Bronterre O’Brien and the Meaning of Radical Reputation in the Age of the Chartists

Though it differed from place to place and was rarely able to present a united front, the Chartist movement promoted the clearest and most direct plan of political reform known to nineteenth-century Britain—the six points of the People’s Charter of 1838: manhood suffrage, vote by ballot, annual elections, equal electoral districts, payment of Members of Parliament, and the abolition of property qualifications for the latter. Opinions differ as to the main spur behind Chartism—whether it was a movement of the politically excluded and therefore an expression of political identity, or primarily a working-class response to the industrial revolution and an expression of class consciousness. Some Chartist leaders and many of their followers did not hail from the laboring ranks. Many in the movement went beyond the six points and pursued social and economic goals, and there was some overlap in personnel and tactics between Chartism and other agitations, including those for temperance, church and law reform, antislavery, free trade, land redistribution, popular education, and international peace.¹ British radicals employed a mixture of ideas and symbols drawn from popular constitutionalism, economic doctrine, the American and French Revolutions, natural rights, public and personal morality, local and national traditions, class relations, and other sources. While the “constitutional idiom” was, for most, the dominant mode of communication, other idioms were employed as well, and in some groups there was a merging of an older rhetoric (political corruption, aristocratic rule, monopolies, heavy taxation) and a new paradigm (class conflict, economic exploitation, the labor theory of value, and capital-versus-labor).²

Bronterre O’Brien was partly responsible for this merging process, for he saw clearly the interrelationship of political, social, and economic measures, and this was a theme he constantly elaborated upon in his writing and speaking. One of the foremost celebrities of Chartism, especially in its early years, O’Brien had made his name with the Poor Man’s Guardian between 1831 and 1835. By the late 1830s he was a well-known radical leader, but he broke with other leaders during the 1840s and expressed dissatisfaction with mainstream Chartism. He was generally overlooked in the memoirs of other Chartists, probably because he quarreled with so many of them; and though regarded by later observers as central to Chartism, especially by writers on the political Left,³ O’Brien has been marginalized in Chartist historiography since the 1960s. He has been discussed in articles, and he usually rates at least a passing reference in books about Chartists, but there is little in-depth treatment. This is understandable: personal papers for him are scarce; his was not a particularly attractive personality; and historians have placed their focus elsewhere on the grounds that his involvement with the movement was more limited in time and, they think, in significance than that of other leaders. O’Brien so far has no entry in the important Dictionary of Labor Biography, which began publication in 1972. There is only one modern biography of O’Brien, from the 1970s, but most of it appears to have been written in the 1920s and 1930s.⁴ Nevertheless, knowledge about O’Brien is growing, and among recent exceptions to the marginalization trend are the volume of documents edited and introduced by David Stack and Ben Maw’s investigations of O’Brien’s ideology.⁵

Other Chartist figures might have received more attention than O’Brien, but he has a claim to be regarded, in his heyday, as the most interesting and dynamic of the movement’s leaders. What follows is a study of leadership viewed through the prism of reputation—for if leaders were really to lead, and exert influence beyond their immediate location and personal circle, they had to build and use reputation.

Born in Ireland, O’Brien arrived in London at the end of the 1820s to study law, but decided instead to devote himself to politics. By the mid-1830s he was a public figure. To remain so, and earn a living, O’Brien had to cultivate a reputation. This was...