2017/03/20 by Katrina Navickas, Adam Crymble · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Australian History and Society #Historical Economic and Social Studies #Scottish History and National Identity
paper · doi:10.1080/13555502.2017.1301179
openalex publication_date 2017/03/20 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/01
Chartism was the largest mass movement for democracy in nineteenth-century Britain. It is best remembered for its extraordinary tactics: ‘monster’ meetings of thousands of people in squares and fields; the three national petitions of 1839, 1842, and 1848, which gathered tens of thousands of signatures; and extraordinary events such as the ‘risings’ of 1839 and the ‘plug plots’ and conventions of 1842. Recently historians have reinterpreted the significance of the more ordinary and everyday elements of the movement. Malcolm Chase, Tom Scriven and others have shown how a familiar and quotidian culture was essential in sustaining Chartism in between the periods of mass agitation.1 Historians of protest now take a more rounded and wide-ranging approach to understanding what adherence to the movement entailed. An integral part of the organization of Chartism as a grass-roots movement was weekly local branch meetings. Usually these meetings were held in the back room of pubs, but also in chapels, working men’s halls, and increasingly as Chartists raised the money to build them, their own halls.2 These meetings gave working men and women (albeit in separate groups) the opportunity to put their democratic principles into practice in voting, speaking, serving on committees and educating themselves. Eager to defend their legality, and to spread the word, the locations of the meetings were advertised in separate columns in the Chartist press, most notably in the Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser newspaper (hereafter Northern Star). The paper was founded in November 1837 as the project of Chartist agitator and former Irish MP, Feargus O’Connor and the Leeds printer Joshua Hobson. It was published in Leeds and distributed nationally, reaching a regular circulation of 80,000 copies a week in 1839.3 Aimed at a respectable working-class readership, the Northern Star followed the usual early Victorian newspaper mix of local, national and international news, but with an additional emphasis on advertising Chartist activities. There has not been a systematic analysis of the weekly meetings reported in the newspaper. How many meetings were there? Who held them and where? What can we learn by examining the geographic patterns of all the meetings that were held?