Abstract
Between 1838 and 1848, Chartism held a place at the centre of British domestic politics. Then, for a further decade, it exercised an intermittent influence on the trajectory of radical politics. As a political movement its concerns extended far beyond the six points for parliamentary reform, embodied in the People’s Charter from which it took its name.1 Studies of the movement in relation to landed property, however, have overwhelmingly focused upon the Chartist land plan. This scheme to settle its supporters on four-acre cottage holdings, located in a network of national colonies, attracted over 70,000 subscribers at its peak in 1847–48. Its inelegant and protracted demise, after only 234 subscribers had been located on the land, tarnished the subsequent reputation of Chartism. The movement’s greatest leader, Feargus O’Connor (whose personal investment in the scheme — financially, politically and emotionally — was considerable) was similarly blighted. It is tempting to explain both the appeal and failure of the land plan by reference to naïve nostalgia for a pre-industrial society. Yet, the sentiments underpinning its appeal were far from simple ‘back to the land’ platitudes, as O’Connor’s attack — quoted above — on the way private property and political patronage were mutually sustaining reveals.
Patronage, which is a consequence of, and springs from, the Large Farm System, withholds the land from you; while the law of primogeniture, and the barbarous law of settlement and entail, prevents such as are able from buying small allotments of land. To break through these barriers is easy and simple, and should be the great national object. By its accomplishment alone can you now set up the principle of individualism against that of centralization … [T]he land of a country belongs to society; and … society, according to its wants has the same right to impose fresh conditions on the lessees, that the landlord has to impose fresh conditions upon a tenant at the expiration of his tenure. Society is the landlord: and as society never dies, the existing government are the trustees … Society looks on the performance of all requisite duties as the only condition on which its lessees can make good that title. (Feargus O’Connor, ‘The Land! Its Value: And How to Get It’, Northern Star 9 November 1844.)
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Notes
The literature on Chartism is extensive. The most substantial histories are D. Thompson, The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution (London, 1984), and M. Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester, 2007 ).
J. MacAskill, ‘The Chartist Land Plan’, in A. Briggs (ed.), Chartist Studies (London, 1959 ), pp. 304–41;
A. M. Hadfield, The Chartist Land Company (Newton Abbott, 1970);
M. Chase, ‘We Wish Only to Work for Ourselves: The Chartist Land Plan’, in M. Chase and I. Dyck (eds), Living and Learning (Aldershot, 1996 ), pp. 133–48.
R. G. Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement, 1837–1854 (Newcastle, 1894 [1854]), pp. 249, 268.
M. Hovell, The Chartist Movement (Manchester, 1918), p. 32. A second edition of Hovell’s seminal book was issued in 1925 and the third in 1966. It remained in print until the 1970s.
E. Dolleans, Le Chartisme (Paris, 1913), ii, pp. 278–301, 328–36, 348–54, 367–86;
F. Bachmann, Die Agrarreform in der Chartistenbewegung (Bern, 1928);
H. Niehuus, Geschichte der Englischen Bodenreformtheorien (Leipzig, 1910), pp. 91–9.
J. Saville, introduction to reprint edition of Gammage, History of the Chartist Movement (New York, 1969);
D. J. V. Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (London, 1975), pp. 130–7; Chase, ‘We Wish Only to Work for Ourselves’;
J. Bronstein, Land Reform and Working-class Experience in Britain and the United States, 1800–1862 (Stanford, 1999);
A. Messner, ‘Land, Leadership, Culture and Emigration: Some Problems in Chartist Historiography’, Historical Journal, 42 (1999), 1093–1109;
A. M. Hadfield, The Chartist Land Company (new edn, Aylesbury, 2000);
M. Chase, ‘“Wholesome Object Lessons”: The Chartist Land Plan in Retrospect’, English Historical Review, 118 (2003), 59–85.
National Trust, Rosedene: An Appeal for Restoration (leaflet issued 1997).
For the classic exploration of the extent of Chartism’s debt to earlier radical tropes and its consequences see G. Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in his Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 90–178.
P. O’Higgins], Chartism and Repeal: An Address to the Repealers of Ireland, by a Member of the Irish Universal Suffrage Association (Dublin, 1842), p. 5. See also ‘On the Law of Primogeniture’, [Scottish] Chartist Circular, 21 December 1839.
C. Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in J. Saville (ed.), Democracy and the Labour Movement (London, 1954).
See also A. Briggs, ‘Saxons, Normans and Victorians’, in The Collected Essays ofAsa Briggs (Hassocks, 1985), ii, pp. 215–35.
E. Jones, Evenings with the People 2: The Hereditary Landed Aristocracy (London, 1856), p. 4.
M. Taylor, Ernest Jones, Chartism and the Romance of Politics, 1819–69 (Oxford, 2003) identifies land reform as a consistent trope in Jones’s political career, stretching from Chartism to the cusp of selection as a Liberal parliamentary candidate shortly before he died.
Bronterre’s National Reformer, 15 January 1837. For O’Brien see A. Plummer, Bronterre (London, 1971).
W. J. Linton, The People’s Land, and an Easy Way to Recover It (London, 1850), p. 6;
cf. F. B. Smith, Radical Artisan: William James Linton, 1812–97 (Manchester, 1973), p. 68.
M. Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Occasioned by his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), repr. in J. Todd (ed.), Mary Wollstonecraft: Political Writings (London, 1993), pp. 60–1.
M. Chase, ‘The People’s Farm’: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775–1840 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 45–120.
Ibid.; see also J. Bellamy and J. Saville (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography (London, 1988), viii, pp. 38–45, 177–81, 192–8, and (for Neesom) Chase, Chartism, pp. 184–91.
F. O’Connor, A Practical Work on the Management of Small Farms (7th edn, Manchester, 1845), p. 40.
[B. O’Brien], A Brief Inquiry into the Natural Rights of Man (London, 1852), p. 45; The Poor Man’s Guardian and Repealer’s Friend, 1 [3 June 1843 ].
C. Doyle, Northern Star, 1 January 1848. For Doyle see P. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (London, 1995), esp. pp. 194–5.
E. Jones, ‘Letters on the Chartist Programme’, Notes to the People, 1, 3 (May 1851), 55–6. See also idem, ‘Our Land: Its Lords and Serfs. A Tract for Labourers and Farmers’, Notes to the People, 1, 5 (June 1851), 103–14.
Birmingham Daily Post, 27 November 1867; cf. Labour and Capital: A Lecture (1867), quoted in J. Saville, Ernest Jones: Chartist (London, 1952), p. 230.
E. Jones, ‘Monopoly and its Effects’, Notes to the People, 1, 23 (September 1851), 444.
J. Mason, A Letter to Mr Macaulay, MP, in Reply to the Charges Made by that Gentleman against the Chartists (Birmingham, 1842), p. 11.
M. Chase, ‘“Out of Radicalism”: The mid-Victorian Freehold Land Movement’, English Historical Review, 106 (1991), 319–45.
G. J. Harney, ‘The Charter, and Something More!’, Democratic Review, February 1850, 351–2.
Power of the Pence, 2 (18 November 1848). For the National Association for the Organization of Trade, see J. Belchem, ‘Chartism and the Trades, 1848–50’, English Historical Review, 98 (1983), 558–87.
J. S. Mill, Principles of Political Economy [book 2, ch. 10], ed. J. M. Robson (Toronto, 1965), ii, p. 1001.
S. Newens, ‘Thomas Edward Bowkett’, History Workshop Journal, 9 (1980), 143–8;
E. J. Cleary, ‘Starr, Richard Benjamin (1813–1892)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004 ).
J. West, History of the Chartist Movement (London, 1920), pp. 282–3;
Chase, Chartism, pp. 26, 245, 349, 353–7. See also ‘James Maw’, in J. Bellamy and J. Saville (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography (London, 2000), x, p. 139.
For convergences between late Chartism, building societies and other forms of mutualism, see J. Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 208–11.
F. C. Mather, Chartism and Society (London, 1980), pp. 26, 58–9, 83–5;
E. Yeo, ‘Some Problems and Practices of Chartist Democracy’, in J. Epstein and D. Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience (London, 1982 ), pp. 345–80.
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Chase, M. (2010). Chartism and the Land: ‘The Mighty People’s Question’. In: Cragoe, M., Readman, P. (eds) The Land Question in Britain, 1750–1950. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230248472_4
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