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Thomas Perronet Thompson, “Sensible Chartism” and the Chimera of Radical Unity
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 June 2017
Extract
Radical disunity and diffusion of effort were cardinal features of mid-nineteenth-century British politics, but only infrequently has Chartism been viewed in this context. Some historians of Chartism prefer to stress its economic roots, or treat it as a rational response to political events, or regard it as a collection of local mobilizations rather than an organized national movement. Others focus upon its democratic ideology and practice, its significance as a mass activity involving “outsiders” (the unskilled, women, the Irish), its symbols, dress, and other forms of display, or upon the deployment of military and police to combat Chartism at times of serious disorder (notably in 1839, 1842, and 1848). Some commentators regard Chartism as the basis for mid-Victorian working-class liberalism, commending the intelligent artisans of London who drew up the Charter, and condemning the violence of the Chartist North. For Dorothy Thompson Chartism was a political movement inspired by concern about threats to workers’ rights. Gareth Stedman Jones has argued that Chartist agitation marks a continuation of familiar pre-1832 radical aims and rhetoric, and that it must be explained with reference to the nature of the state, not class consciousness or the trade cycle.
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References
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27 Thompson to T. P. E. Thompson, 7 Feb., 29 Mar. 1840, DTH 4/9, 5/25.
28 Hull and East Riding Times, 13,27 Mar. 1840; Thompson to Bowling, 16 Mar. 1840, DTH 4/9. I am grateful to Mr. David Smith of the Local Studies Library, Hull, for information on Peck and Kennedy. Thompson must have been on good terms with Kennedy between 1835 and 1837, for the latter published Thompson’s “letters of a representative” in the Hull Advertiser. Thompson’s alliance with Peck, and his connivance in Peck’s vilification of Kennedy, show how much Thompson’s attitude towards the Whigs had changed since the mid-1830s.
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31 Lovett had been sentenced to 12 months in prison for seditious libel, in connection with the Bull Ring riots in Birmingham in 1839. He was released on 24 July 1840.
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40 Thompson to Bowring, 3 June 1841, Thompson to T. P. E. Thompson, 9, 11, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 29 June 1841, DTH 4/10, 5/26.
41 See coverage of Hull politics in the Northern Star during the spring of 1841, and T. W. Wallis, Autobiography of Thomas Wilkinson Wallis (Louth, 1899), pp. 36–42.
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46 O’Connor took up the land question as a “remedy for national poverty” in April 1841 (Briggs, Chartist Studies, p. 409), and it would be his one fixation from the spring of 1845, after which his conduct became increasingly eccentric.
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51 The MPRA, solely the creation of “bourgeois advocates of universal suffrage,” is mentioned only once in Goodway’s London Chartism (p. 247).
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