Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press (review)

The definitive history of the Chartist movement has yet to be written—a fact that has given rise to an extremely vibrant and interesting field of historical writing. The local studies in Asa Briggs's 1959 collection of essays, Chartist Studies, encouraged books and articles on Chartism in many localities; G. D. H. Cole's 1965 Chartist Portraits was followed by a spate of excellent individual biographies of Chartist leaders. In the 1980s, with the publication of Gareth Stedman Jones's essay, "Rethinking Chartism" (in Languages of Class, 1983), and a second major set of essays edited by Dorothy Thompson and James Epstein, The Chartist Experience (1982), Chartist historiography entered a new phase. In addition to continuing to explore the social history of the Chartist movement, historians began to explore Chartist cultural history. They interpreted the message of the Chartists as refracted not only through the radical press, but also through material culture, gender roles and ritual, Chartist poetry and fiction, and the use of Chartist spaces, such as the Land Company allotments. Even the familiar chronology of the Chartist movement was expanded as Margot Finn traced the Chartists' entry into their post-petition, internationalist phase.

More recently, Miles Taylor and Andrew Messner have called for historians of Chartism to move on from these social and cultural preoccupations, urging historians to reintegrate Chartism into the broader political narrative, to examine the political and economic thought of the Chartist movement, and to study the impact of Chartism in Britain's colonies and elsewhere abroad. In their introduction, Joan Allen and Owen Ashton position Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press as a response to this critique. While only a few of the essays in the volume actually do engage with that challenge, taken together they show the vibrancy of the Chartist public sphere and the ease with which it could be undermined by financial misfortune and government oppression.

The volume opens with an essay by Aled Jones that touches on the iconography of the Chartist masthead and the relationship between Chartist journalism, the war of the unstamped, and the later Victorian popular press. Looking mainly at the Northern Star, Jones argues that the Chartist press resembled later popular newspapers in being crowded and full of variety, but that its embattled focus on politics made it unique. Malcolm Chase provides a sophisticated and convincing look at Chartist iconography, particularly the steel-engraved portraits that the Northern Star distributed to its subscribers in order to boost sales. He argues that these expensive, high-quality engravings of male leaders—in conventional poses, and abstracted from the controversial activities of the Chartist movement—catered to popular appreciation of portraiture but also legitimated the respectable "gentlemen leaders" who so prospered in the movement.

Michael Huggins uses two short-lived Irish Chartist papers of 1848 to sketch a revisionist history of the Irish Chartist movement. He argues that Irish Chartists were holdovers from earlier, Enlightenment radical movements—that they were Jacobin descendants rather than Fenian ancestors. Their failure to ally with the Catholic masses or to create a mass platform kept them from crafting a national appeal. Only in 1848, when they were able to create a short-lived alliance with a few nationalists—leading to the creation of newspapers—was their message effectively communicated.

Scottish Chartists faced a similar set of issues, as Hamish Fraser shows. Although more pro-Chartist newspapers survive for Scotland than for Ireland, Chartism there gravitated toward temperance, legal reform, and moral force. Just as English Chartists created an alternative history of Chartism that focused on the Norman Yoke, so Scottish Chartists created their own version of nationalism, which compared them with the Covenanters. Nonetheless, as in Ireland, the Scottish Chartists' inability to support a Chartist press between 1842 and 1847 was not only a symptom of weakness in the Chartist...