BARRICADES PROJECT

When William Lovett finally left prison after serving his full year's sentence for seditious libel, he took with him a manuscript of a book he had written in prison, with the help of John Collins, entitled Chartism; A New Organization of the People, Embracing a Plan for the Education and Improvement of the People, Politically and Socially; Addressed to the Working Classes of the United Kingdom, and more especially the Advocates of the Rights and Liberties of the Whole People as Set Forth in the 'People's Charter'. The book indicated Lovett's own conviction of the importance of moral transformation which underpinned a change on direction for his aspirations for Chartism. In 1840 he and Henry Vincent initiated the 'New Move' in which they began to emphasise the importance of ‘Self-Help within the Chartist movement through self-education, teetotalism, and Christianity. It resulted in the formation of many organisations to promote such ideas. This wider moral reform movement was particularly popular in Scotland and the North of England. This can be seen in the Scottish paper the ‘Chartist Circular’, which condemned the ‘pernicious use of inebriating drinks’ on the ‘physical, moral, and political wellbeing’ of the working classes. They therefore implored their readers to ‘dedicate this year [1841] to total abstinence.’ 101 Scottish Chartists signed this pledge.

William Cobbett (1763-1835) was a distinctively English political actor, who defies easy classification. He was in turn, a soldier; a polemicist (under the pseudonym Peter Porcupine) in America in the 1790s, writing against radicalism and Paine; a publisher in London and an apologist for William Pitt and the Tory government; a chronicler and recorder of Parliamentary proceedings in Cobbett's Parliamentary Debates (1803-4); the owner of the Political Register a successful weekly paper that sold widely to ordinary working people from 1802 until 1835; an associate of Major John Cartwright, Sir Francis Burdett and other reformers; a prisoner of the state for his denunciation of the use of flogging of members of the militia by Hanoverian troops; a sufficient risk to political order that, in 1817, the government offers him £10,000 to retire from politics; a self-appointed guardian of the radical legacy of Paine (whom he had once denounced) by bringing Paine's bones back to England in 1819, where they were promptly mislaid; a parliamentary candidate in Coventry in 1820; a defender of the farming interest following his own troubles as a seedsman and nurseryman and an advocate for rural sports and amusements; a candidate in Preston in 1826; a long awaited electoral victor in the General Election of 1832 when he was elected for Oldham, by which he was re-elected in 1835, shortly before his death. Cobbett was one of the country's most successful publicists, but his imprudence and restless disposition meant that his many of his publishing and farming ventures rarely succeeded for long. From 1805 he increasingly became a thorn in the side of governments, and a resolute advocate for political reform - albeit, largely with the aim of pre-empting the dangers of revolution. He was an extremely effective communicator, in person and in print, and was one of the most popular writers of his generation. His Rural Rides (1821-26) gave a powerful portrait of English rural life, coupled with swingeing attacks on landlords, middlemen, corn dealers, and the swelling spread of the 'Great Wen' of London into the English countryside. And he captures perfectly some of the less familiar strands of English radicalism as it developed in the late 1810s and the 1820s. He became a convinced Painite, but coupled this with a belief in a strong agrarian society, and saw in the developing urban expansion a corruption of the British character which he feared would prove fatal. He was an advocate of freedom of the press, but was not prepared to challenge the government directly by joining the ranks of the unstamped press, and continued to sell his Political Register as stamped, even though it dramatically inhibited its circulation. Cobbett was in many respects a reactionary. He retained from his Anti-Jacobin propaganda of the 1790s a hatred of Jacobin egalitarian principles, but he also distrusted the powers of government that had been raised against that threat only, as he saw it, to be deployed to the cost of ordinary men and women and the established ways of the country.  He had little interest in industry but came to be concerned for the industrial working classes and their poverty as a result of his political tours of the Northern counties.  He was against machines and sympathised with those who turned on them in the Luddite riots of the 1810s. And he contributed a strand of thinking to radicalism that emphasised the potential for a self-sustaining community in which agricultural production played a major part, and in which ordinary people lived fuller, less exploited lives.  Chartism's concern with land and its distribution to the people, shared this bucolic admiration for the independent producer rooted in the soil of the community.

William Benbow (c. 1784-1864), a sometime shoemaker, non-conformist preacher, and reformer, was involved in political agitation between 1817 and 1820, and again during the Reform Act agitations in 1830-32, and then in the early years of the Chartist movement. His distinctive contribution to that movement was a pamphlet he published entitled 'Grand National Holiday, and Congress of the Productive Classes' (London, 1832). This introduced a new potential tactic into the repertoire of radical strategies . Benbow's idea was that, through unity of thought and action, the working classes could 'move mountains of injustice, oppression, misery and want.' He called for a holiday - or holy day - so that they could 'legislate for all mankind':  'the constitution drawn ip during our holiday, shall place every human being on the same footing. Equal rights, equal liberties, equal enjoyments, equal toil, equal respect, equal share of production: this is the object of our holy day - of our sacred day, - of our festival.'The holiday was to be a withdrawal of labour for a month long, during which, 'by our consultations, deliberations, discussions, holiday and congress, endeavour to establish the happiness if the immense majority of the human race, of that far largest portion called the working classes.'  It would need preparation -involving the formation of committees of management in local communities to promote the scheme and the necessary arrangements.  Food for the first week would have to be laid in, and subsequent weeks would be procured from funds controlled by local bodies, such as vestries, overseers and justices; it would take place in the summer, when the weather was clement, so there would be no need for people to be producing clothing; and the wealthy would be asked for contributions - and when they refuse the representations of 100 persons, then a 1,000 shall be sent, and more til they contribute.At the same time, a National Congress would be held, with representatives from all communities, whose object would be to reform society - from the crown of our head to the sole of our foot.'Benbow's pamphlet was extremely popular in 1832 and it was influential in 1839,when the Chartist General Convention considered calling a 'sacred month.'The identification of the Grand National Holiday with the General Strike, is misleading, as Prothero has argued: it is not an idea tied to unionism, or to socialism, but it grows out of a tradition of conventionism, reaffirmed in the writings of Thomas Paine and the practices of the corresponding societies in 1793-4, and again in 1817 (in the coordination of returns from the Hampden Clubs).  And while he calls on the working classes, the most prominent part of his rhetoric concerns the broader 'people.'At the same time, Benbow was a 'physical force' reformer - with an often violent rhetoric to accompany his enthusaism for arming and drilling that accompanied his involvement in the opposition movements of 18176 and 1817, and were evident again in the agitation for electoral reform in 1830-32.In 1839 his project was discussed and adopted by the Chartist Convention and Benbow invested his energies touring the North and calling for the national holiday. In August he was arrested, and shortly after the Convention lost its nerve and abandoned the scheme.   He was eventually sentenced to 16 months in prison and his moment had effectively passed.  He ceased to be active in the Chartist movement (although he remained a target for cartoonists - as in one from Punch in 1848), and it is believed that he emigrated with his family to Australia in the 1850s.See Iorwerth Prothero, 'William Benbow and the Concept of the 'General Strike', Past and Present May 1974, 63, pp. 132-71.

Newspapers in the 18th century had to be 'stamped' - they needed to be marked to establish that they had paid the duty which all vehicles for news were required to pay. The Stamp Act of 1712 (a time of heightened political controversy) taxed all newspapers @ 2 pence per sheet and required the lodging of copies and the identification of printers. The tax doubled in 1757. Following Peterloo, the Government passed the Six Acts,  one of which the scope of publications liable for stamp duty to papers publishing opinion rather than just news, and required newspaper publishers to post a bond against their good conduct.  This set the stage for a series of confrontations between publishers of material aimed at a wide popular audience, which the Stamp  duty made unaffordable, and the government.  In the 1820s, but espcially the early 1830s, a mass press defied the Stamp duty, with a range of popular newspapers appearing until they were prosecuted, and publishers and printers were jailed. Over 500 illegal journals were published between 1830 and 1836.  Among the most famous were:William Carpenter,'s Political Letters and Pamphlets (1830); Henry Hethrington's The Poor Man's Guardian (1831); and  The Working Man's Friend and Political Magazine (1831-2).A number of key Chartists, such as Hetherington, George Julian Harney and others earned their political laurels by spending time in jail for publishing and cirulating unstamped papers. In 1836, the government reduced the stamp duty to 1 penny, which both broke the back of the unstamped opposition by reducing the penal rate, while successfully ensuring that mass circulation papers directed at a very popular audience would still be a luxury for their intended readers. The freedom of the press was both secured and withheld - and it remained an issue for many in the Chartist movement, becoming a central plank, for example, of the East London Democratic Association.

Thomas Attwood (1783-1856) was the son of a successful Birmingham businessman, who cut his teeth arguing against East India Company monopolies and went on to become a powerful advocate for monetary reform. His lack of success led to his advocacy of political reform and he played an important role in the the creation and then leadership of the Birmingham Political Union, which held its first meeting in April 1829, and was formally established in January 1830, at a meeting of some 10,000 people chaired by the old radical MP Sir Francis Burdett. The organisation campaigned for shorter Parliaments, payment for MPs and the removal of the property qualification, and the extension of the vote to all those paying direct or indirect taxes. The Union became a model for many others throughout the country. as momentum gathered for the 1832 Reform Act - following which Attwood and his deputy at the BPU, Joshua Scholefield, were returned to Parliament. Attwood revived the Union in 1837 in an attempt to achieve further Parliamentary reform, and the organisation began working closely with the London Working Men's Association, which were similarly moderate in their views. Despite concern at more radical elements in the movement Attwood presented the first Chartist petition to Parliament in 1839.

The East London Democratic Association was founded in January 1837 (on the centennial of Thomas Paine's birth). It announced that: The object of this Association is to promote the Moral and Political condition of the Working Classes by disseminating the principles propagated by that great philosopher and redeemer of mankind, the Immortal ‘THOMAS PAINE’. It was founded by a group of men, some of whom had been active in 1830-32, but also including a number of younger men, such as George Julian Harney who had been part of the campaign for an unstamped press. While not ideologically distinct initially from the London Working Men's Association, the ELDA widened the scope of its concerns following the Irish radical (and LWMA member) Daniel O'Connell's denunciation of trade union activism subsequent to the arrest of members of the Glasgow cotton spinners union. In response, the ELDA emphasised its roots in the proletariat of the city and widened its concerns to include social equality, the free press, and an eight-hour working day. In doing so it effectively secured wider support than the LWMA across the city. In August 1838, the Association dropped the 'East' - becoming the London Democratic Association. Its more radical stance was evident when the first Chartist meeting discussed 'means'. Members of the ELDA were prominent in pointing to the limits of 'moral force' and arguing for recourse to physical force to protect their communities and to increase their bargaining power. In 1839 a Women's London Democratic Association was founded by a number of women linked to the LDA. George Julian Harney 1817-1897 was a major figure in political and social reform movements from the 1830s. Having intended a career at sea, he became an assistant in LWMA member Henry Hethrington's print shop, and was imprisoned on three occasions for selling the unstamped Black Dwarf. He grew impatient with the LWMA and became associated with the more radical ideas of William Benbow, James Bronterre O'Brien, and Feargus O'Connor, and collaborated with others in the setting up of the ELDA.Harney became the editor of the Northern Star, the main Chartist paper in 1843, and persuaded both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to contribute to the paper.  His developing socialism led to disagreements with Feargus O'Connor, who forced his resignation from the Star.  He set up his own paper, the Red Republican, arguing for socialism and internationalism. The Red Roublican  published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto in 1850.

The London Working Men's Association was founded in the Summer of 1836 by William Lovett (1800-1877 - a former cabinet maker who became politically active in the reform movement in 1831/2); Henry Hethrington (1792-1849, a printer and publisher and co-founder in 1831 of the National Union of the Working Classes; James Watson (1799-1874 - a publisher and similarly a co-founder of the NUWC in 1831); and John Cleave (b c 1790 - a former sailor turned printer). Following the disappointment with the Impact of the 1832 Reform Act, the group met in the early summer of 1836 and issued a brochure in June setting out th rules of the association. The objects of the association were: 1 To draw into one bond of Unity the intelligent and influential portion of the working classes in town and country; 2 To seek by every legal means to place all classes of society in possession of their equal, political, and social rights; 3 To devise every possible means, and to use every exertion, to remove those cruel laws that prevent the free circulation of thought through the medium of a cheap and honest press; 4 To promote, by all available means, the education of the rising generation, and the extirpation of those systems which tend to future slavery; 5 To collect every kind of information appertaining to the interests of the working classes in particular, and society in general, especially statistics regarding the wages of labour, the habits and condition of the labourer, and all those causes that mainly contribute to the present state of things; 6 To meet and communicate with each other for the purpose of digesting the information acquired, and to mature such plans as they believe will conduce in practice to the well-being of the working classes; 7 To publish their views and sentiments in such form and manner as shall best serve to create a moral, reflecting, yet energetic public opinion, so as eventually to lead to a gradual improvement in the condition of the working classes, without violence or commotion; 8 To form a library of reference and useful information; to maintain a place where they can associate for mental improvement, and where their brethren from the country can meet with kindred minds actuated by one great motive—that of benefiting politically, socially, and morally, the useful classes. Though the persons forming this Association will be at all times disposed to co-operate with all those who seek to promote the happiness of the multitude, yet being convinced, from experience, that the division of interests in the various classes, in the present state of things, is too often destructive of that union of sentiment which is essential to the prosecution of any great object, that they have resolved to confine their members, as far as practicable, to the working classes. But as there are great differences of opinion as to where the line should be drawn which separates the working classes from the other portions of society, they leave to the members themselves to determine whether the candidate proposed is eligible to become a member.In the Minute Book of the Association, for 18 October 1836, a set of resolutions were recorded including a demand for political reform to ensure that the country would be governed justly:'To this end are wanted, Universal Suffrage, the Protection of the Ballot, Annual Parliaments, Equal representation, and no propoerty qualification for Members.'These are five of the six principles later adopted in the People's Charter.The LWMA was an elitist and respectable body. It had a membership fee of a shilling per month, and members had to be 'persons of good moral character among the working classes.'  Honorary members, not from the working classes, were also created as a way of linking to the more traditional political elite.  And this was not a mass membership organisation: there were only 291 full members at the organisations strongest, and it say its activism as involving publication and communication with the elite, rather than being orientated to mass mobilisation.

The Chartist movement is seen as starting with the publication of 'The People's Charter' in 1838 , but many of its components were of longstanding, both in the form of political and trade union organisations, and in the principles that it became fundamentally associated with:  Universal male suffrage Annual Parliaments  Secret ballot Equal electoral districts Payment for MPs The abolition of property qualifications for Parliamentary candidates Each of these can be found together in a pamphlet, published by Major John Cartwright in his The Legislative Rights of the Commonalty Vindicated, or Take your Choice! (London, 1777). The setting out of these principles in the London Working Men's pamphlet 'The People's Charter' (1838) gave the growing movement both a manifesto and an identity.Cartwright (1740-1824) was a leading figure in movements for Parliamentary reform from the 1770s until his death, and he stuck to his principles throughout his life becoming, if anything, more radical later in life as the government proved increasingly intransigent.  He founded the Society for Constitutional Information in 1780, which became a major organisation in the 1790s reform movement; and was the instigator of the Hampden reform clubs in 1812, which fed into many of the post war popular movements.  He fought campaigns to be elected to Parliament on many occasions, and was unsuccessful every time. At the age of 80,  in 1820, he was found guilty of sedition and fined £100 He was a country gentleman and ex-naval officer.

William Lovett was the Secretary of the London Working Men's Association and the key author of the 'People's Charter.' When the first Chartist Convbention met in London in February 1839, Lovett was elected as its secretary. When the Convention moved to Birmingham in May the police tried to stop supporters meeting in Birmingham's Bull Ring, using heavy handed methods. When placards were produced by the convention deploring the activities of the police and accusing them of excessive and illegitimate force, Lovett (as Secretary) and John Collins (who had taken the placards to the printer) were arrested and sentenced to a year in prison for seditious libel - a charge that did not require that what they claimed was untrue, only that it was likely to bring the authorities into disrepute. On his release in July 1840, Lovett retired from politics but, with Collins and Henry Vincent, formed the National Association for Promoting the Political and Social Improvement of the People - an organisation devoted to the education of working people aimed at helping them to better themselves. The organisation lasted until 1857. Lovett's later life was spent as an impoverished bookseller.

Written by William Lovett on behalf of the London Working Men’s Association and first published in early 1838, the People’s Charter begins by setting out the six demands that would come to define Chartism, including most notably the universal male franchise and the secret ballot. The full Charter, however, includes a longer address 'to the radical reformers of Great Britain and Ireland' and the full text of a draft parliamentary Bill to turn the six points into law. Priced at 4d, the Charter was widely circulated in draft form and went through several versions. The edition shown here was published at some point in early 1839, before the first Chartist petition was presented to Parliament. Although the Charter would evolve over the next 20 years, the six points – already at the core of radical demands for the previous half century – remained a touchstone of Chartist politics.