right|thumb|upright=1.35|A photograph of the Great Chartist Meeting on [[Kennington Common, London, 1848]]
Chartism was a working-class movement for political reform in the United Kingdom that lasted from 1838 to 1857 and was strongest in 1839, 1842 and 1848. It took its name from the People's Charter of 1838 and was a national protest movement, with particular strongholds of support in Northern England, the East Midlands, the Staffordshire Potteries, the Black Country and the South Wales Valleys, where working people depended on single industries and were subject to wild swings in economic activity. Chartism was less strong in places such as Bristol, that had more diversified economies. The movement was fiercely opposed by government authorities, which finally suppressed it.
Support for the movement was at its highest when petitions signed by millions of working people were presented to the House of Commons . The strategy employed was to use the scale of support which these petitions and the accompanying mass meetings demonstrated to put pressure on politicians to concede universal manhood suffrage. Chartism thus relied on constitutional methods to secure its aims, though some became involved in insurrectionary activities, notably in South Wales and in Yorkshire .
The People's Charter called for six reforms to make the political system more democratic:
- A vote for every man aged twenty-one years and above, of sound mind, and not undergoing punishment for a crime.
- The secret ballot to protect the elector in the exercise of his vote.
- No property qualification for Members of Parliament (MPs), to allow the constituencies to return the man of their choice.
- Payment of Members, enabling tradesmen, working men, or other persons of modest means to leave or interrupt their livelihood to attend to the interests of the nation.
- Equal constituencies, securing the same amount of representation for the same number of electors, instead of allowing less populous constituencies to have as much or more weight than larger ones.
- Annual parliamentary elections, thus presenting the most effectual check to bribery and intimidation, since no purse could buy a constituency under a system of universal manhood suffrage in every twelve months.
Eventually, after Chartism died out, Britain adopted all but the last of these six reforms. Chartists saw themselves fighting against political corruption and for democracy in an industrial society, but attracted support beyond the radical political groups for economic reasons, such as opposing wage cuts and unemployment.
Origin
thumb|The meeting of the [[Birmingham Political Union on 16 May 1832, attended by 200,000]]
Along with Luddism (a workers' movement contemporary to Chartism, whose focus of attack was the machines with which the workers worked), Chartism is considered as a movement of the first stage of the workers' movement, although, unlike Luddism, its essence was eminently political.
After the passing of the Reform Act 1832, which failed to extend the vote beyond those owning property, the political leaders of the working class made speeches claiming that there had been a great act of betrayal. This sense that the working class had been betrayed by the middle class was strengthened by the actions of the Whig governments of the 1830s. Notably, the hated new Poor Law Amendment was passed in 1834, depriving working people of outdoor relief and driving the poor into workhouses, where families were separated.
The massive wave of opposition to this measure in the north of England in the late 1830s made Chartism a mass movement. It seemed that only securing the vote for working men would change things. Dorothy Thompson, the preeminent historian of Chartism, defines the movement as the time when "thousands of working people considered that their problems could be solved by the political organization of the country." providing a platform for Chartists in the southeast. The origins of Chartism in Wales can be traced to the foundation in the autumn of 1836 of Carmarthen Working Men's Association.
The English Industrial Revolution is one of the most important processes in contemporary history, resulting in a gradual but profound series of changes at all levels. Technological innovations enabled the introduction of machinery—which replaced human labor— and gave rise to the factory system, as well as the consolidation of industrial capitalism.
W. Lovett and Robert Owen, who were more moderate, had more economic aims and advocated for the organization of production cooperatives and the elimination of intermediaries. They sought to reach an understanding with the middle classes.
Press
Both nationally and locally a Chartist press thrived in the form of periodicals, which were important to the movement for their news, editorials, poetry and especially in 1848, reports on international developments. They reached a huge audience. The Poor Man's Guardian in the 1830s, edited by Henry Hetherington, dealt with questions of class solidarity, manhood suffrage, property, and temperance, and condemned the Reform Act 1832. The paper explored the rhetoric of violence versus nonviolence, or what its writers called moral versus physical force.
It was succeeded as the voice of radicalism by an even more famous paper: the Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser. The Star was published between 1837 and 1852, and in 1839 was the best-selling provincial newspaper in Britain, with a circulation of 50,000. Like other Chartist papers, it was often read aloud in coffeehouses, workplaces and the open air. Other Chartist periodicals included the Northern Liberator (1837–40), English Chartist Circular (1841–43), and the Midland Counties' Illuminator (1841). The papers gave justifications for the demands of the People's Charter, accounts of local meetings, commentaries on education and temperance and a great deal of poetry. They also advertised upcoming meetings, typically organised by local grassroots branches, held either in public houses or their halls.
Research of the distribution of Chartist meetings in London that were advertised in the Northern Star shows that the movement was not uniformly spread across the metropolis but clustered in the West End, where a group of Chartist tailors had shops, as well as in Shoreditch in the east, and relied heavily on pubs that also supported local friendly societies. Readers also found denunciations of imperialism—the First Opium War (1839–42) was condemned—and of the arguments of free traders about the civilizing and pacifying influences of free trade.
People's Charter of 1838
In 1837, six Members of Parliament (MPs) and six working men, including William Lovett, from the London Working Men's Association, set up in 1836, formed a committee. In 1838, they published the People's Charter. This set out the movement's six main aims. The achievement of these aims would give working men a say in lawmaking: they would be able to vote, their vote would be protected by a secret ballot, and they would be able to stand for election to the House of Commons as a result of the removal of property qualifications and the introduction of payment for MPs. None of these demands were new, but the People's Charter became one of the most famous political manifestos of 19th-century Britain.
Beginnings
thumb|right|upright=1.2|Chartists' riots
thumb|right|upright=1.2|The national convention, meeting on Monday 4 February 1839, at the [[British Coffee House]]
Chartism was launched in 1838 by a series of large-scale meetings in Birmingham, Glasgow and the north of England. A huge mass meeting was held on Kersal Moor near Salford, Lancashire, on 24 September 1838 with speakers from all over the country. Speaking in favour of manhood suffrage, Joseph Rayner Stephens declared that Chartism was a "knife and fork, a bread and cheese question". These words indicate the importance of economic factors in the launch of Chartism. If, as the movement came together, there were different priorities amongst local leaders, the Charter and the Star soon created a national, and largely united, campaign of national protest. John Bates, an activist, recalled: