The Crisis of 1842: Chartism, the Colliers’ Strike and the Outbreak in the Potteries

Abstract

IN recent years historians have begun to recognise the crucial importance of the widespread disturbances in Britain in the summer of 1842. In contrast to the older and more traditional Chartist historiography, with its summary and dismissive treatment of the ‘Plug Riots’ as a brief spasm of unrest,¹ these events have been described as ‘a general strike, the first not only in Britain but in any capitalist country’ and ‘the British equivalent of the 1848 revolution’.² F. C. Mather, in a valuable article, has stressed the very wide geographical spread of the disturbances, which affected twenty-three counties between early July and late September, and the seriousness with which the authorities viewed the ‘semi-revolutionary strike movement’.³ Recently the first book on The General Strike of 1842 has appeared.⁴ But with a single exception,⁵ the published studies have concentrated almost exclusively on south-east Lancashire and north-east Cheshire, the storm-centre of the strike movement and of the attempts to organise it on a regional, and later national, scale.⁶ This concentration can perhaps be justified, for the events in this area, and parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire, most nearly seem to deserve the description ‘general strike’. But a wider understanding of the crisis will only be possible when historians have looked more closely at the disturbances in other parts of Britain: as F. B. Smith has said, ‘we need to discover much more about the actual spread of the strikes, their local forms of participation, demands and defeats, their leaders and opponents’.⁷