Chartism

On 21 May 1838 an estimated 150,000 people assembled on Glasgow Green for a mass demonstration. There they witnessed the launch of the People’s Charter, a list of demands for political reform. The changes they called for included voting by secret ballot, equal-sized constituencies and, most importantly, that all men should have the vote. The Chartists, as they came to be known, were the first national mass working-class movement. In the decade that followed, they collected six million signatures for their Petitions to Parliament: all were rejected, but their campaign had a significant and lasting impact.

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Guests

• Joan Allen No other episodes
  Visiting Fellow in History at Newcastle University and Chair of the Society for the Study of Labour History
• Emma Griffin 6 episodes
  Professor of Modern British History at the University of East Anglia and President of the Royal Historical Society
• Robert Saunders No other episodes
  Reader in Modern British History at Queen Mary, University of London

Reading list

• Joan Allen, Joseph Cowen and Tyneside Radicalism
  Joan Allen (Merlin, 2007)
• Radicals, Chartists and Internationalism
  Joan Allen and Owen Ashton (eds) (Labour History Review, 78.1, 2013)
• New Perspectives on Chartism
  Joan Allen and Owen Ashton (eds) (Labour History Review, 74.1, 2009)
• Papers for the People: A Study of the Chartist Press
  Joan Allen and Owen Ashton (eds) (Merlin, 2005)
• Friends of the People: Uneasy Radicals in the Age of the Chartists
  Owen Ashton and Paul Pickering (Merlin Press, 2002) Google Books →
• The Chartist Legacy
  Owen Ashton, Fyson Robert and Roberts Stephen (eds) (Merlin Press, 1993) Google Books →
• The Chartists: Perspectives and Legacies
  Malcolm Chase (Merlin Press, 2015) Google Books →
• Chartism: A New History
  Malcolm Chase (Manchester University Press, 2007) Google Books →
• The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-class Radicalism and Culture, 1830-60
  James Epstein and Dorothy Thompson (eds) (Macmillan, 1982) Google Books →
• Chartism in Scotland
  Hamish W. Fraser (Merlin Press, 2010) Google Books →
• London Chartism, 1838-1848
  David Goodway (Cambridge University Press, 1982) Google Books →
• Protest, Politics and Work in Rural England, 1700-1850
  Carl J. Griffin (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014) Google Books →
• Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution
  Emma Griffin (Yale University Press, 2013) Google Books →
• The making of the Chartists: working-class autobiography and the rise of Chartism
  Emma Griffin (English Historical Review, 129/538, 2014)
• A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783-1846
  Boyd Hilton (Oxford University Press, 2006) Google Books →
• The Last Rising. The Newport Insurrection of 1839
  D.J.V. Jones (Oxford University Press, 1985)
• Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789-1848
  Katrina Navickas (Manchester University Press, 2016) Google Books →
• Feargus O'Connor: A Political Life
  Paul Pickering (Merlin Press, 2007) Google Books →
• Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford
  Paul,Pickering (Macmillan Press, 1995)
• The Home Office and The Chartists, 1838-48: Protest and Repression in the West Riding of Yorkshire
  Neil Pye (Merlin Press, 2013)
• Political Movements in Urban England, 1832-1914
  Matthew Roberts (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) Google Books →
• The People's Charter: Democratic Agitation in the Early Victorian Age
  Stephen Roberts (ed.) (Merlin Press, 2003)
• Revolutionary Britannia? Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain, 1789-1848
  Edward Royle (Macmillan, 2002) Google Books →
• Chartism
  Edward Royle (Longman, 1996) Google Books →
• Women in the Chartist Movement
  Jutta Schwarzkopf (Macmillan, 1991) Google Books →
• Ernest Jones, Chartism and the Romance of Politics, 1819-1869
  Miles Taylor (Oxford University Press, 2003) Google Books →
• The Chartists: Popular Politics in the Industrial Revolution
  Dorothy Thompson (Temple Smith, 1984) Google Books →
• The Early Chartists
  Dorothy Thompson (ed.) (London, 1971) Google Books →

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Programme ID: m001hx7n

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hx7n

Auto-category: 324.273 (Political parties – Great Britain)