The media is one of the things that makes the charter's movement an important historical moment and event for us. What we see here is working people starting to grab hold of the levers of political communication in ways that are very new and very novel. We've got this kind of use of not just the newspapers, but so many other forms of media. They're hitting on every single front and bringing in lots and lots of different mechanisms to get their message out to as many people as possible. So it's very much of its time. I mean, it's very interesting in that so much is unified. But of course it is still the early 19th century. So a lot of it is
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.