Prison, Poverty and Professional Politics: A Biographical Analysis of the Local Chartist Leadership

Abstract

Since G. D. H. Cole initiated the biographical approach to Chartist studies with the publication of Chartist Portraits in 1941, there have been few attempts to examine the personnel of Chartism collectively.¹ Biographical considerations have suffered most in local studies. Donald Read’s account of Manchester Chartism, for example, is salted with the names of a dozen or so local leaders, but they remain no more than names.² In conjunction with a set of biographies (see Appendix A) this chapter will examine the careers of 30 local Chartists; it will compare their backgrounds; it will discuss some crucial common experiences, and will conclude by offering a composite picture of the ‘typical’ Chartist leader in Manchester and Salford.³ Inevitably this will involve some overlap with material covered in other sections of the book. The 30 individuals whose experiences form the core of the chapter were not randomly chosen from several hundred candidates. The 30 portraits have been built up from a multitude of fragmentary references in a plethora of primary sources; those chosen to appear were not necessarily the most important local Chartists or even the most active, but they were the most vociferous and, consequently, in an important sense they selected themselves. An obituary in the Northern Star said of a Hulme Chartist, William McCulloch, that he was ‘one of those quiet though not less useful members of the cause, who did the more important part of working, and left the speechifying to others…’⁴ The ‘quiet’ men and women who filled the ranks of the movement are not found in this chapter. It will surprise no practitioner of ‘history from below’ that there are important gaps in the information even about these 30 Chartists.