The Victorian Era

What Was the Chartist Movement?

Article · History & Overview · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The Chartist movement was the first great mass movement of the Victorian era. It took its name from the People’s Charter, a set of six political demands drawn up in 1838 by the London Working Men’s Association and the radical members of Parliament. The Charter called for universal manhood suffrage, the secret ballot, no property qualification for members of Parliament, payment of members of Parliament, equal-sized constituencies, and annual parliamentary elections. The Chartists were the first political movement in British history to demand a genuinely democratic franchise, and although the movement failed to achieve its demands in its own time, five of its six points eventually became law. The history of the movement is one of the central stories of Victorian political history, and it is examined in Victorian Political History and in The Victorian Era: A Complete Historical Overview.

The Origins of the Movement

The Chartist movement grew out of the disappointment of the working class with the Reform Act of 1832. The Reform Act had extended the franchise to a wider section of the middle class, but it had done little for the working class, and the new industrial workers of the north of England, the Midlands, and South Wales felt that they had been betrayed. The economic crisis of the late 1830s, the harshness of the New Poor Law of 1834, and the increasing concentration of political power in the hands of the propertied classes sharpened the resentment.

The principal architect of the Charter was William Lovett, a working-class radical from Cornwall who had been involved in the establishment of the London Working Men’s Association in 1836. Lovett drafted the People’s Charter with the assistance of the radical Members of Parliament Francis Place and Joseph Parkes, and with the support of the Birmingham Political Union of Thomas Attwood. The Charter drew on the long radical tradition of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, on the ideas of Tom Paine, on the speeches of Henry Hunt, and on the programmes of the Hampden Clubs and the Birmingham Political Union. The political context is examined in the page on the Reform Acts.

The Three Petitions

The Chartist movement is most famous for its three great petitions to Parliament. The first petition, presented in 1839, was said to have been signed by 1.28 million people, although the number was widely disputed. The petition was rejected by the House of Commons by a vote of 235 to 46, and the rejection led to a wave of strikes, riots, and disturbances across the industrial north. The most serious outbreak was the Newport Rising of 4 November 1839, when a Chartist force of about 3,000 miners and ironworkers, led by John Frost, marched on the town of Newport in Monmouthshire to free imprisoned Chartists, but was defeated by troops of the regular army, the 45th Regiment of Foot and several companies of the Special Constabulary. Twenty-two demonstrators were killed, and Frost and his fellow leaders were convicted of high treason and transported to Australia. Frost was later pardoned in 1856, and returned to England in 1857.

The second petition was presented in May 1842, and was said to have been signed by over three million people, more than the number of adult males in the United Kingdom at the time, a fact that gave the government an easy excuse to reject it. The economic distress of the early 1840s, the bad harvest of 1842, and the resentment against the new Poor Law all helped to swell the signatures. The petition was rejected by the Commons, and a second wave of strikes and disturbances followed. The plug plot riots, in which factory workers in the north removed the plugs from the steam engines and brought the mills to a halt, were the most dramatic of the outbreaks.

The third petition was presented on 10 April 1848, the year of revolutions across Europe. The petition was rumoured to be accompanied by a mass demonstration in London, and the government prepared for a possible uprising. The demonstration on Kennington Common on 10 April 1848, organised by Feargus O’Connor, the most charismatic of the Chartist leaders, was attended by perhaps 20,000 to 50,000 people. It was a large but orderly affair, and the petition was presented to Parliament by a delegation. The petition was rejected, and the Chartist movement began to decline. The petition itself, in a famous mystery of nineteenth-century history, was apparently lost or destroyed after being presented.

The Decline of the Movement

The Chartist movement declined in the 1850s. The reasons for the decline were several. The great Chartist leaders had died, gone mad, or emigrated: O’Connor died in 1855; Lovett had been imprisoned after the Newport Rising and retired from active politics; and Ernest Jones, who tried to revive the movement in the 1850s, never matched the earlier leaders. The Crimean War, the revival of trade, the gradual extension of the franchise by the Reform Act of 1867, and the growing strength of the trade unions all drew political energy away from the Chartist movement.

Yet the Chartist movement was not a failure. The six points of the Charter were gradually conceded by Parliament. The secret ballot was introduced in 1872. Equal-sized constituencies were largely established by the Reform Act of 1884 and the Redistribution of Seats Act of 1885. The property qualification for members of Parliament had been abolished in 1858. The payment of members of Parliament was introduced in 1911. Universal manhood suffrage was introduced in 1918. The annual elections were never introduced, but the maximum life of a Parliament was reduced to five years by the Parliament Act of 1911. The six points of the Charter, in other words, became the basic framework of the modern British democratic system. The history of the franchise is examined in the page on the Reform Acts.

The Significance of the Movement

The Chartist movement was significant for several reasons. It was the first mass movement in British history to organise on a national scale, with meetings, petitions, newspapers (including the Northern Star, edited by Feargus O’Connor and at its peak the best-selling political newspaper in the country), and a clear set of demands. It united the working class of the industrial north with the working class of the rural south, and it pioneered the new techniques of mass politics, including monster meetings, processions, and the mass petition, as deliberate political instruments. It also articulated a clear democratic programme, in which the franchise was not a gift from above but a right of all adult men.

The Chartist movement was also significant because it produced a generation of working-class leaders who went on to play important roles in the later Victorian labour movement. Many of the principles of the modern trade union movement, including the principle of collective bargaining, the principle of mutual benefit, and the principle of political action, were first articulated in the Chartist movement. The transition from Chartism to trade unionism, examined in The Victorian Economy and Industrialization, is one of the central stories of the period.