Chartist movement

Chartist movement, a chiefly working-class political movement between 1837 and 1848, arose as a result of the Reform Bill of 1832, which had excluded the working classes from political rights for lack of the necessary property qualification. Their six-point ‘People's Charter’ consisted of: Universal Suffrage, Vote by Ballot, Annually Elected Parliaments, Payment for Members of Parliament, Abolition of the Property Qualification, and Equal Electoral Districts. The points eventually became law between 1860 and 1914, except for Annually Elected Parliaments.

The movement was alluded to by novelists of the mid-19th cent. who were concerned with the Condition of England question, in particular b, Disraeli in Sybil, and C. Kingsley in Alton Locke; and also by T. Carlyle in his essay ‘Chartism’. The Chartists themselves also produced a considerable amount of literature, including the documentary accounts of S. Bamford, and many short-lived periodicals sprang up (the Northern Star, the Chartist Circular, the Star of Freedom, the Red Republican, and others). Chartist poets and novelists, some of them writing in prison, included master bootmaker Thomas Cooper (1805–92), author of the lengthy and ambitious The Purgatory of Suicides (1853), a ‘working man's epic’ in Spenserian stanzas, who was imprisoned for ‘incitement to riot’; E. Elliott of Sheffield, the so-called ‘Corn Law Rhymer’; and Ernest Jones (1819–68/9?), orator and publisher.