Abstract
THE East London Democratic Association was founded in 1837, on 29 January the birthday of Thomas Paine,1 and became in 1838 the London Democratic Association, on 10 August, a date memorable for the overthrow of the French Monarchy. As such it played a brief but stormy part in the Chartist Movement before being absorbed in 1841 into the wider movement it had helped to create.
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Notes
G. D. H. Cole and R. Postgate, The Common People (Methuen, 1938) pp. 275, 276.
M. Hovell, The Chartist Movement (Manchester University Press, 1918) p. 126; see also F. Rosenblatt, The Chartist Movement in its Social and Political Aspects (Frank Cass, 1967) p. 110.
G. D. H. Cole and A. W. Filson, British Working Class Movements (Macmillan, 1965) p. 366; G. D. H. Cole, Chartist Portraits (Macmillan, 1941) p. 311.
A. R. Schoyen, The Chartist Challenge (Heinemann, 1957) pp. 30, 32.
See I. J. Prothero, ‘Chartism in London’, Past & Present, no. 44 (1969).
This claim has been supported by several historians, including Schoyen, Ph.D., p. 30; D. Read and E. Glasgow, Feargus O’Connor (Edward Arnold, 1961) p. 51.
Coombe joined the LWMA in 1836 (LWMA Minutes, 7 Aug. 1836). Both he and Chapman left and joined the LDA at the beginning of 1839 (Operative, 6 Jan 1839). On Beniowski, see LWMA Minutes, 18 Sept. 1838 and P. Brock, ‘Polish Democrats and English Radicalism 1832–1862’, Journal of Modem History, vol. 25 (June 1953) p. 146.
This structure was significantly similar to that of earlier societies, e.g. the London Corresponding Society, and the Society for Constitutional Information, which had been involved in the Despard Plot (E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Gollancz, 1965) pp. 163,480). Possibly this was why some questioned the legality of the new organisation.
Place, 56 f. 350; R. G. Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement (Newcastle-on-Tyne: Browne and Browne, 1894) p. 95.
W. Lovett, The Life and Struggles of William Lovett in his Pursuit of Bread, Knowledge and Freedom (Trübner, 1876) Vol. 1, p. 203.
D. J. Rowe, ‘Chartism and the Spitalfields Silk-weavers’, Economic History Review (Dec. 1967) pp. 484,485.
The distinction between ‘honourable’ and ‘dishonourable’ sections of trades is elucidated by I. J. Prothero, ‘Chartism in London’, Past & Present, no. 44 (1969) p. 83. For a detailed account of the London tailors’ situation in the 1830s, see the same author’s The London Tailors’ Strike of 1834 and the Collapse of the Grand National Consolidated Trades’ Union: a Police Spy’s Report’, International Review of Social History, no. 22 (1977) p. 65.
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© 1982 Clive Behagg, John Belchem, Jennifer Bennett, James Epstein, Robert Fyson, Gareth Stedman Jones, Robert Sykes, Dorothy Thompson, Kate Tiller, Eileen Yeo
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Bennett, J. (1982). The London Democratic Association 1837–41: a Study in London Radicalism. In: Epstein, J., Thompson, D. (eds) The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–60. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-16921-4_4
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