Abstract
Acts and marks of commemoration, from anniversary dinners to monuments and statues were vital components in the production of an English democratic culture in the ‘age of revolutions’. But acts of remembrance were not always consensual and reformers were sometimes divided over both the form and subject of commemoration, often making it easier to critique the loyalist appropriation of public space and the erection of monuments to the unworthy than it was to agree upon an alternative. This essay considers these points of non-convergence and argues that it was not so much ideological or practical disagreements over constitutionalism or physical/moral force that divided the movement but political compromise—the gradual abandonment of bedrock demands for universal manhood suffrage.
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Notes
- 1.
See Rodney Harrison, Heritage: Critical Approaches (Routledge: 2013) for recent discussion about ‘official’ and ‘unofficial heritage’, for example. For dissonant heritage, see Gregory Ashworth and John Tunbridge, Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict (Wiley: 1996).
- 2.
Tunbridge and Ashworth, Dissonant Heritage; Laurajane Smith, Uses of Heritage (Routledge: 2011), 30.
- 3.
Laurajane Smith, Paul A. Shackel and Gary Campbell (eds), Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes (Routledge: 2011); David Lowenthal, The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (Cambridge: University Press: 1998), 226; Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, Volume 1: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture (Verso: 1994), 211; Harrison, Heritage: Critical Approaches, 193.
- 4.
See Iain J. M. Robertson, ‘Heritage from below: class, social protest and resistance’, in Brian Graham and Peter Howard (eds), The Ashgate Research Companion to Heritage and Identity (Ashgate: 2008), 144–56.
- 5.
Hilda Kean, ‘Tolpuddle, Burston and Levellers: the making of radical and national heritages at English labour movement festivals’, in Smith, Shackel and Campbell, Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes, 273.
- 6.
Particularly, James Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England (Oxford University Press: 1994), pp. 177–201; Robert G. Hall, ‘Creating a people’s history: political identity and history in Chartism’, and Antony Taylor, ‘Commemoration, memorialisation and political memory in post-Chartist radicalism: The 1885 Halifax Chartist reunion in context’, in Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson and Stephen Roberts (eds), The Chartist Legacy (Merlin: 1999); David S. Karr, ‘The embers of expiring sedition’: Maurice Margarot, the Scottish martyrs monument and the production of radical memory across the British South Pacific’, Historical Research, 86 (2013), 638–60; and the essays in Paul A. Pickering and Alex Tyrrell (eds), Contested Sites: Commemoration, Memorial and Popular Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain (Routledge: 2004).
- 7.
David S. Karr, ‘“The embers of expiring sedition’”, 239–40.
- 8.
Iain McCalman, ‘Preface’, in Pickering and Tyrrell (eds), Contested Sites, p. xiii.
- 9.
John Thelwall, The Peripatetic or Sketches of the Heart, of Nature and Society… Vol. 3 (self-published: 1796), 110.
- 10.
Thelwall, Peripatetic, Vol. 2, 37. See also S. Poole, ‘“Not precedents to be followed but examples to be weighed”: John Thelwall and the Jacobin sense of the past’, in Steve Poole (ed.), John Thelwall: Radical Romantic and Acquitted Felon (Pickering and Chatto: 2009), 161–73.
- 11.
John Thelwall, The Peripatetic; edited with an introduction by Judith Thompson (Wayne State University Press: 2001), 45.
- 12.
John Thelwall, The Rights of Nature Against the Usurpations of Establishments (H.D. Symonds: 1796), 21.
- 13.
Thelwall, The Peripatetic Vol. 3, 110.
- 14.
Mark Akenside, ‘Inscription VI, For a Column at Runnymede’, A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes. By Several Hands, Vol. VI (R, and J. Dodsley: 1758), 34.
- 15.
The point is argued by Lisa Vargo, ‘Anna Barbauld and natural rights: the case of “Inscription for an ice-house”’, European Romantic Review 27 (2016), 331–39.
- 16.
Lynda Pratt, ‘Southey in Wales: inscriptions, monuments and romantic posterity’, in Damien Walford Davies and Lynda Pratt (eds), Wales and the Romantic Imagination (Univeristy of Wales Press: 2007), 86–103; Paul Jarman, ‘Feasts and fasts: Robert Southey and the politics of calendar’, in Lynda Pratt (ed.), Robert Southey and the Contexts of English Romanticism (Ashgate: 2006), 49–69.
- 17.
Wooler’s British Gazette, 2 February 1822; Lynda Pratt, ‘Robert Southey, writing and romanticism’, Romanticism on the Net 32 (2003); ‘Southey’s West Country’, in Nicholas Roe (ed.), English Romantic Writers and the West Country (Palgrave: 2010), 201–18.
- 18.
John Thelwall, ‘On prosecutions for pretended treason’, The Tribune, 1 (1795), 281; Thomas Hardy, ‘Memoir of Thomas Hardy’, in David Vincent (ed.), Testaments of Radicalism: Memoirs of Working Class Politicians, 1790–1885 (Europa: 1977), 70.
- 19.
John Thelwall, ‘Historical strictures on Whigs and Tories…’, The Tribune 1 (1795), 171; John Baxter, A New and Impartial History of England (H.D. Symonds: 1795), 114.
- 20.
Quoted in Harry T. Dickinson, ‘Magna Carta in the Age of Revolution’, Enlightenment and Dissent 30 (2015), 16.
- 21.
There was, however, a notable growth in the placing of memorials on British battlefield sites during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and these markers have indeed been a locus for contested public interpretation of the events they record in ways that Thelwall would certainly have recognised. See Ian Atherton and Philip Morgan, ‘The Battlefields War Memorial: commemoration and the battlefield site from the Middle Ages to the modern era’, Journal of War and Culture Studies 4 (2011), 289–304; Dolly MacKinnon, ‘“Correcting an error in history”: battlefield memorials at Marston Moor and Naseby, 1771–1939’, Parergon 32 (2015), 205–35.
- 22.
Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (Oxford University Press: 1967/1884), 278, 282, 284, 292.
- 23.
Bamford, Passages, 272.
- 24.
The Republican, 3 February 1826. As James Epstein has argued, Carlile was in any case instrumental in the rehabilitation of Paine as a central figure of inspiration to post-war popular democrats: Radical Expression, 127.
- 25.
The Republican, 3 February 1826. The most likely candidates are Thomas Preston and Allen Davenport.
- 26.
Poor Man’s Guardian, 11 July 1835.
- 27.
Northern Star, 10 November 1838; 30 August 1845; Poor Man’s Guardian, 7 February 1835.
- 28.
The development of a Chartist counter-historical narrative, and its marginalisation not only of Spenceans but of black and minority ethnic radicals and of women is traced in Robert G. Hall, ‘Creating a people’s history: political identity and history in Chartism, 1832–1848’, in Ashton, Fyson and Roberts, The Chartist Legacy, 232–55.
- 29.
TNA, HO 40/7/1, Precis of Correspondence Relative to Disturbances etc. in London, 1817–18, Part 1, June to September, p. 2, and HO 40/7/2, Part 2, Oct, pp. 48, 54; HO 40/7/8, James Lyon to Lord Sidmouth, 12 December 1817.
- 30.
Morning Advertiser, 6 January 1818; Morning Chronicle, 12 January 1818; Kentish Weekly Post, 13 January 1818; Chester Chronicle, 16 January 1818, TNA, HO 40/8, Information dated 9 January 1818; HO 42/171, Testimony of John Smith 15 November 1817; HO 42/173, Edward Marshland to Henry Hobhouse, 11 January 1818. For Hooper’s funeral, see also David Worrall, Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance ad Surveillance, 1790–1820 (Wayne State University Press: 1992), 124–5.
- 31.
Matthew Roberts, ‘Chartism, commemoration and the cult of the radical hero, c.1770–c.1840’, Labour History Review,78 (2013), 20–21.
- 32.
Northern Star, 9 November 1850.
- 33.
Morning Advertiser, 6 November 1819.
- 34.
Ironically, in 1847 Hobhouse would lose his parliamentary seat at Nottingham to Feargus O’Connor.
- 35.
For more on these disputes, see The Champion, 17 January, 14 February 1819; Morning Chronicle, 18 November 1818, 3 September 1819.
- 36.
Morning Chronicle, 6 November 1823.
- 37.
Morning Advertiser, 6 November 1837; 6 November 1838.
- 38.
Morning Advertiser, 6 November 1844. For the controversy over the toast to Cartwright, see Thomas Cleary’s letter of protest in Morning Chronicle, 7 November 1842.
- 39.
Northern Star, 27 September 1845.
- 40.
Northern Star, 23 December 1848.
- 41.
Alex Tyrrell and Michael T. Davis, ‘Bearding the Tories: the commemoration of the Scottish political martyrs of 1793–94’, in Pickering and Tyrrell, Contested Sites, 25–56; Karr, ‘The embers of expiring sedition’, 653–4.
- 42.
Northern Star, 9 August 1845.
- 43.
Black Dwarf, 31 December 1817.
- 44.
Poor Man’s Guardian, 17 August 1833; Northern Star, 2 October 1841.
- 45.
John Belchem, ‘Orator’ Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working Class Radicalism (Breviary Stuff: 2012/1985), 211–2.
- 46.
Poor Man’s Guardian, 26 September 1835.
- 47.
Northern Star, 7 April 1842 and 12 August 1843, 24 August 1844; Terry Wyke, ‘Remembering the Manchester Massacre’, in Robert Poole (ed.), Return to Peterloo: Manchester Region History Review, special edition 23 (2012), 116–17. No further memorials on such a scale would be erected to British radicals until the death of Feargus O’Connor a decade later. By 1860, two monuments had been built to Chartism’s most notable leader, an obelisk in London’s Kensal Green cemetery and a statue in the Nottingham arboretum. The difficulties faced by these two projects are discussed in detail in Paul A. Pickering, ‘The Chartist Rites of Passage: Commemorating Feargus O’Connor’ in Pickering and Tyrrell, Contested Sites, 101–26.
- 48.
Bunhill Fields contains the graves of Hardy and Gale Jones, amongst others. Gale Jones, noted The Satirist, was buried ‘beside the rest of the Liberal dust; and posterity will no doubt raise a monument over the whole Liberal cemetery’: The Satirist, 17 March 1838.
- 49.
For Emmet’s speech being ‘very ably given by S. Walker’ at a meeting of Ashton Chartists, see Northern Star, 16 November 1844. Emmet crafted this speech as ‘a claim on your memory… that my memory and name may serve to animate those who survive me’: Kevin Whelan, ‘Robert Emmet: between history and memory’, History Ireland 11, 3 (2003), p. 51.
- 50.
The Times, 20 October 1832.
- 51.
Northern Star, 8 November 1851
- 52.
Rowland Weston, ‘History, memory, and moral knowledge: William Godwin’s essay on sepulchres (1809)’, The European Legacy 14 (2009), 651–65.
- 53.
Chartist Circular, 23 September 1839.
- 54.
Epstein, Radical Expression, 146.
- 55.
Benjamin Wilson, ‘The Struggles of an Old Chartist’ (Halifax: 1887), reprinted in Vincent, Testaments of Radicalism, pp. 220–1. For Galloway’s death, see Northern Star, 18 December 1847, and for Preston’s, Northern Star, 8 June, 31 August 1850.
- 56.
Paul A. Pickering, ‘A “grand ossification”: William Cobbett and the commemoration of Tom Paine’, in Pickering and Tyrrell, Contested Sites, 70–1.
- 57.
Terry Wyke, ‘Remembering the Manchester massacre’, 113–4; Northern Star, 18 August 1838.
- 58.
Poor Man’s Guardian, 16 May 1835.
- 59.
Northern Star, 16 September 1843.
- 60.
Black Dwarf, 21 December 1824.
- 61.
Frances D. Cartwright (ed.), Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright, Vol. 2 (H. Colborn: 1826), 290–6.
- 62.
Poor Man’s Guardian, 23 July 1831.
- 63.
Northern Star, 3 June 1843. Nugent was anxious to prove that, on the contrary, Hampden had been shot in the back by two musketeers. The evidence remains inconclusive.
- 64.
Eugenio F. Biagini and Alastair J. Reid (eds), Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain 1850–1914 (Cambridge University Press: 1991). For critical reappraisals of the tendency of these arguments to soften distinctions between ‘working-class’ Chartism and ‘middle-class’ Liberalism, and of the ways in which Chartist autobiographers represented their own militant pasts, see Robert G. Hall, ‘Chartism remembered: William Aitken, liberalism, and the politics of memory’, Journal of British Studies 38 (1999), 445–70, and Matthew Roberts, ‘Chartism, commemoration’, 3–32.
- 65.
Thomas Cooper, The Purgatory of Suicides. A Prison Rhyme. In Ten Books, 2nd edition (J. Watson: 1858), 158–9.
- 66.
Northern Star, 22 November 1845.
- 67.
Cooper also demonstrated an understanding of physical force as a legitimate constitutional process in his lectures on English history to Chartist audiences. See Hall, ‘Creating a people’s history’, 237–9.
- 68.
Nick Mansfield, Buildings of the Labour Movement (English Heritage: 2013), viii.
- 69.
Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell, ‘Don’t mourn, organise: heritage, recognition and memory in Castleford, West Yorkshire’, in Smith, Shackel and Campbell, Heritage, Labour and the Working Classes, 86–7.
- 70.
Cited in Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 207. For a critical discussion of the uses of intangible heritage see Rodney Harrison and Deborah Rose, ‘Intangible heritage’ in Tim Benton (ed.), Understanding Heritage and Memory (Manchester University Press: 2010), 238–76.
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Poole, S. (2018). The Politics of ‘Protest Heritage’, 1790–1850. In: Griffin, C., McDonagh, B. (eds) Remembering Protest in Britain since 1500. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74243-4_8
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