I hear very much what Joan is saying about conditions being very difficult for working people, and I wouldn't dispute that at all. In the cities, wages tend to be higher for men than they are out of the countryside so as long as you had a largely rural population, it's going to be very difficult for rural people to organise on a national level. We can see some of the ways in which being a more modern and urban nation and industrial nation made it possible for people in one part of the country to get behind the same set of ideas as somebody in another parts of the country. That just makes chartism much more powerful because, historically, where people have riots and rebellions,
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.
With
Joan Allen
Visiting Fellow in History at Newcastle University and Chair of the Society for the Study of Labour History
Emma Griffin
Professor of Modern British History at the University of East Anglia and President of the Royal Historical Society
and
Robert Saunders
Reader in Modern British History at Queen Mary, University of London.
The image above shows a Chartist mass meeting on Kennington Common in London in April 1848.