Chartist Movement (1838): Britain's Mass Fight for the Vote

The Chartist movement was the first mass political movement of the British working class, launched in May 1838 with the publication of the People’s Charter and its six demands for parliamentary reform. For about two decades Chartists organised huge meetings, newspapers and three national petitions to Parliament, the largest of their kind in British history. Although the movement failed in its own time, it shaped British democracy, and almost all of its demands eventually became law.

Background: why Chartism began

The Great Reform Act of 1832 had widened the vote to many middle-class men but left the great majority of working men without it. In England and Wales only about one adult man in five could vote after 1832, and the property qualification kept wage earners out entirely. Many workers who had supported reform felt betrayed by the result.

Anger grew with the policies of the reformed Parliament. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 replaced local relief with harsh workhouses, and the transportation of the Tolpuddle Martyrs in the same year showed how the law could be used against trade unions. Factory workers, handloom weavers ruined by mechanisation and miners all had economic grievances, and many came to believe that only a Parliament elected by working men would address them.

The People’s Charter and its six points

The Charter was drafted by William Lovett, a cabinetmaker and leader of the London Working Men’s Association, founded in 1836, with help from the veteran radical Francis Place. It was published as a draft parliamentary bill on 8 May 1838. Its six points were:

• a vote for every man aged 21 or over who was of sound mind and not in prison;
• the secret ballot;
• no property qualification for members of Parliament;
• payment of MPs, so that working men could afford to sit;
• equal electoral districts;
• annual elections to Parliament.

None of these ideas was new; most went back to radicals of the 1770s and 1780s. What was new was the scale of organisation. Within months the Charter had been adopted at mass meetings in Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester and the West Riding of Yorkshire, and Chartist associations spread across the country.

The first petition and the Newport Rising

A National Convention of Chartist delegates met in London in February 1839, partly as a rival to Parliament. It collected a national petition with about 1.28 million signatures, which the radical MP Thomas Attwood presented to the House of Commons. On 12 July 1839 the Commons refused even to consider it, by 235 votes to 46.

The rejection sharpened a long-running division between “moral force” Chartists, such as Lovett, who wanted to win through education and persuasion, and “physical force” Chartists, who argued that the threat of violence was needed. On the night of 3 to 4 November 1839, several thousand men from the mining and ironworking valleys of South Wales marched on Newport, led by the former mayor John Frost, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones. At the Westgate Hotel they were met by soldiers, who fired on the crowd. Around 20 or more marchers were killed; figures vary between sources.

Frost, Williams and Jones were convicted of high treason and sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. After a public campaign they were transported for life to Van Diemen’s Land, now Tasmania. Hundreds of other Chartists were imprisoned in 1839 and 1840.

Key people

William Lovett (1800–1877) represented the respectable, self-educated artisan wing of Chartism and later withdrew to concentrate on education.

Feargus O’Connor (1796–1855), an Irish barrister and former MP, became the movement’s most popular leader through his speeches and his weekly paper, the Northern Star, founded in Leeds in 1837, which at its peak sold tens of thousands of copies a week. In 1847 he was elected MP for Nottingham, the only Chartist ever to win a seat.

John Frost (1784–1877) led the Newport march and was eventually pardoned in 1856. George Julian Harney and Ernest Jones kept the movement alive in the 1850s and linked it with European democrats and socialists.

The 1842 petition and the 1848 climax

In 1840 the National Charter Association was founded in Manchester, often described as one of the first working-class political parties. A second petition, said to carry more than 3.3 million signatures, was presented in May 1842 and rejected by 287 votes to 49. That summer a wave of strikes spread through the industrial North and Midlands, known as the Plug Plot riots because strikers pulled the plugs from factory boilers. Many Chartists took part, and hundreds of people were arrested.

Chartism revived in 1848, encouraged by the revolutions of 1848 on the Continent. A great meeting was called on Kennington Common in south London on 10 April 1848 to escort a third petition to Parliament. The government, fearing revolution, moved the royal family to the Isle of Wight, placed troops under the Duke of Wellington and enrolled tens of thousands of special constables. Estimates of the crowd range from about 15,000 to well over 100,000. O’Connor agreed to call off the march, and the petition was taken to Westminster in cabs.

The organisers claimed 5.7 million signatures, but a Commons committee counted fewer than 2 million and reported many forgeries and joke names. The episode was widely mocked, although historians stress that the government took the threat very seriously and arrested many Chartists that summer.

Decline

After 1848 Chartism shrank to a small, more socialist movement led by Ernest Jones and Harney. Several factors contributed: rising wages and steadier employment in the 1850s, the energy of rival causes such as trade unions, cooperatives and the campaign that achieved the repeal of the Corn Laws, and the collapse of O’Connor’s Land Company, which had tried to settle workers on smallholdings. O’Connor was declared insane in 1852. The last national Chartist convention met in 1858.

Legacy

The Chartist petitions failed, but the demands did not. Parliament abolished the property qualification for MPs in 1858, extended the vote to many urban working men in 1867, introduced the secret ballot in 1872 and began paying MPs in 1911. The Representation of the People Act 1918 gave the vote to almost all men over 21, and redistributions from 1885 onwards moved towards equal constituencies. Annual parliaments are the only point never adopted.

Chartism also left a cultural legacy: a tradition of working-class newspapers, poetry and self-education, and a model of peaceful mass petitioning. Many former Chartists became active in later Liberal and Labour politics, and some carried its ideas to Australia, where several of its points were adopted early.

Timeline

• 1836, June: The London Working Men’s Association is founded.
• 1838, 8 May: The People’s Charter is published.
• 1839, 12 July: The Commons rejects the first national petition by 235 votes to 46.
• 1839, 4 November: The Newport Rising; soldiers fire on marchers at the Westgate Hotel.
• 1840, July: The National Charter Association is founded in Manchester.
• 1842, 3 May: The second petition is rejected by 287 votes to 49.
• 1842, August: The Plug Plot strikes spread across the industrial North.
• 1848, 10 April: The Kennington Common meeting and the third petition.
• 1858: The last Chartist convention meets; the property qualification for MPs is abolished.

Why it matters

Chartism was the first time working people across Britain organised nationally and over many years for political rights. It showed both the limits of protest against a Parliament elected by a minority and the long-term power of clear demands. Most of the democratic system Britain has today follows the programme the Chartists set out in 1838.