Christopher Shaw

Malcolm Chase

History and Nostalgia

The Imagined Past

No British social movement captured contemporary imaginations as Chartism did. This unique book is the only history to offer complete, in-depth coverage of the full chronological spread of its activities (1838-58), based throughout on detailed research.

A New History

Chartism

Chartism, the mass movement for democratic rights, dominated British domestic politics in the late 1830s and 1840s. It mobilised over three million supporters at its height. Few modern European social movements, certainly in Britain, have captured the attention of posterity to quite the extent it has done. Encompassing moments of great drama, it is one of the very rare points in British history where it is legitimate to speculate how close the country came to revolution. It is also pivotal to debates around continuity and change in Victorian Britain, gender, language and identity. Chartism: A New History is the only book to offer in-depth coverage of the entire chronological spread (1838-58) of this pivotal movement and to consider its rich and varied history in full. Based throughout on original research (including newly discovered material) this is a vivid and compelling narrative of a movement which mobilised three million people at its height. The author deftly intertwines analysis and narrative, interspersing his chapters with short ‘Chartist Lives’, relating the intimate and personal to the realm of the social and political. This book will become essential reading for anyone with an interest in early Victorian Britain, specialists, students and general readers alike.

A new history

First published in 1994, this volume features an autobiography of Allen Davenport, a key figure linking Chartism with the French Revolution, along with some of his selected works. Davenport was an important propagandist for agrarian reform, a critical follower of Robert Owen, one of the first male supporters of the feminist causes and birth control and a leading member of the revolutionary underground movement in Regency London. He was a prolific author, political journalist and poet. His autobiography, published in 1845, has long been presumed lost - historians have had to make do with tantalising fragments from contemporary reviews. When a copy was found in Nashville in 1982 it was immediately recognised as a unique source of information about nineteenth-century popular politics. This volume reprints the complete text with editorial apparatus and supplemented by a careful selection of Davenport's other writing by Dr Malcolm Chase. The Life and Literary Pursuits of Allen Davenport thus gives a unique insight into the cultural and political life of England in the crowded years between Peterloo and Chartism.

Malcolm Chase

Books

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