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Chartism: The First Mass Working-Class Political Movement

Chartism (1838–1857) was the first mass working-class political movement in world history. At its peak, in 1848, it probably had the active support of a majority of the male urban working class of England, and it produced a petition of more than two million signatures in a single year. It failed in its own time, but almost all of its demands became law within thirty years of its collapse.

The Six Points of the People’s Charter

The People’s Charter, drafted by the London Working Men’s Association in 1838, contained six demands. They are conventionally remembered by their initials — SUFFRAGE, SECRET BALLOT, NO PROPERTY QUALIFICATIONS, PAYMENT OF MPs, EQUAL CONSTITUENCIES, ANNUAL PARLIAMENT — and they constitute one of the most important documents in the history of British democracy:

  1. Universal manhood suffrage — the vote for every man over 21 who was not a felon.
  2. The secret ballot — to protect voters from coercion by landlords, employers, and customers.
  3. No property qualifications for Members of Parliament — to allow working men to sit.
  4. Payment of Members — to enable working men to sit without private income.
  5. Equal-sized constituencies — to give the new industrial towns the representation that the unreformed boroughs of rotten and pocket boroughs had been denying them.
  6. Annual parliamentary elections — to keep MPs accountable.

The Charter was published on 8 May 1838. Of the six points, three — universal manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, and payment of MPs — are still incompletely realised in British democracy; annual elections and equal constituencies are not. The Chartists were not revolutionaries in the French sense: they were constitutional reformers asking the House of Commons to adopt a programme that, if passed, would have made the British political system a working-class democracy by the 1840s.

The Origins of Chartism

Chartism had its origins in the political radicalism of the early nineteenth century and in the disappointment with the Reform Act of 1832. The Reform Act had extended the franchise to the new middle class — roughly one in seven adult men — but it had done nothing for the working class, and the working-class radicals who had supported reform felt betrayed. The new Poor Law of 1834, which had abolished outdoor relief and forced the unemployed into workhouses, was an additional radicalising force.

The London Working Men’s Association, founded in June 1836 by William Lovett (a self-educated Cornish cabinet-maker) and other working-class radicals including Henry Hetherington, James Watson, and Henry Vincent, drafted the People’s Charter in February 1838, drawing on ideas that had been circulating in radical politics since the 1810s. The Charter was adopted as the programme of a new movement that quickly spread from London to the industrial towns of the Midlands, Lancashire, Yorkshire, and south Wales, and to the smaller radical communities of the West Country and East Anglia.

The Movement at Its Peak, 1839–1842

Chartism reached its first peak in 1838–39. The movement organised mass open-air meetings (the so-called “monster meetings”) that sometimes drew tens of thousands; the meeting at Newhall Hill, Birmingham, on 16 July 1839 was estimated to have attracted 30,000 to 200,000 people (the contemporary estimates varied widely and the figure remains uncertain). A first national petition, presented to the House of Commons in July 1839, was said to bear 1,283,000 signatures; the actual number of distinct signatures was, on closer examination, considerably lower.

The petition was rejected by 235 votes to 46 on 12 July 1839. The rejection produced a wave of “physical force” uprisings, principally the Newport Rising in Wales (3–4 November 1839), when several thousand Chartist marchers led by John Frost (a former mayor of Newport) and his colleagues were dispersed by soldiers with several deaths on both sides. Frost, Zephaniah Williams, and William Jones were convicted of high treason and sentenced to death; they were reprieved and transported to Australia for life.

The movement revived in the depression of 1841–42, with a second national petition of more than three million signatures presented to the Commons on 2 May 1842, and a wave of strike action — the Plug Plot riots of August 1842, in which millworkers across the industrial north pulled the plugs from steam-engine boilers and forced a general strike. The second petition was rejected by 287 to 49.

The 1848 Petition and the Decline of Chartism

The third and largest peak of Chartism came in 1848, the year of revolutions across Europe. A third petition was collected, allegedly bearing more than five million signatures — so many that, on its famous journey to Westminster, the rolls were paraded on a timber frame carried by sixteen men. The House of Commons refused even to consider it; the speaker and a committee that examined it reported that the petition was “a heap of insignificance” and that many of the signatures were fictitious or duplicates (including signatures signed “Punch”, “P. Snooks”, and “His Majesty”). The disappointment broke the movement.

Chartism declined for several reasons. The “moral force” Chartists (Lovett, Robert Lowery) had never supported the 1839 uprising; the “physical force” Chartists (Frost, O’Connor, Ernest Jones) were disillusioned by 1842 and 1848. The 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws created a new Conservative working-class constituency that the Chartists had no organisation to capture. The 1850s saw the rise of the model trade union, the friendly society, the co-operative, and the political action of organised labour — a different kind of working-class politics, more practical and less universalist than the Chartists’ programme. By 1857 the National Charter Association had dissolved.

The Legacy of Chartism

Despite its failure to achieve its immediate aims, Chartism had important long-term effects. Five of the six points became law between 1867 and 1972: secret ballot (Ballot Act 1872); no property qualifications for MPs (Parliamentary Elections Act 1858, reformed 1866); payment of MPs (Parliamentary Expenses Act 1911); equal constituencies (Reform Act 1884, Representation of the People Act 1948, Parliamentary Constituencies Act 1986); universal manhood suffrage (Reform Acts 1867 and 1884, Representation of the People Act 1918). The sixth — annual parliamentary elections — has not been adopted. The movement established the principle that the working class had a right to political representation, and it helped to build support for the later extensions of the franchise.

The historiography of Chartism is among the richest in British history. E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963) reads the movement as a chapter in the formation of a class conscious of itself; Dorothy Thompson’s The Chartists (1984) restores the centrality of the women and the localities to a story usually told from London; Gareth Stedman Jones’s Languages of Class (1983) re-reads Chartism as a language of class politics rather than the reflection of a prior class interest.

The Continuing Question

The unresolved question about Chartism is whether the six points of the People’s Charter were a coherent program of working-class politics, or a tactical combination of older radical demands that only later came to look like a coherent program. The traditional answer, going back to the 1840s’ Chartist newspapers and given its modern form in E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (1963), is that the six points were a coherent program: they articulated the working-class demand for full political citizenship, and the gradual adoption of five of the six points between 1867 and 1972 is the proof that the program was the right one. The revisionist answer, developed in Gareth Stedman Jones’s Languages of Class (1983) and given a more pointed form in Dorothy Thompson’s The Chartists (1984), is that the six points were a tactical combination of older radical demands (manhood suffrage, secret ballot, annual elections) that had been on the radical agenda since the 1810s, and that the working-class coherence of the 1838 Charter was less a real social fact than a 19th-century historians’ construction. The interesting current question, raised in the work of political historian Malcolm Chase and developed in the recent literature on the social history of the 1840s, is whether Chartism was a real working-class movement with deep social roots, or whether it was a coalition of artisans, factory workers, and radical intellectuals that fell apart when the economic conditions of the late 1840s improved. The honest answer, given the recent work, is probably: both, and the balance between the two readings depends on the period and the region one is looking at.

Selected Sources

  • E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Victor Gollancz, 1963)
  • Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists (Temple Smith, 1984)
  • Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832–1982 (Cambridge University Press, 1983)
  • Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester University Press, 2007)
  • Paul Pickering and Alex Tyrell, The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League (Frank Cass, 2000)