New Moral Worlds — Co-operation, Owenism and Radical Christianity

Abstract

When G. J. Holyoake wrote his history of co-operation in 1875 he saw his subject as one that was divided into two periods: a flourish of formative activity from 1828 to 1834 and, following a ten-year hiatus, the continuous history of the movement proceeding onwards and upwards from the time the famous Rochdale pioneers began trading in 1844. These parameters have informed much subsequent work, as can be seen by Beatrice Webb’s conclusion that after the collapse in 1834 the threads of the movement were picked up a ‘generation later’ by the second co-operative movement.¹ The difficulty with this approach is that it fails to take account of the co-operative endeavours which flourished in the late 1830s and early 1840s under the banner of Chartism. This omission is the more surprising given that the later history of the co-operative movement and Chartism are inextricably linked by more than the simple fact that the Rochdale pioneers were themselves Chartists. In 1920, at the height of the co-operative movement, one Chartist historian went as far as to refer to the foundation of the Rochdale society as ‘the humble birth of the most prodigious child of the Chartist movement’.² Despite this claim the activities of a lost generation of Chartist co-operators have attracted little attention from historians.³