No Laughing Matter: Chartism and the Limits of Satire

Abstract

The premise of this chapter is that the relative paucity of satire within Chartist cultural production demands explanation, particularly given the importance and vitality of satire within Regency radicalism. This discussion argues that the answer lies in an intersection of generic and historical factors. It begins by considering the relationship between satire’s formal properties and its political potential, before considering the extent to which cultural forces both intrinsic and extrinsic to Chartism acted as a powerful block on the mobilization of satirical energies. Finally, the chapter returns to the question of the extent to which literary forms encode historical (and thus political) possibilities. It maintains that satire depends on a binary structure that is increasingly at odds with Chartism’s own understanding of its historical situation, and that Chartist cultural production instead begins to elaborate triadic structures that will eventually issue in melodrama. In this respect, my analysis engages with a vital part of Sally Ledger’s work: namely, her understanding of the aesthetic as something that is simultaneously and inescapably both politicized and historicized. In addition, it explores a thesis that is implicit in Ledger’s Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination: the idea that the movement from Regency radicalism to Chartism is characterized through the movement from satire to melodrama.