out of print, but containing many details that could be found in no other writings.25

  • 26 Liz Stanley, The diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian maidservant (New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers Un (...)
  • 27 The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/
  • 28 Raphael Samuel, “The eye of history”, in Theatres of Memory. Vol. 1: Past and Present in Contempora (...)

15One of the drawbacks of such new source material however was that very few autobiographies, particularly in the earlier period, were written by working-class women. In the 1970s, historians of women’s movements turned to some rare diaries, to hospital records like those of the foundlings in London, and to some judicial archives, for the study of infanticide or domestic violence for instance.26 The later Old Bailey online project derived from this interest in sources which documented the words of those – domestic servants, farm girls and cotton weavers, ‘unskilled’ workers like dockers and navvies, children and so on – whose testimony would otherwise never have been recorded.27 Old photographs, which had so far been absent from history books, took on new importance. Raphael Samuel, for instance, thought that visual sources such as these could enable the historian to gain access to the Victorian world ‘directly’, in unmediated fashion, without the distorting lens of the middle-class observer. Of course, this was partly an illusion, as photographs also needed to be subject to historical criticism, mediated as they are through the lens of the photographer, but from that period onwards, they started being used in books, articles, exhibitions, TV documentaries, and many other historical media.28

  • 29 Henry Mayhew, London labour and the London poor: a cyclopaedia of the condition and earnings of tho (...)
  • 30 Elizabeth Roberts, A Woman's Place : An Oral History of Working-Class Women 1890-1940 (Oxford, 1984 (...)

16Another departure in the 1970s was the making of oral history. It was not entirely new, as one could argue that Henry Mayhew, who had extensively interviewed the poor and the labourers of London, and Frank Peel, who did the same with “Luddites, Chartists and Plug-Drawers”, had been pioneers.29 However, in the 1970s, new techniques and equipment – such as the tape recorder – were used to facilitate oral history and devise new methods. It was through such developments that Elizabeth Roberts could write her original history of working-class women, that Paul Thompson could monitor a collective project on the Edwardians, and that Brian Harrison could interview 183 elderly suffrage campaigners (see Figure 2).30

Figure 2: In 1974, in the context of second-wave feminism, a drama series, Shoulder to shoulder, revived interest in the suffragettes.

Figure 2: In 1974, in the context of second-wave feminism, a drama series, Shoulder to shoulder, revived interest in the suffragettes.

Many elderly suffrage activists were still alive at the time and were interviewed by oral historians.

Radio Times, 30 March 1974.

  • 31 Nick Mansfield and Martin Wright, Made by Labour: a material and visual history of British labour, (...)

17The digitisation of local newspapers, census records, birth, death and marriage registers, and of so many archival deposits, has also provided historians trying to document the lives of the anonymous workers, women and protesters of the long nineteenth century with new material or new ways of accessing such material. Recently, the history of objects has been seized upon by historians of protest. Banners had long been used for the study of trade-union history, but in recent years more diverse, less explicit objects, like a Peterloo walking stick, a Chartist helmet or a membership card of the National Charter Association have been used to expand our knowledge of the past (see Figure 3).31 The research presented in this collection of essays is very much the result of these collective and individual endeavours over the past three-quarters of a century, which have made it possible to study the history of protest in a way that was neither attempted nor possible before.

Figure 3: Membership card of the National Charter Association, c. 1843.

Figure 3: Membership card of the National Charter Association, c. 1843.

On the back of the card, the weekly member’s contributions to the ‘general fund’ of the NCA, which gathered up to 50,000 members in 400 branches, were recorded by the secretary. This has given credence to the idea that Chartism was an early working-class party, and not just a movement.

© Mark Crail – Chartist ancestors website

Common threads and current debates

18Much of what we know then about the protest movements which emerged in Britain in the period from 1811 to 1914 is inextricably linked to developments in the writing of history. Changes in historiographical approaches are the result of a range of interlocking factors, whose respective impact cannot be easily quantified. These include the social and political contingencies of the historian’s own time, scholars’ backgrounds and the accessibility and choice of sources and the timely unearthing of new deposits. Tutors and mentors, as well as critical baggage encountered early in a career, or over a lifetime of work, can wield influence over avenues pursued and approaches adopted. Even though shifts are not linear and trends overlap, developments in the historiography of protest movements, as we have seen, can be considered to a certain extent chronologically.

  • 32 For work on children in activism see for instance Malcolm Chase, ‘‘Resolved in Defiance of Fool and (...)
  • 33 Matthew Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism and the makeshift economy of the Nottinghamshire framework knitters (...)

19Since the 2000s there have been a number of departures in protest studies within what is a broad picture of flourishing methodological diversification. These include the exploration of the role of children in activism (see figure 4), interest in the geographies and ecologies of protest, and sensitivity to the tensions within and between movements. And, as Matthew Roberts discusses in his article on Chartism, research is now being carried out into disability issues within protest studies.32 There is also ongoing discussion, as seen above, over the type of sources which allow historians to fully access the experience of the poor, the marginalised or the oppressed. Roberts, following David Hopkin, argues that “the problem with relying on ‘ego-documents’ such as autobiographies and diaries is that this genre is not representative of the wider working class, especially the poor”.33 The study of working-class autobiographies, a way of accessing the lived experience of their authors (and families), has nevertheless expanded in recent years. What follows here is an exploration of some of the debates which have animated historical scholarship in the twenty-first century and which continue to have currency today. An inquiry into the ‘Britishness’ of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century protest movements will be followed by a discussion of how new lenses have prompted, and are still pushing for, history from below to revisit, and perhaps reaffirm, its core premises.

Figure 4: An illustration from Amelia Opie Alderson’s abolitionist book for children, entitled The Black Man’s Lament; or, how to make sugar (1826).

Figure 4: An illustration from Amelia Opie Alderson’s abolitionist book for children, entitled The Black Man’s Lament; or, how to make sugar (1826).

The illustration shows two young children carrying a petition calling for the abolition of the slave trade. The book was published at the height of the movement to end slavery in the British Empire.

Public domain.

The contested ‘Britishness’ of protest movements

  • 34 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, Penguin, 1968 [1963]), p.12; p. 91 (...)

20The extent to which protest movements of the nineteenth century were genuinely British in nature has been a source of contention. It is a debate which emerged forcefully in the 1970s, as nationalism was on the rise in Scotland and Wales, and which has come to the fore to an even greater degree since the 1990s, a decade which saw the devolution of power to the Scottish Parliament and the then Welsh Assembly after many years of activism within Welsh and Scottish civil society. E. P. Thompson excluded Scottish and Welsh experience from his 1963 study of the forging of an English working-class identity, “not out of chauvinism, but out of respect”, and yet towards the end of his book, he makes reference to the making of “this British working class of 1832”, casting doubt on the clearly defined ‘English’ remit of his book.34 Discussions of the potency of the “free-born Englishman” constitutional idiom in radicalism, whether by Thompson or others, raise the issue of the relevance of such an apparently nationally-specific tradition and discourse elsewhere in Britain. It can nevertheless be argued that protest movements in this period were genuinely British, given the shared experience of rapid and transformative industrialisation across the country, in the areas around Glasgow, Newport and Manchester for instance, which was a catalyst for protest. Chartism appears to have had considerable reach across the three nations. It certainly had a resolutely national agenda. Trade unionism and the women’s suffrage movement developed across the whole country in the nineteenth century and were as strong in Wales and Scotland as England, despite the later prominence of London-based suffragette militancy. Landmark judgements in industrial disputes, such as the Taff Vale decision, could be focused on Wales, as were some of the most notorious suppressions of strike action. Antony Taylor discusses the myriad trends in trade union historiography in this volume.

  • 35 Beth Jenkins, ‘Suffrage Organizers, Grassroots Activism and the Campaign in Wales’, in Alexandra Hu (...)
  • 36 See Elspeth King, The Scottish Women’s Suffrage Movement (Glasgow, People’s Palace Museum, 1978) an (...)
  • 37 W. Hamish Fraser, Chartism in Scotland (London, Merlin, 2010); Eleanor Gordon, Women and the Labour (...)

21There has also been interest in the national specificities of movements. Beth Jenkins has recently considered the particular development of the women’s suffrage movement in Wales, and the contribution of Welsh organisations to policy-making within the movement, while Sarah Pedersen, writing in the same collection, has highlighted the tensions between Scottish suffrage societies such as the Glasgow and West of Scotland Association for Women’s Suffrage and the better-known London-based organisations, with a particular focus on their mobilisation of the press.35 Pedersen’s work fits into a rich tradition of historiography on the suffrage movement in Scotland, epitomised by the research of Elspeth King and Leah Leneman.36 W. Hamish Fraser has explored the particular nature of Chartism and trade unionism in Scotland and Eleanor Gordon has assessed Scottish women’s contribution to the labour movement.37 Myriam Boussahba explores the struggles led by English women for the suffrage and citizenship rights in this special issue.

  • 38 David V. Jones, The Last Rising: The Newport Chartist Insurrection of 1839 (Cardiff, University of (...)

22David Jones pointed out in 1999 that although Welsh Chartism was part of a wider British movement, the rising at Newport in 1839 was rooted in the Welsh valleys and a very particular local, South Welsh culture.38 Newport is a salient example of an event, in this case an armed uprising, with very clear geographical anchorage, which has inspired community interest and given rise to sustained local efforts at commemoration (see figure 5). Newport has particular resonance for Welsh people and a festival is held every year in the town in November to commemorate the rising, with a torch-lit procession gathering hundreds of people.

Figure 5: The ‘Chartist steps’ in Newport, South Wales leading to John Frost Square.

Figure 5: The ‘Chartist steps’ in Newport, South Wales leading to John Frost Square.

Visitors can read the six points of the People’s Charter engraved in the stone steps.

Pwimageglow, Wikimedia Commons.

  • 39 Gordon Pentland, ‘‘Betrayed by infamous spies’? The Commemoration of Scotland's ‘radical war’ of 18 (...)
  • 40 See for instance Peter Berresford Ellis and Seumas Mac a’Ghobhainn, The Scottish Insurrection of 18 (...)
  • 41 Malcolm Chase, 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester, Manchester Universit (...)
  • 42 For a discussion of the 1820 Commemoration Committee’s actions, see the preface to the 1989 edition (...)
  • 43 Maggie Craig, One Week in April: The Scottish Radical Rising of 1820 (Edinburgh, Birlinn, 2020).
  • 44 An online conference, ‘1820: A Year of Crisis in the British and Irish Isles’, was also held at Uni (...)

23In Scotland the “radical war” of April 1820, when an armed uprising was staged and suppressed near Glasgow, has been commemorated in “highly contested” fashion in the Scottish Parliament, according to Gordon Pentland.39 Scholars Peter Berresford Ellis and Seumas Mac a’Ghobainn contended in 1970 that the armed rebellion at Bonnymuir and acts of resistance in Paisley and Strathaven over Easter 1820, had nationalist as well as social roots.40 A banner held aloft by Scottish marchers of the Strathaven Union Society in 1820, which read ‘Scotland Free, or Scotland a Desart’, was deemed proof that the rebels were following in the footsteps of the earlier United Scotsmen in calling for an independent and sovereign Scottish Parliament. Such claims were dismissed by Malcolm Chase who saw them as the result of “a combination of wistful thinking and over-emphasis on incidentals.” For Chase, and others, “The events of 1820 were conceived as a British rising and are fully intelligible only in that light.”41 In the aftermath of the publication of Berresford Ellis and Mac a’Ghobhainn’s book, an 1820 Commemorative Committee was formed. The Committee held its first meeting at the monument to two of the executed rebels, Andrew Hardie and John Baird, in Sighthill Cemetery, Glasgow and set about campaigning to both ensure the memorial was preserved and fight for the rising to be talked about in Scottish schools.42 Further awareness about the Scottish uprising and its aftermath was prompted by the bicentenary in 2020 and new books also came out.43 On 3rd April 2020, the Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies at the University of Glasgow organised a day of talks and performance on the radical uprising at the Trades Hall, which included the staging of James Kelman’s radio play, ‘Hardie and Baird: The Last Days’, first aired on BBC Radio Scotland in 1978.44 Rémy Duthille gives consideration to the nature of Scottish radicalism below in his piece on the mass-platform movement.

  • 45 See, for instance, Eric Richards, Debating the Highland Clearances (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University (...)
  • 46 Katrina Navickas, “The Multiple Geographies of Peterloo and its impact in Britain’, Bulletin of the (...)
  • 47 On the use of ‘moral ecology’ to study rural protest, see Iain Robertson, ‘‘Two steps forward; six (...)
  • 48 See for instance Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imaginati (...)

24Interest in particular experiences and manifestations of protest or organised labour movements in different areas and regions of the country, be it Scotland, Wales, London or Lancashire, is a long-standing feature of the historiography of protest and undoubtedly a corollary of the fact that movements were rooted in strong grassroots or rank-and-file activism. Regional case studies abound in the historiography of British protest and labour history. There has also been consideration of nationally-specific and geographically limited struggles which did not spread beyond certain localities and remained rooted in the communities they originated in. Resistance to the Highland Clearances in Scotland and the targeted campaign of sabotage and destruction of toll gates in Wales in the 1840s, known as the ‘Rebecca Riots’, are salient examples.45 Recent historiography, informed by critical social geography, has also taken an interest in the places and spaces of protest.46 There may be further insights to come as environmental approaches to social and political movements proliferate and as historians dig deeper into the fate of those transported beyond Britain’s shores to the penal colonies for political crimes in the nineteenth century.47 There will surely be more to be said on the imperial resonances of protest movements and the intersection of, and tensions between, anti-imperial struggles in the Empire and those taking place in mainland Britain. Catherine Hall, Neville Kirk, Yann Béliard and Ryan Hanley have done significant scholarship in this vein.48 Such work is providing vital new approaches to the study of protest movements and prompting debate in a way which echoes the critical work of feminist scholars in the 1970s.

Writing history from below: Between ‘empathy’ and ‘authenticity’?

  • 49 See an interview with Thompson from 1988 reproduced in Barbara Taylor’s post on the History Worksho (...)
  • 50 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, Penguin, 1968 [1963]), p. 455.
  • 51 Catherine Hall, ‘The Tale of Samuel and Jemima: Gender and Working-class Culture in Nineteenth-Cent (...)
  • 52 Jill Liddington and Jill Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the Women’s Suffrage Movement(...)

25Edward Thompson was adamant that The Making of the English Working Class was a book as much about working women as men.49 Thompson identified the impact of industrialisation on families, noting that “the family was roughly torn apart each morning by the factory bell, and the mother who was also a wage-earner often felt herself to have the worst of both the domestic and the industrial worlds.50 Whatever the later criticism of Thompson’s broadly gender-blind approach, such an assertion has striking contemporary resonance. Yet it is true that the main drivers of organised protest in Thompson’s reading were cloth-dressers, stocking-makers, shoemakers and handloom weavers. Feminist historians such as Catherine Hall and Barbara Taylor, writing in the decades following the publication of The Making highlighted the gendered nature of working-class radicalism and workplaces, neither of which had been central preoccupations for Thompson.51 Writing in the late 1970s, Jill Liddington and Jill Norris focused, in their work, on the shortcomings of conventional accounts of the women’s suffrage movement. As historians from Lancashire, they resolved to tell the story of the radical suffragists of the north-west of England whose contribution to the women’s suffrage campaign had been eclipsed, in their view, by the “sensational” and “glamorous” publicity stunts of their middle-class and better-known counterparts, the “suffragettes”. Leaders of the WSPU had called for women’s suffrage on the same terms as men, and therefore on the basis of a property qualification which would exclude working-class women. One Hand Tied Behind Us, discussed earlier, was a vital contribution to the historiography of the fight for women’s votes and was published to widespread critical acclaim. Yet it was seen by some as undermining the solidarity of the feminist movement through its perceived finger-pointing at the Pankhursts. Jill Liddington’s discussion of these reactions, and of the particular spirit and context in which the first edition came out, in the preface to the 2000 re-edition of the book, is a fascinating read.52

  • 53 Louise Raw, Striking a Light: The Bryant and May matchwomen and their place in history (London, Con (...)

26Recent historiography, in line with the gentle but sustained backlash against the ‘linguistic turn’ of the 1980s, which appeared to question the legitimacy of social class as a category of historical analysis, has sought to combine gender and class lenses. Laura Schwartz has explored the position of domestic servants in the women’s suffrage movement, noting the ambivalent attitudes held by some middle-class suffrage campaigners to the claims of female servants to better working conditions. While some heads of household were sympathetic to their servants’ demands, others were alarmed at the exodus of young working women from service into factory work. Similarly, in her probing exploration of the Bryant and May matchworkers’ strike of 1888, Louise Raw draws attention to the failures of convergence between the women’s suffrage, labour and socialist movements, suggesting that the “lack of harmonious interaction and exchange of ideas” between these different struggles in the nineteenth century “was to the detriment of all parties, leaving the first to develop without a coherent policy on class relations, and socialist groups and the labour movement to harbour sexism and misogyny.”53

  • 54 Katrina Navickas, ‘What happened to class? New histories of labour and collective action in Britain (...)
  • 55 See Ryan Hanley, ‘Slavery and the Birth of Working-Class Racism in England,1814-1833’, Transactions (...)
  • 56 Malcolm Chase argued that the ‘biographical turn’ could be a way of both perpetuating labour histor (...)
  • 57 Malcolm Chase, ‘Labour History’s Biographical Turn’, History Workshop Journal 92 (Autumn 2021), p. (...)

27Katrina Navickas, who has studied expressions of women’s independent political agency within the radical reform movement in the years before the Peterloo massacre, suggested in 2011 that there are now more and more studies which admit that “the working class could and did share in multiple identities”. She contends that, while the intersection of gender and class lenses is now widely accepted and practised, “attention to other ‘identities’ is, however, still limited, especially those of race and ethnicity.”54 Ryan Hanley, for one, is doing much to redress the balance. He has already pointed to some of the failures of convergence between the democratic and abolitionist movements in the 1820s and 1830s, suggesting that the beginnings of “working-class racism” can be located in the discourse of radical leaders such as William Cobbett and Richard Carlile who criticised middle-class abolitionists for focusing on the issue of slavery rather than the rights of working men and women in Britain. The historian, following in the footsteps of the late Malcolm Chase, has recently turned to biography, and the particular figure of Black abolitionist and radical reformer Robert Wedderburn who was at the crossroads of both movements.55 Amanda Goodrich adopted a similar biographical approach in her study of earlier radical figure, Henry Redhead Yorke, also of mixed-race heritage.56 In an article published posthumously in English, Chase suggested that labour biography, as well as being a way of communicating “beyond the academic milieu, with an audience whose hunger for life stories cannot be quenched”, can also constitute a way of going “beyond the theoretical division between empiricism and a cultural history marked by the ‘linguistic turn’”. Moreover, micro-biography “acknowledges that its characters were situated in social structures or political regimes, but notes that they were not the prisoners of or rendered powerless by these social structures or political regimes.57

  • 58 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London (...)
  • 59 Gregory Vargo, ‘‘Outworks of the Citadel of Corruption’: The Chartist Press Reports the Empire’, Vi (...)
  • 60 ‘To the Women of England’, Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, Saturday 22 February 1851, p (...)
  • 61 Malcolm Chase, in Chartism: A New History (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007), devotes (...)

28Scholarship on race and imperial identities within protest movements is prompting new debate as the legacy of colonial slavery and Britain’s imperial project is deconstructed and assessed in the present. Biography may be one way of furthering our understanding of the convergences and tensions within and between movements. To quote prominent post-war social historian, Christopher Hill, “History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change, the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past, and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors”.58 Hill’s use of the term “sympathy” is significant, since history from below has long been practised by historians who, if not part of the social movements themselves, as was the case in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have generally been sympathetic to their aims. The founding of the History Workshop Journal, and continued contributions to both the journal and its blog, epitomises this ongoing activism which has its roots in the written histories of nineteenth-century activists and labour leaders. Chartism, for Malcolm Chase and others, is undeniably Britain’s civil rights movement. Chartists were among the first to demand wider rights for a broader cross-section of society on British soil and were, as Gregory Vargo has shown, among the first to offer coherent and determined counter-arguments against Britain’s imperial expansion.59 Some of the earliest popular demands for rights for women came from within the movement. It was the Sheffield Women Chartists who called for “pure and true democracy” in their 1851 petition to the ‘Women of England’, and their appeal was directly related to their experience and role as “observers for a number of years of the various plans, systems and organisations which have been laid down for the better government and guidance of democracy” within Chartism.60 Chartism was also a movement which drew Black activists into its fold. William Cuffay, as Chase and Martin Hoyles have demonstrated, was a leader among radicals in the 1840s, a rare, if not unique example of Black leadership in a British political organisation at the time (see figure 6).61 The profound achievements of this broad, working-class movement and the efforts of its individual activists and predecessors in the mass-platform years can be acknowledged alongside observations, prompted by historians working from new perspectives and studying sources differently, that working-class radicalism did not admit the female suffrage onto its agenda, may have broadly preferred a gender organisation predicated on the ideal of the male breadwinner and the restriction of women to a domestic, auxiliary role, and harboured within it ideas and prejudices, widespread in British society at the time and inextricably linked to Empire.

Figure 6: William Cuffay in his cell in Newgate prison, 1848.

Figure 6: William Cuffay in his cell in Newgate prison, 1848.

Courtesy of Mark Crail, Chartist Ancestors.

  • 62 Malcolm Chase, ‘Labour History’s Biographical Turn’, History Workshop Journal, 92, (2021), pp. 194- (...)

29The challenge in contemporary historiography then, as it was in the 1980s and 1990s when feminist historians were providing new perspectives on social and political movements, is to strike the right balance between retaining history from below’s signature “warmth and empathy”, as Chase put it, towards its subjects, those living in the past who wielded very little economic or political leverage in the societies they were part of, but yet were often the main drivers of emancipatory change, and ensuring that “the less appealing aspects of the characters we study” are not brushed under the carpet in attempts to protect them from apparently abrasive and unforgiving revisionism.62 Historians of social movements can be, rightly, sympathetic to and inspired by the emancipatory aims and collective solidarities of grassroots movements which emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, while still acknowledging features which, rightly again, trouble contemporaries and call out for acknowledgement.

  • 63 Arlette Farge, ’Préface’ in Coline Cardi et Geneviève Pruvost (dir.), Penser la violence des femmes(...)

30Recent scholarship in other areas of both historical and more contemporary social life may also provide insight and inform this discussion on British protest studies. In 2012, a collection of essays, edited by Coline Cardi and Geneviève Pruvost, set out to historicise acts of female violence and attitudes towards it in a range of settings, be they on screen, in the media, in the political or private sphere. As Arlette Farge writes in the preface, women express their humanity in a range of different ways. Women’s violence may be uncomfortable to admit, its realisation contravening assumptions about what a woman is, or should be. Yet it is, and has been in the past, one of the ways in which women wielded power in their own lives, or were, as Farge put its “agents of their own fate”.63 Such work shows a commitment to admitting the full, if uncomfortable, scope of women’s existence.

31Malcolm Chase’s call for “authenticity” may be a useful gauge for scholars grappling with such dilemmas, and one in keeping with some of the methodological groundwork and principles of post-war social history. This social history determined to take the lives and actions of marginal or understudied groups seriously, to see their members as having leverage over their lives rather than as victims of wider forces outside their control. It vowed to explore their social lives without condescension. It follows then that the movements they belonged to were complex and evade neat definition. They can provide hope, nourishment, even keep us from despair in our present, but they can also fail, sometimes spectacularly, to conform to our own values and expectations. It is perhaps this honesty, the ability to admit the flaws and failings as well the profound achievements and successes of popular protest movements, which may signal, more than anything else, that the history of the marginal, the excluded or the powerless has become just as legitimate a field of scholarship as any other.

Conclusion

32All of the articles in this volume engage in lively, informed and original ways with the historiographical debates which have raged in scholarship over the nature, significance and legacies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British protest movements. In doing so, it is hoped they will provide clarity and insight for readers.

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Notes

1 E. Sylvia Pankhurst, Life of Emmeline Pankhurst: The Suffragette Struggle for Women’s Citizenship (London, T. Werner Laurie, 1935), p. 8.

2 Cecil Clarke, ‘Death of an Aged Chartist’, Notes & Queries, 1 Feb. 1902, p. 86; G.J. Holyoake, ‘Disappearing Chartists’, Notes & Queries, 22 Feb. 1902, pp. 144-5, and 29 March 1902, pp. 251-2; W.E. Adams, ‘Disappearing Chartists’, 17 May 1902, pp. 391-392.

3 Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007), pp. 360, 402.

4 George Macaulay Trevelyan, History of England (London, Longmans, Green and Co., 1926), pp. 615-616.

5 George Macaulay Trevelyan, English Social History: A Survey of Six Centuries from Chaucer to Queen Victoria, (London, Longmans, 1944).

6 François Crouzet, « Tout va très bien, madame l’Angleterre », Annales ESC 3.1 (1948), p. 35.

7 Christopher Hill, R.H. Hilton and E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘Past and Present. Origins and Early Years’, Past and Present 100 (Aug. 1983), pp. 3-14.

8 J. H. Plumb, England in the Eighteenth Century (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1968), p. 150, quoted in E. J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Machine Breakers’, Past and Present 1 (February 1952), p. 57.

9 E.P. Thompson, “Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism.” Past & Present 38 (1967), pp. 56-97; E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past & Present 50 (Feb. 1971), pp. 76-136; Douglas A. Reid, ‘The decline of Saint Monday 1766-1876’, Past & Present 71 (1976), pp. 76-101; Eric Hobsbawm and Joan Wallach Scott, ‘Political shoemakers’, Past & Present 89 (1980), pp. 86-114.

10 E.P. Thompson, The making of the English working class (London, Victor Gollancz, 1963).

11 Christopher Hill, The world turned upside down: radical ideas during the English revolution (London, Temple Smith, 1972).

12 Luke Parks, ‘History Workshop Pamphlets’ (4 November 2012), https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/museums-archives-heritage/history-workshop-pamphlets/

13 Eric Hobsbawm, “From Social History to the History of Society”, Daedalus 100 (1971), p. 43.

14 F.M.L Thompson (ed.), The Cambridge social history of Britain, 1750-1950, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990, 3 vols.).

15 Jonathan C. D. Clark, English Society 1660-1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics During the Ancien Régime (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985).

16 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1992), p. 5.

17 Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006).

18 Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History: 300 years of women’s oppression and the fight against it (London, Pluto Press, 1973).

19 Jill Liddington, Jill Norris, One hand tied behind us: The Rise of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London, Virago, 1978).

20 Louise Raw, Striking a light: the Bryant and May Matchwomen and their place in labour history (London, Continuum, 2009).

21 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘The tramping artisan’, Economic History Review 2nd ser., 3.3 (1951), pp. 299-320.

22 Neville Kirk, Comrades and cousins. Globalization, workers and labour movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914 (London, Merlin Press, 2003).

23 Kate Bowan and Paul Pickering, Sounds of Liberty: Music, Radicalism and Reform in the Anglophone World, 1790-1914 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2017).

24 Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (London, Virago Press, 1981 [1930]).

25 John Burnett, David Vincent and David Mayall, The autobiography of the working class: an annotated critical bibliography. Vol. 1: 1790-1900 (Brighton, Harvester, 1984).

26 Liz Stanley, The diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian maidservant (New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 1984); Françoise Barret-Ducrocq, Love in the time of Victoria: sexuality, class and gender in 19th century London (London, Verso, 1991); Lionel Rose, The massacre of the innocents: infanticide in Britain, 1800-1939 (London, Routledge, 1986); A. James Hammerton, Cruelty and companionship: conflict in nineteenth-century married life (London, New York, Routledge, 1992).

27 The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674-1913. https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/

28 Raphael Samuel, “The eye of history”, in Theatres of Memory. Vol. 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (London, Verso, 1994), pp. 315-36.

29 Henry Mayhew, London labour and the London poor: a cyclopaedia of the condition and earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work. (London, 4 vols., 1861-2); Frank Peel, The risings of the Luddites, Chartists, and Plugdrawers (Heckmondwike, 1888).

30 Elizabeth Roberts, A Woman's Place : An Oral History of Working-Class Women 1890-1940 (Oxford, 1984); Brian Harrison, Prudent revolutionaries : portraits of British feminists between the wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987); LSE Library: The Suffrage Interviews https://www.lse.ac.uk/library/collection-highlights/the-suffrage-interviews ; Paul Thompson, The Edwardians : the remaking of British society (London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975).

31 Nick Mansfield and Martin Wright, Made by Labour: a material and visual history of British labour, c. 1780-1924 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2023).

32 For work on children in activism see for instance Malcolm Chase, ‘‘Resolved in Defiance of Fool and of Knave’?: Chartism, Children and Conflict’, in Dinah Birch and Mark Llewellyn (eds.), Conflict and Difference in Nineteenth-Century Literature (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), pp. 126-140. Chase also devoted one of his ‘Chartist Lives’ in Chartism: A New History to Ann Dawson, a young girl whose sampler features on the back cover of his book. Chase recounted elsewhere that in writing on Dawson, he drew on evidence from a whole set of children’s experiences within the movement. For work on the way in which children’s activism was encouraged by abolitionist families, but also escaped the complete control of parents, see Kathryn Gleadle and Ryan Hanley, ‘Children against Slavery: Juvenile Agency and the Sugar Boycotts in Britain’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 30 (2020), pp. 97-117.

33 Matthew Roberts, ‘Rural Luddism and the makeshift economy of the Nottinghamshire framework knitters’, Social History 42, 3 (2017), p. 368.

34 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, Penguin, 1968 [1963]), p.12; p. 913.

35 Beth Jenkins, ‘Suffrage Organizers, Grassroots Activism and the Campaign in Wales’, in Alexandra Hughes-Johnson and Lyndsey Jenkins (eds.), The Politics of Women’s Suffrage: Local, National and International Dimensions (London, University of London Press, 2021), pp. 87-108. Sarah Pedersen, ‘A mistake to raise any controversial question at the present time’: the careful relationship of Glasgow’s suffragists with the press, 1902–18’, in Alexandra Hughes-Johnson and Lyndsey Jenkins (eds.), The Politics of Women’s Suffrage: Local, National and International Dimensions (London, University of London Press, 2021), pp. 191-212.

36 See Elspeth King, The Scottish Women’s Suffrage Movement (Glasgow, People’s Palace Museum, 1978) and Lena Leneman, A Guid Cause: The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland (Aberdeen, Aberdeen University Press, 1995).

37 W. Hamish Fraser, Chartism in Scotland (London, Merlin, 2010); Eleanor Gordon, Women and the Labour Movement in Scotland, 1850-1914 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1991).

38 David V. Jones, The Last Rising: The Newport Chartist Insurrection of 1839 (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 1999).

39 Gordon Pentland, ‘‘Betrayed by infamous spies’? The Commemoration of Scotland's ‘radical war’ of 1820’, Past & Present 201, 1 (November 2008), pp. 141-173; p. 142.

40 See for instance Peter Berresford Ellis and Seumas Mac a’Ghobhainn, The Scottish Insurrection of 1820 (London, Victor Gollancz, 1970).

41 Malcolm Chase, 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2013), p.118.

42 For a discussion of the 1820 Commemoration Committee’s actions, see the preface to the 1989 edition of Berresford Ellis and Mac a’Ghobhainn’s book, published by Pluto Press. A 2016 edition came out with Birlinn.

43 Maggie Craig, One Week in April: The Scottish Radical Rising of 1820 (Edinburgh, Birlinn, 2020).

44 An online conference, ‘1820: A Year of Crisis in the British and Irish Isles’, was also held at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès in March 2021 and papers following two of the talks given there can be found in ‘Peterloo 1819 and After: Perspectives from Britain and Beyond’, Caliban 65-66 (2022) in a section entitled ‘1820 en Grande-Bretagne et dans le monde: radicalisme, conspiration et révolution’.

45 See, for instance, Eric Richards, Debating the Highland Clearances (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2007) and Rhian E. Jones, Petticoat Heroes: Gender, Culture and Popular Protest in the Rebecca Riots (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2015). For a more recent take of these events, see Rhian E. Jones, Rebecca’s Country: A Welsh Story of Riot and Resistance (Cardiff, University of Wales Press, 2024).

46 Katrina Navickas, “The Multiple Geographies of Peterloo and its impact in Britain’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 95, 1 (Spring 2019), pp. 1-13. See also Navickas’s Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016).

47 On the use of ‘moral ecology’ to study rural protest, see Iain Robertson, ‘‘Two steps forward; six steps back’: The dissipated legacy of Captain Swing’, Southern History 32 (2010), pp. 85-100. On the trajectories of the Swing rioters transported to the penal colonies, see David Kent and Norma Townsend, Convicts of the Eleanor: Protest in Rural England, New Lives in Australia (London, Merlin; Pluto Press, 2002). Keiran Hannon also wrote about “The fate of the transported Cato Street conspirators” in Jason McElligott and Martin Conboy (eds.), The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, Counter-Intelligence and the Revolution Tradition in Britain and Ireland (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2020), pp. 153-168.

48 See for instance Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830-1867 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2002); Neville Kirk, ‘The Rule of Class and the Power of Race: Socialist Attitudes to Class, Race and Empire during the Era of ‘new imperialism’, 1899-1910’, in his book Comrades and Cousins: Globalization, Workers and Labour Movements in Britain, the USA and Australia from the 1880s to 1914 (London, Merlin, 2003); Yann Béliard, ‘Le syndicalisme britannique dans la première mondialisation (1868-1914)’, Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique [Online] XV-2 (2009). Online since 1 November 2016, connection on 8 November 2024; Ryan Hanley, “The Shadow of Colonial Slavery at Peterloo”, Caliban [Online] 65-66 (2021). Online since 20 October 2021, connection on 7 November 2024. 

49 See an interview with Thompson from 1988 reproduced in Barbara Taylor’s post on the History Workshop blog on 14 May 2024, https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/womens-history/e-p-thompson-and-the-woman-problem/.

50 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, Penguin, 1968 [1963]), p. 455.

51 Catherine Hall, ‘The Tale of Samuel and Jemima: Gender and Working-class Culture in Nineteenth-Century England’, in Harvey Kaye and Keith McClelland (eds.), E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 1990), pp. 78-102; Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London, Virago, 1983). Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995).

52 Jill Liddington and Jill Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London, Virago, 1978). The book was republished with Rivers Oram in 2000, fifteen years after Jill Norris’s death. In the preface Jill Liddington discusses the variety of reactions to the 1978 first edition.

53 Louise Raw, Striking a Light: The Bryant and May matchwomen and their place in history (London, Continuum, 2011), p. 63. See also Laura Schwartz, Feminism and the Servant Problem. Class and Domestic Labour in the Women’s Suffrage Movement (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019).

54 Katrina Navickas, ‘What happened to class? New histories of labour and collective action in Britain’ Social History 36, 2 (2011), pp. 192–204, p. 194.

55 See Ryan Hanley, ‘Slavery and the Birth of Working-Class Racism in England,1814-1833’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (2016), pp. 103-123, p. 104; p.121. In a similar vein, Miles Taylor portrayed ardent anti-imperialist and Chartist Ernest Jones as also harbouring racist views in a biography published in 2003. See Miles Taylor, Ernest Jones. Chartism, and the Romance of Politics 1819-1869 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003).

56 Malcolm Chase argued that the ‘biographical turn’ could be a way of both perpetuating labour history’s traditional compassion for its subjects and recovering marginal figures in movements (Malcolm Chase, ‘Labour History’s Biographical Turn’, History Workshop Journal 92 (Autumn 2021), pp. 194-207). For a recent biography focusing on a mixed-race radical reformer, see Amanda Goodrich, Henry Redhead Yorke, Colonial Radical: Politics and Identity in the Atlantic World, 1772-1813 (Abingdon, New York, Routledge, 2019). Ryan Hanley published a chapter on Wedderburn, “Cato Street and the Caribbean”, in Jason McElligott and Martin Conboy (eds), The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, Counter Intelligence and the Revolutionary Tradition in Britain and Ireland (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2020), pp.81-100. His forthcoming book, Robert Wedderburn: British Insurrectionary, Jamaican Abolitionist (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2025), will appear in the series ‘Black Lives’. It follows on from a three-part lecture series delivered by Hanley in 2022 at the Hutchins Centre for African and African American Research, Harvard University.

57 Malcolm Chase, ‘Labour History’s Biographical Turn’, History Workshop Journal 92 (Autumn 2021), p. 205.

58 Christopher Hill, The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution (London, Temple Smith, 1972), p. 15.

59 Gregory Vargo, ‘‘Outworks of the Citadel of Corruption’: The Chartist Press Reports the Empire’, Victorian Studies 54, 2 (Winter 2012), pp. 227-253.

60 ‘To the Women of England’, Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, Saturday 22 February 1851, p.9.

61 Malcolm Chase, in Chartism: A New History (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007), devotes one of his vignettes on ‘Chartist Lives’ to William Cuffay. See also Martin Hoyles, William Cuffay: The Life and Times of a Chartist Leader (Hertford, Hansib Publications, 2013).

62 Malcolm Chase, ‘Labour History’s Biographical Turn’, History Workshop Journal, 92, (2021), pp. 194-207, p. 204.

63 Arlette Farge, ’Préface’ in Coline Cardi et Geneviève Pruvost (dir.), Penser la violence des femmes (Paris, La Découverte, 2012), p. 10. Farge uses the expression “actrices volontaires de leurs destins”.

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List of illustrations

Title Figure 1: On 27 September 1884, eleven Peterloo veterans aged 79 to 81, including four women, posed in front of posters for electoral reform and the Peterloo banner of nearby Middleton.
Credits Photo by John Birch, reproduced by Benjamin Brierley, Failsworth: my native village, Oldham, W.E. Clegg, 1895.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/docannexe/image/12904/img-1.jpg
File image/jpeg, 168k
Title Figure 2: In 1974, in the context of second-wave feminism, a drama series, Shoulder to shoulder, revived interest in the suffragettes.
Caption Many elderly suffrage activists were still alive at the time and were interviewed by oral historians.
Credits Radio Times, 30 March 1974.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/docannexe/image/12904/img-2.jpg
File image/jpeg, 100k
Title Figure 3: Membership card of the National Charter Association, c. 1843.
Caption On the back of the card, the weekly member’s contributions to the ‘general fund’ of the NCA, which gathered up to 50,000 members in 400 branches, were recorded by the secretary. This has given credence to the idea that Chartism was an early working-class party, and not just a movement.
Credits © Mark Crail – Chartist ancestors website
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/docannexe/image/12904/img-3.jpg
File image/jpeg, 244k
Title Figure 4: An illustration from Amelia Opie Alderson’s abolitionist book for children, entitled The Black Man’s Lament; or, how to make sugar (1826).
Caption The illustration shows two young children carrying a petition calling for the abolition of the slave trade. The book was published at the height of the movement to end slavery in the British Empire.
Credits Public domain.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/docannexe/image/12904/img-4.png
File image/png, 1.1M
Title Figure 5: The ‘Chartist steps’ in Newport, South Wales leading to John Frost Square.
Caption Visitors can read the six points of the People’s Charter engraved in the stone steps.
Credits Pwimageglow, Wikimedia Commons.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/docannexe/image/12904/img-5.jpg
File image/jpeg, 548k
Title Figure 6: William Cuffay in his cell in Newgate prison, 1848.
Credits Courtesy of Mark Crail, Chartist Ancestors.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/docannexe/image/12904/img-6.png
File image/png, 727k
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References

Electronic reference

Fabrice Bensimon and Rachel Rogers, “Introduction. Nineteenth-Century Protest Movements in Britain: A Survey of Historians’ Approaches”Revue Française de Civilisation Britannique [Online], XXX-1 | 2025, Online since 13 January 2025, connection on 20 April 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/rfcb/12904; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/133da

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About the authors

Fabrice Bensimon

Fabrice Bensimon teaches British history at Sorbonne Université and is a member of the Centre d’histoire du 19e siècle and of the Institut universitaire de France. His recent publications include Artisans Abroad. British Migrant Workers in Industrialising Europe, 1815-1870 (Oxford, 2023) and “Kennington Common, 10 April 1848: The Photographs, the Chartist Crowd, and the Coachman” (Journal of Victorian Culture, 29.3, 2024, p. 430-52).

By this author

Rachel Rogers

Rachel Rogers teaches British history at Toulouse Jean Jaurès university. Her book, Friends of the Revolution: The British Radical Community in Early Republican Paris 1792-1794 (Breviary Stuff Publications), came out in 2021. She has edited two bicentenary volumes on British radicalism with Alexandra Sippel, one on the legacy of Thomas Spence (Miranda, 2016) and a second on the Peterloo massacre and its aftermath (Caliban, 2022).

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Copyright

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The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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