In Our Time - Chartism

Episode Date: March 9, 2023

On 21 May 1838 an estimated 150,000 people assembled on Glasgow Green for a mass demonstration. There they witnessed the launch of the People’s Charter, a list of demands for political reform. The changes they called for included voting by secret ballot, equal-sized constituencies and, most importantly, that all men should have the vote. The Chartists, as they came to be known, were the first national mass working-class movement. In the decade that followed, they collected six million signatures for their Petitions to Parliament: all were rejected, but their campaign had a significant and lasting impact. With Joan Allen Visiting Fellow in History at Newcastle University and Chair of the Society for the Study of Labour HistoryEmma Griffin Professor of Modern British History at the University of East Anglia and President of the Royal Historical Society and Robert Saunders Reader in Modern British History at Queen Mary, University of London.The image above shows a Chartist mass meeting on Kennington Common in London in April 1848.

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello, on May the 21st, 1838, an estimated 150,000 people assembled on Glasgow Green for a mass demonstration. There, they witnessed the launcher 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. Will me to discuss the Chartist movement, Joan Allen, visiting fellow in history at Newcastle University, and Chair of the Society for the Study of Labor History,

Emma Griffin, Professor of Modern British History at the University of East Anglia and President of the Royal Historical Society, and Robert Saunders, reader in modern British history at Queen Mary University of London. Joan Allen, what were the living conditions like for working people in the 1820s and 1830s? You would have to say deteriorating and deteriorating rapidly. And also you'd have to make a difference between skilled workers and the labouring poor, as it were.

Skilled workers had always had independence, time, as well as some surplus income. They were able to educate themselves. They were able to enjoy their work and have some dignity and pride in it. And what you find is that it's the erosion of the apprentice system and the decline of skilled work, which essentially dissoned.

destroys a whole way of life that they'd enjoyed for a long time. They're also, of course, literate and sufficiently politically astute to recognise what that meant. For the labouring poor, their living conditions were appalling. And because of the expansion of industrial areas and an unregulated expansion, they lived in very poor, squalid conditions, multiple occupancy, a very poor diet, and a sense of hopelessness,

and fear, fear that they would end up in the workhouse and would be unable to rescue themselves or their families, particularly if they were old or sick or mentally ill. Is anybody doing anything about this? Well, there's lots of agitation, and those who lead protest groups are quite, quite articulate. The skilled workers who are often the kind of shock troops of some of these protest movements, they articulate a solution, which is to change the government, to move towards

a more democratic system so that those social questions can be tackled. They thought that, because there was some sort of democracy, they claimed, I'd play. Yes, I agree with this expression in your face, but there was some sort of democracy, even though there were rotten boroughs and so on. but they wanted to radically change that. Can you tell us how radically they wanted to change it? They wanted to participate in government and to have a say in government.

And as matters stood, they couldn't do that because they weren't enfranchised. And then up came the Great Reform Bill in 1832, which as far as most people were concerned, didn't reform enough. No, I mean the great in the title is a bit of a misnomer, you might say. it was a fairly dramatic change. You know, the idea that they might reform at all

was quite a dramatic achievement. But of course it doesn't truly address the concerns that working people had. It's certainly not those who belong to political unions and who'd campaigned so hard for this big change. And so that when they finally, after three attempts, they get this reform bill through the House of Commons,

It delivers a vote mainly to wealthier middle class men who could meet the £10 barrier. Can you explain the £10 barrier? It was to do with the ownership of property either as household or tenant. The Rottenboroughs, which had often two representatives, were tiny little ancient constituencies. and the new industrial towns like Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester, they had nothing, they had no representation at all, despite having populations, huge populations that were growing every day. So that was essentially a good move, you could say,

rebalancing the constituencies. So something was done in that direction? Something was done, 57 Rottenboroughs went, 30 lost half of their representation, 67 new constituencies created. So that part of the bill was definitely an improvement. What didn't they do that was hopeful and expected? They didn't deliver the democracy that was demanded,

the suffrage, the triennial parliaments. They just didn't deliver those things. Thank you. Emma Griffin, can we develop the industrialisation question? How part did that play a part in the formation? and what became, as I said at the beginning, a massive movement, the biggest mass movement we know, and from reformation, the extraordinary thing, it didn't take off into revolution, but we might touch on that later. The timing of Chartism is no accident.

I think it is very much tied up with the process of industrialisation and the fact that industrial revolution has been occurring. I hear very much what Joan is saying about conditions being very difficult for working people, and I wouldn't dispute that at all. Conditions are very, very difficult. But there are some features of industrialisation and urbanisation that also give working men in particular some advantages and some opportunities to articulate their discontent.

So in the cities, wages tend to be higher for men than they are out of the countryside. So as long as you had a traditionally, you know, a largely rural population, it's going to be very difficult for rural people to organise on a national level. One of the things that's so significant about charterism is a national movement. So we have people in the north and in the south and in the east and in the west

in Wales and Scotland and England. They're all fighting around the same idea. We can see some of the ways in which being a more modern and a more urban nation and more industrial nation made it possible for people in one part of the country to get behind the same set of ideas as somebody in another part of the country.

That just makes chartism much more powerful because historically where people have riots and rebellions, they tend to be very localised. So people inside one community getting angry about a particular issue and a particular magistrate, and that could be very effective. But it is quite different from the model that we see with Charterism, where we've got people across many, many different communities. You had the Traj Union movement growing at roughly the same time. Did those two interlock? Yes, I think that's right. I mean, what we do see in the first half of the 19th century, from the very tail end of the 18th century and all through the first half of the 19th century,

we see more evidence of working people coming together and agitating for their rights. The union movement is one element of that. Chartism obviously is another element of that. You've also got things like workers' education movements and the Mechanics Institute, for example. These things are starting to be established. I think religion also provides another example. The rise of things like Methodism and various non-conformist churches. You've got a much more kind of active and engaged communities inside the world.

these churches and they've got the same kind of thing where people are learning preaching skills and organisational skills and so you see a lot of changes in many different spheres of life and I think they are definitely interconnected. One of the things that you, when you read about it is the numbers here numbers involved 200,000 just going to meeting, marching to meeting, going miles to get to the meeting and then going to the meeting. It's a massive numbers. Yes, the numbers are unlike anything previous. It's a real turning point in our nation's history. I suppose the big question is, how did it

whip up from a speech in a market square to the intensity and the size that we're talking about? Absolutely. It takes a lot of organisation. It takes clever, careful, political organisation and manoeuvring. And it does start. I mean, it starts

in the late 18th century with people in rooms, small conversations, small groups of a dozen men at a time and little by little every town is doing this kind of organisation and then they're communicating with each other so it takes a lot of there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to be in place and that's what we see

that's why chartism can grow because it's got this political infrastructure that working men for the first time are starting to access as well thank you Robert Saunders how did chartism do we know when chartism came into being as something we can recognise as chartism

Well, the People's Charter, which is the document that gives it its name, is drawn up by a small committee and chiefly written by William Lovett from 1837 to 1838. But that is really just the arrowhead for a great surge of radical politics all the way through the 1830s, which has been drawing on all the things we've heard about so far, the hunger and the misery and the squalor of industrial life. And being led down by the reformed by the reform? Absolutely, the sense of deep betrayal at reform. And what the Charter sets out to do is to weld those things together to say that it is because political power is monopolised by the few that the loss of the many is hunger and misery and squalor. And so whatever it is you want to fix, you have got first to mobilise behind this new Magna Carta, a People's Charter,

and that just as the barons had won the Magna Carta by the display of baronial power. So you will win the People's Charter by the might and majesty of united people. And that's where this strategy of mass petitioning is so important. Some of them going back to the Magna Carta, we want to go back to the time

when people could fight to be equal. That was part of it. Very much so. This is a political culture that's saturated in memories of the past. So for the Whigs, it's very much about 1688 in the glorious revolution. For charters, it's often about the reign of Alfred,

which they often see as a democracy. or it's about a better Magna Carta because that was a Magna Carta for property but now we're going to have a People's Charter for those without property. What were the reaction to beginning with? It got to these enormous sizes but how did it get going?

What was the dynamo of the gutty going? We're talking about individuals and we're talking about individuals plus a movement. Where are we there? Oh, we're talking about so many different things happening at the same time. There was a few. But I think the unifying thread is the national petition

because on the one hand the petition is how you're express your demands, but it's also how you build your movement. So you've got chartist missionaries, as they're called, literally walking the country from one place to another. You've got people knocking on doors or setting up tables outside factories and you're taking down signatures, and then you're sending those signatures to London to be stitched together. And in a way, that's what the petition is doing for chartism as a whole, in that it's taking all of these different radical movements, all of these local grievances, the local culture that them are talked about,

and it's stitching them together into a national democratic campaign. And then we have the six demands, but I'm still quite curious. Was there a centre person that was stitching all this together, or was it some mass movement that was being stitched together north-southeast and west? It's both. So chartism is intensely local. Chartism in Scotland and in Cornwall and in the West Country would be different, and it would tap into, in Scotland Wallace and Bruce and Burns,

or in Wales it'll be much more related to. to the chapels. But it's all communicating that to a central organisation. And to the six main demands. Absolutely. Which we've touched on if we can rattle through them. Okay. So what the, charter is trying to do is to smash a political model that's based on property and based on an educated gentlemanly elite running the country. That's a gentlemanly when you think about it. Well, absolutely. That's the aspiration. So chartism is made up of six points, each of which is about unscruing some aspect of aristocratic power. So first, universal male suffrage. So not a limited property electorate, all adult men. Secondly, secret voting. So you can vote as your conscience tells

you, not as your landlord or your employer tells you. Thirdly, constituencies of equal size. So every vote will count for the same. Fourthly, get rid of the property qualification for members of parliament. So your MP doesn't have to meet a certain threshold of wealth. You can choose whoever you like. Then next payment of MPs. So you're not relying on a class that have private incomes. You're actually paying members of Parliament so they can be working people. And then the sixth point, which perhaps to us is the most alarming, is the idea of annual parliaments or general elections every year, which sounds awful to us. But the point of it is it's about making sure that the people control their MPs. If they go to Parliament and then they don't do what you want, you hook them out again and you

replace them. But despite what a lot of people in idios would think, of course, and despite the six million signatures and the marches, it was blocked. Is this a general fear and loathing of the working classes in Parliament or what's going on? I don't think it's a loathing of the working classes. There is a strong degree of fear. A very common analogy that you encounter in writing about chartism is the idea of Frankenstein's monster. So just as Frankenstein's monster is the creation of a mad science and it's a creature in rage and pain. It's not evil, but it's hurting and it's destructive.

So industrial society has created a class that is in pain and is in torment. Now, you don't respond to that by giving the monster to the vote, but you do recognise your responsibility and you do think about how else you might tackle chartism, perhaps through greater use of

philanthropy, or perhaps through better public welfare or education or Christian teaching. So there's a great attempt to understand what chartism is without accepting its demands. Before I leave you, are you sure that the sort of blunt turning down of this again and again was not because there was an intense, the elite who had had it so good for a long time in Parliament thought that they didn't want their tablecloth to be soiled by these working people? Are you absolutely sure?

You've glided over that, I think, a little. No, there's always a degree of self-interest in politics, and I think that is very important. But I think we also have to remember that if you're looking at the world in the 1830s, the experimental record of democracy is extremely poor. You've had democracies in the ancient world which have collapsed into anarchy and civil war. You've had the French Revolution which has plunged the world into 25 years of bloodshed. So there are quite good reasons for believing that this system simply doesn't work and will in fact be worse for ordinary people as well as for the elite.

Democracy is a very broad concept. If we just hone in on that particular demand about universal adult male suffrage is the headline of what they're after. And it's a really good question. How widely spread is that as an idea and as a concept? It's been something that has been being discussed since the late 18th century. So the American colonies, for example, after the American War of Independence, they establish the same principles as we have in Britain. Initially, you have to be a property holder in order to vote. But they are already, by the early 19th century,

century. There's a lot of devolution among states. There are states that are starting to give the franchise to adult males, basically. I think chartism, it's really the story as to how far in Britain that idea has penetrated. It's there with the debate around the Great Reform Act, but it doesn't get through. It's not passed. So the struggle is getting those people who hold the levers of power in Parliament to go along with it. Because in some ways it's not a question as to how widespread this belief is. The thing that matters is, is how sympathetic are the people who hold positions of power in Parliament. And at this stage, as we know that the Charters are not successful at this particular period,

at that point, they reach the limit as to how far people are happy to go along with these ideas. Joan Allen, how revolutionary were the objectives of the Charterists, in your opinion? You would have thought with all those people signing, with all those people marching, there'd be some ignition. Why wasn't there? There were flashpoints, as you know, the Newport Rising. But the idea that they want to fundamentally change society was revolutionary in itself. But also the way they campaigned in itself was revolutionary.

Whether you think it's because they're drilling and arming themselves and claiming the right to bear arms, not least, you know, in many ways these are threatening activities. they gather in, as you've noted, in enormous numbers. And this is a period in time in which governments across Europe absolutely go in fear and trembling of these enormous crowds because for them that means revolution when people gather on that scale. The charters knew that their presence was in itself

a revolutionary challenge to the state. And the state responds punitively by arresting 2,000 of them between 1839 and 1842 and convicting a large portion of them and committing them to jail for their activity. So in that sense, we could argue that they had a revolutionary intent, but it was very much balanced between the desire to persuade the state constitutionally using constitutional methods,

as we've heard, petitioned. loyal addresses to their MPs. Polite exchanges saying, well, look, listen to us. We'll make a grand speech. We'll tell you what we think and we hope you'll listen. But if you don't,

then this is the alternative. So it's a... Peaceful if we can. Forcibly, if we must. Precisely. So it's that balancing act, I think. And the poor man's guardian, you know, a kind of very strident paper.

flew on the idea of reform or revolution. That's your choice. Make the reform or else. There were a lot of slogans. Yes. A lot of embroidered slogans and splash slogans and newspapers covered it. Newspapers grew because of it.

There were over 120 newspapers around the Chartist movement in various parts of the land. One, the Northern Star, outsold the Times for a while. What placed, it was, slogans play in the development of chartism? I think they were really important. In a period where a lot of the working people were semi-literate, some illiterate.

They needed some kind of political shorthand as a kind of guiding message, if you will. So no taxation without representation, echoing the American Revolution, but very much twinning those two things. It's a pitch for citizenship, a meaningful citizenship. The Charter and No Surrender was another important slogan. All men are brethren. This is a more subtle sort of message, but also lending great moral authority, if you like, to the movement and connecting it to Charter's churches. But often, as we've discussed, this balancing act between promise and threat, peaceably if you can,

forcibly if we must, that was a very, very important message. The comments seemed to have taken very little or no notice of that. Well, the commons may not have, but the charters did. Yes. And it was a way to juggling. But it's where when, isn't it? Yes, and it's juggling these ideas of moral and physical force.

Yes. And the use of moral, the idea of that, that asking for democracy was a moral position. That was really important, I think, because remember, this is a god-fearing society. Emma, can you tell us a little more about the media that was used to develop the Chartist position? Yeah, I think the media is really fascinating

and very much one of the things that makes the Chartist movement, even if its ultimate aims were not successful at the time, why it makes it such an important historical moment and event for us. So, I mean, you've already mentioned, newspapers, for example, we have a huge number of working class newspapers. And what we see here is working people starting to grab hold of the levers of political communication in ways that are very new and very novel. They're not going to get their arguments out through the pages of the times. What do they do? They establish and print and write their own newspapers instead.

Or pamphlets. Exactly. And pamphlets. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. We have things like plays, poetry and songs. We have chartism turning up in novels. I mean, songs are very much. And important because we are still dealing with a working population, many of whom cannot read and write and not read right very well. So songs can be a really important way of communicating. We have banners. We have evidence of people printing tea towels with Chartist methods on and chamber pots and mugs. So we've got this kind of use of not just the newspapers, but so many other forms of media. Of course, we've got the mass media. They're hitting on every single front and bringing in lots and lots of different mechanisms

to get their message out to as many people as possible. When you say they're hitting, does that imply as a sort of central control directing all this? Well, I mean, I think there are some central figures, as Rob has already mentioned. There are some leaders of the movement, but every town as well may well have its own, well, will have its own small organising committee,

and those people will, so, I mean, you know, when we talk about things like the tea towel, that's not necessarily something that's been driven by somebody in the centre, but obviously there are lots of Chartist movements out in cotton towns and people just use their own initiative to start producing these kinds of goods. So it's very much of its time. I mean, it's very interesting in that so much is unified, but of course it is still the early 19th century,

so a lot of it is very diffuse and very localized as well. Robert, you're going to come in. Where you go? I think the fact that these papers are full of poetry and literature and culture is really important because chartism isn't just a set of demands. It's something that people live, that people can send their children to charter schools. They can go to chartist churches. They might address one another as your brother or your sister in chartism.

Something interesting that happens in the early 1840s is that people start giving their children chartist names. So you might have been democracy brag or I might be charter saunders. And of course, we laugh at that and it is funny. but it's also about people who have nothing dedicating their children to the movement and what all this is really trying to do it's about trying to create the democratic society inside the shell of the old

a society that's about the dignity of labour and equality of worth and mutual respect there's been circulating this conversation has been the idea of religion the fact of religion more concretely than that methodism and chartism seem to link up in a specific and a very fertile way. Can you talk to that?

Yes, you can't really talk about any popular political movement in this period without thinking about the power of religion, especially evangelical religion, and chartism absolutely sits in that tradition. In some respects, it's organised quite like a dissenting sect. So we have, as I said, these chartist missionaries walking across the country, preaching what they call the gospel of chartism,

building congregations and moving on. And they're also preaching a kind of radical social goal, gospel. The idea that the truth of Christianity, not what's taught in the Church of England, but the truth of Christianity, is a Christ who comes into the world as the son of a carpenter who lives among the poor, who tells his followers to sell what they have and give to the poor. And that this is a religion of equality and respect. And also Methodism breaks away from the established, just as Chartism wants to break away from the established. Yes. So it's a critique of the state establishment and the church establishment, and those two things are so tightly woven.

in together in this period. And so because of that, chartists often see themselves either as kind of Old Testament prophets who are bringing down judgment upon the sinful rulers of the world, or as Christian martyrs, who are going to suffer because being a chartist is not consequence-free, but they have the promise of redemption. And because this is a movement made up of the poorest and powerless people in the country, it really matters that they believe that God is on their side, that the kind of paper armies of the state can't stand against them because they have the truth of religion behind them. Joan, Alan, can we go back to these mass meetings?

Yes. Because they would have an enormous field and sometimes take 200,000 or more with stages all over the place and slogans and songs and people turn up. Anyway, can you tell us something, give us something more than I've given, the flavour and the detail of that? I suppose a modern comparison. and would be something like the Durham Mainz Gala

would give you an idea of the way that charters occupied the space, not just the meeting space, you understand, but the processions which preceded it often had to divert across several streets because they were so large. They couldn't all proceed together, so they would occupy a central area

by parading down those streets and eventually coalesce as a whole group in that particular meeting place. So you have to imagine both the noise of it, the sheer tramping of feet, the music of it, because of course they often had bands playing, often chartered hymns. They used the old 100 hymn book and changed the words. And so everyone could sing along, so you would have that. also the speeches then.

There's no microphone, so you have multiple hustings, you might say, with a central platform, with the leading figure, Fergus O'Connor, Julian Harney. People they knew about, because of the Northern Star, had been made into these enormous guiding figures, if you like.

And men who could speak, they had great oratorial. skills and so you get this kind of an atmosphere of people being there. Now they may not have been able to hear anything above this noise. So just being there in itself was a matter of great pride and excitement and it must have been exhilarating. You know, it's almost theatrical, if you like. And you add to that a layer of significance because there are often meeting in very, very important locations, places which had meaning for working people, common land which had been retained despite the enclosure movement. And so when they stood there,

there were, if you like, reaffirming their right to meet on that particular space, whether that was the People's Green, Glasgow, it was the town moor in Newcastle, or it was Kennington Common down in London. These are places of real significance. Emma, if we go inside Parliament now and inside the elite who are denying, can you tell us something about there during this period, this almost decade, about their reactions,

their feelings, a pretty solid front they put up, wasn't they? It was, you shall not pass. They do. I think there's a relatively strong front within Parliament and within local communities as well. One of the things that's going on, and I think that make local leaders particularly anxious and concerned is the crowd element of it. Just as Joan has said, you end up with very big, noisy, visible, obvious crowds

and local leaders have never liked the Assembly of Crowds, and we're largely in a pre-police period. So you don't have a law and order framework that you can simply put out on the streets in the way that we do now. Don't they put the troops out on the street? The military, you have to get the army in. So it's quite a lot of reorganise. Go ahead, Joan.

I would just say that one of the problems was being able to mobilise the army because it was stationed in various places and it wasn't always possible to bring that military force to a meeting without a lot of pre-planning and pre-organisation. So you can see why there is so much anxiety. You don't have the forces of law and order serried ranked around you. you just have these big mobs suddenly emerging, and it is certainly something that makes leaders,

particularly in the local community, just very anxious, and Parliament is really steadfastly behind them. Do we have more of a taste of what the authorities that were doing? Do we know what they were saying to each other? Did they have tactics? Did they have somebody running them? Well, there's a very strong policing operation, which is partly about things like putting spies into chartersom and trying to honeycomb the movement with people who can tell you what they're doing.

That's a good word, honey-down. And perhaps precipitate them into doing things that they shouldn't. But I think a particularly interesting figure here actually is Sir Robert Peel, in that Peel comes to power in 1841, when the economic crisis is at its zenith, and when chartism is gathering itself at a second petition. And he is a figure who lies awake at night worrying about revolution. He's got one of the biggest collections of revolutionary pamphlets in Europe.

So the task of his government is to, deactivate chartism and the revolutionary threat that poses. But he doesn't think you can do this just by coercive force. You've also got to kind of break the critique of chartism, the idea that you can achieve nothing until you change the political system. So he reintroduces the income tax on his own supporters, on high earners. He uses that to cut taxes on things like food and raw materials. And famously, he blows up his own government by repealing the tax on bread in the corn laws. And he actually becomes a kind of charting. hero. They actually issue his portraits in a steel engraving. But he's a problem for chartism, because

if the core claim of chartism is that the whole system is corrupt and whatever you want, you have to reform the system first, in a way the legacy of Peel's period suggests you can actually get some things done inside the existing system, and that you might, if you want to reform the poor law or change trade union law, you might be better just working for that. Joan, can you give listeners some specific idea of what the mass meetings brought to people in their daily life. Did they go back enriched by it? Did they continue to be chartists? Did they go back thinking I've been converted? I think many people who came back converted. I think they, because you remember, these are people who are looking for a solution. They have urgent need of a resolution to their daily difficulties.

And so if, you know, as they would now, if you go and listen to someone who says, right, the only way to deal with your problem is to do this, then the idea of fighting for democratic change is bound to empower people and galvanise them into, you know, making a stand and joining forces with people who share those very same ideas. And that would say, surely some of them, it's just a good jolly, isn't it? I mean, it's just fun. part of the crowd, you know, it's a day out, you're kind of cooking a bit of a snoop to

authority. I mean, I think you're right. There's no doubt there's some really good quality ideas and that's why it's effective, but it's also effective because it offers camaraderie, friendship, fun. Certainly. And the association of life that springs from charterism. It leads people into other organisational groups. So temperance, veganism, you know, all kinds of cooperation, trade unionism. The idea of the collective really takes hold. The idea that unity is strength, so you work with other people. And of course, the charters campaigned for the charter and something more. So the six points were not everything. There was a whole list of other things that they wanted to achieve. You know, they wanted a free press. They wanted

education accessible to many more people. They desperately wanted a repeal the poor law amendment attack. Charterism can be exhausting, but it can also be great fun and it can be tremendously energising. And especially, there is almost a kind of organised sport element to it in seeing your champion standing up to authority, perhaps in the courtroom. So, for example, one Chartist leader was on trial because a spy had been at one of his meetings and reported that he had told his followers to travel with a copy of the petition and a musket.

And he said, no, no, you misheard. I said bring the petition and a biscuit because I don't want people getting hungry and there's something wonderful about seeing your people defying authority in this way. Did women pay a big role in this? Certainly they did because they're at the sharp end

of making ends meet, keeping their families fed. And so they participate fully and actually women were very active right through the 18th century with food rioting, which was very common, and then into the 19th century, they formed political unions after the Peterloo Massacre. They were female reformers groups at the time of the 1832 campaign.

And then in Charterism, you have enormous numbers of women's organisations, women's reform groups, at least 100. 24,000 of them signed that first petition. The Birmingham Political Union had 3,000 women. members. So we see them in great numbers and they're active. They're not just signing things and turning up at meetings, but they do door-to-door campaigns. They get involved in what's called exclusive dealing where they lobbied local shopkeepers and made the argument, if you don't vote for the reforms we want, we won't give you our business. We won't shop,

So women were very active in their own account. They made a stand for themselves and they organised their own groups. Unfortunately, they sometimes had to rely on a man to chair the meeting, which I think is unfortunate. Why was it, I mean, I can understand why I say it's unfortunate, but why does it seem to have been mandatory? I think it was just because if they belonged to a local charterist organisation, they were effectively a branch of that male group. Can we discuss when it came to an end? I know this is a bit of a tricky point.

1848 has been taken to be an end point and undoubtedly the movement is in comparative decline in terms of those mass meetings. You've now got special constables, better policing, who are acting as a kind of suppressive force, if you will. But there are still chartist meetings in places like Halifax in 1855. And so they seamlessly, it seems, they move into successive reform groups. And so when you get a revival of the reform question in 1858, they are still a generation of Chartists. I was going to ask that, are they?

Well, obviously they have Joneses, so that's that. Can you just take that on a little? I think that's right. I mean, we think of the Chartist movement or, you know, the easy version is that it's not successful and they don't get their aims, and then it goes into abeyance at some point in the 1840s. And there's truth in all of that.

I think what the chartists do, where I would want to put the emphasis, is they've permanently changed the debate and the discussion as to who's representing whom and what agenda. So it's clearly, it's possible for them to say, well, we're not going to extend the franchise, but it becomes increasingly difficult to say, we're not going to attend to popular demands.

and I think Rob has already alluded to this very well, but that starts to become a part of political debate. And of course, the idea of extended the franchise never really goes away, and it's back on political agenda. By the 1860s, it's back on the political agenda. And we do at that point start to introduce a much broader suffrage that does include working men and further reforms in the 1880s. Then, of course, we move into the 20th century, even further reforms,

and women are included. So there's a degree in which the Chartists are not immediately, But for myself, I would really want to place the emphasis on the fact that it's a permanent change in our political discourse. And it really establishes working people as a force in the country that can't simply be sidelined in the way that really historically up to this point they have been. Would you agree with that as the legacy, Robin? Yes. If we measure chartism by the goals it sets itself, then it doesn't succeed. But it does leave behind, I think, two immensely powerful things. One is the set of ideas about the dignity of working people and the equality of worth.

The other is an entire generation of working men and women who have a political training. And whether that's in organisation or journalism or accountancy or public speaking, they know how to do politics. And that doesn't disappear as chartism eps. It just flows into other movements. So in all the later reform movements of the 19th century, they're stocked with chartists. local government actually is stocked with chartists and that's really important in changing popular liberalism. There's a wonderful photograph taken in Falesworth outside Oldham in the 1880s and it's

two aldermans, so senior local councillors and they're wearing their Sunday bests, they've got their bow ties, their waistcoats, their bowler hats and they're carrying the pikes that they had made in the 1840s, the pike staffs ready to march on parliament. So they've gone from being rebels in the 1840s to local dignitaries in the 1880s, but they're still holding on to that idea of chartism as that sort of continuing thread of dignity. And I think that really is the legacy of chartism. Do you have anything to add to the legacy, Joan? Certainly, I think chartists influenced the emergence of a reformed liberal party in the late 1850s because some of those chartists have moved into local government. And so the links between

local government and the Liberal Party and what they want to achieve. Some of their credibility at the ballot box comes from an endorsement by previous chartist campaigners. I would really want to emphasise the creation of a skilled working class who can advocate for their own interests. It's a real turning point in our nation's history. I think also we have to remember that this isn't just felt in Britain, that there are charters all over the world in the second half of the 19th century.

Some have been transported as a criminal punishment. Others have just left to seek a new life. So if you look at the politics of New South Wales, there are people in the trade union movement there who learnt their politics in Chartism. There are state senators in Massachusetts who started out as Chartists. And in that respect, just as Chartism draws on currents

from continental Europe and American democracy, so it feeds back into it. And it's part of the global story of democracy, not just of democracy in Britain. Well, thank you very much. That was fascinating. Thanks to Joan Allen, Emma Griffin, and Robert Saunders and our studio engineer Jackie Marjoram.

Next week, not waving but drowning the poetry and novels of Stevie Smith. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. The best way to start of is what do you think we missed out that we should have talked about? Starting with you and John. Well, I think I would like to flag up the kind of European links because charterism doesn't operate in isolation.

and particularly by the late 1840s, you know, there is a lot of collaboration with French radicals, German socialists, for example. Marx and Engels, Marx is publishing his communist manifesto for the first time in a British radical journal edited by a chartist. And so I think that's the thing.

I think it's important to get across. This is not an isolated, British group who are just pursuing their own ends. There's a dialogue, I would say, between these European radicals and American radicals, as well as British ones. And the Communist Manifesto is translated into English by Helen McFarlane, who is a female Chartist. So another example of the contribution of women to Chartism in terms of bringing ideas

into the movement. But I would also, I mean, we've said, I think we've emphasised a lot, all the positives. I suppose I would perhaps put a question mark over the role and the position of women inside the organisation. Women do, do, you know, I agree. They are there. They are doing lots of things. But what they can't do or almost exclusively cannot do

is take positions of authority, leadership, to be the person standing up. And there is also something strangely conservative in that respect and that the chartists cannot see at this point in the middle of the 19th century. They cannot see a world in which women have, have voices and in which women stand at the front of the podium and which women organise the people in the room. And I think that's no doubt something of its time. But it's also a bit of a regret. Or for me, it always feels a bit of a regret. We can see all the wonderful things

that they are doing. And yet actually, if you step back and you say, OK, I don't want to say the positive story, what would be the negative story. Actually, you can see there's lots of limitations to women's participation in the political sphere. I mean, there was a discourse around universal suffrage rather than universal male suffrage. But the fear is that they won't get it through unless they drop.

Absolutely, of course. So they have to make it male suffrage as a campaigning vehicle. And women at this time aren't really in a position. We've talked a lot about how men can, you know, are starting to enter the public sphere. They're starting to get a political training. They're starting to learn how to agitate and to organise

and it's something that stays within the culture ever after, but women really can't do that at this moment. They can participate in limited ways, but they can't really organise themselves, I think because they're just too busy at home looking after their families a lot of the time. And there's a dilemma in chartism as well, isn't there? Which is that charters are often attacked for the involvement of women. This is seen as a mark of the corruption of chartism, that it's pushing women out of the home and getting them involved in politics. So chartis tend to respond by turning that on its head and saying, actually it's industrialisation that's forcing women into the workplace. It's the injustices of

government that is making us leave our homes and our children to go out and campaign, and we would really much rather be back home. So charitism actually ends up reinforcing a rhetoric of domesticity. It's sort of ideal is one in which women return to the home. So men secure the so-called breadwinner wage. But that in itself means that the respectable thing is to support your family so your wife does not have to go out to work and that pushes women back into the domestic sphere makes the very vulnerable on somebody else earning reliably and sharing their earnings so there's a real vulnerability in that system but I think it's had ramifications for the position that women were beginning to find for themselves so their activity their political activity during the beginning

of the charter's years but by about 1840s 243, those groups are disappearing. Men are starting to meet in public houses as well. So when chartism is driven off the streets into indoor meetings, that makes it very difficult for women to attend. So as we've heard, they could gather at an outside meeting and could be drawn to it, take their children. It could be a familial activity.

It changes once it's an indoor meeting. meeting. And chartism has at its core the idea that you can represent the people, all of the people, by giving the vote just to men. And that's a reminder of just the scale of the challenge that faces the suffrage movement later in the 19th century, that they're not just campaigning for the vote, they're having to change the meaning of democracy and to change what people think the people is. I mean, it's the start of a really, I mean, I think the chartist is the start of a much longer process as we move towards universal suffrage. We didn't say enough about the conjunction or not real conjunction between the

trade union and charterism, didn't we? Well, I didn't think we did. Well, we could, I mean, there's a lot to say about that. I mean, first of all, there's an argument about why minors are not as representative within charter's ranks as you might expect. So some parts of the country, Northumberland, Staffordshire, for example, you've got huge contingents of mining, mining labourers, mining workers, involved. But in other parts of the country, they are preferring a trade union route. And so that kind of divides that particular occupational group, if you will. Working people can be quite conservative.

and they can be radical, and we've talked about the elements of radicalism, but there can be a conservatism in their movements as well. And minors, they're self-employed. They're in some, you know, small self-employed, sometimes have a different view towards the collective, for example, yeah. In what way and when did, is it where the House of Commons, let chartism through or let its ideas through, and which were let through?

Well, there's a gradual process, over time in which most of the six points are adopted. So we end up with universal male suffrage by 1918, except for conscientious objectors secret ballot in 1872. The property qualification goes in the 1850s. So there's a gradual acceptance of Chartist demands. But the fact that it's happening piecemeal is important. That there's what Chartism believed in was a radical transformation of the state.

It's a big bang movement. And it really matters that this is all a, unit. And so in that respect, the way that it happens is not what the Chalists have envisaged or hoped for. So there was disappointment in the Chalder's ranks. Well, I think as Rob mentioned earlier, there is, the Chardis don't kind of go away and lick their tails and feel very sad and sorry for themselves and nothing worked out. They simply move on to things that they can change. So there are things that you can do once you have political skills. There are things you can do inside your local community.

And very often people who've got swept up by police. activism and enjoyed it very much, move on to other smaller local issues that they can do something about. That's what I feel. Public health, for example. Sanitation. There's no shortage of things for working people to get angry about and to do something about in the 19th century. Our producer is about, John is about to burst in. Oh, gently burst in. Tea, coffee and a musket or a biscuit?

I'd happily take a small coffee. I'd love a tea and a musket, please. I'm not going to take any tea or coffee. I've got quite a long journey back to Norwich. Are you confused about why your mortgage rate is going up? Unsure of what causes inflation or befuddled over what GDP stands for, I've got the perfect podcast for you. I'm Tim Harford.

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