The Poetry of Chartism: Aesthetics, Politics, History (review)

Chances are that when most of us think of the term "Victorian poetry," we don't think first of, for instance, Ernest Jones or Gerald Massey. This is the case, Sanders theorizes, because we have been reared in a critical tradition that is concerned with "individual, subjective, psychological states," a tradition that gives preeminence to poets such as Tennyson and Browning. Sanders wishes to expand our view of Victorian poetry by examining its role in another—more public and socially direct—critical context, the Chartist movement. This movement, he says, linked poetry to a larger context and purpose than portraying individual psychological states of mind. What's more, he argues, Chartist poetry needs to be reevaluated and seen as a major contribution to the category indicated by the term "Victorian poetry."

First, Sanders suggests that because writing poetry is a highly literate skill, its practice might well have encouraged the development of communication skills among those members of the working classes who participated in it. These skills then proved useful in other aspects of the advocacy of Chartism. Beyond that, however, the ability of members of the working classes to write poetry demonstrated to others the fitness of those classes for the franchise and helped to transform the consciousness of a larger audience.

Readers of VPR will be especially interested in Chapter 3, which focuses on the Northern Star's poetry column from 1838 to 1852. Sanders defines a Chartist poem straightforwardly as one published in a Chartist newspaper, particularly the Northern Star. This is so, he argues, because all the contributors and editors of this newspaper were engaged in Chartist activity. During the lifetime of the poetry column, some 1,500 poems written by "at least" 300 Chartist poets appeared. Furthermore, the column reprinted poems by Shelley, Bryon, and Shakespeare, as well as by contemporaries who weren't explicitly Chartists.

Chapter 4, "Insurrectionary Sonnets: The Ideological Afterlife of the Newport Uprising," should also be of interest to the readers of VPR. In this chapter, Sanders considers the editorial problems faced during the trial of John Frost, Zephaniah Williams, and William Jones, following the Newport riots in November 1839. He suggests that the relationship between the reporting of the riots in the news columns and the responses to the riots printed in the poetry column shows tension concerning what might be a "proper" response to the riots. Sanders attributes the disjunction between the attitude of the news reports and the representation of the riots in the poetry column to the wish of the editors neither to "denigrate the sacrifice" nor to "endorse violence." Readers of VPR might well wish to consider the possible intertextual relationships that exist between the editorially controlled published "reports" on the one hand and the far more personal "poetic" responses on the other, when both appear in the same issue of the newspaper.

Throughout his discussion, Sanders emphasizes the challenge of finding a poetic mode suited to the expression of radical political principles. He asserts that the Chartists' success in accomplishing this goal deserves far more attention that it has received hitherto.

In Appendix A, Sanders provides the texts of three Chartist poems: Charles Davlin's "On a Cliff Which O'erhung," published in the Northern Star on October 5, 1839; Davlin's "Questions from the Loom," published in the Northern Star on July 28, 1838; and P. B. Templeton's "To the 'Dear Little Dead,'" published in the Northern Star on January 19, 1839. Appendix B provides a list of the details of the poetry published in the poetry column of the Northern Star, beginning January 6, 1838, with notice of John Smithson's "Working Men's Rhymes—No. 1," and ending July 3, 1852, with notice of Charles Kingsley's "Epicedium on the Death of the Journal of Association."